Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On singular semi-Riemannian manifolds

On a Riemannian or a semi-Riemannian manifold, the metric determines invariants like the Levi-Civita connection and the Riemann curvature. If the metric becomes degenerate (as in singular semi-Riemannian geometry), these constructions no longer work, because they are based on the inverse of the metric, and on related operations like the contraction between covariant indices. In this paper, we develop the geometry of singular semi-Riemannian manifolds. First, we introduce an invariant and canonical contraction between covariant indices, applicable even for degenerate metrics. This contraction applies to a special type of tensor fields, which are radical-annihilator in the contracted indices. Then, we use this contraction and the Koszul form to define the covariant derivative for radical-annihilator indices of covariant tensor fields, on a class of singular semi-Riemannian manifolds named radical-stationary. We use this covariant derivative to construct the Riemann curvature, and show that on a class of singular semi-Riemannian manifolds, named semi-regular, the Riemann curvature is smooth. We apply these results to construct a version of Einstein's tensor whose density of weight 2 remains smooth even in the presence of semi-regular singularities. We can thus write a densitized version of Einstein's equation, which is smooth, and which is equivalent to the standard Einstein equation if the metric is non-degenerate.
DETERMINING TRENDS IN GLOBAL CRIME AND JUSTICE : AN OVERVIEW OF RESULTS FROM THE UNITED NATIONS SURVEYS OF CRIME TRENDS AND OPERATIONS OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS

Effectively measuring comparative developments in crime and justice trends from a global perspective remains a key challenge for international policy makers. The ability to compare crime levels across countries enables policy makers to determine where interventions should occur and improves understanding of the key causes of crime in different societies across the globe. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges to comparative work in the field of criminal justice, not least of which is the ability to quantify accurately levels of crime across countries. Taking into account the methodological weaknesses of using crosscountry data sources, the present article provides conclusions obtained by analysing the large amount of data available from the various United Nations surveys of crime trends and operations of criminal justice systems. “Not everything that can be counted, counts. And not everything that counts can be counted. ” Albert Einstein
A Case of Phosphoglyceride Crystal Deposition Disease in the Pelvic Soft Tissues Recurring after Initial Surgery

Phosphoglyceride crystal deposition disease (PGDD) is a rare disease entity that is characterized by phosphoglyceride crystal deposition that stimulates the formation of masses in soft tissue scars or bones. We report a case of PGDD in the pelvic soft tissues that recurred after initial surgical treatment. A 50-year-old woman was referred to our hospital for the evaluation of pelvic masses that were observed on an abdominal ultrasound. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed masses in the pelvic region, with the largest being 10 cm in diameter. The masses were diagnosed as ovarian malignant tumors, and an exploratory laparotomy was performed. Operative findings revealed them to be foreign body granulomas, and the patient was diagnosed with PGDD. The patient had a history of cesarean delivery at the age of 24 years. PGDD is extremely rare, but it should be considered in the differential diagnosis of abdominal masses in patients with a history of abdominal surgery.
Clinical Features of Patients on Home Oxygen Therapy Due to Chronic Respiratory Failure at One University Hospital

Background/Aims Home oxygen therapy (HOT) costs a great deal every year and demand for the service is growing. In Korea, health insurance has covered HOT since November 1, 2006. The objective of this study was to evaluate clinical features of patients who used long-term HOT due to chronic respiratory failure and to determine the appropriateness of oxygen prescriptions. Methods Between November 2006 and April 2010, patients prescribed long-term HOT were enrolled in the study at a tertiary university referral hospital and their medical records and telephone survey information were evaluated. In total, 340 patients were evaluated retrospectively. Results Regarding the initial indications for HOT, their mean PaO2 was 49.8 mmHg and mean SpO2 was 82.2%. Underlying diseases included chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD, 19.8%), lung cancer (12.6%), and interstitial lung disease (11.2%). The admission rate within 1 year was 53.4% and the average number of admissions was 1.64/patient. Other underlying diseases for which oxygen was prescribed, despite not meeting the insurance coverage criteria, were lung cancer (36.6%) and interstitial pneumonia (16.6%). Conclusions Home oxygen prescriptions have increased since health insurance coverage was extended. However, cases of oxygen prescriptions frequently do not meet the coverage criteria. It is important to discuss extending the coverage criteria to other disease groups, such as interstitial lung disease and lung cancer, in terms of cost-effectiveness. Further, physicians prescribing oxygen therapy should be educated regarding the criteria.
Simple Tests for Exogeneity of a Binary Explanatory Variable in Count Data Regression Models

This article investigates power and size of some tests for exogeneity of a binary explanatory variable in count models by conducting extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The tests under consideration are Hausman contrast tests as well as univariate Wald tests, including a new test of notably easy implementation. Performance of the tests is explored under misspecification of the underlying model and under different conditions regarding the instruments. The results indicate that often the tests that are simpler to estimate outperform tests that are more demanding. This is especially the case for the new test.
Analysis of cerebral shape in Williams syndrome.

BACKGROUND As a neurobehavioral disorder with a specific neurocognitive profile and a well-defined genetic etiology, Williams syndrome (WMS) provides an exceptional opportunity to examine associations among measures of behavior, neuroanatomy, and genetics. This study was designed to determine how cerebral shape differs between the brains of subjects with WMS and those of normal controls. SUBJECTS Twenty adults with clinically and genetically diagnosed WMS (mean +/- SD age, 28.5 +/- 8.3 years) and 20 healthy, age- and sex-matched controls (mean +/- SD age, 28.5 +/- 8.2 years). DESIGN High-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging data were used for shape-based morphological analysis of the right and left cerebral hemispheres and the corpus callosum. Statistical analyses were performed to examine group differences. RESULTS Both right and left cerebral hemispheres of subjects with WMS bend to a lesser degree in the sagittal plane than normal controls (P<.001). The corpus callosum also bends less in subjects with WMS (P =.05). In addition, subjects with WMS have decreased cerebral (P<.001) and corpus callosum (P<.001) midline lengths. CONCLUSIONS Subjects with WMS have significantly different cerebral shape from normal controls, perhaps due to decreased parieto-occipital lobe volumes relative to frontal regions. The similar observation in the corpus callosum may be associated with a decreased size of the splenium in WMS. These findings may provide important clues to the effect of genes in the WMS-deleted region on brain development.
Shaken and Stirred: Explaining Growth Volatility

"If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it. " The economic history of the world is replete with recessions and depressions. From the bursting of the British South Sea Bubble and the French Mississippi Bubble in 1720 (which at least one economic historian claims delayed the industrial revolution by 50 years) to the industrial depressions of the 1870s and 1930s, to the Latin American middle income debt crisis, African low income debt crisis, ex-Communist output collapse, and East Asian financial crisis, crises have been a constant of market capitalism. Add to that the collapses that have accompanied non-economic shocks like wars, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, fires, pests, droughts, and floods, and it is a wonder that anyone in the world has economic security. More recently, economic crises have often tended to go hand in hand with financial crises whose frequency and severity in developing countries has increased over the past quarter century. The causes and nature of these crises have differed. For example, those that characterized the debt crises of the 1980s were precipitated by profligate governments with large cash deficits and uncontrolled monetary policies. The more recent ones have occurred in countries which, for the most part,
Price Floors and Employer Preferences: Evidence from a Minimum Wage Experiment

Minimum hourly wages were randomly imposed on firms posting job openings in an online labor market. A higher minimum wage raised the wages of hired workers substantially. However, there was some reduction in hiring and large reductions in hours-worked. Treated firms hired more productive workers, which can explain, in part, the reduction in hours-worked: with more productive workers, projects were completed in less time. At the conclusion of the experiment, the platform imposed a market-wide minimum wage. A difference-in-differences analysis shows that, in equilibrium, firms still substitute towards more productive workers, adversely affecting less productive workers.
Ant Plant (Myrmecodia tuberosa) Hypocotyl Extract Modulates TCD4+ and TCD8+ Cell Profile of Doxorubicin-Induced Immune-Suppressed Sprague Dawley Rats In Vivo

Myrmecodia tuberosa Jack (Rubiaceae) has been used as part of traditional Indonesian remedies for a wide range of therapeutic usages in West Papua. Our preliminary study revealed the significant potency of these plant extracts and fractions as an immunomodulator by an in vitro technique on Balb/c mice. This study explored the effect of M. tuberosa hypocotyl ethanol extract on the TCD4+ and TCD8+ cell profiles of doxorubicin (Dox)-induced immune-suppressed Sprague Dawley (SD) rats by an in vivo method. Dried powder of M. tuberosa hypocotyl was macerated in 95% ethanol. Following solvent evaporation in a vacuum, the ethanol extract (EE) was partitioned to yield an n-hexane fraction (FH) and residue (FNH). FNH was further partitioned to yield ethyl acetate (FEtOAc) and water fractions (FW). The extract and fractions in the concentrations 10, 20, 50, and 100 μg/mL were tested on macrophage cells by the latex bead method, while the proliferation of lymphocyte cells was evaluated by the MTT assay. The total phenolic and flavonoid contents of those fractions were evaluated. The active fraction was administrated orally on Dox-induced SD rats for 28 days by an in vivo method to observe the TCD4+ and TCD8+ cell profiles. The in vivo assay showed that the FNH could maintain the number of TCD4+ cells, but not the number of TCD8+ cells. The ED50 observed was 24.24 mg/kg BW. Steroid/terpenoid compounds were detected in this fraction along with the phenolics and flavonoids. The FNH contained 3.548 ± 0.058% GAE of total phenolics and 0.656 ± 0.026% QE of total flavonoids. M. tuberosa hypocotyl extract is a potent immunomodulatory agent and may act as co-chemotherapy in Dox use.
Automatic synthesis from UML/MARTE models using channel semantics

Model-driven design is very common nowadays. In this context, the UML/MARTE profile is a well-known solution for real-time, embedded system modeling. This profile enables the functional and non-functional details of the system to be modeled together. Regarding non-functional details, the profile allows certain real-time constraints to be imposed when describing the system concurrency, in order to ensure predictability. However, these constraints also limit the modeling flexibility required to evaluate different design alternatives when optimizing system performance. The paper proposes a solution for automatically synthesizing the resulting models, combining new communication semantics with standard UML/MARTE real-time management features. The UML/MARTE approach presented in this paper enables concurrency and synchronization effects to be modeled at communication points, making system exploration and implementation easier.
A balanced scorecard approach to measuring industry performance

Stakeholders of the Malaysian construction industry produced a Construction Industry Master Plan to chart the strategic direction for the industry for a ten-year period between 2006 and 2015. The objectives of this paper were to review the recommendations of the master plan using the Balanced Scorecard approach, to develop a performance management framework for the construction industry and to propose a set of performance measures to allow stakeholders to monitor the progress of the implementation of the master plan in achieving its strategic aims. The Balanced Scorecard approach was used to evaluate the critical success factors, strategic thrusts and recommendations to ensure that the master plan presents a balanced view to enhance the industry's competitive standing. The review revealed that the recommendations generally address all four Balanced Scorecard perspectives but lacked focus on customer relationships in the customer perspective and customer management in the Internal Processes Perspective. Additional recommendations are suggested to address these gaps. A list of key performance measures for the Malaysian construction industry has been selected by linking each strategic thrust with the relevant performance measures.
Assessing the smoothing impact of automatic stabilizers – evidence from Europe

The smoothing impact of the automatic component of government expenditures (automatic stabilizers) on business cycle volatility is studied for a panel of EU countries in the period 19701999. Special emphasis is put on the investigation of possible nonlinearities in the relationship between GDP growth volatility and government expenditures. The results show that the business cycle volatility smoothing effect of government expenditure may revert at high levels. JEL classification: E62, E63, C23
Essays on Speculative Bubbles in Financial Markets

Essays on Speculative Bubbles in Financial Markets Oswald K. Mungule 2011 The rst essay formulates a dynamic rational contagion model in order to analyse the evolution of speculative bubbles. The model consists of two laws of motion: the speculative bubble and the probability of the bubble. The rst essay shows that the model has two stable equilibria and one unstable equilibrium. The dynamics of both the nonlinear speculative bubbles and the probability interact to form two stable equilibria and one unstable equilibrium which lead to ballooning and busting of the speculative bubbles. These features of speculative bubbles are driven by the speculators's herd behaviour, the bubbles size, the speed of change, the strength of infection, and the effects of both the bubbles and the short-term interest rate on the transition probability. The second essay extracts speculative bubbles from two nancial markets: the foreign exchange and the stock markets for South Africa between 1995Q2 and 2008Q4. The second essay uses the no-arbitrage models for the exchange rate and the stock price. By invoking the rational bubbles theory and using the residuals, we compute the asset price bubbles using the expectational restriction for rational bubbles theory. Three robustness checks on the computed bubbles con rm that speculative bubbles are present in the stock price and the exchange rate. By using
Intending to Leave But No Place to Go: An Examination of the Behaviors of Reluctant Stayers

ABSTRACT We extend recent conceptual work on withdrawal states and develop a framework to examine behavioral tendencies of reluctant stayers (i.e., employees who desire to leave but cannot). Although principles of self-interest suggest that these employees ought to behave appropriately to maintain employment, reactance theory suggests that the combination of high turnover intentions and low job alternatives may result in lower performance and greater deviance. Contrary to conventional wisdom but consistent with reactance theory, low perceived job alternatives strengthened the positive relationship between turnover intentions and deviance, as well as the negative relation between intentions to quit and task performance. Moderated-mediation analyses revealed that the indirect effect of work frustration (via turnover intentions) was stronger on task performance and deviance when perceived job alternatives were low rather than high.
Creating Distance from Body Issues: Exploring New Materialist Feminist Possibilities for Renegotiating Gendered Embodiment

Abstract The body’s active role in the production of gendered embodiments is a key focus for feminist cultural studies and leisure studies. The article draws on new materialist feminist scholarship to explore how gender relations are produced and negotiated in physical culture through one case study example taken from a wider study of young people’s experiences of the body and self-image over time. The article explores how gendered embodiment is assembled through the socio-material circumstances of everyday life. For one particiapnt, 'Ann', “creating distance” from appearance concerns was an embodied process which involved new practices and encounters (e.g., walking for leisure, reading feminist literature) and relationships and engagements with others (e.g., a partner, friends, family). The potential for feminism to open possibilities to imagine the body otherwise is also discussed in relation to recent efforts to foster social justice imperatives in leisure sciences and feminist physical cultural studies.
Toward a Name Entity Aligned Bilingual Corpus

This paper describes a co-training framework in which, through named entity aligned bilingual text, named entity taggers can complement and improve each other via an iterative process. This co-training approach allows us to 1) apply our method to not only parallel but also comparable text, greatly extending the applicability of the approach; and to 2) adapt named entity taggers to new domains; 3) create a named entity aligned bilingual corpus. Experiment results on Chinese-English data are shown and discussed.
Women in higher education : progress, constraints, and promising initiatives

Improving and widening access to education has been a major goal in most developing countries in the past three decades. Impressive progress has been achieved at all levels. Two issues are examined in this paper. First, how did women fare in the wake of this general expansion of tertiary enrollment? Second, what programs and policies contributed to enhancing women's enrollment in the context of World Bank project experience?
Parental Incarceration and Social Status Attainment of Hispanic Young Adults

The fact that parental incarceration has become a common event in the life course of many children is troubling. Using structural equation modeling, the present study investigates how immigrant generational status and family socioeconomic background interact with parental incarceration to influence status attainment for Hispanic young adults. Three indicators of status attainment in young adulthood are used as outcome variables—educational attainment, wage, and job quality. Results indicate that parental incarceration has a strong and negative influence on all three indicators of attained status. Most importantly, we found that parental incarceration mediates influence of immigrant generational status and family socioeconomic background on status attainment of Hispanic young adults.
Mutual Monitoring in Teams: Theory and Experimental Evidence on the Importance of Reciprocity

Monitoring by peers is often an effective means of attenuating incentive problems. Most explanations of the efficacy of mutual monitoring rely either on small group size or on a version of the Folk theorem with repeated interactions which requires reasonably accurate public information concerning the behavior of each player. We provide a model of team production in which the effectiveness of mutual monitoring depends not on these factors, but rather on strong reciprocity: the willingness of some team members to engage in the costly punishment of shirkers. This alternative does not require small group size or public signals. An experimental public goods game provides evidence for the behavioral relevance of strong reciprocity in teams.
Nurr1 Represses Tyrosine Hydroxylase Expression via SIRT1 in Human Neural Stem Cells

Nurr1 is an orphan nuclear receptor best known for its essential role in the development and maintenance of midbrain dopaminergic (DA) neurons. During DA neurogenesis, Nurr1 directly targets human tyrosine hydroxylase (hTH). Here we investigated this targeting to identify the molecular mechanisms by which Nurr1 regulates DA neurogenesis. We previously cloned the hTH promoter and found three consensus elements for Nurr1 binding: NBRE-A, -B, and -C. In the present study, gel retardation and luciferase assays using hTH constructs showed that Nurr1 preferentially bound to NBRE-A, through which it mediated transcriptional activity. Furthermore, Nurr1 displayed dual-function transcriptional activities depending on the cell type. In DA-like SH-SY5Y cells, Nurr1 dose-dependently stimulated hTH-3174 promoter activity by 7- to 11-fold. However, in the human neural stem cell (hNSC) line HB1.F3, Nurr1 strongly repressed transcription from the same promoter. This repression was relieved by mutation of only the NBRE-A element and by nicotinamide [an inhibitor of class III histone deacetylases (HDACs), such as SIRT1], but not by trichostatin A (an inhibitor of class I and II HDACs). SIRT1 was strongly expressed in the nucleus of HB1.F3 cells, while it was localized in the cytoplasm in SH-SY5Y cells. ChIP assays of HB1.F3 cells showed that Nurr1 overexpression significantly increased the SIRT1 occupancy of the NBRE-A hTH promoter region, while low SIRT1 levels were observed in control cells. In contrast, no significant SIRT1 recruitment was observed in SH-SY5Y cells. These results indicate that differential SIRT1 localization may be involved in hTH gene regulation. Overall, our findings suggest that Nurr1 exists in dual transcriptional complexes, including co-repressor complexes that can be remodeled to become co-activators and can fine-tune hTH gene transcription during human DA neurogenesis.
Managing NymBoxes for Identity and Tracking Protection

Despite the attempts of well-designed anonymous communication tools to protect users from tracking or identification, flaws in surrounding software (such as web browsers) and mistakes in configuration may leak the user's identity. We introduce Nymix, an anonymity-centric operating system architecture designed "top-to-bottom" to strengthen identity- and tracking-protection. Nymix's core contribution is OS support for nymbrowsing: independent, parallel, and ephemeral web sessions. Each web session, or pseudonym, runs in a unique virtual machine (VM) instance evolving from a common base state with support for long-lived sessions which can be anonymously stored to the cloud, avoiding de-anonymization despite potential confiscation or theft. Nymix allows a user to safely browse the Web using various different transports simultaneously through a pluggable communication model that supports Tor, Dissent, and a private browsing mode. In evaluations, Nymix consumes 600 MB per nymbox and loads within 15 to 25 seconds.