Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bayesian variable selection for binary outcomes in high-dimensional genomic studies using non-local priors

Motivation: The advent of new genomic technologies has resulted in the production of massive data sets. Analyses of these data require new statistical and computational methods. In this article, we propose one such method that is useful in selecting explanatory variables for prediction of a binary response. Although this problem has recently been addressed using penalized likelihood methods, we adopt a Bayesian approach that utilizes a mixture of non-local prior densities and point masses on the binary regression coefficient vectors. Results: The resulting method, which we call iMOMLogit, provides improved performance in identifying true models and reducing estimation and prediction error in a number of simulation studies. More importantly, its application to several genomic datasets produces predictions that have high accuracy using far fewer explanatory variables than competing methods. We also describe a novel approach for setting prior hyperparameters by examining the total variation distance between the prior distributions on the regression parameters and the distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator under the null distribution. Finally, we describe a computational algorithm that can be used to implement iMOMLogit in ultrahigh-dimensional settings (p>>n) and provide diagnostics to assess the probability that this algorithm has identified the highest posterior probability model. Availability and implementation: Software to implement this method can be downloaded at: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/∼amir/code.html. Contact: wwang7@mdanderson.org or vjohnson@stat.tamu.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Elastic properties of cellular polypropylene films: Finite element simulations and their comparison with experiments

The Young's modulus of a two-dimensional truss-like structure is simulated by using the finite element method. A power-law expression is proposed for the effective Young's modulus of the system. The obtained numerical results are compared with the experimental data of the {\em anisotropic thin cellular polypropylene films}. At high solid volume fractions ($>0.4$), the average shape of the cells are lateral, and their dimensions have around one-to-five ratio. As the samples are inflated further, volume fraction of the solid is decreased, the average shape approach a diamond-like structure with one-to-two ratio. In addition the effective Young's modulus of the system increases. It is concluded that valuable structural information can be obtained by analyzing the experimental data and the numerical simulations, which take into account the material's micro-structural information, simultaneously.
On the Cause of the 1930 s Dust Bowl

During the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains. In this study, we present model results that indicate that the drought was caused by anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures during that decade and that interactions between the atmosphere and the land surface increased its severity. We also contrast the 1930s drought with other North American droughts of the 20th century.
Carbon Radio Recombination Lines in the Orion Bar

We have carried out VLA D-array observations of the C91α carbon recombination line as well as Effelsberg 100 m telescope observations of the C65α line in a 5' square region centered between the Orion Bar and the Trapezium stars in the Orion Nebula with spatial resolutions of 10'' and 40'', respectively. The results show the ionized carbon in the photon-dominated regions (PDRs) associated with the Orion Bar to be in a thin, clumpy layer sandwiched between the ionization front and the molecular gas. From the observed line widths we get an upper limit on the temperature in the C+ layer of 1500 K, and from the line intensity we get a hydrogen density between 5 × 104 and 2.5 × 105 cm-3 for a homogeneous medium. The observed carbon level population is not consistent with predictions of hydrogenic recombination theory but could be explained by dielectronic recombination. The layer of ionized carbon seen in C91α is found to be essentially coincident with emission in the v = 1-0 S(1) line of vibrationally excited molecular hydrogen. This is surprising in light of current PDR models, and some possible explanations of the discrepancy are discussed.
Organizing Prisons through Public-Private Partnerships: a Cross-Country Investigation

In this paper, we analyze the private participation in prison services in three countries: Brazil, France, and the United States. We highlight striking differences in efficiency between these countries and argue that the explanation for these differences is not restricted to the way property rights are distributed (i.e.public vs. private management). Instead, our analysis suggests that understanding those differences also requires an analysis of the incentives provided by contractual choices as well as decision and revenue rights distribution and institutional constraints. The theoretical literature usually analyzes these blocks separately, and often focuses on property rights distribution. We argue that an efficient arrangement is the result of the way these elements are combined, giving rise to a distinctive governance structure.
Evaluation of Neutrophil Function during Hemodialysis Treatment in Healthy Dogs under Anesthesia with Sevoflurane

ABSTRACT This study evaluated the number and function of neutrophils during 3 hr of hemodialysis in healthy dogs under anesthesia. Isolated neutrophils were used to assess neutrophil adhesion, phagocytosis and the oxidative burst. At 0.5 and 3 hr after the start of hemodialysis treatment, there was a decrease in neutrophil number. The phagocytic ability of neutrophils was decreased 3 hr after the start of hemodialysis. In conclusion, this study demonstrated that hemodialysis reduces the number and phagocytic ability of neutrophils during treatment. However, these changes recover within 24 hr of hemodialysis.
Does welfare play any role in female headship decisions ?

Previous studies have examined whether the welfare system has contributed to the dramatic increase in single-parent families. This paper explores why the results in this literature are sensitive to the presence of state fixed effects. It considers one natural explanation, namely that the composition of the population differs across states in ways that are related to welfare program generosity. After controlling for individual effects the results provide no evidence that welfare raises the propensity to form female-headed households for either whites or blacks. These results illustrate the potential pitfalls of assuming that state factors are fixed over a long period of time. They also suggest that previous studies may have overstated the effect of welfare programs on family structure.
Functional Duality of Astrocytes in Myelination

Astrocytes undergo major phenotypic changes in response to injury and disease that directly influence repair in the CNS, but the mechanisms involved are poorly understood. Previously, we have shown that neurosphere-derived rat astrocytes plated on poly-l-lysine (PLL-astrocytes) support myelination in dissociated rat spinal cord cultures (myelinating cultures). It is hypothesized that astrocyte reactivity can affect myelination, so we have exploited this culture system to ascertain how two distinct astrocyte phenotypes influence myelination. Astrocytes plated on tenascin C (TnC-astrocytes), a method to induce quiescence, resulted in less myelinated fibers in the myelinating cultures when compared with PLL-astrocytes. In contrast, treatment of myelinating cultures plated on PLL-astrocytes with ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF), a cytokine known to induce an activated astrocyte phenotype, promoted myelination. CNTF could also reverse the effect of quiescent astrocytes on myelination. A combination of microarray gene expression analysis and quantitative real-time PCR identified CXCL10 as a potential candidate for the reduction in myelination in cultures on TnC-astrocytes. The effect of TnC-astrocytes on myelination was eliminated by neutralizing CXCL10 antibodies. Conversely, CXCL10 protein inhibited myelination on PLL-astrocytes. Furthermore, CXCL10 treatment of purified oligodendrocyte precursor cells did not affect proliferation, differentiation, or process extension compared with untreated controls, suggesting a role in glial/axonal ensheathment. These data demonstrate a direct correlation of astrocyte phenotypes with their ability to support myelination. This observation has important implications with respect to the development of therapeutic strategies to promote CNS remyelination in demyelinating diseases.
Influence of 5 ‐ and 6‐Hydroxydopamine on Adrenergic Transmission and Nerve Terminal Morphology in the Canine Pulmonary Vascular Bed

We studied the effects of 5- and 6-hydroxydopamlne on adrenergic neurotransmission, fluorescence histocbemistry, and nerre terminal ultrastructure in the canine pulmonary vascular bed. Fluorescence histocbemistry on stretched preparations and section of intrapulmonary artery and vein demonstrated that these vessels are well supplied with adrenergic nerves. Electron microscopy revealed adrenergic terminals in the adventitia and outer third of tbe media In the artery, but only in tbe adventitia in tbe vein. Adrenergic terminals in artery and vein contained many small and a few large dense-core vesicles. At least 20% of the terminals In the artery contained any small agranular vesicles and a few large opaque vesicles; this suggests that they were of tbe cbolinergic type. Such terminals were not found in intrapulmonary veins. Under conditions of controlled blood flow, stimulation of tbe sympathetic nerves to the lung and intralobar injection of norepinephrine increased pressure in the perfused lobar artery and small intrapulmonary vein in a stimulus-related maaner. Tbe rise in pressure in tbe lobar artery and vein in response to nerve stimulation was blocked after administration of either 5- or 6-hydroxydopamine. Neither agent modified tbe response of the pulmonary vascalar bed to morepinephrine. In contrast, tbe rise in pressure in the lobar artery and vela in response to both norepineph-rime and to nerve stimulation was blocked by phenoxybenzamine, an α-receptor blocking agent. The attenuated neurogenic vasoconstric tor response in dogs treated with 5- or 6-hydroxydopamine was associated with a marked decrease in intensity of fluorescence of the abundant adreaergk innervation in both iatrapulmonary artery and vein, and with the appearance of an osmiophillc material in densecore vesicles of adrenergic terminals in artery and vein. We believe that these data suggest that 5- and 6-hydroxydopamine interfere with adrenergic transmission in intrapuunonary vessels by depleting norepinephrine from adrenergic terminals. Furthermore, we conclude from bemodynamic, histochemkal, and ultrastructural studies that vasomotor tone in tbe pulmonary vascular bed can be regulated by tbe sympathetic nervous system.
Stochastic Discount Factors

The valuation process that economic agents undergo for investments with uncertain payoff typically depends on their statistical views on possible future outcomes, their attitudes toward risk, and, of course, the payoff structure itself. Yields vary across different investment opportunities and their interrelations are difficult to explain. For the same agent, a different discounting factor has to be used for every separate valuation occasion. If, however, one is ready to accept discounting that varies randomly with the possible outcomes, and therefore accepts the concept of a stochastic discount factor, then an economically consistent theory can be developed. Asset valuation becomes a matter of randomly discounting payoffs under different states of nature and weighing them according to the agent's probability structure. The advantages of this approach are obvious, since a single discounting mechanism suffices to describe how any asset is priced by the agent.
Regional Differences in the Contribution of Off-Farm Work to Income Inequality

This paper uses the concept of the Gini Coefficient and data from the 1991 Farm Costs and Returns Survey (FCRS) to measure the role of off-farm income and that of other income sources in the size distribution of farm operator households' total personal income. Disaggregated FCRS data by region and by level of participation in off-farm employment show that nonparticipating farm operator households have, as a group, higher income inequality than participating households. The results also indicate that, irrespective of the off-farm work status of the farm operator household, the distribution of income among households in the North Central region is least unequal and that in the West is most unequal.
Wages, Schooling and Background: Investments in Men and Women in Urban Brazil

Numerous empirical regularities of the urban Brazilian labor market are documented using the 1982 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicilios (PNAD). Adopting a semi-parametric approach special attention is paid to the shape of the relation between wage and years of schooling. The authors focus on heterogeneity in this relationships: by gender region choice of sector of employment age-cohort and race. They also examine the role of family background in wage determination both directly and through its influence on labor market participation choices. The effect of education on both (the logarithm of) wage and sectoral choices is neither linear nor smooth. Returns to post-primary schooling tend to be far higher than returns to less schooling. This is true for both market and self-employment work. The differential is greater in the Northeast than the South and has been increasing over time. Furthermore additional years of schooling sometimes have either no effect or even a negative impact on expected wages. The heterogeneity in the shape of the wage-education function suggest that the lack of smoothness cannot be explained by credentialism but rather indicates self-selection among those who choose to continue at school. Family background factors are found to play a significant role in wage determination though of far less magnitude than own education. Unobserved characteristics of those entering the wage vs self-employment sectors or not participating in the labor force at all are also found to affect log-wages in plausible ways suggesting that workers are sorting according to their comparative advantages. (authors)
A Methodological Extension for Sustainability

Mustaquim, M. M. 2016. Universal Design Revisited. A Methodological Extension for Sustainability. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Social Sciences 1346. 83 pp. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. ISBN 978-91-554-9479-7. Around 1960, it was difficult for people with disabilities to enter official buildings, visit public toilets or even opening the packages of alimentary products. It was seen as an unfortunate but unavoidable situation. The architect Ron Mace started a revolution in that he founded the movement of universal design, a design philosophy regarding everyone’s access regardless of age or disabilities. As a result of this, for example, today we see ramps on almost every official building. In today’s world however, a pressing problem is environmental, economic and social sustainability. This thesis investigates how universal design can be updated and extended to be more adapted to the sustainability problems we face today. This thesis includes six empirical and theoretical studies. One empirical study that was made in an elderly home where patients with disabilities spend their everyday life showed that the universal design principles need to be extended by taking into account social factors and learning. Another empirical study in the context of video game play showed that not all design principles were understood meaningfully during game play indicating that the purpose of a design might not always be served by following the current universal design principles. To find a way of expanding universal design for sustainability, a theoretical analysis identified five steps for conducting interdisciplinary research as useful. A new framework was then developed to show how the new universal design concept could help achieve sustainability in system design. This framework was then tested using two use cases where the result showed that the new extended concept of universal design can be a trigger for sustainability. Finally, a cognitive dissonance model with five identified design principles showed how this new extension could be practiced to address practical problems like persuasive design for sustainability followed by a system development life cycle showing what needs to be done to perform such extension. In conclusion, this thesis has shown that by introducing a contextual interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of the problem domain, UD can be extended to achieve sustainability.
Recommendations for Addressing the Impact of Test Administration Interruptions and Irregularities

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) is a nonpartisan, nationwide, nonprofit organization of public officials who head departments of elementary and secondary education in the states, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and five U.S. extra-state jurisdictions. CCSSO provides leadership, advocacy, and technical assistance on major educational issues. The Council seeks member consensus on major educational issues and expresses their views to civic and professional organizations, federal agencies, Congress, and the public. We thank Richard Hill for his comments and contributions to this paper and the body of work in this area.
HoloNet: towards robust emotion recognition in the wild

In this paper, we present HoloNet, a well-designed Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture regarding our submissions to the video based sub-challenge of the Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) 2016 challenge. In contrast to previous related methods that usually adopt relatively simple and shallow neural network architectures to address emotion recognition task, our HoloNet has three critical considerations in network design. (1) To reduce redundant filters and enhance the non-saturated non-linearity in the lower convolutional layers, we use a modified Concatenated Rectified Linear Unit (CReLU) instead of ReLU. (2) To enjoy the accuracy gain from considerably increased network depth and maintain efficiency, we combine residual structure and CReLU to construct the middle layers. (3) To broaden network width and introduce multi-scale feature extraction property, the topper layers are designed as a variant of inception-residual structure. The main benefit of grouping these modules into the HoloNet is that both negative and positive phase information implicitly contained in the input data can flow over it in multiple paths, thus deep multi-scale features explicitly capturing emotion variation can be well extracted from multi-path sibling layers, and then can be further concatenated for robust recognition. We obtain competitive results in this year’s video based emotion recognition sub-challenge using an ensemble of two HoloNet models trained with given data only. Specifically, we obtain a mean recognition rate of 57.84%, outperforming the baseline accuracy with an absolute margin of 17.37%, and yielding 4.04% absolute accuracy gain compared to the result of last year’s winner team. Meanwhile, our method runs with a speed of several thousands of frames per second on a GPU, thus it is well applicable to real-time scenarios.
Differentiation by improving quality of services at the last touch point: The case of Tehran pharmacies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the quality of Tehran pharmacies' services and their impacts on the pharmaceutical firms, to highlight forces behind the current situation and suggest some improvements. This provides the means for pharmaceutical companies to differentiate themselves by quality of services, in the forefront of dealing with the customers, so‐called the last “touch point”. Design/methodology/approach – After a comprehensive literature review, SERVQUAL model was chosen to be used in this study. A combination of quantitative and qualitative (integrative) methods was used for data collection and analysis. The quantitative data were gathered by questionnaires, including 22 pair items measuring expectation and perception, followed by qualitative data, including 32 in‐depth interviews. Furthermore, the views of our expert panel consisting of nine experts have been identical to the study. For statistical treatment of quantitative data, SPSS software was used.Findings – The study reve.
Forecasting Macroeconomic Variables for the New Member States of the European Union

The accession of ten countries into the European Union makes the forecasting of their key macroeconomic indicators an exercise of some importance. Because of the transition period, only short spans of reliable time series are available, suggesting the adoption of simple time series models as forecasting tools. However, despite this constraint on the span of data, a large number of macroeconomic variables (for a given time span) are available, making the class of dynamic factor models a reasonable alternative forecasting tool. The relative performance of these two forecasting approaches is compared by using data for five new Member States. The role of Euro-area information for forecasting and the usefulness of robustifying techniques such as intercept corrections are also evaluated. We find that factor models work well in general, although with marked differences across countries. Robustifying techniques are useful in a few cases, while Euro-area information is virtually irrelevant.
Response of ecosystem respiration to experimental warming and clipping in Tibetan alpine meadow at three elevations

This study aims to understand the response of ecosystem respiration ( R eco ) to warming and clipping in the alpine meadow of Tibet. A field warming experiment using open top chambers was conducted in three alpine meadow sites at elevation 4313 m, 4513 m and 4693 m on the Tibetan Plateau since July 2008. Clipping was conducted three times a year since 2009. R eco was measured from June to September in 2010–2012. For most cases, the seasonal variation of R eco was mainly affected by soil water content rather than soil and air temperature, especially under warmer environment. Experimental warming tended to decrease seasonal average R eco by 21.6% and 10.9% at elevation 4313 m and 4513 m, respectively, but significantly increased seasonal average R eco by 11.3% at elevation 4693 m. The different responses of R eco to experimental warming could be mainly dependent on temperature and water availability condition. Clipping decreased seasonal average R eco by 6.9%, 36.9% and 31.6% at elevation 4313 m, 4513 m and 4693 m. The consistent declines caused by clipping may be mainly attributed to clipping-induced decline in aboveground biomass. Our findings suggested that the response of R eco to warming differed among the alpine meadow and was regulated by soil water content on the Tibetan Plateau.