Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The growth effects of monetary policy

This article investigates the relationship between inflation and output, in the data and in standard models. The article reports that empirical cross-country studies generally find a nonlinear, negative relationship between inflation and output, a relationship that standard models cannot come close to reproducing. The article demonstrates that the models' problem may be due to their standard narrow assumption that all money is held by the public for making transactions. When the models are adjusted to also assume that banks are required to hold money, the models do a much better job. The article concludes that researchers interested in studying the effects of monetary policy on growth should shift their attention away from printing money and toward the study of banking and financial regulations.
The Ordinance Amending the Land Acquisition Law (2013): Farmers Lose out in the Unequal Contest of Power

The Land Acquisition Act 1894 was comprehensively amended in 2013 which, among others, provided for prior consent of land owners in cases of acquisition for private companies and public partnerships, social impact assessment of all projects requiring land acquisition and restrictions on acquisition of irrigated agricultural land to accommodate some of the concerns of people affected by land acquisition. The ordinance promulgated in 2014 nullifies them to make land available to project authorities without hassles with a view to promoting growth. The changes carried out clearly demonstrate the clout of the industry in public policy making. Farmers and others dependent upon land for livelihood lose out in this contest of power.
Reading Speech from Still and Moving Faces: The Neural Substrates of Visible Speech

Speech is perceived both by ear and by eye. Unlike heard speech, some seen speech gestures can be captured in stilled image sequences. Previous studies have shown that in hearing people, natural time-varying silent seen speech can access the auditory cortex (left superior temporal regions). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study explored the extent to which this circuitry was activated when seen speech was deprived of its time-varying characteristics. In the scanner, hearing participants were instructed to look for a prespecified visible speech target sequence (voo or ahv) among other monosyllables. In one condition, the image sequence comprised a series of stilled key frames showing apical gestures (e.g., separate frames for v and oo [from the target] or ee and m [i.e., from nontarget syllables]). In the other condition, natural speech movement of the same overall segment duration was seen. In contrast to a baseline condition in which the letter V was superimposed on a resting face, stilled speech face images generated activation in posterior cortical regions associated with the perception of biological movement, despite the lack of apparent movement in the speech image sequence. Activation was also detected in traditional speech-processing regions including the left inferior frontal (Broca's) area, left superior temporal sulcus (STS), and left supramarginal gyrus (the dorsal aspect of Wernicke's area). Stilled speech sequences also generated activation in the ventral premotor cortex and anterior inferior parietal sulcus bilaterally. Moving faces generated significantly greater cortical activation than stilled face sequences, and in similar regions. However, a number of differences between stilled and moving speech were also observed. In the visual cortex, stilled faces generated relatively more activation in primary visual regions (V1/V2), while visual movement areas (V5/MT+) were activated to a greater extent by moving faces. Cortical regions activated more by naturally moving speaking faces included the auditory cortex (Brodmann's Areas 41/42; lateral parts of Heschl's gyrus) and the left STS and inferior frontal gyrus. Seen speech with normal time-varying characteristics appears to have preferential access to purely auditory processing regions specialized for language, possibly via acquired dynamic audiovisual integration mechanisms in STS. When seen speech lacks natural time-varying characteristics, access to speech-processing systems in the left temporal lobe may be achieved predominantly via action-based speech representations, realized in the ventral premotor cortex.
Banks, Credit Market Frictions, and Business Cycles∗

This paper proposes a fully micro-founded framework that incorporates an active banking sector into New Keynesian DSGE models with financial frictions. Then, it evaluates the role and importance of banks’s behavior and financial shocks in the U.S. business cycles. The banking sector consists of two types of heterogenous banks that offer different banking services and interact in an interbank market. Loans are produced using interbank borrowing and bank capital subject to the bank capital requirement condition. Banks have monopoly power, set nominal deposit and prime lending rates, choose their portfolio compositions and their leverage ratio, and can endogenously default on fractions of their interbank borrowing and bank capital returns. Also, the model includes unconventional monetary policy shocks. Overall, an active banking sector amplifies real effects of supply-side shocks, while it dampens effects of demand-side and financial shocks on real variables. The presence of an active banking sector reduces the impacts of financial shocks, lowers macroeconomic volatilities, and improves social welfare. Moreover, expansionary unconventional monetary policies reduce negative impacts of financial crises. JEL classification: E32, E44, G1
Coevolutionary Dynamics of Costly Bonding Ritual and Altruism

While altruistic behavior and bonding in altruistic pairs or groups of cooperators is observed throughout the animal kingdom, the genetic evolution of such is on an ongoing source of debate, curiosity, and conflict in the behavioral sciences. Many such bonded groups and pairs are observed to take part in costly ritualized movement behavior that is hypothesized to trigger or maintain altruistic sentiments amongst the participants. Such costly ritualized practices could have evolved if they engaged pre-existing behavioral instincts that manifest as altruism in the new context of ritual bonding. While this seems at first to be a ‘Green Beard’ hypothesis (‘marker (ie., ‘green beard’) as honest signal of altruistic intent', an hypothesis well-known to be problematic), it is distinct in two important ways. First, the ritual as marker is costly, and second the ritual engages a pre-existing behavioral potential caused by genes which, importantly, have some other benefit. This paper models the genetic coevolutionary dynamics both analytically and through simulation. It finds that such coevolution can lead to fixation of altruism in a population or to cycling of altruism in the population, depending on the balance of costs and benefits. Where cycling occurs, even though altruism is consistently present in the population, population mean fitness declines with the introduction of these bonding rituals.
Parturient perineal distensibility tolerance assessed by EPI-NO: an observational study

ABSTRACT Objective: To determine how parturient women tolerate the use of a perineal distensibility assessment technique using the EPI-NO device. Methods: An observational study with a total of 227 full-term parturient women was performed. During the evaluation with EPI-NO, parturient patients were asked about their sensation of discomfort. The degree of discomfort was measured using the Visual Analogue Scale, with a score from zero to 10. The Mann-Whitney test was applied to assess perineal distensibility measured by EPI-NO and the degree of discomfort caused by the test according to parity. The relation between perineal distensibility and discomfort was analyzed by using the Spearman correlation test (r). Results: The test with EPI-NO caused only slight discomfort (mean Visual Analogue Scale of 3.8), and primiparous women reported significantly greater discomfort (mean Visual Analogue Scale of 4.5) than did multiparous (mean Visual Analogue Scale=3.1), with p<0.001 women. A negative correlation was observed, in other words, the greater the perineal distensibility on the EPI-NO, the lower the pain reported by the patients (r=-0.424; p<0.001). Conclusion: The assessment of perineal distensibility with EPI-NO was well tolerated by the parturient women.
Evaluating standards-based assessment rubrics in a postgraduate public health subject

Abstract Standards-based assessment rubrics are recognised as an important tool for ensuring clear criteria in higher education. Most of the available evidence on rubrics comes from studies with face-to-face undergraduate students. Our study evaluated the introduction of rubrics into a postgraduate subject that included both online and face-to-face students. We conducted formative evaluation with former students to develop the rubrics, as well as surveying current students for process and impact evaluation, supplemented with a focus group. Process results showed that the rubrics were used widely and were generally considered to be of at least some use. Clarity of the rubrics was the main issue affecting perceived usefulness, particularly for the assessment tasks that had undergone comparatively less formative evaluation. Impact evaluation showed mixed results, with students that reported always using rubrics having higher marks on average compared to students who did not always use the rubrics. However, an expected improvement in marks across the whole student cohort compared to previous years did not eventuate, although this could be explained by a number of factors independent of the rubrics. Our results provide some evidence for the use of rubrics in postgraduate and online settings but highlight the need for rigorous formative evaluation.
The Brain Involvement in Congenital Myotonic Dystrophy: a Review

The congenital variant of Myotonic Dystrophy (MyD) is transmitted by the affected mothers to children with the MyD gene, in the region q! 3.3 of chromosome 19, carrying a CTG repeat length larger than 1000. We reviewed the brain abnormalities reported to date in series of cases with Congenital MyD and compared them with our data on patients affected by the same disease. Studies of molecular genetics on cases with Congenital MyD were also considered. In our experience and as seen in recent reports, evaluation of intellectual ability in such children clearly indicates that mental retardation of mild or moderate degree affects almost all the patients with the disease. At the neuroimaging evaluation (CT or MRI) the vast majority of them have also been shown to be affected by central white matter changes and ventricular enlargement, usually not of severe degree. Correlation among the degree of mental retardation, the ventricular enlargement and the white matter changes seems lacking. In our experience, it seems inconsistent also the relationship between the size of the CTG repeat expansion in peripheral blood cells DNA and the degree of the clinical and neuroimaging alterations presented by children with Congenital MyD, even though all showing a trinucleotide expansion larger than 1000. Altogether,
Texture-based Leaf Identification (version 1.1)

A novel approach to visual leaf identification is proposed. A leaf is represented by a pair of local feature histograms, one computed from the leaf interior, the other from the border. The histogrammed local features are an improved version of a recently proposed rotation and scale invariant descriptor based on local binary patterns (LBPs). Describing the leaf with multi-scale histograms of rotationally invariant features derived from sign-and magnitude-LBP provides a desirable level of invariance. The representation does not use colour. Using the same parameter settings in all experiments and standard evaluation protocols, the method outperforms the state-of-the-art on all tested leaf sets-the Austrian Federal Forests dataset, the Flavia dataset, the Foliage dataset, the Swedish dataset and the Middle European Woods dataset-achieving excellent recognition rates above 99%. Preliminary results on images from the jnorth and south regions of France obtained from the LifeCLEF'14 Plant task dataset indicate that the proposed method is also applicable to recognizing the environmental conditions the plant has been exposed to.
Optimal Synthesis of a Surgical Robot Manipulators for Lumbar Stenosis

The paper presents a novel mechanism of a surgical robot for lumbar stenosis, LSRobot. To optimize the mechanism of the robot arm, optimum design method based on multi-factor model, including maximum dexterity, workspace, joint limitation, and configuration orientation of joint variable (COJV), is proposed. The results are useful for the optimum design of the robot manipulator, and provided some helpful revelation to hatch other robots as well. Compared with other approaches, the optimal synthesis method considered more comprehensive and was more readily available. Preliminary experiments show that the proposed surgical robot can be operated with an acceptable degree of positional error
Multi-step linear Dyna-style planning

In this paper we introduce a multi-step linear Dyna-style planning algorithm. The key element of the multi-step linear Dyna is a multi-step linear model that enables multi-step projection of a sampled feature and multi-step planning based on the simulated multi-step transition experience. We propose two multi-step linear models. The first iterates the one-step linear model, but is generally computationally complex. The second interpolates between the one-step model and the infinite-step model (which turns out to be the LSTD solution), and can be learned efficiently online. Policy evaluation on Boyan Chain shows that multi-step linear Dyna learns a policy faster than single-step linear Dyna, and generally learns faster as the number of projection steps increases. Results on Mountain-car show that multi-step linear Dyna leads to much better online performance than single-step linear Dyna and model-free algorithms; however, the performance of multi-step linear Dyna does not always improve as the number of projection steps increases. Our results also suggest that previous attempts on extending LSTD for online control were unsuccessful because LSTD looks infinite steps into the future, and suffers from the model errors in non-stationary (control) environments.
Antihypertensive Agents and Risk of Parkinson's Disease: A Nationwide Cohort Study

Background and Purpose Hypertension has been associated with Parkinson's disease (PD), but data on antihypertensive drugs and PD are inconclusive. We aim to evaluate antihypertensive drugs for an association with PD in hypertensive patients. Methods Hypertensive patients who were free of PD, dementia and stroke were recruited from 2005–2006 using Taiwan National Health Insurance Database. We examined the association between the use of calcium channel blockers (CCBs), angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEIs), angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs) and the incidence of PD using beta-blockers as the reference. Cox regression model with time-varying medication use was applied. Results Among 65,001 hypertensive patients with a mean follow-up period of 4.6 years, use of dihydropyridine CCBs, but not non-dihydropyridine CCBs, was associated with a reduced risk of PD (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] = 0.71; 95% CI, 0.57–0.90). Additionally, use of central-acting CCBs, rather than peripheral-acting ones, was associated with a decreased risk of PD (aHR = .69 [55–0.87]. Further decreased association was observed for higher cumulative doses of felodipine (aHR = 0.54 [0.36–0.80]) and amlodipine (aHR = 0.60 [0.45–0.79]). There was no association between the use of ACEIs (aHR = 0.80 [0.64–1.00]) or ARBs (aHR = 0.86 [0.69–1.08]) with PD. A potentially decreased association was only found for higher cumulative use of ACEIs (HR = 0.52 [0.34–0.80]) and ARBs (HR = 0.52 [0.33–0.80]). Conclusions Our study suggests centrally-acting dihydropyridine CCB use and high cumulative doses of ACEIs and ARBs may associate with a decreased incidence of PD in hypertensive patients. Further long-term follow-up studies are needed to confirm the potential beneficial effects of antihypertensive agents in PD.
Evaluation of multi-radio extensions to AODV for wireless mesh networks

Due to their self-configuring and self-healing capabilities, as well as their low equipment and deployment cost, Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) based on commodity hardware present a promising technology for a wide range of applications. Currently, one of key challenges that WMN technology faces is the limited capacity and scalability due to high levels of interference, which is typical for multi-hop wireless networks. A simple and relatively low-cost approach to address this problem that has recently been proposed is the use of multiple wireless network interfaces (radios) per node. Operating the radios on each node on different, non-overlapping channels allows making more efficient use of the radio spectrum and thereby reducing interference and contention. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol in a Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Network. Our simulation results show that under high traffic load conditions, Multi-Radio AODV (AODV-MR) is able to efficiently utilize the increased spectrum, and proves to be far superior to single radio AODV. We therefore believe that AODV-MR is a promising candidate for multi-radio WMNs.
Coseismic Deformation from the 1999 Mw 7.1 Hector Mine, California, Earthquake as Inferred from InSAR and GPS Observations

We use interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) and Global Positioning System (GPS) observations to investigate static deformation due to the 1999 M_w 7.1 Hector Mine earthquake, that occurred in the eastern California shear zone. Interferometric decorrelation, phase, and azimuth offset measurements indicate regions of surface and near-surface slip, which we use to constrain the geometry of surface rupture. The inferred geometry is spatially complex, with multiple strands. The southern third of the rupture zone consists of three subparallel segments extending about 20 km in length in a N45°W direction. The central segment is the simplest, with a single strand crossing the Bullion Mountains and a strike of N10°W. The northern third of the rupture zone is characterized by multiple splays, with directions subparallel to strikes in the southern and central. The average strike for the entire rupture is about N30°W. The interferograms indicate significant along-strike variations in strain which are consistent with variations in the ground-based slip measurements. Using a variable resolution data sampling routine to reduce the computational burden, we invert the InSAR and GPS data for the fault geometry and distribution of slip. We compare results from assuming an elastic half-space and a layered elastic space. Results from these two elastic models are similar, although the layered-space model predicts more slip at depth than does the half-space model. The layered model predicts a maximum coseismic slip of more than 5 m at a depth of 3 to 6 km. Contrary to preliminary reports, the northern part of the Hector Mine rupture accommodates the maximum slip. Our model predictions for the surface fault offset and total seismic moment agree with both field mapping results and recent seismic models. The inferred shallow slip deficit is enigmatic and may suggest that distributed inelastic yielding occurred in the uppermost few kilometers of the crust during or soon after the earthquake.
Beyond BMI - Phenotyping the Obesities

cations of using BMI are profound. The cut-off points of BMI of <18.5 kg/m 2 , 18.5–24.9 kg/m 2 , 25.0–29.9 kg/m 2 , 30.0–34.9 kg/m 2 , 35.0–39.9 kg/m 2 and 40.0+ kg/m 2 define categories usually referred to as underweight, normal weight, overweight (pre-obese) and obese (grades I, II and III). These cut-off points therefore define the number of individuals falling into each category which, in turn, tells us the prevalence of obesity on the planet. However, the essence of obesity is adipose tissue in the body (not a relationship of height and weight), so the BMI can only serve as an indirect estimate of obesity. Obesity is defined as an excess accumulation of body fat, and this excess fat is normally conceived as an indicator of poor health and, in turn, constitutes a risk factor for a range of diseases including diabetes, ischaemic heart disease, hyperlipidaemia, sleep apnoea, arthritis and others [1] . The BMI is therefore a measure of the number of people in the world who are in poor health, and who possess a condition that is threatening to their longevity or their quality of life. This has implications for who should be concerned (about themselves) and who should be a candidate for treatment (by others). Since the risk of early death or a life of disease prompts actions by public health authorities or medical agencies, the economic consequences are profound. If BMI provides a faulty quantification of who is at risk, then the personal, social and economic consequences are serious. However, BMI is an anthropometric concept and therefore serves only as a surrogate measure for fatness. Although BMI correlates with percentage body fat, the correlation between both parameters is not sufficiently accurate to truthfully reflect the amount of fat in