Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An information systems curriculum model for developing Asian nations

Information Systems (IS) have, over the past decades, become increasingly important in the corporate and public sectors throughout the developed world. This will continue in the future at an even greater pace of change as information technology revolutionises the administration, planning and marketing of business and industry. The impact of information technology and IS is increasingly felt in developing nations such as those in South-east Asia. In order to leapfrog in their use of new technology the developing Asian nations must be able to produce their own IS personnel. The objective of this study is to develop a model curriculum suitable for implementation in tertiary institutions in such developing nations. In order to develop a model which reflects the views of academics and practising professionals a survey was conducted involving: • Academics from Australian universities and TAPE colleges • Academics from South-east Asian universities • Practising professionals from leading organisations throughout Australia • Practising professionals from leading organisations in Malaysia In each case these groups were asked to rate the present and future importance of a carefully selected set of 51 subtopics which cover the major areas in the field of information systems. The views of these groups were analysed and compared and the results formed the basis for a model IS curriculum suitable for implementation in institutions of higher education in developing South­ east Asian nations.
Tongue Volume Influences Lowest Oxygen Saturation but Not Apnea-Hypopnea Index in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Objectives The aim of this study was to identify correlations between sleep apnea severity and tongue volume or posterior airway space measured via three-dimensional reconstruction of volumetric computerized tomography (CT) images in patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) for use in predicting OSA severity and in surgical treatment. We also assessed associations between tongue volume and Mallampati score. Methods Snoring/OSA male patients (n = 64) who underwent polysomnography, cephalometry, and CT scans were enrolled in this retrospective study. OSA was diagnosed when the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) was greater than 5 (mild 5–14; moderate 15–29; severe>30). The patients were also categorized into the normal-mild group (n = 22) and the moderate-severe group (n = 42). Using volumetric CT images with the three-dimensional reconstruction technique, the volume of the tongue, posterior airway space volume, and intra-mandibular space were measured. The volumes, polysomnographic parameters, and physical examination findings were compared, and independent factors that are related to OSA were analysed. Results No associations between tongue volume or posterior airway space and the AHI were observed. However, multivariate linear analyses showed that tongue volume had significantly negative association with lowest O2 saturation (r = 0.365, p = 0.027). High BMI was related to an increase in tongue volume. Modified Mallampati scores showed borderline significant positive correlations with absolute tongue volume (r = 0.251, p = 0.046) and standardized tongue volume (absolute tongue volume / intramandibular area; r = 0.266, p = 0.034). Between the normal-mild and moderate-severe groups, absolute tongue volumes were not different, although the standardized tongue volume in the moderate-severe group was significantly higher. Conclusion Absolute tongue volume showed stronger associations with lowest O2 saturation during sleep than with the severity of AHI. We also found that high BMI was a relevant factor for an increase in absolute tongue volume and modified Mallampati grading was a useful physical examination to predict tongue size.
A Survey of Recent Empirical Money Demand Studies

This paper surveys a selected number of studies that evaluated the demand for money using the error-correction model approach in the 1990s across a range of industrial and developing countries. It briefly presents issues relevant to modeling and estimating the demand for money; and synthesizes information concerning variables, data period and frequency, unit root and cointegration techniques, stability tests, and findings in a tabular form. In addition, it presents estimated long-run income elasticity and elasticities or semi-elasticities for opportunity cost and other variables in a comparable framework. It aims to provide a reference tool for future research on demand for money in various countries.
Essays on markets with frictions : applications to the housing, labour and financial markets

The classical treatment of market transactions in economics presumes that buyers and sellers engage in transactions instantly and at no cost. In a series of applications in the housing market, the labour market and the market for corporate bonds, this thesis shows that relaxing this assumption has important implications for Macroeconomics and Finance. The first chapter combines theory and empirical evidence to show that search frictions in the housing market imply a housing liquidity channel of monetary policy transmission. Expansionary monetary policy attracts buyers to the housing market, raising housing liquidity. Higher housing sale rates in turn allow lenders to threaten foreclosure more effectively, because the expected carrying costs on foreclosure inventory are lower. Ex-ante, this makes banks willing to offer larger loans, stimulating aggregate demand. The second chapter uses a heterogeneous firm industry model to explore how the macroeconomic response to a temporary employer payroll tax cut depends on the hiring and firing costs faced by firms. Controversially, the presence of non-convex labour adjustment costs suggests that tax cuts create fewer jobs in recessions. When firms hoard labour during downturns, they do not respond to marginal tax cuts by hiring additional workers. The third chapter develops a theory in which trader career concerns generate an endogenous transaction friction. Traders are reluctant to sell assets below historical purchase price, since realizing a loss signals to the employer that the trader is incompetent. The chapter documents empirically several properties of corporate bond transaction data consistent with this theory of career-concerned traders.
The Grabbing Hand: Government Pathologies and Their Cures

In many countries, public sector institutions impose heavy burdens on economic life: heavy and arbitrary taxes retard investment, regulations enrich corrupt bureaucrats, state firms consume national wealth, and the most talented people turn to rent-seeking rather than productive activities. As a consequence of such predatory policies--described in this book as the grabbing hand of the state--entrepreneurship lingers and economies stagnate. The authors of this collection of essays describe many of these pathologies of a grabbing hand government, and examine their consequences for growth. The essays share a common viewpoint that political control of economic life is central to the many government failures that we observe. Fortunately, a correct diagnosis suggests the cures, including the best strategies of fighting corruption, privatization of state firms, and institutional building in the former socialist economies. Depoliticization of economic life emerges as the crucial theme of the appropriate reforms. The book describes the experiences with the grabbing hand government and its reform in medieval Europe, developing countries, transition economies, as well as today's United States.
Crowdsourcing with multi-dimensional trust

We consider a typical crowdsourcing task that aggregates input from multiple workers as a problem in information fusion. To cope with the issue of noisy and sometimes malicious input from workers, trust is used to model workers' expertise. In a multi-domain knowledge learning task, however, using scalar-valued trust to model a worker's performance is not sufficient to reflect the worker's trustworthiness in each of the domains. To address this issue, we propose a probabilistic model to jointly infer multi-dimensional trust of workers, multi-domain properties of questions, and true labels of questions. Our model is very flexible and extensible to incorporate metadata associated with questions. To show that, we further propose two extended models, one of which handles input tasks with real-valued features and the other handles tasks with text features by incorporating topic models. Finally, we evaluate our model on real-world datasets and demonstrate that our model is superior to state-of-the-art and the two extended models have even better performance. In addition, our models can effectively recover trust vectors of workers, which can be very useful in task assignment adaptive to workers' trust in the future. These results can be applied for fusion of information from multiple data sources like sensors, human input, machine learning results, or a hybrid of them.
inferior segments during walking in young and older adults

Active control of trunk motion is believed to enable humans to maintain stability during walking, suggesting that stability of the trunk is prioritized over other segments by the nervous system. We investigated if superior segments are more stable than inferior segments during walking and if agerelated differences are more prominent in any particular body segments. Eighteen healthy older adults and 17 healthy young adults walked on a treadmill for two trials of 5 min each at their preferred speed. 3D kinematics of the trunk, pelvis, and left thigh, shank, and foot were recorded. Local divergence exponents and maximum Floquet multipliers (FM) were calculated to quantify each segment’s responses to small inherent perturbations during walking. Both older and younger adults walked with similar preferred walking speeds (p = 0.86). Local divergence exponents were larger in inferior segments (p < 0.001), and larger in older adults (p < 0.001). FM was larger in the superior segments (p < 0.001), and larger in older adults (p < 0.001). The age-associated difference in local divergence exponents was larger for trunk motion (interaction p = 0.02). Thus, superior segments exhibited less local instability but greater orbital instability. Trunk motion was more sensitive to age-associated differences in dynamic stability during gait. Trunk motion should be considered in studying age-related deterioration of gait. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: Institute for Aging Research, Hebrew SeniorLife, 1200 Center St, Boston, MA 02131, United States. Tel. : +1 617 363 8487; fax: +1 617 363 8936. E-mail address: hyungukang@hrca.harvard. edu (H.G. Kang). URL: http://www.instituteforagingresearch. org
Bovine Feces from Animals with Gastrointestinal Infections Are a Source of Serologically Diverse Atypical Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli and Shiga Toxin-Producing E. coli Strains That Commonly Possess Intimin

ABSTRACT Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) and enteropathogenic E. coli (EPEC) cells were isolated from 191 fecal samples from cattle with gastrointestinal infections (diagnostic samples) collected in New South Wales, Australia. By using a multiplex PCR, E. coli cells possessing combinations of stx1, stx2, eae, and ehxA were detected by a combination of direct culture and enrichment in E. coli (EC) (modified) broth followed by plating on vancomycin-cefixime-cefsulodin blood (BVCC) agar for the presence of enterohemolytic colonies and on sorbitol MacConkey agar for the presence of non-sorbitol-fermenting colonies. The high prevalence of the intimin gene eae was a feature of the STEC (35 [29.2%] of 120 isolates) and contrasted with the low prevalence (9 [0.5%] of 1,692 fecal samples possessed STEC with eae) of this gene among STEC recovered during extensive sampling of feces from healthy slaughter-age cattle in Australia (M. Hornitzky, B. A. Vanselow, K. Walker, K. A. Bettelheim, B. Corney, P. Gill, G. Bailey, and S. P. Djordjevic, Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 68:6439-6445, 2002). Forty-seven STEC serotypes were identified, including O5:H−, O8:H19, O26:H−, O26:H11, O113:H21, O157:H7, O157:H− and Ont:H− which are known to cause severe disease in humans and 23 previously unreported STEC serotypes. Serotypes Ont:H− and O113:H21 represented the two most frequently isolated STEC isolates and were cultured from nine (4.7%) and seven (3.7%) animals, respectively. Fifteen eae-positive E. coli serotypes, considered to represent atypical EPEC, were identified, with O111:H− representing the most prevalent. Using both techniques, STEC cells were cultured from 69 (36.1%) samples and EPEC cells were cultured from 30 (15.7%) samples, including 9 (4.7%) samples which yielded both STEC and EPEC. Culture on BVCC agar following enrichment in EC (modified) broth was the most successful method for the isolation of STEC (24.1% of samples), and direct culture on BVCC agar was the most successful method for the isolation of EPEC (14.1% samples). These studies show that diarrheagenic calves and cattle represent important reservoirs of eae-positive E. coli.
Renal Receptors in the Rat Sensitive to Chemical Alterations of Their Environment

Two major groups of renal chemosensory neural elements have been identified in the rat: one specifically activated by renal ischemia, the previously described "R" chemoreceptors, and the other by backflow of nondiuretic urine into the renal pelvis. The latter group is the object of the present investigation. In anesthetized, male Sprague-Dawley rats, single-unit recordings were obtained by dissection of the centrally cut nerves of the right kidney. The responses of single units to backflow into the renal pelvis of nondiuretic urine, diuretic urine, and solutions containing urea, mannitol, or inorganic ions were compared. The excitatory effect of the backflow of nondiuretic urine was due to its chemical composition rather than to changes in pelvic pressure and pelvic distension. The same units were activated markedly by renal ischemia. The resting discharge rate of the units was very high in nondiuretic conditions, and it declined progressively when diuresis was induced by expansion of the extracellular fluid volume. It is concluded that this group of sensory elements responds to the chemical environment in the renal interstitium as modified by ions crossing the pelvic epithelium, by leakage of ions out of ischemic cells, and by alterations in the excretory function of the kidney and renal blood flow. This group of renal sensory nerve endings has been termed "R2" chemoceptive receptors, to distinguish them from the previously described group of renal "R" chemoreceptors. Circ Res 46: 395-405, 1980
Prognostic Value of Circulating MicroRNA-210 Levels in Patients with Moderate to Severe Aortic Stenosis

Background Circulating micro-RNAs have been proposed as a novel class of cardiovascular (CV) biomarkers, but whether they meet analytical requirements and provide additional information to establish risk indices have not been established. miR-210 levels are increased in subjects with low VO2 max, which is a recognized risk factor in patients with aortic stenosis (AS), and we hypothesized that circulating miR-210 levels may be increased in patients with AS and associated with a poor prognosis. Methods We measured circulating miR-210 levels by real-time PCR in 57 patients with moderate to severe AS and in 10 age- and gender-matched healthy controls. The merit of miR-210 as a biomarker was assessed according to established criteria, including by comparing miR-210 levels with NT-proBNP and miR-22 levels, which is another miRNA biomarker candidate. Results All patients and control subjects had miR-210 levels within the range of detection (Cq<35) and the analytical variability was low. Circulating miR-210 levels were 2.0±0.2 [mean±SEM] fold increased in AS patients compared to controls (p = 0.002), whereas miR-22 levels were not differently expressed in the AS patients (0.12±0.06 fold increase, p = 0.45). The increase in miR-210 levels in AS patients was comparable to the increment in NT-proBNP levels: [AUC] 0.82 (95% CI 0.70–0.90) vs. 0.85 (0.75–0.93), respectively, p = 0.71. During a median follow-up of 1287 days, 15 patients (26%) died. There was a significant association between higher circulating levels of miR-210 and increased mortality during follow-up: hazard ratio [supra- vs. inframedian levels] 3.3 (95% CI 1.1–10.5), p = 0.039. Adjusting for other risk indices in multivariate analysis did not attenuate the prognostic merit of circulating miR-210 levels. Conclusion Circulating miR-210 levels are increased in patients with AS and provide independent prognostic information to established risk indices. Analytical characteristics were also excellent supporting the potential of micro-RNAs as novel CV biomarkers.
Student perceptions in a Social Studies classroom

This study describes differential student perceptions towards Social Studies in a high school classroom. A case study approach, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative data gathering techniques, was used to collect data by seeking individual students' perceptions of the classroom environment, the teacher, classroom instruction and the Social Studies subject content. Social Studies education in Western Australia has been guided by the Social Studies K-10 Syllabus which has been implemented for almost 10 years. In 1990 a comprehensive review of the curriculum was commissioned by the Ministry of Education and undertaken by Print (1990a). This study found that a need existed for teachers to promote Social Studies education within the schools. To enable educators to act on this recommendation, it followed that, among other things, a need existed for data about students' thoughts and feelings towards the subject. Since the review of literature indicated that the classroom environment was a variable that impacted on the formation of attitudes towards school subjects an exploratory case study approach was used to investigate student perceptions in a year 9 Social Studies classroom.
The luminosity function of the Virgo Cluster from MB = -22 to -11

We measure the galaxy luminosity function (LF) for the Virgo Cluster between blue magnitudes M B = -22 and -11 from wide-field charge-coupled device (CCD) imaging data. The LF is only gradually rising for -22 < M B < -16.Between M B = -16 and - 14 it rises steeply, with a logarithmic slope of α∼ - 1.6. Fainter than M B = -14, the LF flattens again. This LF is shallower (although turning up at brighter absolute magnitudes) than the R-band LF measured recently by Phillipps et al., who found α ∼ -2.2 to be fainter than M R = -13. It is similar, however, to the LF determined from the Virgo Cluster Catalog by Sandage et al. A few faint galaxies are found that Sandage et al. missed because their surface brightness threshold for detection was too high, but these do not dominate the luminosity function at any magnitude. Most of the faint galaxies we find are dwarf elliptical, alternatively called dwarf spheroidal, galaxies. The most important potential source of systematic error is that we may have rejected some high surface brightness galaxies from the cluster sample because we think that they are background galaxies. This is quite different from what has conventionally been regarded as the most serious source of systematic error in this kind of study: that we are missing many low surface brightness galaxies because they are never visible above the sky. There are ∼ 2.5 times more dwarfs per giant galaxy in Virgo than in the Ursa Major Cluster, a diffuse group of ∼ 80 spiral galaxies at the same distance as Virgo, or the Local Group. The Virgo and Ursa Major Cluster LFs are inconsistent with each other at a high level of significance. These results add weight to the hypothesis that is developing that dwarf galaxies are more common relative to giant galaxies in dense environments than diffuse ones. Both LFs are highly inconsistent with cold dark matter theory, which has been so successful at reproducing observations on large scales. Possible theoretical explanations for this discrepancy, and for the detailed shape of the Virgo Cluster LF, are investigated.
The declining association between earnings and returns: Diminishing value relevance of earnings or noisier markets?

Purpose - This paper aims to identify what drives the temporal reduction in the value relevance of earnings documented in the literature. Is it the increasing noise in stock returns over time, noise in earnings, or both? Design/methodology/approach - The authors develop hypotheses from the lead/lag structure between stock returns and accounting earnings and perform empirical tests using data from annual COMPUSTAT and monthly CRSP over the sample period of 39 years (1970-2008). Findings - The test results show that increasing noise in stock returns over time is primarily responsible for the temporal reduction of Research limitations/implications - The Originality/value - The paper contributes to the limited body of research on noise in stock returns as the main driver for the temporal reduction in value relevance of earnings.
A Series Elastic- and Bowden-Cable-Based Actuation System for Use as Torque Actuator in Exoskeleton-Type Robots

Within the context of impedance controlled exoskeletons, common actuators have important drawbacks. Either the actuators are heavy, have a complex structure or are poor torque sources, due to gearing or heavy nonlinearity. Considering our application, an impedance controlled gait rehabilitation robot for treadmill-training, we designed an actuation system that might avoid these drawbacks. It combines a lightweight joint and a simple structure with adequate torque source quality. It consists of a servomotor, a flexible Bowden cable transmission, and a force feedback loop based on a series elastic element. A basic model was developed that is shown to describe the basic dynamics of the actuator well enough for design purpose. Further measurements show that performance is sufficient for use in a gait rehabilitation robot. The demanded force tracking bandwidths were met: 11 Hz bandwidth for the full force range (demanded 4 Hz) and 20 Hz bandwidth for smaller force range (demanded 12 Hz). The mechanical output impedance of the actuator could be reduced to hardly perceptible level. Maxima of about 0.7 Nm peaks for 4 Hz imposed motions appeared, corresponding to less than 2.5% of the maximal force output. These peaks were caused by the stick friction in the Bowden cables. Spring stiffness variation showed that both a too stiff and a too compliant spring can worsen performance. A stiff spring reduces the maximum allowable controller gain. The relatively low control gain then causes a larger effect of stick in the force output, resulting in a less smooth output in general. Low spring stiffness, on the other side, decreases the performance of the system, because saturation will occur sooner.
East Asian Supply Chains and Relative Prices: A survey of the evidence

This paper provides an analytical description of East Asian supply chains. The data indicate that they have become more and more centered on China. In a value-added sense, though, East Asia as a whole is running surpluses against the West. The paper then surveys evidence from a variety of sources indicating that an appreciation throughout East Asian supply chain countries would help to rebalance trade within regional production networks.