Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International implications of European Economic and Monetary Union

For a long time European Economic and Monetary Union was mainly considered an internal European issue and external consequences were largely ignored. In contrast to most previous analyses, this paper looks at a number of international implications of monetary union. It is argued that several factors could contribute to the euro becoming an international currency in the future and a competitor to the US dollar in this respect. The degree of uncertainty attached to this outcome, however, remains considerable and in any event the emergence of the euro as a major international currency is likely to take some time. Given the expected size of the euro-zone and the likelihood of the euro becoming an international currency, fiscal and monetary policies in the area are likely to have a significant impact on the macroeconomic environment in the rest of the world. An important issue is how will monetary union affect major bilateral exchange rate developments and their volatility. A number of . Pendant longtemps, l’Union economique et monetaire europeenne etait surtout consideree comme une affaire interne a l’Europe, et les consequences externes etaient largement ignorees. Contrairement a la plupart des analyses precedentes, cet article considere un certain nombre d’implications internationales de l’union monetaire. Il soutient que plusieurs facteurs pourraient contribuer a transformer l’euro en une monnaie internationale dans l’avenir et devenir ainsi le concurrent du dollar americain. Cependant, le degre d’incertitude entourant ce resultat demeure considerable et, en tout etat de cause, l’emergence de l’euro en tant que monnaie internationale devrait prendre quelque temps. Etant donne la dimension prevue de la zone euro et la probabilite que l’euro devienne une monnaie internationale, les politiques budgetaires et monetaires dans ce domaine devraient influer de maniere significative sur l’environnement macroeconomique du reste du monde. La maniere dont l’union monetaire .
A Plasmodium falciparum screening assay for anti-gametocyte drugs based on parasite lactate dehydrogenase detection.

OBJECTIVES Plasmodium gametocytes, responsible for malaria parasite transmission from humans to mosquitoes, represent a crucial target for new antimalarial drugs to achieve malaria elimination/eradication. We developed a novel colorimetric screening method for anti-gametocyte compounds based on the parasite lactate dehydrogenase (pLDH) assay, already standardized for asexual stages, to measure gametocyte viability and drug susceptibility. METHODS Gametocytogenesis of 3D7 and NF54 Plasmodium falciparum strains was induced in vitro and asexual parasites were depleted with N-acetylglucosamine. Gametocytes were treated with dihydroartemisinin, epoxomicin, methylene blue, primaquine, puromycin or chloroquine in 96-well plates and the pLDH activity was evaluated using a modified Makler protocol. Mosquito infectivity was measured by the standard membrane feeding assay (SMFA). RESULTS A linear correlation was found between gametocytaemia determined by Giemsa staining and pLDH activity. A concentration-dependent reduction in pLDH activity was observed after 72 h of drug treatment, whereas an additional 72 h of incubation without drugs was required to obtain complete inhibition of gametocyte viability. SMFA on treated and control gametocytes confirmed that a reduction in pLDH activity translates into reduced oocyst development in the mosquito vector. CONCLUSIONS The gametocyte pLDH assay is fast, easy to perform, cheap and reproducible and is suitable for screening novel transmission-blocking compounds, which does not require parasite transgenic lines.
From Aspiration to Attainment: African American Community College Transfer Student Experiences Through Baccalaureate Degree Attainment

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore African American community college transfer student experiences through baccalaureate degree completion. The current study used qualitative methods to examine the experiences and perceptions of eighteen African American community college transfer students who recently graduated or were within 30 credit hours of graduating from a four-year university in Texas. Ten female and eight male students, ranging in age from 21 to 56 years old, with an average age of 28, composed the sample. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews which were transcribed and analyzed based on an integrated conceptual model of Padilla’s (1999) Model of Minority Student Success and Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth Model. Findings suggest that African American community college transfer student experiences are very similar to transfer student experiences revealed in current literature. However, findings indicate students perceive their experiences differ from student of other races/ethnicities when dealing with negative stereotypes, lack of role models, and racial bias. Findings also suggest African American community college transfer student persist by employing transfer student capital, familial, aspirational, and resistant capital to learn how the traverse transfer, transition, and persistence through baccalaureate degree attainment.
Statistical Modeling of High Frequency Financial Data: Facts, Models and Challenges

The availability of high-frequency data on transactions, quotes, and order flow in electronic order-driven markets has revolutionized data processing and statistical modeling techniques in finance and brought up new theoretical and computational challenges. Market dynamics at the transaction level cannot be characterized solely in terms the dynamics of a single price, and one must also take into account the interaction between buy and sell orders of different types by modeling the order flow at the bid price, ask price, and possibly other levels of the limit order book.
Measuring the Canada-U.S. Productivity Gap: Industry Dimensions

A key objective of economic policy in Canada is to reduce the productivity gap with the United States. The development of appropriate policies to attain this goal requires a thorough understanding of the nature of the gap, including its industry dimensions. Unfortunately, statistical agencies do not currently produce estimates of Canada-U.S. productivity gaps by industry. To fill this data lacuna, Someshwar Rao, Jianmin Tang, and Weimin Wang of Industry Canada in the first article present benchmark estimates of the Canada-U.S. labour productivity and total factor productvity gap for 29 industries for 1999 and extend the industry estimates back to 1997 and forward to 2001. They report that in 2001 output per hour in the business sector in Canada was 82 per cent and total factor productivity was 87 per cent of the U.S. level. Lower capital intensity was responsible for about 30 per cent of the business sector labour productivity gap. Three of four major sectors in Canada had a labour productivity level below its U.S. counterpart – manufacturing (80 per cent), the service sector (81 per cent), and primary industries (87 per cent) – while the level of labour producivity in the construction industry was well above that in the United States (129 per cent). Within manufacturing, the largest productivity gaps were found in electronic and electrical products, fabricated metal, and machinery and computers. Within the service sector, finance, insurance and real estate and information and cultural industries had particularly large productivity gaps. In contrast, labour productivity levels in a number of Canadian natural resource industries exceeded U.S. levels.
THE ACTUAL USE OF METADATA IN ARIADNE: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS

In this paper, we present the first results of our empirical analysis for the actual use that is made of metadata in Learning Object Repositories, more specifically in the ARIADNE Knowledge Pool System (KPS). We analyze metadata information provided by indexers when they introduce new learning objects into the KPS. This gives a clear indication about their understanding of metadata elements, values, etc. Finally, we study the correlation between metadata elements filled-in by those indexers. These results provide us with empirical guidelines to asses the development of application profiles and metadata toolsets.
The Influence of Argument Structure on Semantic Role Assignment

We present a data and error analysis for semantic role labelling. In a ﬁrst experiment, we build a generic statistical model for semantic role assignment in the FrameNet paradigm and show that there is a high variance in performance across frames. The main hypothesis of our paper is that this variance is to a large extent a result of differences in the underlying argument structure of the predicates in different frames. In a second experiment, we show that frame uniformity, which measures argument structure variation, correlates well with the performance ﬁgures, effectively explaining the variance
Distributed coordination in multi-agent systems: a graph Laplacian perspective

This paper reviews some main results and progress in distributed multi-agent coordination from a graph Laplacian perspective. Distributed multi-agent coordination has been a very active subject studied extensively by the systems and control community in last decades, including distributed consensus, formation control, sensor localization, distributed optimization, etc. The aim of this paper is to provide both a comprehensive survey of existing literature in distributed multi-agent coordination and a new perspective in terms of graph Laplacian to categorize the fundamental mechanisms for distributed coordination. For different types of graph Laplacians, we summarize their inherent coordination features and specific research issues. This paper also highlights several promising research directions along with some open problems that are deemed important for future study.
Prebiotics Do Not Influence the Severity of Atopic Dermatitis in Infants: A Randomised Controlled Trial

The objective was to evaluate the effects of a hypoallergenic (HA) formula supplemented with prebiotic galacto-oligosaccharides on the severity of atopic manifestations. A randomised clinical trial was conducted. The control group was infants, fed with hypoallergenic formula and without supplementation. The duration of the study was six months. The primary outcome of the study was a difference in the severity of atopic dermatitis measured using SCORAD (Scoring Atopic Dermatitis) criteria. Secondary outcomes were anthropometry (length, weight, and head circumference), together with the tolerance and incidence of infections. Both groups showed a decrease of average SCORAD values, but no statistically significant difference between the evaluated groups was observed. There were no statistically significant differences in anthropometry, or the tolerance or incidence of infections. Although there is no evidence, that consumption of a hypoallergenic infant formula enriched with prebiotic galacto-oligosaccharides had any effect on SCORAD, it was safe and well tolerated. Trial Registration www.clinicaltrials. gov NCT 02077088
The globalization paradox

For a century, economists have driven forward the cause of globalization in financial institutions, labour markets, and trade. Yet there have been consistent warning signs that a global economy and free trade might not always be advantageous. Where are the pressure points? What could be done about them? Dani Rodrik examines the back-story from its seventeenth-century origins through the milestones of the gold standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the Washington Consensus, to the present day. Although economic globalization has enabled unprecedented levels of prosperity in advanced countries and has been a boon to hundreds of millions of poor workers in China and elsewhere in Asia, it is a concept that rests on shaky pillars, he contends. Its long-term sustainability is not a given. The heart of Rodrik's argument is a fundamental 'trilemma': that we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization. Give too much power to governments, and you have protectionism. Give markets too much freedom, and you have an unstable world economy with little social and political support from those it is supposed to help. Rodrik argues for smart globalization, not maximum globalization.
The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: the local E+A galaxy population

We select a sample of low-redshift (z similar to 0.1) E+A galaxies from the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS). The spectra of these objects are defined by strong hydrogen Balmer absorption lines (Hdelta, Hgamma, Hbeta) combined with a lack of [O II] 3727-Angstrom emission, together implying a recently truncated burst of star formation. The E+A spectrum is thus a signpost to galaxies in the process of evolution.We quantify the local environments, clustering properties and luminosity function of the E+A galaxies. We find that the environments are consistent with the ensemble of 2dFGRS galaxies: low-redshift E+A systems are located predominantly in the field, existing as isolated objects or in poor groups. However, the luminosity distribution of galaxies selected using three Balmer absorption lines Hdeltagammabeta appears more typical of ellipticals. Indeed, morphologically these galaxies are preferentially spheroidal (E/S0) systems. In a small but significant number we find evidence for recent major mergers, such as tidal tails. We infer that major mergers are one important formation mechanism for E+A galaxies, as suggested by previous studies. At low redshift the merger probability is high in the field and low in clusters, thus these recently formed spheroidal systems do not follow the usual morphology-density relation for ellipticals.Regarding the selection of E+A galaxies: we find that basing the Balmer-line criterion solely on Hdelta absorption leads to a significant subpopulation of disc systems with detectable Ha emission. In these objects the [O II] emission is presumably either obscured by dust or present with a low signal-to-noise ratio, whilst the (Hgamma, Hbeta) absorption features are subject to emission-filling.
Procyclicality of Fiscal Policy in Emerging Countries: The Cycle is the Trend

This paper uses the Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) methodology in order to estimate whether “the cycle is the trend” in 23 emerging markets and 22 OECD economies. These estimates are then used to test whether procyclical fiscal policy in emerging countries is due to persistent shocks to per-capita GDP. We find support for this hypothesis. While both developed and emerging countries have a procyclical policy for investment expenditure, procyclicality is evident in emerging countries also for government consumption and transfers. Over the period of increasing globalization after the 1990s, these are signs of a reduction in the extent of procyclical expenditure policy in emerging countries. We also find that, in countries with high levels of foreign direct investment, procyclicality is milder.
A knowledge based approach for capturing rich semantic representations from text for intelligent systems

In this paper, we present a knowledge based approach to capture semantic representations from text for intelligent systems that know the representations of interest in advance. Our approach performs this task by generating phrases from these representations and then matching these phrases against text using a set of syntactic and semantic transformations. The representation that best matches a piece of text is selected as its meaning. We evaluate our approach in the context of a real-world intelligent system that tracks the maturity of wireless technologies, and show how our approach performs well on capturing semantic representations from text.
Children’s Health and Parental Labour Supply

This paper investigates the relationship between children’s long‐term health problems and parental labour supply using the 2004, 2006 and 2008 Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). The results from the individual Fixed Effects Model indicate that mothers of children aged 0 years in 2004 reduce their labour supply when their children start to show long‐term health problems, and their household income declines by 8 per cent, mainly due to the partners’ shift from permanent to fixed‐term work. Parents of children aged 4 years in 2004 show no change in these outcomes associated with the onset of their children’s long‐term health problems.
FoxM1 regulates re-annealing of endothelial adherens junctions through transcriptional control of β-catenin expression

Repair of the injured vascular intima requires a series of coordinated events that mediate both endothelial regeneration and reannealing of adherens junctions (AJs) to form a restrictive endothelial barrier. The forkhead transcription factor FoxM1 is essential for endothelial proliferation after vascular injury. However, little is known about mechanisms by which FoxM1 regulates endothelial barrier reannealing. Here, using a mouse model with endothelial cell (EC)-restricted disruption of FoxM1 (FoxM1 CKO) and primary cultures of ECs with small interfering RNA (siRNA)-mediated knockdown of FoxM1, we demonstrate a novel requisite role of FoxM1 in mediating endothelial AJ barrier repair through the transcriptional control of β-catenin. In the FoxM1 CKO lung vasculature, we observed persistent microvessel leakage characterized by impaired reannealing of endothelial AJs after endothelial injury. We also showed that FoxM1 directly regulated β-catenin transcription and that reexpression of β-catenin rescued the defective AJ barrier–reannealing phenotype of FoxM1-deficient ECs. Knockdown of β-catenin mimicked the phenotype of defective barrier recovery seen in FoxM1-deficient ECs. These data demonstrate that FoxM1 is required for reannealing of endothelial AJs in order to form a restrictive endothelial barrier through transcriptional control of β-catenin expression. Therefore, means of activating FoxM1-mediated endothelial repair represent a new therapeutic strategy for the treatment of inflammatory vascular diseases associated with persistent vascular barrier leakiness such as acute lung injury.
Dynamics of Offshore Wind Turbines

The dynamic behavior of offshore wind turbines decides the design of several components, such as bearings, gear boxes, foundation platform and tower. In this paper, an analytical rotordynamic model of offshore wind turbine is developed and effects of several parameters, such as rotor blade size, rotational speed, distribution of mass imbalance, wind loading, wave loading, current speeds, and location of rotor-nacelle assembly are investigated on the dynamic behavior (response and stability) of an offshore wind turbine. It is particularly important to determine the rotor response for minimizing structural resonance and corresponding failure of wind turbine components. The dynamic response prediction is also desirable to address the fatigue design of wind turbine components. The rotordynamic model of the wind turbines is expressed as partial differential equations, with timedependent boundary conditions. These equations of motion are integrated with respect to time for a simple case of rotor imbalance to determine the closed-form solutions of the rotor response and its resonance frequencies, in the absence of wind or wave loadings. The effect of wave and wind loadings is described in the governing equations of motion. The predictions developed through the analytical model for the wind turbines free vibrations are compared with finite element modeling of the wind turbines. The results are compared and the relative merit of using either analytical or finite element modeling is discussed.
Productivity Change and the Effects of Policy Reform in China's Agriculture Since 1979

During China's rural reforms, policies were frequently adjusted. Most policies favoured the continuation and deepening of reform; but some were contradictory or even led to regression in the reform process. How have the rural reforms affected China's agricultural production over the past three decades; and what lessons can be learned to aid the future course of reform? To answer these questions, this study estimates productivity change in China's agriculture and evaluates the effects of policy on agricultural output during the reform period. Aggregated provincial‐level data for the 1979–2008 period are used in a translog production frontier model to estimate indices of total factor productivity (TFP) change and its three components - technical change, technical efficiency change, and a scale effect - with a focus on explaining the variation in technical efficiency. The estimation results show that the impressive improvement of TFP change is dominated by the technical change component. However, technical efficiency change and scale effects have worked against the improvement in TFP change in most periods. To improve technical efficiency, social welfare policies designed to eliminate the rural–urban divide, and reform polices focusing on factor market reforms, such as reform of the household registration system (hukou) and reform of land rights, seem to hold some potential.
Lifestyle and lifestyle-related comorbidities independently associated with colorectal adenoma recurrence in elderly Chinese people

Objective The purpose of this study was to determine the lifestyle and lifestyle-related comorbidities independently associated with colorectal adenoma (CRA) recurrence in elderly Chinese people. Methods During the 5-year follow-up after the initial colonoscopy, participants aged >60 years with the diagnosis and removal of CRA underwent a complete surveillance colonoscopy, and 152 participants with CRA recurrence plus 152 participants free of recurrence were included in this analysis. Results Participants with CRA recurrence were more likely to consume less vegetables and fruits, and more red meats compared with the control group (P<0.05 for all). Lifestyle-related comorbidities, including hypertension and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), were more common in participants with CRA recurrence than in the control group (P<0.05 for all). In the multivariate analysis, pack-years of smoking were independently associated with an increased CRA recurrence (odds ratio [OR]: 1.03; P<0.05). Eating less vegetables (OR: 099; P<0.05) and fruits (OR: 0.98; P<0.05) was identified as a statistically independent factor influencing CRA recurrence, as was eating more red meats (OR: 1.01; P<0.05). Hypertension was also found to be a factor independently associated with an increased CRA recurrence (OR: 2.44; P<0.05). NAFLD had an independent association, with an increased CRA recurrence (OR: 3.43; P<0.05). Conclusion Smoking cigarettes, high consumption of red meats, low intake of fruits and vegetables, and the presence of hypertension and NAFLD were independently associated with an increased CRA recurrence in elderly Chinese people. This conclusion helps elderly Chinese people to make effective behavioral changes, such as smoking cessation, substitution of fruits and vegetables for red meats, and timely treatment of hypertension and NAFLD, to reduce CRA recurrence and colorectal cancer risk.