Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-Reporting, Investigation, and Evidentiary Standards

Self-reporting schemes have become a substantial part of law enforcement. This paper analyzes the optimal use of such schemes when the authority cannot commit to an ex post investigation effort. I show that this leads to a negative relationship between self-reporting incentives and investigation effort. Three main conclusions arise. First, violators self-report with a probability of 1 if and only if full amnesty is offered. Second, self-reporting schemes are not efficient when the level of harm of the act is high. Finally, authorities can increase the incentives to self-report when they convict without hard evidence. However, a hard-evidence standard provides more deterrence and is weakly welfare superior.
A Hidden Markov Model Approach to Information-Based Trading: Theory and Applications

This paper develops a novel approach to information‐based securities trading by characterizing the hidden state of the market, which varies following a Markov process. Extensive simulation demonstrates that the approach can successfully identify market states and generate dynamic measures of information‐based trading that outperform prevailing models. A sample of 120 NYSE stocks further verifies that it can better depict trading dynamics. With this sample, we characterize the features of information asymmetry and belief dispersion around earnings announcements. The sample is also applied to the study of the co‐movements of trading activities due to private information or disputable public information. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Using a polymorphic VLIW processor to improve schedulability and performance for mixed-criticality systems

As embedded systems are faced with ever more demanding workloads and more tasks are being consolidated onto a smaller number of microcontrollers, system designers are faced with opposing requirements of increasing performance while retaining real-time analyzability. For example, one can think of the following performance-enhancing techniques: caches, branch prediction, out-of-order (OoO) superscalar processing, simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). Clearly, there is a need for a platform that can deliver high performance for non-critical tasks and full analyzability and predictability for critical tasks (mixed-criticality systems). In this paper, we demonstrate how a polymorphic VLIW processor can satisfy these seemingly contradicting goals by allowing a schedule to dynamically, i.e., at run-time, distribute the computing resources to one or multiple threads. The core provides full performance isolation between threads and can keep multiple task contexts in hardware (virtual processors, similar to SMT) between which it can switch with minimal penalty (a pipeline flush). In this work, we show that this dynamic platform can improve performance over current predictable processors (by a factor of 5 on average using the highest performing configuration), and provides schedulability that is on par with an earlier study that explored the concept of creating a dynamic processor based on a superscalar architecture. Furthermore, we measured a 15% improvement in schedulability over a heterogeneous multi-core platform with an equal number of datapaths. Finally, our VHDL design and tools (including compiler, simulator, libraries etc.) are available for download for the academic community.
Otorhinolaryngology Emergency Unit Care: The Experience of a Large University Hospital in Italy

We recorded the symptoms and disposition of every patient who visited the otorhinolaryngology emergency department at our hospital in Rome, Italy, during 1996. During that time, our ENT specialists saw 21,548 patients. Only 311 of these patients (1.4%) required immediate hospitalization, while another 2,391 patients (11.1%) received treatment and were released. The other 18,846 patients (87.5%) did not have any pathology or condition that qualified as an actual emergency, and they were examined and released, often with a prescription or instructions for home care. These patients could have easily been treated by a family physician. The fact that emergency care in Italy is rendered free of charge (unlike ambulatory care, for which fees are charged) provides patients with a strong incentive to misuse the system. Such overutilization drives up the cost of health care and stretches the capacity of the medical staff. Steps need to be taken to redirect patients who misuse emergency services to seek medical care in ambulatory care centers.
Patterns of Work Across the OECD

Market work per person of working age differs widely across the OECD countries and there have been some significant changes in the last forty years. How to explain this pattern? Taxes are part of the story but much remains to be explained. If we include all the elements of the social security systems like early retirement benefits, sickness and disability benefits and unemployment benefits, then we can capture some aspects of the overall pattern but still a lot remains unexplained. The story favoured by Alesina et al. (CEPR DP.5140, 2005) is that the nexus of strong unions, generous welfare and social democracy implies both high taxes and pressure in favour of work-sharing in response to adverse shocks. This story, however, falls foul of the simple fact that most Scandinavian countries now do much more work than the French and Germans despite having stronger unions, more generous welfare, higher taxes and more social democracy. Ultimately, we are forced into the position that there is no simple story. Some of the broad patterns can be explained but there remain country specific factors which are hard to identify but lead to substantial differences from one country to another.
WHAT CONCLUSIONS CAN BE DRAWN ABOUT BUS DEREGULATION IN BRITAIN

This paper concludes the series on deregulation, updating the statistics presented in the introductory paper to cover the financial year 1994–1995, and output from the National Travel Survey 1992–94 published by the Department of Transport in 1995. Broad trends match those described earlier, but fuller analysis is given of the link between car availability and bus ridership, and changes in trip length/passenger‐kilometres. Trends in London, the metropolitan areas, Northern Ireland and rural areas are discussed separately. A commentary is given on the papers from other contributors, especially those analysing aggregate trends, and Ben Colson's paper on the Stagecoach experience. Evidence cited in the latter on the effects of fares experiments is analysed to derive elasticities, indicating that in some cases fare reductions may give a net revenue increase from the viewpoint of an individual operator. Comment is made on recent policy developments, and the growing concentration of ownership in Britain, prior .
A neutral glycoprotease of Pasteurella haemolytica A1 specifically cleaves O-sialoglycoproteins

A neutral metalloprotease with marked specificity for an O-sialoglycoprotein has been isolated from culture supernatants of Pasteurella haemolytica A1. The 35-kDa enzyme cleaves human erythrocyte glycophorin A, which is O glycosylated, but does not cleave N-glycosylated proteins or nonglycosylated proteins. Glycophorin A was cleaved when it was present in situ in erythrocyte ghost plasma membranes or when it was free in solution. The glycoprotease did not hydrolyze glycophorin A from which sialate residues had been removed by neuraminidase treatment. An immobilized preparation of the enzyme cleaved glycophorin A at several positions, with a major site of cleavage at Arg-31-Asp-32. The glycoprotease is inhibited by EDTA, citrate, and ascorbate, but inhibition appears to be due to the masking of metal ion activators rather than to their removal. The enzyme is not inhibited by phosphoramidon, an inhibitor of other bacterial neutral metalloproteases.
Proprietary Costs and the Disclosure of Information About Customers

In deciding how much information about customers to disclose, firms face a trade-off between the benefits of reducing information asymmetry with capital market participants and the costs of aiding competitors by revealing proprietary information. This paper investigates the determinants of firms’ choices to disclose information about their customers using a comprehensive dataset of firms’ customer-information disclosures over the period 1976-2006. We find that firms facing greater proprietary costs are significantly less likely to voluntarily reveal information about their customers and are significantly more likely to make less informative mandatory disclosures about their customers. These findings offer support for the hypothesis that proprietary costs are an important factor in disclosure choice. We also find that firms significantly increase their voluntary disclosures of customer information in the years immediately prior to conducting seasoned equity offerings consistent with the hypothesis that capital market concerns are also an important factor in disclosure choice.
Female Labor Participation in the Arab World: Some Evidence from Panel Data in Morocco

Female labor participation in the Arab world is low compared with the level of economic development of Arab countries. Beyond anecdotal evidence and cross-country studies, there is little evidence on what could explain this phenomenon. This paper uses the richest set of panel data available for any Arab country to date to model female labor participation in Morocco. The paper finds marriage, household inactivity rates, secondary education, and gross domestic product per capita to lower female labor participation rates. It also finds that the category urban educated women with secondary education explains better than others the low level of female labor participation. These surprising findings are robust to different estimators, endogeneity tests, different specifications of the female labor participation equations, and different sources of data. The findings are also consistent with previous studies on the Middle East and North Africa region and on Morocco. The explanation seems to reside in the nature of economic growth and gender norms. Economic growth has not been labor intensive, has generated few jobs, and has not been in female-friendly sectors, resulting in weak demand for women, especially urban educated women with secondary education. And when men and women compete for scarce jobs, men may have priority access because of employers' and households' preferences.
Impact of IPSAS on reforming governmental financial information systems: a comparative study

The diversity in reformed governmental financial information systems created a need for harmonized international accounting standards, resulting in the elaboration of the IPSAS (International Public Sector Accounting Standards). By means of a survey on experts, this study examines the extent to which European governments adopt IPSAS accrual accounting and how the differing levels of adoption can be explained. The study reveals diversity in the adoption process of IPSAS and accrual accounting. Some governments still use cash based accounting. Only a minority apply IPSAS. The majority of local and central governments apply accrual accounting disregarding IPSAS. The trend toward accrual accounting can be explained by the need for transparency and efficiency. The fact that the IPSAS are unique and offer specific know-how is the main argument for making use of them. However, a number of jurisdictions do not adopt IPSAS because they transfer their own local business accounting rules. Points for practitioners The transition to business accounting is an important element of New Public Management in that modernized governmental management needs useful financial information, and business accounting is supposed to accomplish this need. An important characteristic of the IPSAS accounting standards is that governments are not obliged to adopt them and thus their adoption depends on a free choice. Therefore, it is clear that the success of IPSAS strongly depends on setting out its strengths and highlighting the necessary conditions to be met. Based on this article, an important condition is that practitioners keep in mind that in governments business accrual accounting rules are not a substitute for IPSAS.
Understanding Users' Budgets for Recommendation with Hierarchical Poisson Factorization

People consume and rate products in online shopping websites. The historical purchases of customers reflect their personal consumption habits and indicate their future shopping behaviors. Traditional preference-based recommender systems try to provide recommendations by analyzing users' feedback such as ratings and clicks. But unfortunately, most of the existing recommendation algorithms ignore the budget of the users. So they cannot avoid recommending users with products that will exceed their budgets. And they also cannot understand how the users will assign their budgets to different products. In this paper, we develop a generative model named collaborative budget-aware Poisson factorization (CBPF) to connect users' ratings and budgets. The CBPF model is intuitive and highly interpretable. We compare the proposed model with several state-of-the-art budget-unaware recommendation methods on several realworld datasets. The results show the advantage of uncovering users' budgets for recommendation.
KINETICS OF WOUND HEALING IN RABBIT EAR CHAMBERS, A TIME LAPSE CINEMICROSCOPIC STUDY.

Wound healing in rabbit ear chambers was studied by time lapse cinemicroscopy. Endothelial cells for the growth of blood vessel sprouts arose in a zone proximal to the growing fringe both by the mitotic division of existing endothelium and by the conservation for re-use of the endothelium of resorbing blood vessels. The migration of endothelial cells distally along the luminal surfaces of the walls of circulating blood vessels, into the proximal ends of developing blood vessel sprouts, and along the mid part and finally into the tips of blood vessel sprouts was demonstrated. New lumen of sprouts was produced by the formation, enlargement and coalescence of loculated spaces between apposed layers of endothelium. This process was considered to reflect secretory activity of the endothelial cells. Anastomosis between sprouts involved similar lumen formation and the spatial rearrangement of endothelial cells. Evidence supporting the conversion of fibroblasts into smooth muscle cells was obtained. Growth of lymphatic sprouts was also studied. The virtual absence of locomotion by macrophages during wound healing was confirmed and a possible explanation proposed. Mathematical analysis of the data obtained from film analysis revealed that the curves for blood vessel endothelial migration and sprout growth and lymphatic sprout growth were all derivable from the same general pseudo generating mathematical function.
Outcome of Deliberate Self-Poisoning

Background One of the most important outcomes following an episode of non-fatal deliberate self-poisoning is its repetition. Method In a prospective follow-up study the subjects were 992 people responsible for 1096 consecutive episodes of deliberate self-poisoning recorded at a teaching hospital accident and emergency department. Risk factors examined were socio–demographic variables, psychiatric and self-harm history, aspects of the self-poisoning episode, and appearance and behaviour at accident and emergency; the frequency of each was compared between those patients who repeated within one year (n= 116) and those who did not (n = 876). Results Those who repeated were more likely to have ingested more than one drug, to report a previous episode of self-poisoning, to be aged 25–54, and to have experienced previous psychiatric care or psychiatric admission. They were less likely to be in paid employment, or to have expressed a threat to another person or written a note. The best predictor – previous psychiatric contact – only had a positive predictive value of 21 % (95% confidence interval 16–25%). Conclusions Risk factors for repetition of self-poisoning should be kept up-to-date despite modest predictive power. More attention might be paid to clinical rather than socio–demographic aspects of self-harm.
Ultra-Thin UHF Broadband Antenna on a Non-Uniform Aperiodic (NUA) MetaSurface

A new concept to design ultrathin directional broadband antennas using a nonuniform aperiodic metasurface is introduced. The study and design of the NUA metasurface show that, by employing a decreasing taper for both the metasurface patch and their interelement spacing, broad impedance and pattern bandwidths can be attained. Experimental results show that, with a total thickness of 0.04 of the free space wavelength (corresponding to the lowest frequency of operation), an octave bandwidth can be attained, which is significantly larger compared with existing designs on uniform mushroom electromagnetic band-gap structures.
Encoding details: Positive emotion leads to memory broadening

In the current experiment we tested the hypothesis that unlike negative arousal, which leads to memory narrowing effects whereby an increase in memory for the central details is accompanied by a decrease in memory for the peripheral details, positive arousing events might lead to a memory broadening effect such that positive arousal would increase memory for both central and peripheral details. This was assessed by testing recognition for central and peripheral details of pictures that were selected to vary in a continuous manner across a wide range of arousal for both positive and negative items. The results indicated that increases in both positive and negative stimulus arousal levels led to gradual increases in memory for the central aspects of the photos. In contrast, negative arousal first increased then decreased memory for peripheral detail as arousal levels increased, whereas positive arousal led to a continuous increase in memory for peripheral details. Thus, arousing negative materials lead to memory narrowing, whereas arousing positive materials can lead to memory broadening.
A framework for post-earthquake rapid damage assessment of hospitals. Case study: Rasoul-e-Akram Hospital (Tehran, Iran)

Due to Iran's position in a seismic-prone region, the county is always at risk of earthquakes with potentially catastrophic results. Given earthquakes' potential for devastation, hospitals are among the main critical facilities that should be active continuously after an earthquake in order to provide necessary emergency services. In order to access the sufficiency of hospital services after an earthquake, and to reduce potential casualties due to subsequent effects, it is necessary to evaluate both structural and non-structural damage. In this article, methods of damage evaluation applicable to hospitals are reviewed and a summary of hospital damage that has been observed from previous earthquakes is provided. It concludes by proposing a new structure to support the continuity of hospital operations after an earthquake. This new approach is a framework for damage evaluation of hospitals including objectives, responsibilities, action time and operational criteria that covers structural and non-structural components (e.g. architectural, medical equipment and lifeline facilities). This new method, when used with human resources management, establishes primary roles in a prescriptive emergency recovery plan. The proposed framework was applied to Rasoul-e-Akram General Hospital in Tehran (Iran) as a case study. The results can be generalized to other hospitals in Iran and neighboring countries with similar construction and seismic conditions.
Incorporating Logistics in Freight Transport Demand Models: State-of-the-Art and Research Opportunities

Freight transport demand is a demand derived from all the activities needed to move goods between locations of production to locations of consumption, including trade, logistics and transportation. A good representation of logistics in freight transport demand models allows us to predict the effects of changes in logistics systems on future transport flows. As such it provides better estimations of the costs of interaction and allows to predict changes in spatial patterns of freight transport flows more accurately. In recent years, the attention for freight modelling has been growing and new research work has appeared aimed at incorporating logistics in freight models. In this paper we review the state of the art in the representation of logistics considerations in freight transport demand models. Our focus is on the service and cost drivers of changes in logistics networks and how these affect freight transport. Our review proceeds along a conceptual framework for modelling that goes beyond the conventional 4-step modelling approach. We identify promising areas for freight modelling that have an integrative function within this framework, such as spatial computable general equilibrium models, supply chain choice models and hypernetwork models.
Intermediaries and the Governance of Sociotechnical Networks in Transition

The author makes the case for studying intermediary organisations as a window on the shifting governance of water and energy services in Europe today. He explores the notion of intermediaries and intermediation in a wide range of literatures and demonstrates how the governance concept can provide focus to the term, indicating how intermediaries can influence the pursuit of collective goals under shifting governance structures and processes. Against this conceptual backdrop, the author sets out the key governance challenges emerging from the ongoing transformation of sociotechnical systems (addressing water and energy services) in terms of changing relations between the state and the utility, between service provider and user, between infrastructure and urban systems, and between infrastructure and the environment. Empirical illustration of the emergence of intermediaries in the water sector across Europe, the relational nature of their work, the interests they pursue, and the impacts they are having is provided.
Esophageal Motility Changes after Thyroidectomy; Possible Associations with Postoperative Voice and Swallowing Disorders

Objective Swallowing and voice impairment are common after thyroidectomy. We evaluated short-term functional changes in esophageal motility in a series of patients who had undergone total thyroidectomy. Several studies have investigated these symptoms by means of interviews or questionnaires. Study Design Prospective study. Setting Academic research. Materials and Methods Thirty-six consenting patients were prospectively recruited. Eligibility criteria were thyroid volume ≤60 mL, benign disease, and age between 18 and 65 years. Exclusion criteria were previous neck surgery, severe thyroiditis, hyperthyroidism, and pre- or postoperative vocal cord palsy. Voice impairment score, swallowing impairment score, lower esophageal sphincter pressure, esophageal motility, upper esophageal pressure, and coordination were evaluated preoperatively and 30 to 45 days after surgery. Results Postoperative swallowing impairment (appearance or worsening of dysphagia) was found in 20% of patients and voice impairment in more than 30%. Both preoperative and postoperative esophageal motility were similar. All patients showed an average decrease of 25% in upper esophageal pressure, although the pressure was within normal range. Swallowing alterations were associated with upper esophageal incoordination (P < .03), and proximal acid reflux was significantly associated with voice impairment (P < .02). Conclusion After uncomplicated thyroidectomy, decreased upper esophageal pressure may explain both pharyngeal (dysphagia) and laryngeal (vocal impairment) exposure to acid. In the future, proton pump inhibitor therapy protocols should be evaluated.