Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Open Skies for Africa: Implementing the Yamoussoukro Decision

For the purposes of this book, "open skies" refers to a bilateral or multilateral air service agreement that liberalizes the rules for international aviation markets and minimizes government intervention. It can apply to passenger or cargo services or both, for both scheduled and charter air services. This book evaluates Africa's progress toward liberalizing air services. It specifically examines what the term implementation means in the context of applying the principles of one of the major pan-African multilateral agreements, the Yamoussoukro decision. It also highlights the shortcomings of the 20-year-old effort toward liberalizing air services in Africa by analyzing pending or completed implementation steps both on a pan-Africa level and within various regions. The book focuses on the challenges posed by the poor aviation safety and security standards in most African countries. Finally the sector work measures the impact of certain policy steps of the decision and evaluates the economic significance of air transportation and its full liberalization in Africa. It concludes with policy recommendations that aim at completing implementation to fully liberalize Africa's air services.
Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Revisited: Estimates Based on Lifetime Earnings

Using Norwegian intergenerational data, which include a substantial part of the life-cycle earnings for children and almost the entire life-cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility. Extending the length of fathers’ earnings window from 5 to 25 years increases estimated elasticities. Increasing the age at which fathers’ earnings are observed has the opposite effect. Biases in the estimated elasticities are related to both transitory earnings variation and life-cycle measurement error; the former appear to be more important than the latter. Estimation bias stemming from persistence in transitory innovations plays only a minor role. Our findings indicate that intergenerational earnings mobility in Norway might have been strongly overstated in many earlier studies with shorter earnings histories. Some of our new estimates are twice as large as earlier estimates.
A Ten-Year Odyssey of the 'IS Productivity Paradox' - A Citation Analysis (1996-2006)

The information systems “productivity paradox” has become an important catalyst for research within the IS field. This study examines how the paradox has impacted IS research through a content analysis of 150 articles published between 1996 and 2006 that cite Brynjolfsson and Hitt’s seminal productivity paradox paper (e.g., Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1996). The results show that the original paradox has largely been resolved due to more sophisticated and refined data sources, a shift in the level of analysis, and a refocus on the management of IS. However, a more complex picture has emerged about the link between IS and outcome variables. This paper explores this complexity in order to identify remaining gaps and propose directions for future research.
[Effect of liposome-entrapped lidocaine on limbic status epilepticus in rats].

Liposomes (LIPO), which are concentric lipid layers alternating with aqueous compartments, have been suggested as a potential carrier for various drugs. In the previous studies, we have demonstrated that anticonvulsant drugs such as valproic acid, phenytoin, and DN-1417 (an analog of thyrotropin-releasing hormone) entrapped into LIPO exert more prominent therapeutic efficacy than parent drugs. In the present study, we examined the comparative effects of Lidocaine (LDCA) which acts as a proconvulsant as well as an anticonvulsant, and LIPO-entrapped LDCA (LDCA-L) on limbic status epilepticus originating in the amygdala (AM) of rats. LDCA (LDCA hydrochloride) was dissolved in distilled water as a vehicle at a concentration of 2.5 mg/ml or 10 mg/ml. LIPO and LDCA-L were prepared from L-alpha-phosphatidylcholine, cholesterol, and stearylamine. Status epilepticus was induced by intra-AM injection of combined dibutyryl (db)-cAMP-200 micrograms/ethylene diaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA)-67.2 micrograms through the implanted cannula. The animals were divided into 4 groups which received vehicle (n = 6), LIPO (n = 5), LDCA (n = 9), and LDCA-L (n = 10). LDCA group was subdivided into 5 mg/kg (n = 4) and 20 mg/kg (n = 5) groups. LDCA-L group was treated with 5mg/kg (n = 4) or 20mg/kg (n = 6). All drugs were intravenously given at a volume of 2ml/kg via teflon tube previously inserted into cervical vein 30 min after db-cAMP/EDTA injection. Vehicle or LIPO alone did not alter the pattern of electroclinical ictal responses produced by intra-AM injection of db-cAMP/EDTA. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Pharmaceuticals Analyzed through the Lens of a Sectoral Innovation System

Introduction This chapter analyzes the pharmaceutical industry through the lens of a sectoral system of innovation. Intuitively, the pharmaceutical industry quite naturally lends itself to be analyzed as an SSI or as a network (see Galambos and Sewell, 1995; Chandler, 1990; Gambardella, Orsenigo and Pammolli, 2000; and McKelvey and Orsenigo, 2002). However, at the same time and precisely given the intuitive appeal of the notion of “system” and/or “network” for this industry, taking this approach forces the researcher to try to make this notion more precise and compelling and – above all – to clarify why and in what sense a “sectoral innovation system” approach is useful. This constitutes the general aim of this chapter. Generically, the pharmaceutical industry can easily be considered as a system or a network because innovative activities involve, directly or indirectly, a large variety of actors, including: (different types of) firms; other research organizations, such as universities and other research centers; financial institutions; regulatory authorities; and consumers. An innovation system or network is composed of actors, relationships among actors and other contextual features that affect the decisions of actors' behavior and the development of knowledge and economic competencies (Edquist and McKelvey, 2000). All the actors mentioned above are part of an SSI, and they are different in many senses. They know different things; they have different rules of action; they have different incentives and motivations, which may often conflict.
Multimodal Keyless Attention Fusion for Video Classification

The problem of video classification is inherently sequential and multimodal, and deep neural models hence need to capture and aggregate the most pertinent signals for a given input video. We propose Keyless Attention as an elegant and efficient means to more effectively account for the sequential nature of the data. Moreover, comparing a variety of multimodal fusion methods, we find that Multimodal Keyless Attention Fusion is the most successful at discerning interactions between modalities. We experiment on four highly heterogeneous datasets, UCF101, ActivityNet, Kinetics, and YouTube-8M to validate our conclusion, and show that our approach achieves highly competitive results. Especially on large-scale data, our method has great advantages in efficiency and performance. Most remarkably, our best single model can achieve 77.0% in terms of the top-1 accuracy and 93.2% in terms of the top-5 accuracy on the Kinetics validation set, and achieve 82.2% in terms of GAP@20 on the official YouTube-8M test set.
The Value Relevance of Brazilian Accounting Numbers: An Empirical Investigation

I present evidence of the value relevance of Brazilian accounting numbers under the Ohlson framework. My results suggest that book values are superior to earnings in terms of value relevance. I also show that accounting income does not incorporate economic income in a conservative way (asymmetrically). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that under the very concentrated ownership capital market system of Brazil accounting earnings are less useful as information asymmetry reducers while book values remain relevant due to legal implications of Brazilian corporate law. This result also supports the hypothesis that ownership concentration is the most relevant factor influencing earnings quality. Trading does not seem to play a relevant role in this analysis of accounting quality. I also show that accounting numbers are more relevant for companies of the so-called New Economy than for companies of the Old Economy. These results are contrary to what is normally supposed in the literature, which assumes that New Economy companies have more intangible assets that are not measured by traditional GAAP measures causing accounting numbers to lose relevance. The reasons behind these results demand further investigation. One possible explanation is that Brazilian accounting rules allow for a better representation of intangibles than US-GAAP. This is reasonable given the current accounting system in Brazil. Another alternative explanation is that corporate governance arrangements play a more important role than the accounting standards in the quality of accounting information.
Lifetime cost of stroke in the United States.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Stroke imposes a substantial economic burden on individuals and society. This study estimates the lifetime direct and indirect costs associated with the three major types of stroke: subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), and ischemic stroke (ISC). METHODS We developed a model of the lifetime cost of incident strokes occurring in 1990. An epidemiological model of stroke incidence, survival, and recurrence was developed based on a review of the literature. Data on direct cost of treating stroke were obtained from Medicare claims data, the 1987 National Medical Expenditure Survey (NMES), and insurance claims data representing a group of large, self-insured employers. Indirect costs (the value of foregone market and nonmarket production) associated with premature morbidity and mortality were estimated based on data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and the 1987 NMES. RESULTS The lifetime cost per person of first strokes occurring in 1990 is estimated to be $228,030 for SAH, $123,565 for ICH, $90,981 for ISC, and $103,576 averaged across all stroke sub-types. Indirect costs accounted for 58.0% of lifetime costs. Aggregate lifetime cost associated with an estimated 392,344 first strokes in 1990 was $40.6 billion: $5.6 billion for SAH, $6.0 billion for ICH, and $29.0 billion for ISC. Acute-care costs incurred in the 2 years following a first stroke accounted for 45.0%, long-term ambulatory care accounted for 35.0%, and nursing home costs accounted for 17.5% of aggregate lifetime costs of stroke. CONCLUSIONS The lifetime cost of stroke varies considerably by type of stroke and entails considerable costs beyond the first 2 years after a stroke.
Race, Turnout, and Public Policy In the American States

We attempt to bridge the conceptual gap between the black politics and state politics literatures by studying the effect of racial differences in elec toral participation on public policy. If state politics has considered whether "voters matter," and black politics has asked whether "black elected officials matter," we attempt to determine if "black voters matter. " In particular, we ask whether, and how, the racial composition of the electorate affects state policies. Our results suggest that the greater black participation relative to that of whites, the less liberal are state policies. The implications for democratic theory and black politics are discussed.
Does AMP-Activated Protein Kinase Negatively Mediate Aged Fast-Twitch Skeletal Muscle Mass?

The activity of 5′-adenosine monophosphate (AMP)-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a negative regulator of cell size, is up-regulated with age in resting and overloaded fast-twitch skeletal muscle but not slow-twitch muscle. Here, we provide evidence to support the hypothesis that elevated AMPK activity plays a potentially important integrative role in the age-related atrophy and diminished capacity for growth specific to fast-twitch skeletal muscle.
Decomposing the Yield Curve

We construct an affine model that incorporates bond risk premia. By understanding risk premia, we are able to use a lot of information from well-measured risk-neutral dyanmics to characterize real expectations. We use the model to decompose the yield curve into expected interest rate and risk premium components. We characterize the interesting term structure of risk premia -- a forward rate reflects expected excess returns many years into the future, and current slope and curvature factors forecast future expected returns even though they do not forecast current returns.
Watering cities: spatial analysis of urban water use in the Southeastern United States

This study explores the spatial pattern of urban water use in the southeastern US using Moran's I and Local Moran statistics, and identifies the factors influencing urban water use quantity using a regression model. The findings suggest that counties with a large quantity of water use are spatially clustered. The regression analysis reveals that the quantity of water use decreases as the water price increases in cities in the light water use group and when a city government manages water in cities in the heavy use group. Effective water management policies in the southeastern region of the US need to be established in consideration of these effects.
Gender diversity within R&D teams: Its impact on radicalness of innovation

Abstract Literature on diversity in organisations is limited and even fewer studies investigate its impact on innovation. Therefore, the aim of this research is to study how gender diversity within R&D teams, among other factors, impacts innovation, drawing on data from an innovation survey in Spain. Our findings support the assertion that gender diversity within R&D teams generates certain dynamics that foster novel solutions leading to radical innovation. The results indicate that gender diversity is positively related to radical innovation. However it does not promote incremental innovation in the same way. The positive relation occurs under particular conditions of the task (a higher degree of novelty), as the two types of innovation might require different skills for their effective performance. These results have several implications for academics, politicians and practitioners.
Termination Theory and National Climate Change Mitigation Programs: The Case of New Zealand

In 2008 New Zealand (NZ) changed from a Labour-led to a National-led government, and this resulted in a shift to government's carbon emission mitigation strategy, including the abandonment of the Communities for Climate Protection (CCP) and the Carbon Neutral Public Service (CNPS) programs. Using deLeon's seminal model for program termination, the objective of this research is to determine why NZ's newly elected government discontinued these initiatives. This empirical research is investigative and probing, and comprises a series of semi-structured interviews with senior managers responsible for the delivery of the respective program within their organization. The architects of each program are also investigated. In the end, this study finds that while economic constraints and programmatic inefficiencies may have played a contributing role, political ideology is the primary rationale for the termination of the CNPS and the CCP-NZ programs.
Financial literacy: a psychologist's perspective on an emerging societal problem in Australia

In the past decade, researchers in New Zealand, the United States, and the United Kingdom have devoted considerable effort to monitoring financial literacy among adolescents and adults and concluded that almost half the population of those countries exhibit serious deficiencies in their understanding of everyday financial matters. Two recent surveys by Australian financial institutions indicate that the situation is no different in Australia, prompting the federal government to call for a concerted effort from all sections of the professional community to address this growing societal problem. To explore the psychological predictors of financial literacy, the present study administered tests of numeracy, general fluid (Gf), and general crystallised (Gc) intelligence to a sample of 126 adults. Despite the fact that the test was not intended to be difficult, 39% of the participants failed to achieve a pass mark. The demographic variables, level of education and annual income, explained 26% of the variance in scores with the cognitive ability measures contributing a further 15%. We conclude by outlining directions for future research and some possible ways in which the discipline of psychology can contribute to this emerging societal challenge.
Double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of the use of lithium to augment antidepressant medication in continuation treatment of unipolar major depression.

OBJECTIVE Use of lithium to augment antidepressant medication has been shown to be beneficial in the acute treatment of depression. The authors examined the efficacy of lithium augmentation in the continuation treatment of unipolar major depressive disorder. METHOD Thirty patients with a refractory major depressive episode who had responded to acute lithium augmentation during an open 6-week study participated in a randomized, parallel-group, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of lithium augmentation during continuation treatment. After a 2-4-week stabilization period following remission, patients were randomly assigned to receive either lithium or placebo for a 4-month period. Antidepressant medication was continued throughout the study. RESULTS Relapses (including one suicide) occurred in seven (47%) of the 15 patients who received placebo in addition to antidepressants. None (0%) of the 14 patients who received lithium augmentation with antidepressants suffered a relapse during the double-blind phase of the study. Five of the seven relapsing patients in the placebo group developed a depressive episode, and the other two experienced a manic episode. CONCLUSIONS Lithium augmentation in the continuation phase of treatment of unipolar major depressive disorder effectively protects patients against a relapse. Patients who respond to lithium augmentation should be maintained on lithium augmentation for a minimum of 6 months or even longer.
Visa-free Travel Privileges: An Exploratory Geographical Analysis

Abstract In early 2006 the Swiss migration-specialist company Henley and Partners released a global ranking of visa-free travel privileges. The present paper comprises an exploratory analysis of the data, despite the lack of information as to how or when it was originally compiled. The initial hypothesis – that the ability for citizens to travel to other countries visa-free is based on the wealth and openness of their own country – is confirmed. The bulk of the world's countries, and indeed population, have very little travel freedom. A measure of global travel freedom combining the Henley data with national population figures is proposed. Any more comprehensive investigation requires the full release, or re-construction, of the dataset and knowledge of how it was compiled.
Economic Analysis and Strategic Management

This article reviews the contribution of economic analysis to issues in strategic management. It explores why orthodox economic theory has an uneasy tension with the concerns of strategic managers, outlines some important recent contributions from industrial organizations, and attempts to develop some normative principles from recent theoretical and empirical work in transactions cost economics. The article also attempts an assessment of the respective contributions of different industrial organization paradigms to strategic management issues.
Market Timing with Moving Averages

I present evidence that a moving average (MA) trading strategy has a greater average return and skewness as well as a lower variance compared to buying and holding the underlying asset using monthly returns of value-weighted US decile portfolios sorted by market size, book-to-market, and momentum, and seven international markets as well as 18,000 individual US stocks. The MA strategy generates risk-adjusted returns of 3–7% per year after transaction costs. The performance of the MA strategy is driven largely by the volatility of stock returns and resembles the payoffs of an at-the-money protective put on the underlying buy-and-hold return. Conditional factor models with macroeconomic variables, especially the default premium, can explain some of the abnormal returns. Standard market timing tests reveal ample evidence regarding the timing ability of the MA strategy.
Single-Molecule Sequencing (PacBio) of the Staphylococcus capitis NRCS-A Clone Reveals the Basis of Multidrug Resistance and Adaptation to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Environment

The multi-resistant Staphylococcus capitis clone NRCS-A has recently been described as a major pathogen causing nosocomial, late-onset sepsis (LOS) in preterm neonates worldwide. NRCS-A representatives exhibit an atypical antibiotic resistance profile. Here, the complete closed genome (chromosomal and plasmid sequences) of NRCS-A prototype strain CR01 and the draft genomes of three other clinical NRCS-A strains from Australia, Belgium and the United Kingdom are annotated and compared to available non-NRCS-A S. capitis genomes. Our goal was to delineate the uniqueness of the NRCS-A clone with respect to antibiotic resistance, virulence factors and mobile genetic elements. We identified 6 antimicrobial resistance genes, all carried by mobile genetic elements. Previously described virulence genes present in the NRCS-A genomes are shared with the six non-NRCS-A S. capitis genomes. Overall, 63 genes are specific to the NRCS-A lineage, including 28 genes located in the methicillin-resistance cassette SCCmec. Among the 35 remaining genes, 25 are of unknown function, and 9 correspond to an additional type I restriction modification system (n = 3), a cytosine methylation operon (n = 2), and a cluster of genes related to the biosynthesis of teichoic acids (n = 4). Interestingly, a tenth gene corresponds to a resistance determinant for nisin (nsr gene), a bacteriocin secreted by potential NRCS-A strain niche competitors in the gut microbiota. The genomic characteristics presented here emphasize the contribution of mobile genetic elements to the emergence of multidrug resistance in the S. capitis NRCS-A clone. No NRCS-A-specific known virulence determinant was detected, which does not support a role for virulence as a driving force of NRCS-A emergence in NICUs worldwide. However, the presence of a nisin resistance determinant on the NRCS-A chromosome, but not in other S. capitis strains and most coagulase-negative representatives, might confer a competitive advantage to NRCS-A strains during the early steps of gut colonization in neonates. This suggests that the striking adaptation of NRCS-A to the NICU environment might be related to its specific antimicrobial resistance and also to a possible enhanced ability to challenge competing bacteria in its ecological niche.