Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Passion for Democracy: American Essays

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPt. IAmerican Theory: Democracy, Liberalism, and RightsCh. 1Liberal Democracy and the Costs of Consent3Ch. 2Foundationalism and Democracy19Ch. 3Why Democracy Must Be Liberal: An Epitaph for Marxism31Ch. 4The Compromised Republic: Public Purposelessness in America41Ch. 5The Rights of We the People Are All the Rights There Are60Ch. 6Have Rights Gone Wrong? The Reconstruction of Rights79Pt. IIAmerican Practice: Leadership, Citizenship, and CensorshipCh. 7Neither Leaders nor Followers: Citizenship under Strong Democracy95Ch. 8Command Performance: Where Have All the Leaders Gone? 111Ch. 9The Undemocratic Party System: Citizenship in an Elite/Mass Society119Ch. 10One Nation Indivisible or a Compact of Sovereign States? The Two Faces of Federalism134Ch. 11The Market as Censor in a World of Consumer Totalism143Pt. IIIEducation for Democracy: Civic Education, Service, and CitizenshipCh. 12Thomas Jefferson and the Education of the Citizen161Ch. 13The Civic Mission of the University178Ch. 14Service, Citizenship, and Democracy: Civic Duty as an Entailment of Civil Right187Ch. 15Cultural Conservatism and Democratic Education: Lessons from the Sixties203Ch. 16America Skips School: Why We Talk So Much about Education and Do So Little214Ch. 17Education for Democracy225Pt. IVDemocracy and Technology: Endless Frontier or End of Democracy? Ch. 18The Second American Revolution237Ch. 19Pangloss, Pandora, or Jefferson? Three Scenarios for the Future of Technology and Democracy245Ch. 20The New Telecommunications Technology: Endless Frontier or the End of Democracy? 258Index283
NEW LOWER BOUND TECHNIQUES FOR DYNAMIC PARTIAL SUMS AND RELATED PROBLEMS

We study the complexity of the dynamic partial sum problem in the cell-probe model. We give the model access to nondeterministic queries and prove that the problem remains hard. We give the model access to the right answer ±1 as an oracle and prove that the problem remains hard. This suggests which kind of information is hard to maintain. From these results, we derive a number of lower bounds for dynamic algorithms and data structures: We prove lower bounds for dynamic algorithms for existential range queries, reachability in directed graphs, planarity testing, planar point location, incremental parsing, and fundamental data structure problems like maintaining the majority of the prefixes of a string of bits. We prove a lower bound for reachability in grid graphs in terms of the graph’s width. We characterize the complexity of maintaining the value of any symmetric function on the prefixes of a bit string.
An Elliptic Curve Cryptography Coprocessor over GF(2m) on a Low-Cost Embedded System

In this paper we propose a low-cost coprocessor architecture for elliptic curves cryptography which supports the main mathematical operations for the computation of ECDSA over GF(2193), including point doubling, point addition and scalar multiplication over field ECC. As the field is fixed, we use this special property to design special operational units and pipeline structure. Although only increasing 4% area, it speeds around 40% faster at the same time. Our design allows to perform a scalar multiplication over GF(2193) in 24 ms at a clock frequency of 10 MHz, and is only 11,486 NAND gates large. The advantages of both the performance and hardware cost are much favorable compared with previous similar work.
Analysis of Demand for Family Takaful and Life Insurance : A Comparative Study in Malaysia

This study is aimed at investigating the key factors that influence the demand for family takaful and comparing with its conventional counterpart. This study, therefore, examines Malaysian takaful and insurance market by using relevant data obtained from Bank Negara Malaysia and Department of Statistics Malaysia for the period of 1990 – 2009. In analysing the data, this study uses multiple regressions model. The findings of this study indicate that, four variables, namely “GDP per capita”, “education”, “saving” and “religion” are significantly related to the demand for family takaful. On the other hand, there are three variables that significantly influence the demand for life insurance, namely “GDP per capita”, “saving” and “religion”. This study reveals that, there are two factors that negatively influence the demand for family takaful i.e. Customer Price Index and Saving. Meanwhile, age, saving and religion are the three factors which give negative influence on life insurance. The findings also reflect higher public receptive to takaful as compared to the conventional insurance in the Malaysian market.
The effect of weight loss on fasting blood sugars and hemoglobin A1c in overweight and obese diabetics and non-diabetics

Background: Diet and exercise are recommended first line treatment for overweight, obese, and diabetic patients with the goal of decreasing weight and improving glycemic control. The goal of this study was to determine the effect that a low calorie diet and behavioral modification program, as implemented by a medically supervised weight loss program, would have on the fasting blood sugar and hemoglobin A1c in overweight or obese diabetic and overweight or obese non-diabetic participants. Methods: Charts from 2009 to 2010 were reviewed for 310 diabetic and non-diabetic patients enrolled in the Via Christi Weight Management (VCWM) program in Wichita, Kansas. Data were collected before and after patients underwent a program of meal replacements and weekly physical activity lasting 12 weeks. Variables included pre and post treatment fasting blood sugars, hemoglobin A1c, body mass index, percent body weight lost, and diabetes status. RESULTS: Diabetic participants lost an average of 11.7% of their initial body weight (IBW), and non-diabetic patients lost 12.5% of their IBW over the treatment course. Post-treatment average fasting blood glucose (FBG) decreased in both diabetics and non-diabetics by 15.53 mg/dL and 8.46 mg/dL, respectively (p = 0.08). Diabetic patients experienced a significant decrease of 0.83% from pre to post-treatment in hemoglobin A1c. For diabetic and non-diabetic groups, the changes in FBG were correlated with the change in weight. Conclusions: Diet and exercise, as prescribed by the VCWM program, is effective in reducing hemoglobin A1c in diabetics and reducing fasting blood sugars in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients.
Improving Persian-English Statistical Machine Translation:Experiments in Domain Adaptation

This paper documents recent work carried out for PeEn-SMT, our Statistical Machine Translation system for translation between the English-Persian language pair. We give details of our previous SMT system, and present our current development of significantly larger corpora. We explain how recent tests using much larger corpora helped to evaluate problems in parallel corpus alignment, corpus content, and how matching the domains of PeEn-SMT’s components affect translation output. We then focus on combining corpora and approaches to improve test data, showing details of experimental setup, together with a number of experiment results and comparisons between them. We show how one combination of corpora gave us a metric score outperforming Google Translate for the English-toPersian translation. Finally, we outline areas of our intended future work, and how we plan to improve the performance of our system to achieve higher metric scores, and ultimately to provide accurate, reliable language translation.
The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Values and Human Interactions 90 Years after the Fall of the Habsburg Empire

Do Empires affect human values and behavior long after their demise? In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone border of the Habsburg Empire have been sharing common formal institutions for 90 years now. We exploit this geographic discontinuity in a regression-discontinuity design with country fixed effects using data of individuals living inside a restricted band around the former border. We find that historical Habsburg affiliation increases current social capital and trust and reduces corruption in several public services. Past formal institutions can leave a legacy through cultural norms even after generations of common statehood.
Visual Cortical Mechanisms of Motion Perception and Navigation: Experiments and Models

The proposed research will explore human motion perception and navigation through a combination of neural modeling and experiments. A neural model is proposed in which optic flow is mapped to visual cortex via the cortical magnification factor, and this mapping serves as a basis for cell selectivity in the dorsal medial superior temporal cortex (MSTd). MSTd cells have large receptive fields, receive an eye movement efference copy, and respond to the spiral motion patterns that occur during combined observer rotation and translation. MSTd cells also exhibit position-invariant responses, which are useful for object motion processing. Model cells match MSTd neuron responses to optic flow stimuli placed in different parts of the visual field. The model demonstrates how MSTd cell responses can explain human judgments of self-motion direction (heading) and time-to-contact (TTC). Spiral-tuned model cells clarify when a subtractive efference copy is needed for accurate heading perception, and when retinal input is sufficient. Model cells also match human heading judgments across a range of heading angles, scene layouts, and rotation rates. TTC is processed by attentionally modulated cells selective for rate of expansion. Simulations match human TTC judgments when an observer moves towards a stationary object, and when an object moves towards a stationary observer. The experimental work addresses the mechanisms by which visual and extraretinal sources of information are combined. The foundation for this work is an optical illusion in which an expansion flow field of moving dots is overlapped by planar motion. In this case observers perceive an illusory displacement of the focus of expansion (FOE) in the direction of the planar motion (Duffy & Wurtz, 1993). The illusion may be a consequence of induced motion, wherein an induced component of motion relative to planar dots is added to the motions of expansion dots to produce the FOE shift. While such a process could be mediated by local “center-surround” receptive fields, the effect could also be due to a higher level process which detects and subtracts large-field planar motion from the flow field. In the experiments reported herein, larger FOE shifts were perceived for greater speeds and sizes of planar motion fields, although the speed effect saturated at high speeds. While the illusion appears to share a common mechanism with center-surround induced motion, the results also point to involvement of a more global mechanism that subtracts coherent planar motion from the flow field. Such a process might help to maintain visual stability during eye movements.
Social Inequality, Human Capital and Economic Growth in OECD Countries : Synthesis

Interesting conclusions concerning the relationships between economic growth and inequalities arise from endogenous growth theory. The assumption of this theory is that human capital not only determines the rate of long-term growth, but also that based on this factor of production changes in income distribution between economic entities can be explained. Moreover, it can be observed from models of endogenous growth based on human capital, that smaller inequalities lead to increased pace of economic growth in the long-run. Unfortunately, existing empirical research does not yield unambiguous conclusions on the directions of impacts of social inequality on economic growth. It is our thinking, that the cause of this ambiguity in results of these studies lies in over-aggregation of indicators of social inequalities. The purpose of the article is therefore, to overview the theoretical and empirical literature and present the own analysis of relationships between economic growth, human capital and social inequalities, separated into activating and frustrating ones. The article has been structured as follows. Paragraph 2 presents conclusions from the theory of endogenous growth as regards impacts of human capital on income inequalities between economic entities. Paragraph 3 presents conclusions of empirical studies on existing dependences between economic growth and inequalities. Paragraph 4 is a description of the classification of inequalities separated into activating types, i.e., for promoting growth and efficiency, and
Bayesian Vars: A Survey of the Recent Literature with an Application to the European Monetary System

This paper reviews recent advances in the specification and estimation of Bayesian Vector Autoregressive models (BVARs). After describing the Bayesian principle of estimation, we first present the methodology originally developed by Litterman (1986) and Doan et al. (1984) and review alternative priors. We then discuss extensions of the basic model and address issues in forecasting and structural analysis. An application to the estimation of a system of time-varying reaction functions for four European central banks under the European Monetary System (EMS) illustrates how some of the results previously presented may be applied in practice.
Essays in favor-trading

We investigate two previously little studied aspects of favor-trading. First, we study whether and how individuals who stand to gain from favor-trading can best form cooperative relationships in an environment with private information about each agent’s ability and willingness to do favors. For agents with a low discount factor (low types) cooperation is not incentive compatible, for agents with a high discount factor (high types) it is. Both types receive privately observed opportunities to do favors with positive probability each period. We show high types are always able to separate from low types. Separation is implementable as soon as a high type receives a favor opportunity if the opportunities are independent across agents. If they are mutually exclusive, high types continue to separate with probability one if one of the agents is designated to do the first favor and that agent is a high type. Equilibria that designate an agent to act first implement separation approximately twice as slowly as symmetric equilibria that task the first high type with opportunity to separate first. Therefore the latter type of symmetric equilibria may dominate the former type of non-symmetric equilibria. Second, we study two-player games of favor-trading in a complete information environment standard to the literature, but in contrast to prominent models of favor-trading to date, we assume agents have concave utility functions of the form u(x)=x^a; 0 Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Economics First Advisor Andrew Postlewaite Second Advisor George J. Mailath Third Advisor Philipp Kircher
Adaptive Time-Variant Model Optimization for Fuzzy-Time-Series Forecasting

Fuzzy time series forecasting model is one of the tools that can be used to identify factors in order to solve the complex process and uncertainty, nowadays widely used in forecasting problems, but having appropriate universe of discourse and interval length are two subjects that exist in the Fuzzy time series. Recently Adaptive Time-Variant Model for fuzzy time series (ATVF) has been proposed with a computational method and an adaptive selection of analysis windows. In this paper, first we have introduced particle swarm optimization algorithm which is used for interval lengths improvement for ATVF model, another challenge that ATVF model confront with it is universe of discourse and this problem is solved using K-means clustering algorithm. Two models are applied to predict three data bases (the Enrolment of University of Alabama, Taiwan Futures Exchange (TAIFEX) and Taiwan Stock Exchange Capitalization Weighted Stock Index (TAIEX)). The experimental results show that the proposed methods gets good forecasting results as compared to other existing fuzzy-time-series forecasting
Investigation of the Josephin Domain Protein-Protein Interaction by Molecular Dynamics

Spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) 3, the most common form of SCA, is a neurodegenerative rare disease characterized by polyglutamine tract expansion and self-assembly of Ataxin3 (At3) misfolded proteins into highly organized fibrillar aggregates. The At3 N-terminal Josephin Domain (JD) has been suggested as being responsible for mediating the initial phase of the At3 double-step fibrillogenesis. Several issues concerning the residues involved in the JD’s aggregation and, more generally, the JD clumping mechanism have not been clarified yet. In this paper we present an investigation focusing on the JD protein-protein interaction by means of molecular modeling. Our results suggest possible aminoacids involved in JD contact together with local and non-local effects following JD dimerization. Surprisingly, JD conformational changes following the binding may involve ubiquitin binding sites and hairpin region even though they do not pertain to the JD interaction surfaces. Moreover, the JD binding event has been found to alter the hairpin open-like conformation toward a closed-like arrangement over the simulated timescale. Finally, our results suggest that the JD aggregation might be a multi-step process, with an initial fast JD-JD binding mainly driven by Arg101, followed by slower structural global rearrangements involving the exposure to the solvent of Leu84-Trp87, which might play a role in a second step of JD aggregation.
Cloud Computing Adoption Factors in Turkish Large Scale Enterprises

While most research regarding adoption of cloud computing by companies covers countries with highly developed IT infrastructure, cloud computing is actually used also in less IT-mature countries. Still, companies address cloud computing differently in countries with different levels of IT-maturity. This research explores cloud computing adoption factors in less IT-mature countries having Turkey as the example. Embracing an exploratory approach, we investigated five large Turkish companies. The results show that the main adopti on factors in favour of cloud computing are “cost”, “distributed organisational structure”, “mobility of the employees”, and “end-user satisfaction”, while “security”, “critical business processes”, “loss of control over data and systems”, and “technical infrastructure of the region in terms of broadband” are the factors that make companies cautious about cloud computing. The main difference between Turkey and more IT-mature countries with respect to cloud computing adoption factors is inadequate broadband access and lack of knowledge on cloud computing.
ow do humans represent the emotions of dogs ? The esemblance between the human representation of the anine and the human affective space

As (critical) anthropomorphism provides a useful hypothesis for looking at animal behavior, people’s reports about how they see animals’ emotions can provide a start point in the direction of experiment-oriented studies. It has been shown that humans attribute a wide range of emotions to animals. The concept of ‘affective space’ is often used to model human emotional states in a dimensional way. However, there has been no study carried out on how humans may construct non-human animals’ affective space. Our aim was to assess owners’ attribution of emotions to their dogs (Canis familiaris), and to construct the affective space for dogs. We used two questionnaires to investigate owners’ opinion about (1) the emotions that humans can recognize in dogs and dogs can recognize in humans, and (2) the behavior elements that characterize certain emotions. The first questionnaire revealed that humans are reported to perceive a wide range of emotions in dogs. The reported contingencies between behavior elements and emotions in the second questionnaire were analyzed using correspondence analysis. The resulting two-dimensional affective space showed similarity to those found in human studies: the two dimensions were interpreted as ‘activity’ and ‘assertiveness’. The results suggest that humans represent dogs’ emotions in a partly similar way to their own. These similarities could reflect anthropomorphism and/or homologies in the expression of emotional states. The understanding of how humans represent animal emotions could provide both a step in the direction of experimental studies of animal emotions and also an important knowledge about ‘folk animal psychology’ which shapes the socially constructed concept of animal welfare. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Estimating Dynamic Merger Effciencies with an Application to the 1997 Boeing-McDonnell Douglas Merger

I evaluate the welfare effects of the 1997 merger between Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in the medium-sized, wide-bodied aircraft industry. I develop an empirical model of multi-product firms, allowing for both learning-by-doing and product innovation in a dynamic game to quantify merger efficiency. Merger efficiency from learning-by-doing is then disentangled from both the effects of innovation and market power. The results show that the primary benefits from the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger come from accelerated learning-by-doing. Taking account of all static and dynamic effects, net consumer surplus is found to have increased by as much as $1.57 billion. In contrast, a static model ignoring learning-by-doing and innovation predicts a consumer loss of approximately $20 billion. These results show that ignoring dynamic effects can lead to biased results and erroneous policy decisions regarding the welfare effects of proposed mergers.
Analysis of the Ush2a Gene in Medaka Fish (Oryzias latipes)

Patients suffering from Usher syndrome (USH) exhibit sensorineural hearing loss, retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and, in some cases, vestibular dysfunction. USH is the most common genetic disorder affecting hearing and vision and is included in a group of hereditary pathologies associated with defects in ciliary function known as ciliopathies. This syndrome is clinically classified into three types: USH1, USH2 and USH3. USH2 accounts for well over one-half of all Usher cases and mutations in the USH2A gene are responsible for the majority of USH2 cases, but also for atypical Usher syndrome and recessive non-syndromic RP. Because medaka fish (Oryzias latypes) is an attractive model organism for genetic-based studies in biomedical research, we investigated the expression and function of the USH2A ortholog in this teleost species. Ol-Ush2a encodes a protein of 5.445 aa codons, containing the same motif arrangement as the human USH2A. Ol-Ush2a is expressed during early stages of medaka fish development and persists into adulthood. Temporal Ol-Ush2a expression analysis using whole mount in situ hybridization (WMISH) on embryos at different embryonic stages showed restricted expression to otoliths and retina, suggesting that Ol-Ush2a might play a conserved role in the development and/or maintenance of retinal photoreceptors and cochlear hair cells. Knockdown of Ol-Ush2a in medaka fish caused embryonic developmental defects (small eyes and heads, otolith malformations and shortened bodies with curved tails) resulting in late embryo lethality. These embryonic defects, observed in our study and in other ciliary disorders, are associated with defective cell movement specifically implicated in left-right (LR) axis determination and planar cell polarity (PCP).