Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
La productivité dans la zone de l'OCDE: les déterminants à moyen terme

Cet article passe en revue les etudes theoriques et empiriques portant sur les facteurs de croissance de la productivite a moyen terme et presente une analyse econometrique de la croissance de la productivite du travail et de la productivite totale des facteurs (PTF) dans le secteur des entreprises des pays de l'OCDE. L'amelioration des niveaux d'instruction, de bas niveaux initiaux de productivite, un accroissement peu important de la population active et une faible inflation sont autant d'elements associes a une plus forte croissance de la PTF. Une accumulation plus rapide du capital accelere les gains de productivite de la main-d'oeuvre, mais rien n'indique qu'elle contribue a la progression de la PTF. Une part importante du ralentissement de la croissance de la productivite n'a pu etre expliquee, que ce soit dans le cadre du present article ou dans les autres etudes empiriques
Rethinking 'Fixed-Ability Thinking' and Grouping Practices: questions, disruptions and barriers to change in primary and early years education

This article uses data from a research project exploring grouping practices based on 'ability' in classrooms for children aged 3-7 years in England to consider the relationship between teachers' views of ability and their ways of organising children. The widespread use of grouping with young children and the concomitant 'fixed-ability thinking' by teachers are discussed, alongside an exploration of how and why teachers object to grouping on this basis. Examples of teachers who were able to disrupt grouping practices based on 'ability' are described, allowing for a further discussion of the barriers to change for the majority of teachers. The article concludes that the relationship between teachers' beliefs about ability and their grouping practice is complex, as there can be both grouping without fixed-ability thinking and vice versa.
Getting Handcuffs on an Octopus

Theoretical work on minimum wage policy emphasizes labor market dynamics, but the resulting implications for worker mobility remain largely untested. The authors show that in the teenage labor market, higher minimum wage standards reduce worker flows and increase job stability. Furthermore, they find that the employment effects of a relatively higher minimum wage vary considerably across markets with different levels of turnover and labor market tightness. Results help to explain the small effects of minimum wage standards on employment commonly found in the aggregate data and are consistent with labor market models that involve search frictions.
Psychological and neuroscientific advances to understand Internet Use Disorder

Zusammenfassung Internet-Nutzungsstörung (INS; in der jüngeren Vergangenheit zumeist als „Internet-Sucht“ benannt) stellt ein viel diskutiertes Thema weltweit dar. Besonders mit der Aufnahme der Diagnose Gaming Disorder im ICD-11 der Weltgesundheitsbehörde ist das nächste Level einer oftmals emotional geführten Debatte über die Natur der Verhaltenssüchte erreicht worden. Um den Leser aktuelle Einsichten in den aktuellen Stand der Dinge bezüglich dieses Themenbereiches zu vermitteln, wird in der vorliegenden Übersichtarbeit zunächst zusammengefasst, was über die INS bekannt ist und auch wie sich das Störungsbild entwickelt. Zusätzlich wird versucht, das relativ neue Phänomen der Smartphone-Nutzungsstörung (für viele eher bekannt als „Smartphone-Sucht“) in dem großen Themenkomplex der INS zu verorten. Über diese theoretischen und diagnostischen Aspekte hinausgehend, gibt der vorliegende Artikel eine Übersicht über neurowissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse, die dabei helfen, die INS besser zu charakterisieren. Viele unterschiedliche Methoden der Neurowissenschaften wurden bereits eingesetzt, um die biologischen Grundlagen der INS zu entschlüsseln. Die Magnetresonanztomographie (MRT) stand dabei in der Vergangenheit besonders im Fokus, so dass Befunde aus der MRT-Forschung auch im Fokus dieses Übersichtsartikel stehen werden. Der Artikel endet mit Limitationen der aktuellen empirischen Forschung. Zusätzlich wird ein Ausblick auf die nächsten Schritte in dem lebhaften Forschungsfeld der INS gegeben.
Are Beholden Rulers Enlightened Rulers ? Uniting Democratic and Fiscal Perspectives on Infant and Child Mortality

Many scholars contend that democracy has a significant and positive effect on the provision of public services. Alternately, the fiscal theory of the state predicts that if the state is beholden to the citizenry for revenue, it will have economic incentives to defer to citizens’ preferences and enact policies that benefit broad segments of society. I argue that the incentives to provide public services are a function both of democratic institutions and of the costs associated with enforcing compliance with various revenue-generating instruments. When these costs are low, such as when states are reliant on non-tax revenue and taxes on international trade, the incentives to provide public goods are low. When these costs are high, such as with consumption taxes and taxes on income, capital gains and assets, the incentives to provide public goods are greater. Using time-series cross-sectional data on 157 countries from 1980-2002, I find that the ratio of high-cost to low-cost revenue (what I call the quasi-voluntary ratio) is negatively associated with infant and child mortality. Moreover, when the nature of government revenue is adequately modeled, the strong relationship linking GDP per capita and infant mortality disappears. The analysis supports both democratic and fiscal notions of accountability and suggests that democratization should be accompanied by reforms that increase the fiscal dependence of the state on its citizenry in order to enjoy advances in human well-being.
Waypoint guidance control of snake robots

This paper considers path following control of snake robots and has two contributions. The first contribution is a description of how a straight line path following controller previously proposed by the authors can be extended to path following of general curved paths. The second contribution of this paper is a waypoint guidance strategy for steering a snake robot along a path defined by waypoints interconnected by straight lines. The waypoint guidance strategy builds on the straight line path following controller previously proposed by the authors. The paper presents simulation results that illustrate the performance of the proposed guidance strategy.
Numerical investigation of particle–particle and particle–wall collisions in a viscous fluid

The dynamics of particle–particle collisions and the bouncing motion of a particle colliding with a wall in a viscous fluid is numerically investigated. The dependence of the effective coefficient of restitution on the Stokes number and surface roughness is analysed. A distributed Lagrange multiplier-based computational method in a solid–fluid system is developed and an efficient method for predicting the collision between particles is presented. A comparison between this method and previous collision strategies shows that the present approach has some significant advantages over them. Comparison of the present methodology with experimental studies for the bouncing motion of a spherical particle onto a wall shows very good agreement and validates the collision model. Finally, the effect of the coefficient of restitution for a dry collision on the vortex dynamics associated with this problem is discussed.
Is early intervention in psychosis cost-effective over the long term?

OBJECTIVE This study assesses the long-term cost-effectiveness of a comprehensive model of mental health care for first-episode psychosis. The study is an extension of a previous economic evaluation of the Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) that assessed the first-year costs and outcomes of treatment. METHOD The current study used a matched, historical control group design with a follow-up of approximately 8 years. Complete follow-up data were available for 65 of the original 102 participants. Direct public mental health service costs incurred subsequent to the first year of treatment and symptomatic and functional outcomes of 32 participants initially treated for up to 2 years at EPPIC were compared with a matched cohort of 33 participants initially treated by generic mental health services. Treatment-related resource use was measured and valued using Australian published prices. RESULTS Almost 8 years after initial treatment, EPPIC subjects displayed lower levels of positive psychotic symptoms (P = .007), were more likely to be in remission (P = .008), and had a more favorable course of illness (P = .011) than the controls. Fifty-six percent of the EPPIC cohort were in paid employment over the last 2 years compared with 33% of controls (P = .083). Each EPPIC patient costs on average A$3445 per annum to treat compared with controls, who each costs A$9503 per annum. CONCLUSIONS Specialized early psychosis programs can deliver a higher recovery rate at one-third the cost of standard public mental health services. Residual methodological limitations and limited sample size indicate that further research is required to verify this finding.
REPORT RAPPORT A Numerical Study of Mixed Parabolic-Gradient Systems

This paper is concerned with the numerical solution of parabolic equations coupled to gradient equations. The gradient equations are ordinary di(cid:11)erential equations whose solutions de(cid:12)ne positions of particles in the spatial domain of the parabolic equations. The vector (cid:12)eld of the gradient equations is determined by gradients of solutions to the parabolic equations. Such mixed parabolic-gradient systems are for example used in neurobiological studies of the formation of axonal connections in the nervous system. We discuss a numerical approach for solving parabolic-gradient systems on a grid. The basic ingredients are 4th-order spatial (cid:12)nite-di(cid:11)erencing for the parabolic equations, piecewise cubic Hermite interpolation for approximating the gradient equations, and explicit time-stepping by means of a Runge-Kutta-Chebyshev method.
Privatization and Incentives

Is public or private ownership more likely to promote social welfare? This ancient and central question in economics has generated a fair amount of conventional wisdom on the benefits and costs of public production of goods and services. However, the arguments underlying this conventional wisdom are often delicate. The first goal of this exploratory article is to recast some of these arguments in the framework of modem agency theory. ] This article will remain almost as superficial as the conventional wisdom it criticizes and will only try to suggest that recent research in agency theory may start offering clues to a more satisfactory analysis of comparative ownership structures. The second goal of this article is to analyze a specific trade-off between a public enterprise and a private regulated firm. In order not to exogenously presume the superiority of one ownership structure, we trace differences in efficiency not to intrinsic taste differences of managers and supervisors of public and private enterprises, but rather to different institutional arrangements and incentives. In our model, the cost of public ownership is a suboptimal investment by the firm's managers in those assets that can be redeployed to serve social goals pursued by the public owners. While such a reallocation
Modulation of Top-Down Control of Visual Attention by Cathodal tDCS over Right IPS

The right intraparietal sulcus (rIPS) is a key region for the endogenous control of selective visual attention in the human brain. Previous studies suggest that the rIPS is especially involved in top-down control and spatial distribution of attention across both visual hemifields. We further explored these attentional functions using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the rIPS to modulate behavioral performance in a partial report task. Performance was analyzed according to the theory of visual attention (TVA) (Bundesen, 1990), which provides a computational framework to investigate different parameters of visuo-attentional processing such as top-down control, attentional weighting, capacity of visual short term memory, and processing speed. We investigated the effects of different tDCS current strengths (1 mA and 2 mA) in two experiments: 1 mA tDCS (anodal, cathodal, sham) did not affect any of the TVA parameters, but cathodal 2 mA stimulation significantly enhanced top-down control as evidenced by a reduction of the α parameter of TVA, regardless of hemifield. This differential impact on the top-down control component of attentional processing suggests that the horizontal rIPS is mainly involved in attentional selection as none of the spatial or resource variables of TVA were altered. Furthermore, the data add evidence to previous work highlighting (1) the importance of using appropriate current strength in stimulation protocols, and (2) that the often reported inhibitory effect of cathodal stimulation in e.g., motor tasks might not extend to cognitive paradigms.
Transport equations for the inflationary trispectrum

We use transport techniques to calculate the trispectrum produced in multiple-field inflationary models with canonical kinetic terms. Our method allows the time evolution of the local trispectrum parameters, tauNL and gNL, to be tracked throughout the inflationary phase. We illustrate our approach using examples. We give a simplified method to calculate the superhorizon part of the relation between field fluctuations on spatially flat hypersurfaces and the curvature perturbation on uniform density slices, and obtain its third-order part for the first time. We clarify how the 'backwards' formalism of Yokoyama et al. relates to our analysis and other recent work. We supply explicit formulae which enable each inflationary observable to be computed in any canonical model of interest, using a suitable first-order ODE solver.
Involvement of the Limbic Basal Ganglia in Ethanol Withdrawal Convulsivity in Mice Is Influenced by a Chromosome 4 Locus

Physiological dependence and associated withdrawal episodes are thought to constitute a motivational force that sustains ethanol (alcohol) use/abuse and may contribute to relapse in alcoholics. Although no animal model duplicates alcoholism, models for specific factors, like the withdrawal syndrome, are useful for identifying potential genetic and neural determinants of liability in humans. We generated congenic mice that confirm a quantitative trait locus (QTL) on chromosome 4 with a large effect on predisposition to alcohol withdrawal. Using c-Fos expression as a high-resolution marker of neuronal activation, congenic mice demonstrated significantly less neuronal activity associated with ethanol withdrawal than background strain mice in the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNr), subthalamic nucleus (STN), rostromedial lateral globus pallidus, and ventral pallidum. Notably, neuronal activation in subregions of the basal ganglia associated with limbic function was more intense than in subregions associated with sensorimotor function. Bilateral lesions of caudolateral SNr attenuated withdrawal severity after acute and repeated ethanol exposures, whereas rostrolateral SNr and STN lesions did not reduce ethanol withdrawal severity. Caudolateral SNr lesions did not affect pentylenetetrazol-enhanced convulsions. Our results suggest that this QTL impacts ethanol withdrawal via basal ganglia circuitry associated with limbic function and that the caudolateral SNr plays a critical role. These are the first analyses to elucidate circuitry by which a confirmed addiction-relevant QTL influences behavior. This mouse QTL is syntenic with human chromosome 9p. Given the growing body of evidence that a gene(s) on chromosome 9p influences alcoholism, our results can facilitate human research on alcohol dependence and withdrawal.
Essays in Economics and Institutions

This dissertation incorporates institutional analysis in the examination of a number of questions that are relevant for the economic literature, touching on issues of public policy, demography, transition, and organized crime. It is composed of three chapters that can be read separately. First, I evaluate the nexus between public works expenditures in post-war Italy and internal migration. Using nonlinear differences-in-differences, I present evidence that one of the goals of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno mmitigating out-migration from the South of Italymwas, at best, a failure, and possibly exacerbated the problem. This evaluation is relevant for public policy that aims to address differentials between regions. Next, I re-examine the common finding that institutional quality is a determinant of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the context of transition economies. Using various measures of institutional quality, I find that more parsimonious and more commonly used models in evaluating FDI suggest that the previous findings are sensitive to specification. While this should not be considered as falsification of the notion that institutional quality is important in attracting FDI, it is a cautionary tale for those attempting to incorporate institutional measures in their work. Finally, after a careful consideration of the institutional environment of the Mafia in Italy, I propose a simple game-theoretic model to explain violence as an equilibrium outcome in such organizations.
A new tool for gestural action recognition to support decisions in emotional framework

Introduction and objective: the purpose of this work is to design and implement an innovative tool to recognize 16 different human gestural actions and use them to predict 7 different emotional states. The solution proposed in this paper is based on RGB and depth information of 2D/3D images acquired from a commercial RGB-D sensor called Kinect. Materials: the dataset is a collection of several human actions made by different actors. Each action is performed by each actor for three times in each video. 20 actors perform 16 different actions, both seated and upright, totalling 40 videos per actor. Methods: human gestural actions are recognized by means feature extractions as angles and distances related to joints of human skeleton from RGB and depth images. Emotions are selected according to the state-of-the-art. Experimental results: despite truly similar actions, the overall-accuracy reached is approximately 80%. Conclusions and future works: the proposed work seems to be back-ground- and speed-independent, and it will be used in the future as part of a multimodal emotion recognition software based on facial expressions and speech analysis as well.
Perceptual segmentation and component selection for sinusoidal representations of audio

This paper presents two fundamental enhancements in a hybrid audio signal model consisting of sinusoidal, transient, and noise (STN) components. The first enhancement involves a novel application of a perceptual metric for optimal time segmentation for the analysis of transients. In particular, Moore and Glasberg's model of partial loudness is modified for use with general signals and then integrated into a novel time segmentation scheme. The second, and perhaps more significant STN enhancement is concerned with a new methodology for ranking and selection of the most perceptually relevant sinusoids. A systematic procedure is developed for the selection of a compact set of sinusoids and comparative results are given to demonstrate the merit of this method.
Implications of Mobility: The Uses of Personal Communication Media in Everyday Life

This study examined the impact of mobile communications on interpersonal relationships in daily life. Based on a nationwide survey in Japan, landline phone, mobile voice phone, mobile mail (text messaging), and PC e-mail were compared to assess their usage in terms of social network and psychological factors. The results indicated that young, nonfamily-related pairs of friends, living close to each other with frequent faceto-face contact were more likely to use mobile media. Social skill levels are negatively correlated with relative preference for mobile mail in comparison with mobile voice phone. These findings suggest that mobile mail is preferable for Japanese young people who tend to avoid direct communication and that its use maintains existing bonds rather than create new ones. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006. 00023.x Since their rapid growth in popularity in the late 1990s, mobile phones have become an almost essential part of daily life. Currently, mobile phones are also used for purposes other than voice communication. In some countries, there has been a trend for young people to create their own unique subcultures in which they communicate predominantly through SMS (short message service), or by e-mail over their mobile phones (Ishii, 2004; Kasesniemi & Rautiainen, 2002; Skog, 2002). To explore the implications of media mobility, this study compared the impact of four types of personal communication media—landline phone, mobile voice phone, mobile mail, and PC e-mail—on interpersonal relationships, based on a representative survey. More specifically, egocentric network data were analyzed to examine the factors affecting the use of these media in daily life. In this study, empirical data were collected in Japan where cutting-edge mobile technologies (e.g., ‘‘i-mode’’ and 3-G phones) are widely used and where a unique mobile communication culture is prevalent among the youth. Henceforth, the term ‘‘mobile mail’’ will be used to refer to both SMS and e-mail via mobile phones because in Japan, SMS and e-mail
Critical Care Nurses' Knowledge, Perception and Barriers Regarding Delirium in Adult Critical Care Units

Purpose/Aims: the purpose of this study was to evaluate critical care nurses' knowledge, perception and barriers regarding delirium in adult critical care units. Design: A descriptive exploratory research design was used to conduct this study. Methods: the current study was conducted at Intensive care units located at Mansoura Emergency Hospital. A total of 40 nurses completed the study. Assessment of critical care nurses' perception, knowledge and barriers regarding delirium was done through direct interview method using study questionnaires. Results: nurses' experience in ICU has a positive impact on their knowledge and perception regarding delirium. The mean score of perception, general knowledge and knowledge related to risk factors were significantly higher among diploma degree nurses. The mean score of nurses' perception of delirium was 27.4 ±6.4. The mean score of general knowledge was 25.0 ±8.6 which represents 69.4% of total possible score. The mean score of knowledge regarding risk factors of delirium was 35.1 ±10.1which represents 73.1% of total possible score. Critical care nurses face many barriers regarding delirium assessment. The mean score regarding barriers to proper delirium assessment was 25.1 ±4.8. Conclusion: In light of the results of our study, we can emphasize that there is a need to upgrade critical care nurses' knowledge and perception regarding delirium to help nurses to be more active in performing delirium assessment and management.