Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Popular Attitudes Toward Markets & Institutional Reform in Transition Economies

Any set of formal institutions requires a legitimating and complementary cultural system. Re-examining existing data and studies indicates low levels of public support for a market economy in transition countries. In addition, support is lower in less successful transition economies, indicating that political preferences affect institutional change. It is shown that the currently available data leaves open questions about the structure and origins of these political attitudes. Three out of four hypotheses on the origin of this lacking support can be rejected after the data analysis. In addition, thirty-five in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals from east and west Germany. The results suggest a novel hypothesis for future research – risk preferences and social disruptions are the main cause for the dissatisfaction with the market economy.
Vibrio cholerae Utilizes Direct sRNA Regulation in Expression of a Biofilm Matrix Protein

Vibrio cholerae biofilms contain exopolysaccharide and three matrix proteins RbmA, RbmC and Bap1. While much is known about exopolysaccharide regulation, little is known about the mechanisms by which the matrix protein components of biofilms are regulated. VrrA is a conserved, 140-nt sRNA of V. cholerae, whose expression is controlled by sigma factor σE. In this study, we demonstrate that VrrA negatively regulates rbmC translation by pairing to the 5′ untranslated region of the rbmC transcript and that this regulation is not stringently dependent on the RNA chaperone protein Hfq. These results point to VrrA as a molecular link between the σE-regulon and biofilm formation in V. cholerae. In addition, VrrA represents the first example of direct regulation of sRNA on biofilm matrix component, by-passing global master regulators.
Reflexive and reflective judgment processes: A social cognitive neuroscience approach.

One of the driving forces in social cognition has been the goal of understanding the mental mechanisms that can produce the large array of paradoxical findings that have excited social psychology students for half a century. From persuasion to person perception, decision making to dissonance, and judgment to job descrimination, the distinction between automatic and controlled processes has provided tremendous empirical leverage in the crusade to divide and conquer mental phenomena (in this volume, see Brewer; Chartrand & Jefferis; Galinsky, Martorana, & Ku; Johnston & Miles; cf. Kruglanski et al.). Controlled processes (sometimes referred to as explicit, conscious, or rational processes) typically involve some combination of effort, intention, and awareness, tend to interfere with one another, and are usually experienced as self-generated thoughts. Automatic processes (sometimes referred to as implicit, nonconscious, or intuitive processes) typically lack effort, intention, or awareness, tend not to interfere with one another, and are usually experienced as perceptions or feelings. Deciding how to budget one’s finances effectively to cover
Ethical Management of Business Organizations: Responsibility or Strength?. A Theoretical Approach on its Relation to Business Value Generation

Ethics in the business sector has become a relevant focus of interest, both at academic and professional level, although there are also some approaches trying to minimize the need for ethical behaviour in the business organization limiting the responsibility of the business just to profit maximization. In this paper, after thoroughly analysing and debating the postulates of this line of thought, we have concluded that the company bears the responsibility for behaving ethically and then, not exclusively to serve and be fair to its shareholders but also respond to the needs and desires of all of its stakeholders. Nevertheless the true aim of this paper is not only to consider the company’s responsibility for behaving ethically but rather to show that fulfilling this responsibility implies a consistent basis on which the company can operate in the market. Thus, through the implementation by the company of an ethical management system (EMS), the achievement of the ethical atmosphere which can contribute to create the so much desired by top managers “best place to work” is expected to be satisfied, considerably improving in addition the reputation of the company for its stakeholders, which finally redounds in a better organizational operation. JEL CLASSIFICATION : M1; M10
New strategies for New Physics search in B -> K* nu anti-nu, B -> K nu anti-nu and B -> X(s) nu anti-nu decays

The rare decay B -> K* nu anti-nu allows a transparent study of Z penguin and other electroweak penguin effects in New Physics (NP) scenarios in the absence of dipole operator contributions and Higgs (scalar) penguin contributions that are often more important than Z contributions in B -> K* l+l- and B(s) -> l+l- decays. We present a new analysis of B -> K* nu anti-nu with improved form factors and of the decays B -> K nu anti-nu and B -> X(s) nu anti-nu in the SM and in a number of NP scenarios like the general MSSM, general scenarios with modified Z/Z' penguins and in a singlet scalar extension of the SM. We also summarize the results in the Littlest Higgs model with T-parity and a Randall-Sundrum (RS) model with custodial protection of left-handed Z-di-dj couplings. Our SM prediction BR(B -> K* nu anti-nu)=(6.8^+1.0_-1.1) x 10^-6 turns out to be significantly lower than the ones present in the literature. Our improved calculation BR(B -> X(s) nu anti-nu)=(2.7+-0.2) x 10^-5 in the SM avoids the normalization to the BR(B -> X(c) e anti-nu(e)) and, with less than 10% total uncertainty, is the most accurate to date. The results for the SM and NP scenarios can be transparently summarized in a (epsilon,eta) plane with a non-vanishing eta signalling the presence of new right-handed down-quark flavour violating couplings which can be ideally probed by the decays in question. Measuring the three branching ratios and one additional polarization observable in B -> K* nu anti-nu allows to overconstrain the resulting point in the (epsilon,eta) plane with (epsilon,eta)=(1,0) corresponding to the SM. The correlations of these three channels with the rare decays K+ -> pi+ nu anti-nu, KL -> pi0 nu anti-nu, B -> X(s) l+ l- and B(s) -> mu+ mu- offer powerful tests of New Physics with new right-handed couplings and non-MFV interactions.
Design of permutation order statistic filters through group colorings

In this paper, we develop a group theoretic method for reducing the class cardinality of Permutation (P) filters. P filters are a recently introduced class of nonlinear filters that have their roots in permutation theory and are based on the mapping x/spl rarr/x/sup r/, where x and x/sup r/ are temporal-ordered and rank-ordered observation vectors, respectively. While P filters contain as a proper subset a large body of nonlinear filters proposed to date, and have shown to be effective at estimating nonstationary processes in non-Gaussian environments, the large number of parameters required to define a P filter limits the filter's practical window size. Also, the information required to formulate an acceptable estimate is often only a subset of that contained in the permutation mapping x/spl rarr/x/sup r/. To reduce in a flexible and systematic way the information contained in the permutation mapping, the concept of coloring is introduced. A coloring is an equivalence relation applied to rank-ordering, temporal-ordering, or both temporal- and rank-ordering. These equivalences lead to the definitions of Rank colored Permutation (RP), Temporal colored Permutation (TP), and Temporal-Rank colored Permutation (TRP) filters, respectively. The rank- and temporal-order equivalences are shown to induce equivalences on the group of permutations. The induced permutation equivalences form a quantization of the permutation group. A distance bound on this quantization is derived as well as the cardinalities of RP, TP, and TRP filter classes. Additionally, symmetry constraints are formally developed and the number of filters in an arbitrarily constrained class counted. Several simulations are provided showing the effect of coloring and demonstrating the performance of colored P filters.
Detecting a Stock Market Anomaly with a Classifier System

This paper presents a classifier system to detect stock market anomalies. The classifier system groups the last 15 years' daily data of the ISE100 Index of the Istanbul Securities Exchange into classes of fixed size, and computes for every observation in each class the return over the succeding T days. Next, the average return in each class is calculated. Confidence intervals for average returns are constructed using bootstrap re-sampling method. It is observed that for an investment period of at least one year, average classified returns becomes positive at all levels of the ISE100 Index, strengthening the now well-known assertion that the ISE is not weak form efficient.
Customer Behavior in an Online Ordering Application: A Decision Scoring Model

This research presents the development of behavioral scoring models to predict future customer purchases in an online ordering application. Internet retailing lowers many barriers for customers switching between retailers for repeat purchases; thus, retaining existing customers is a key challenge for achieving profitability. Survey data were collected from 1,089 online customers of two companies. The subjective survey data were then used to predict purchases over the ensuing 12 months based on data from the company databases. The analysis illustrates the general applicability of predictive models of future customer purchases while also demonstrating the need to develop specific models tailored for an individual company’s operating and marketing environment. The models provide insight on how companies can target marketing dollars more effectively and allocate investment across multiple operational areas for maximum return. The research answers a call for rigorous research in the area of predictive marketing, an area in which many companies are excelling but where there is a scarcity of detailed knowledge regarding application of such models.
The Impact of Health on Productivity: Macro and Microeconomic Evidence and Policy Implications

This chapter by Emile Tompa provides a comprehensive review of the theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence of the health-productivity relationship with an emphasis on the public policy implications. This relationship goes well beyond the obvious effect of health on capacity to work both in terms of energy level and working time. Focusing on the Grossman model, the author describes three additional pathways through which health can affect productivity at an aggregate level. For instance, individuals with a longer life expectancy may choose to invest more in education as they receive greater returns from their investment. They may also be motivated to save more for retirement, which would lead to greater accumulation of physical capital. Finally, improvement in the survival and health of young children may provide incentives for reduced fertility and may result in increased labour-force participation.
Problematizing ‘pro-feminist’ depictions of female on male rape: American Horror Story’s ‘Rape of the Monsignor’

Dramatized depictions of female on male rape, in inverting the conventional gendered rape binary of male assailant/female victim, are commonly regarded as subverting gender norms, and are thus celebrated as pro-feminist. I present a Foucauldian problematization of this rationale – arguing that, through a process of over-writing gender, inversion of the norm masks a ‘reversion to the norm’. To interpret this as pro-feminist, one must be distracted by corporeal gender in the superficial role reversal, and blind to the anti-feminist effects in operation. Critical discourse analysis of an example drawn from the popular US television show American Horror Story illustrates that such depictions operate in discursive space as the locus for a process of ‘governmentalized recursion’. A close reading of the media text and its audience reception is performed, methodological considerations in the intersection of feminist analyses and cultural criminology vis a vis gendered lacunae and popular misinterpretation are discussed and the primacy of scenographic analysis is challenged via a focus on ‘the arc’. This article thus contributes an intervention in the discourse predicated on a Foucauldian triangulation of media texts, audience responses and institutional frameworks and practices, to comprise a history of the present in a controversial and neglected area.
Extreme precipitation events in NW Greece

Abstract. In this work, the extreme precipitation events in NW Greece are studied. The data used are daily precipitation totals recorded at the meteorological station of Ioannina University for the period 1970–2002. 156 days with precipitation totals above 35 mm (5% upper limit) are only considered. It is seen that, a minimum frequency of extreme precipitation events appears in the period 1986–1991, which is characterized by a high positive NAO index. For each of the 156 extreme precipitation days, at first, the mean sea level pressure pattern over Europe is constructed by using 273 grid point values. Using Factor Analysis, the dimensionality of the 156×273 data matrix is reduced to 156×5 (84% of the total variance) and then, Cluster Analysis is applied on the results of Factor Analysis. Thus, the 156 cases are grouped objectively to 11 clusters, revealing the main pressure patterns, which favour extreme precipitation in NW Greece. Seven of the patterns are encountered in winter and autumn, while three of them cover a period from autumn to spring and one appears mainly in summer. In all of them the cause of the extreme precipitation event is a low pressure system centred west of Greece or a low pressure trough extended eastwards or southwards up to Greece. In some cases the depression is so strong and extended that it covers the whole Europe and the Mediterranean. In the single summer pattern, rainfall is caused by an extension of the SW Asia thermal low up to the central Mediterranean.
Achieving information integration in supply chain management through B2B e-hubs: concepts and analyses

While supply chain integration is measured at three levels: information, resources and organization, the emphasis of the paper is placed on how information integration can be achieved through B2B e‐hubs. After reviewing the concept of supply chain integration and the evolution of e‐hubs, we examine two groups of e‐hubs classified by supply chain processes, namely procurement and transportation, along with two case studies of each. A value‐gap analysis is performed from the perspectives of facilitating supply chain activities and connecting chain partners, revealing that gaps and limitations do exist in existing e‐hubs. Finally, we present a framework for integrating existing e‐hubs into other advanced information technologies, such as ERP and CRM, to bridge the gaps and to expand their functionality to provide better solutions to supply chain integration.
The Effect of Family Literacy Culture on Student’s Motivation in Islamic Education Subject at State Senior High School in Garut

The environment is believed to have a strong effect on the learning process of students, including the family’s influence. This study is aimed to examine the influence of family literacy culture on student learning motivation in Islamic education subject. This study applied the associative method with inferential statistical analysis. The population of this study covers 484 students of class X at State Senior High School in Garut District, Indonesia, while the number of research samples comprises 83 respondents. Data measurement in this research uses ordinal data with Likert Scale measurement. The analysis methods include regression analysis, correlation coefficient, the coefficient of determination, and hypothesis testing. The results showed that the culture of family literacy had a positive and significant impact on students’ learning motivation in the Subject of Islamic Education
Recognition of spontaneous conversational speech using long short-term memory phoneme predictions

We present a novel continuous speech recognition framework designed to unite the principles of triphone and Long ShortTerm Memory (LSTM) modeling. The LSTM principle allows a recurrent neural network to store and to retrieve information over long time periods, which was shown to be well-suited for the modeling of co-articulation effects in human speech. Our system uses a bidirectional LSTM network to generate a phoneme prediction feature that is observed by a triphone-based large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) decoder, together with conventional MFCC features. We evaluate both, phoneme prediction error rates of various network architectures and the word recognition performance of our Tandem approach using the COSINE database - a large corpus of conversational and noisy speech, and show that incorporating LSTM phoneme predictions in to an LVCSR system leads to significantly higher word accuracies. Index Terms: Long Short-Term Memory, Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition, Context Modeling, Recurrent Neural Networks
Endocannabinoids Mediate Presynaptic Inhibition of Glutamatergic Transmission in Rat Ventral Tegmental Area Dopamine Neurons through Activation of CB1 Receptors

The endogenous cannabinoid system has been shown to play a crucial role in controlling neuronal excitability and synaptic transmission. In this study we investigated the effects of a cannabinoid receptor (CB-R) agonist WIN 55,212-2 (WIN) on excitatory synaptic transmission in the rat ventral tegmental area (VTA). Whole-cell patch clamp recordings were performed from VTA dopamine (DA) neurons in an in vitro slice preparation. WIN reduced both NMDA and AMPA EPSCs, as well as miniature EPSCs (mEPSCs), and increased the paired-pulse ratio, indicating a presynaptic locus of its action. We also found that WIN-induced effects were dose-dependent and mimicked by the CB1-R agonist HU210. Furthermore, two CB1-R antagonists, AM281 and SR141716A, blocked WIN-induced effects, suggesting that WIN modulates excitatory synaptic transmission via activation of CB1-Rs. Our additional finding that both AM281 and SR141716A per se increased NMDA EPSCs suggests that endogenous cannabinoids, released from depolarized postsynaptic neurons, might act retrogradely on presynaptic CB1-Rs to suppress glutamate release. Hence, we report that a type of synaptic modulation, previously termed depolarization-induced suppression of excitation (DSE), is present also in the VTA as a calcium-dependent phenomenon, blocked by both AM281 and SR141716A, and occluded by WIN. Importantly, DSE was partially blocked by the D2DA antagonist eticlopride and enhanced by the D2DA agonist quinpirole without changing the presynaptic cannabinoid sensitivity. These results indicate that the two pathways work in a cooperative manner to release endocannabinoids in the VTA, where they play a role as retrograde messengers for DSE via CB1-Rs.
R-Baclofen Reverses a Social Behavior Deficit and Elevated Protein Synthesis in a Mouse Model of Fragile X Syndrome

Background: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common known inherited form of intellectual disability and the single genomic cause of autism spectrum disorders. It is caused by the absence of a fragile X mental retardation gene (Fmr1) product, FMRP, an RNA-binding translation suppressor. Elevated rates of protein synthesis in the brain and an imbalance between synaptic signaling via glutamate and γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) are both considered important in the pathogenesis of FXS. In a mouse model of FXS (Fmr1 knockout [KO]), treatment with R-baclofen reversed some behavioral and biochemical phenotypes. A remaining crucial question is whether R-baclofen is also able to reverse increased brain protein synthesis rates. Methods: To answer this question, we measured regional rates of cerebral protein synthesis in vivo with the L-[1-14C]leucine method in vehicle- and R-baclofen–treated wildtype and Fmr1 KO mice. We further probed signaling pathways involved in the regulation of protein synthesis. Results: Acute R-baclofen administration corrected elevated protein synthesis and reduced deficits on a test of social behavior in adult Fmr1 KO mice. It also suppressed activity of the mammalian target of rapamycin pathway, particularly in synaptosome-enriched fractions, but it had no effect on extracellular-regulated kinase 1/2 activity. Ninety min after R-baclofen treatment, we observed an increase in metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 expression in the frontal cortex, a finding that may shed light on the tolerance observed in human studies with this drug. Conclusions: Our results suggest that treatment via activation of the GABA (GABA receptor subtype B) system warrants further study in patients with FXS.
Increasing Arabian dust activity and the Indian summer monsoon

Abstract. Over the past decade, aerosol optical depth (AOD) observations based on satellite and ground measurements have shown a significant increase over Arabia and the Arabian Sea, attributed to an intensification of regional dust activity. Recent studies have also suggested that west Asian dust forcing could induce a positive response of Indian monsoon precipitations on a weekly timescale. Using observations and a regional climate model including interactive slab-ocean and dust aerosol schemes, the present study investigates possible climatic links between the increasing June–July–August–September (JJAS) Arabian dust activity and precipitation trends over southern India during the 2000–2009 decade. Meteorological reanalysis and AOD observations suggest that the observed decadal increase of dust activity and a simultaneous intensification of summer precipitation trend over southern India are both linked to a deepening of JJAS surface pressure conditions over the Arabian Sea. In the first part of the study, we analyze the mean climate response to dust radiative forcing over the domain, discussing notably the relative role of Arabian vs. Indo-Pakistani dust regions. In the second part of the study, we show that the model skills in reproducing regional dynamical patterns and southern Indian precipitation trends are significantly improved only when an increasing dust emission trend is imposed on the basis of observations. We conclude that although interannual climate variability might primarily determine the observed regional pattern of increasing dust activity and precipitation during the 2000–2009 decade, the associated dust radiative forcing might in return induce a critical dynamical feedback contributing to enhancing regional moisture convergence and JJAS precipitations over southern India.
Goal‐oriented error estimation for Cahn–Hilliard models of binary phase transition

A posteriori estimates of errors in quantities of interest are developed for the nonlinear system of evolution equations embodied in the Cahn–Hilliard model of binary phase transition. These involve the analysis of wellposedness of dual backward‐in‐time problems and the calculation of residuals. Mixed finite element approximations are developed and used to deliver numerical solutions of representative problems in one‐ and two‐dimensional domains. Estimated errors are shown to be quite accurate in these numerical examples. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Numer Methods Partial Differential Eq, 2010