Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sub-Saharan Africa's Recent Growth Spurt: An Analysis of the Sources of Growth

Since the mid-1990s, Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced unprecedented levels of high economic growth. A key question follows: What accounts for the turnaround of the growth performance in the mid-1990s? The answer can provide insight into whether the recent growth spurt in Sub-Saharan Africa is merely temporary or the beginning of a sustainable takeoff. This paper examines the sources of growth of 32 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in a growth accounting framework. The findings suggest that the recent growth spurt is largely associated with an increase in the share of working-age population, capital accumulation, and total factor productivity, unlike previous periods. Resources play a role by attracting capital inflows, particularly from foreign direct investment and shifting labor away from agriculture. However, the growth prospects for Sub-Saharan Africa seem promising beyond resources, with steady progress in decreased fertility, increased foreign direct investment, political stability, and structural transformation.
Testing of a microanalysis system

During the testing of microsystems, one has to cope with many problems resulting from inaccessibility, different technologies, and nonelectrical failure modes. A number of mixed-signal test techniques have been applied to test a new advanced microsystem. The choices on testing are directly dependent on implementation form and application area of the microsystem. Mixed-signal testing approaches are a key factor in this environment.
Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks

Localization is the process of finding a sensor node’s position in space. This paper explains the complete procedure for locating nodes in a wireless sensor network, including the techniques for estimating inter-node distances and angles and how nodes compute their positions using trilateration or triangulation. It focuses on the mathematical concepts underlying localization, detailing the computational steps involved in trilateration and triangulation, the steps necessary to compensate for inexact distance or angle estimates, and the derivation of the linear systems for calculating nodal coordinates in 2D or higher space dimension. Lastly, this work compares three existing localization algorithms: Directionality based Localization Discovery Scheme, TERRAIN, and Hop-TERRAIN, in terms of their major benefits, sources of error, and positioning accuracy.
On the Real-Time Forecasting Ability of the Consumption-Wealth Ratio

Lettau and Ludvigson (2001a) show that the consumption-wealth ratio—the error term from the cointegration relation among consumption, net worth, and labor income—forecasts stock market returns out of sample. In this paper, we reexamine their evidence using real-time data. Consistent with the early authors, we find that consumption and labor income data are subject to substantial revisions, which reflect (1) incorporating new information or methodologies and (2) reducing noise. Consequently, in contrast with the results obtained from the current vintage, the out-of-sample forecasting power of the consumption-wealth ratio is found to be negligible in real time.
Household Portfolio Allocation Over the Life Cycle

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between age and portfolio structure for households in the US. We focus on both the probability that households of different ages own particular portfolio assets and the fraction of their net worth allocated to each asset category. We distinguish between age and cohort effects using data from the repeated cross-sections of the Federal Reserve Board's Surveys of Consumer Finances. We present two broad conclusions. First, there are important differences across asset classes in both the age-specific probabilities of asset ownership and in the portfolio shares of different assets at different ages. The notnion that all assets can be treated as identical from the standpoint of analyzing household wealth accumulation is not supported by the data. Institutional factors, asset liquidity, and evolving investor tastes must be recognized in modeling asset demand. These factors could affect analyses of overall household saving as well as the composition of this saving. Second, there are evident differences in the asset ownership probabilities of different birth cohorts. Currently, older households were more likely to hold corporate stock, and less likely to hold tax-exempt bonds, than younger households at any given age. These differences across cohorts are important to recognize when analyzing asset accumulation profiles.
Functional Microarchitecture of the Mouse Dorsal Inferior Colliculus Revealed through In Vivo Two-Photon Calcium Imaging

The inferior colliculus (IC) is an obligatory relay for ascending auditory inputs from the brainstem and receives descending input from the auditory cortex. The IC comprises a central nucleus (CNIC), surrounded by several shell regions, but the internal organization of this midbrain nucleus remains incompletely understood. We used two-photon calcium imaging to study the functional microarchitecture of both neurons in the mouse dorsal IC and corticocollicular axons that terminate there. In contrast to previous electrophysiological studies, our approach revealed a clear functional distinction between the CNIC and the dorsal cortex of the IC (DCIC), suggesting that the mouse midbrain is more similar to that of other mammals than previously thought. We found that the DCIC comprises a thin sheet of neurons, sometimes extending barely 100 μm below the pial surface. The sound frequency representation in the DCIC approximated the mouse's full hearing range, whereas dorsal CNIC neurons almost exclusively preferred low frequencies. The response properties of neurons in these two regions were otherwise surprisingly similar, and the frequency tuning of DCIC neurons was only slightly broader than that of CNIC neurons. In several animals, frequency gradients were observed in the DCIC, and a comparable tonotopic arrangement was observed across the boutons of the corticocollicular axons, which form a dense mesh beneath the dorsal surface of the IC. Nevertheless, acoustically responsive corticocollicular boutons were sparse, produced unreliable responses, and were more broadly tuned than DCIC neurons, suggesting that they have a largely modulatory rather than driving influence on auditory midbrain neurons. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Due to its genetic tractability, the mouse is fast becoming the most popular animal model for sensory neuroscience. Nevertheless, many aspects of its neural architecture are still poorly understood. Here, we image the dorsal auditory midbrain and its inputs from the cortex, revealing a hitherto hidden level of organization and paving the way for the direct observation of corticocollicular interactions. We show that a precise functional organization exists in the mouse auditory midbrain, which has been missed by previous, more macroscopic approaches. The fine-scale distribution of sound-frequency tuning suggests that the mouse midbrain is more similar to that of other mammals than previously thought and contrasts with the more heterogeneous organization reported in imaging studies of auditory cortex.
iVector Based Language Recognition

The focus of this thesis is an fairly new approach to phonotactic language recognition, i.e. identifying a language from the sounds in an spoken utterance, known as iVector subspace modeling. The goal of the iVector is to compactly represent the discriminative information in a utterance so that further processing of the utterance is less computationally intensive. This might enable the system to be trained with more data, and thereby reach an higher performance. We present both the theory behind iVectors and experiments to better fit the iVector space to our development data. The final system got comparable result to our baseline PRLM system on the NIST LRE03 30 second evaluation set.
A category-dependent feature selection method for speech signals

We present a novel method of dimension reduction and feature selection that makes use of category-dependent regions in high-dimensional data. Our method is inspired by phoneme-dependent, noise-robust low-variance regions observed in the cortical response, and introduces the notion of category-dependence in a two-step dimension reduction process that draws on the fundamental principles of Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis. As a method of applying these features in an actual pattern classiﬁcation task, we construct a system of multiple speech recognizers that are combined by a Bayesian decision rule under some simplifying assumptions. The results show a signiﬁcant increase in recognition rate for low signal-to-noise ratios compared with previous methods, providing motivation for further study on hierarchical, category-dependent recognition and detection.
Heat-processed ginseng saponin ameliorates the adenine-induced renal failure in rats

To evaluate the effect of the saponin of heat-processed ginseng (Sun ginseng, SG), we investigated the protective effect of SG total saponin fraction against adenine-induced chronic renal failure in rats. SG saponin significantly decreased the levels of urea nitrogen and creatinine in the serum, but increased the urinary excretion of urea nitrogen and creatinine, indicating an improvement of renal function. SG saponin also inhibited adenine-induced kidney hypertrophy and edema. SG saponin reduced serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase, glutamic pyruvic transaminase, and lactate dehydrogenase activities increased by adenine. Based on these findings, the ameliorating effect of SG on chronic renal failure may result from its saponin.
A Test of Monetary and Portfolio Balance Models of Exchange Rate Determination

This paper tests whether the volatility in the fundamentals that ought to determine exchange rates is large enough to produce the observed volatility in exchange rates. The results show that monetary and portfolio balance considerations cannot explain the observed variability in the exchange rate of the deutsche mark vis-a-vis the U.S. dollar Japanese yen and Swiss franc. However monetary and portfolio balance considerations can explain the observed variability of the deutsche mark vis-a-vis other EMS currencies. This suggests that the EMS has been successful in reducing the exchange rate volatility to the minimum compatible with the volatility in the fundamentals.
Gravitational hydrodynamics of large-scale structure formation

The gravitational hydrodynamics of the primordial plasma with neutrino hot dark matter is considered as a challenge to the bottom-up cold-dark-matter paradigm. Viscosity and turbulence induce a top-down fragmentation scenario before and at decoupling. The first step is the creation of voids in the plasma, which expand to 37 Mpc on the average now. The remaining matter clumps turn into galaxy clusters. At decoupling galaxies and Jeans clusters arise; the latter constitute the galactic dark-matter halos and consist themselves of earth mass milli brown dwarfs. Frozen milli brown dwarfs are observed in microlensing and white-dwarf-heated ones in planetary nebulae. The approach explains the Tully-Fisher and Faber-Jackson relations, and cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations of sub-milli-kelvins.
Debt Ownership Structure and Legal System: An International Analysis

This paper is concerned with the ownership structure of corporate debt from an institutional perspective. We try to identify the factors affecting bank debt use from an international sample of companies from Austria, Germany, Japan, Belgium, France, Italy, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden and the USA. Our results show that bank debt depends both on factors specific to each company and on institutional features of each country. More exactly, we find that bank loans are related to firm size, to the quality and risk of the projects, and to the collateral. We also find a number of legal-institutional factors impacting on the source of firms' debt, such as creditor protection, firm disclosure requirements and law enforcement.
Cross-cultural team building : guidelines for more effective communication and negotiation

Introduction to cross-cultural team building the business of culture and the culture of business management and the structure of culture bridging the language gap through international networking culture change and team building in Hungary training Germans and Americans in conflict management team building in the United Nations team building in Asia diversity and team building reducing prejudice between unions and management leading and facilitating international teams facilitation skills for cross-cultural learning.
The modern obesity epidemic, ancestral hunter-gatherers, and the sensory/reward control of food intake.

Obesity has become a true pandemic. In the United States, over two thirds of adults are obese or overweight. The prevalence of obesity has doubled since 1980. The increase in the prevalence of obese and overweight individuals has happened too rapidly for it to be due to an alteration in the genome. The gastrointestinal, sensory (taste and olfaction), and brain feeding mechanisms that developed during the past 2 million years were highly adaptive for ancestral hunter-gatherers living in an environment with limited high-density foods and periods of food deprivation. Today, however, humans in industrialized countries live in what has been called an "obesogenic environment. " The nonhomeostatic brain reward circuitry that was acquired during evolution to seek out and eat as many nutritionally high-dense foods as possible is able to overrule the physiological inhibitory mechanisms that were designed to limit meal size and weight gain.
Classifying Bug Reports to Bugs and Other Requests Using Topic Modeling

Bug reports are widely used in several research areas such as bug prediction, bug triaging, and etc. The performance of these studies relies on the information from bug reports. Previous study showed that a significant number of bug reports are actually misclassified between bugs and non-bugs. However, classifying bug reports is a time-consuming task. In the previous study, researchers spent 90 days to classify manually more than 7,000 bug reports. To tackle this problem, we propose automatic bug report classification techniques. We apply topic modeling to the corpora of pre-processed bug reports of three open-source software projects with decision tree, naive Bayes classifier, and logistic regression. The performance in classification, measured in F-measure score, varies between 0.66-0.76, 0.65-0.77, and 0.71-0.82 for HTTPClient, Jackrabbit, and Lucene project respectively.
UV Properties of Early-Type Galaxies in the Virgo Cluster

We study the UV properties of a volume-limited sample of early-type galaxies in the Virgo Cluster combining new GALEX far-ultraviolet (1530 Å) and near-ultraviolet (2310 Å) data with spectrophotometric data available at other wavelengths. The sample includes 264 elliptical, lenticular, and dwarf galaxies spanning a large range in luminosity (MB ≤ -15). While the NUV to optical or near-IR color-magnitude relations (CMRs) are similar to those observed at optical wavelengths, with a monotonic reddening of the color index with increasing luminosity, the (FUV - V) and (FUV - H) CMRs show a discontinuity between massive and dwarf objects. An even more pronounced dichotomy is observed in the (FUV - NUV) CMR. For elliptical galaxies, the (FUV - NUV) color becomes bluer with increasing luminosity and with increasing reddening of the optical or near-IR color indices. For the dwarfs, the opposite trend is observed. These observational evidences are consistent with the idea that the UV emission is dominated by hot, evolved stars in giant systems, while in dwarf ellipticals residual star formation activity is more common.
Genome-wide analysis of p63 binding sites identifies AP-2 factors as co-regulators of epidermal differentiation

The p63 transcription factor (TP63) is critical in development, growth and differentiation of stratifying epithelia. This is highlighted by the severity of congenital abnormalities caused by TP63 mutations in humans, the dramatic phenotypes in knockout mice and de-regulation of TP63 expression in neoplasia altering the tumour suppressive roles of the TP53 family. In order to define the normal role played by TP63 and provide the basis for better understanding how this network is perturbed in disease, we used chromatin immunoprecipitation combined with massively parallel sequencing (ChIP-seq) to identify >7500 high-confidence TP63-binding regions across the entire genome, in primary human neonatal foreskin keratinocytes (HFKs). Using integrative strategies, we demonstrate that only a subset of these sites are bound by TP53 in response to DNA damage. We identify a role for TP63 in transcriptional regulation of multiple genes genetically linked to cleft palate and identify AP-2alpha (TFAP2A) as a co-regulator of a subset of these genes. We further demonstrate that AP-2gamma (TFAP2C) can bind a subset of these regions and that acute depletion of either TFAP2A or TFAP2C alone is sufficient to reduce terminal differentiation of organotypic epidermal skin equivalents, indicating overlapping physiological functions with TP63.
Democratic Transitions and Institutional Change: What's Behind the Association?

Many empirical studies have shown democracies to be more supportive of sound economic institutions than authoritarian regimes and recent analysis also finds that democratic transitions are followed by overall improvements in economic freedom. This sheds some light on a possible chain of causality, but up to date it is virtually unknown through which channel democracy actually creates institutional improvements. Employing a dataset by Cheibub et al. (2010), we identify 41 political transitions to democracy since the mid-1970s, for which measures on economic institutions and policies are also available. Panel data analysis is used to examine the outcome of democratization within the framework of a fixed- and random-effects model. To control for possible endogeneity, the paper further employs an instrument for democratic transitions, based on observations by Huntington (1991). Results mainly indicate that stable transitions to democracy are followed by strongly improved access to sound money, while unstable transitions seem to impede it. We further find evidence that the improved access to sound money is driven by the installation of more independent central banks in newly established electoral democracies.
A search for TeV gamma-ray emission from SNRs, pulsars and unidentified GeV sources in the Galactic plane in the longitude range between 2 and 85

Using the HEGRA system of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, one quarter of the Galactic plane ( 2< l < 85) was surveyed for TeV gamma-ray emission from point sources and moderately extended sources (O 0:8). The region covered includes 86 known pulsars (PSR), 63 known supernova remnants (SNR) and nine GeV sources, representing a significant fraction of the known populations. No evidence for emission of TeV gamma radiation was detected, and upper limits range from 0.15 Crab units up to several Crab units, depending on the observation time and zenith angles covered. The ensemble sums over selected SNR and pulsar subsamples and over the GeV-sources yield no indication of emission from these potential sources. The upper limit for the SNR population is 6.7% of the Crab flux and for the pulsar ensemble is 3.6% of the Crab flux.
Technology and the dynamics of specialization in open economies

Let's read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd technology and the dynamics of specialization in open economics to read.
Comparing Chemical Abundances of the Damped Lyα Systems and Metal-Poor Stars

I briefly draw comparisons between the fields of damped Lya and metal-poor stellar abundances. In particular, I examine their complementary age-metallicity relations and comparisons between the damped Lya and dwarf galaxy abundance patterns. Regarding the latter, I describe a series of problems concerning associating high z damped Lya systems with present-day dwarfs.
Surgical treatment of double primary liver cancer

AbstractDouble primary liver cancer (DPLC) is a special type of clinical situation. As such, a detailed analysis of the surgical management and prognosis of patients with DPLC is lacking. The objective of the current study was to define the management and outcome of patients undergoing surgery for DPLC at a major hepatobiliary center.A total of 87 patients treated by surgical resection at the Eastern Hepatobiliary Surgery Hospital from January 1st, 2007 to October 31st, 2013 who had DPLC demonstrated by final pathological diagnosis were identified. Among these, 50 patients had complete clinical and prognostic data. Demographic and tumor characteristics as well as the prognosis were analyzed.The proportion of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) (+) and hepatitis B virus e antigen (HBeAg) (+), HBsAg (+), and HBeAg (−) hepatocirrhosis in all patients was 21.84%, 67.82%, and 63.22%, respectively. Incidental findings accounted for 58.62% of patients; among those who had symptoms, the main symptom was abdominal pain (31.03%). Nonanatomic wedge resection was the main operative approach (62.07%). Postoperatively, the main complications included seroperitoneum (11.49%), hypoproteinemia (10.34%), and pleural effusion (8.05%). Factors associated with disease-free survival (DFS) included intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) tumor size (P = 0.002) and use of postoperative prophylactic transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) treatment (P = 0.015). Meanwhile, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) size (P = 0.045), ICC size (P < 0.001), and liver function (including aspartate aminotransferase [P = 0.001] and r-glutamyl transferase [P < 0.001]) were associated with overall survival (OS). Hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related hepatitis or cirrhosis is also an important factor in the pathogenesis of DPLC and surgical treatment is safe for it with low complication rates. In addition, it is effective to prolong DFS that DPLC patients undergo postoperative prophylactic TACE treatment.
DNA Binding Properties of the Actin-Related Protein Arp8 and Its Role in DNA Repair

Actin and actin-related proteins (Arps), which are members of the actin family, are essential components of many of these remodeling complexes. Actin, Arp4, Arp5, and Arp8 are found to be evolutionarily conserved components of the INO80 chromatin remodeling complex, which is involved in transcriptional regulation, DNA replication, and DNA repair. A recent report showed that Arp8 forms a module in the INO80 complex and this module can directly capture a nucleosome. In the present study, we showed that recombinant human Arp8 binds to DNAs, and preferentially binds to single-stranded DNA. Analysis of the binding of adenine nucleotides to Arp8 mutants suggested that the ATP-binding pocket, located in the evolutionarily conserved actin fold, plays a regulatory role in the binding of Arp8 to DNA. To determine the cellular function of Arp8, we derived tetracycline-inducible Arp8 knockout cells from a cultured human cell line. Analysis of results obtained after treating these cells with aphidicolin and camptothecin revealed that Arp8 is involved in DNA repair. Together with the previous observation that Arp8, but not γ-H2AX, is indispensable for recruiting INO80 complex to DSB in human, results of our study suggest an individual role for Arp8 in DNA repair.