Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The youth charter : how communities can work together to raise standards for all our children

Disintegrating families and neighborhoods, mediocre schools, low expectations -- children today face a daunting array of obstacles on the path to adulthood. Youth charters -- a clear set of guidelines for academic excellence and proper moral behavior that are established and supported by the entire community -- were created in response to an overwhelming need William Damon encountered as he lectured around the country. Damon, who has developed numerous community youth charters over the years, draws on the proven track record of those in both affluent and impoverished areas, and in this revolutionary book he explains how to develop and implement a youth charter and how to combat negative media and other external influences that undermine it. He convincingly demonstrates why conventional, stand-alone programs -- including antidrug and safe-sex campaigns -- don't work, and why an integrated and consistent approach is essential to bringing about real change.
Monitoring, Moral Hazard, and Market Power: A Model of Bank Lending

We model the relationship between market power and both loan interest rates and bank risk without placing strong restrictions on the moral hazard problems between borrowers and banks and between banks and a government guarantor. Our results suggest that these relationships hinge on intuitive parameterizations of the overlapping moral hazard problems. Surprisingly, for lending markets with a high degree of borrower moral hazard but limited bank moral hazard, we find that banks with market power charge lower interest rates than competitive banks. We also find that competition makes banking industry risk highly sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations by making banks more vulnerable to borrower moral hazard. This finding offers an explanation for the dramatic rise and subsequent decline in bank failure rates during the 1980s and 1990s.
I need to be your only friend: the effect of salesperson network centrality on opportunistic behavior

Transaction cost economics can be used to detect opportunistic behavior by one or more actors within a sales network. Using a sample of firms in the medical industry, where the role of salespeople is important, this study examines network centrality as a determinant of a salesperson’s opportunistic behavior in intrafirm relationships. The results indicate that opportunistic behavior is affected differently depending on a salesperson’s relational and positional centralities. While relational centrality decreases opportunistic behavior by providing motivation to protect one’s reputation, positional centrality negatively moderates the effect of relational centrality on opportunistic behavior. However, with a high relational centrality, a salesperson is less likely to be opportunistic when she or he is low in positional centrality than when her or his positional centrality is high.
Engaging in Science as Inquiry: Prospective Elementary Teachers' Learning in the Context of an Innovative Life Science Course.

This study was undertaken to examine prospective elementary teachers' learning about science inquiry within the context of an innovative life science course developed specifically to meet the unique needs of elementary education majors. As part of the course, prospective teachers not only engaged in an extended science investigation, but also participated in a project designed to support elementary school children in experiencing inquiry-based science. The literature indicates that such experiences can have a powerful influence on teachers' developing understanding of science learning and teaching. In light of this, the research questions for this study are: (1) What do prospective elementary teachers learn about science inquiry within the context of the course? ; and (2) In what ways do their experiences learning to do science inquiry influence prospective elementary teachers' understanding of science and science learning and teaching? (Contains 51 references.) (SAH) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. 0 Engaging in Science as Inquiry: Prospective Elementary Teachers' Learning in the Context of an Innovative Life Science Course PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Leigh Boardman Haefner Carla Zembal-Saul, Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association Seattle, WA April 2001 2 , U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as eived from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy.
Options for Indian Pharmaceutical Industry in the Changing Environment

With the shift to a strong patent law, Indian pharmaceutical companies are rapidly shifting their focus to the generics market of the developed world. But even as India has become a net exporter of pharmaceuticals, import dependence on active pharmaceutical ingredients has steadily increased over the last 10 years. As far as the Indian affiliates of the multinational pharmaceutical companies are concerned, their shares of both the active pharmaceutical ingredients and formulations are declining and their "investment" preferences have shifted towards financial securities. A process of consolidation through mergers and acquisitions has been underway, which apart from increasing market concentration, has been a key element of firm strategy to tap business opportunities along the value chain in the domestic as well as the overseas markets. In the field of R&D, with no Indian pharmaceutical company being equipped to take a potential drug from the investigational stage to the stage of final market launch, collaboration with multinational corporations is the norm, resulting in biases in the choice of therapeutic areas towards lifestyle-related diseases.
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Research Department Staff Report 314 Wealth Inequality and Intergenerational Links

Previous work has had difficulty generating household saving behavior that makes the distribution of wealth much more concentrated than that of labor earnings, and that makes the richest households hold onto large amounts of wealth, even during very old age. I construct a quantitative, general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model in which parents and children are linked by accidental and voluntary bequests and by earnings ability. I show that voluntary bequests can explain the emergence of large estates, while accidental bequests alone cannot, and that adding earnings persistence within families increases wealth concentration even more. I also show that the introduction of a bequest motive generates lifetime savings profiles more consistent with the data. three anonymous referees, and especially Thomas J. Sargent for helpful comments and suggestions. I thank the participants at seminars at many institutions for comments, and Martin Flodén, Paul Klein and David Domeij for discussions about the Swedish data. All errors are my own. All views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.
Patterns of theory use in qualitative research in higher education studies in Latin America: a geopolitical interpretation

Abstract The relationship between theory and qualitative research has been extensively examined in the literature and has emerged as a problematic matter. This debate has been driven forward mainly in Anglo-Saxon countries and has done scant justice to an understanding of these issues in regions of the South. This paper addresses this matter by drawing on a geopolitical perspective. The study here provides an analysis of 24 papers by Latin-American researchers in higher education, as included in the Web of Science between 2006 and 2015. Theories in Latin America are mainly produced in the North and exhibit two patterns: (i) critical perspectives are used to address local problems – ‘epistemic problematization’; and (ii) a nuancing of Northern theories so as to contextualize them – ‘epistemic nuancing’. Suggestions are also made for a new configuration of knowledge production in higher education studies – a model of knowledge from and for the South.
Exploiting Instrument-wise Playing/Non-Playing Labels for Score Synchronization of Symphonic Music

Synchronization of a score to an audio-visual music performance recording is usually done by solving an audio-to-MIDI alignment problem. In this paper, we focus on the possibility to represent both the score and the performance using information about which instrument is active at a given time stamp. More speciﬁcally, we investigate to what extent instrument-wise “playing” (P) and “non-playing” (NP) labels are informative in the synchronization process and what role the visual channel can have for the extraction of P/NP labels. After introducing the P/NP-based representation of the music piece, both at the score and performance level, we deﬁne an efﬁcient way of computing the distance between the two representations, which serves as input for the synchronization step based on dynamic time warping. In parallel with assessing the effectiveness of the proposed representation, we also study its robustness when missing and/or erroneous labels occur. Our experimental results show that P/NP-based music piece representation is informative for performance-to-score synchronization and may beneﬁt the existing audio-only approaches.
Morbid obese adults increased their sense of coherence 1 year after a patient education course: a longitudinal study

Background Personal factors are key elements to understand peoples’ health behavior. Studies of such factors are important to develop targeted interventions to improve health. The main purpose of this study is to explore sense of coherence (SOC) in a sample of persons with morbid obesity before and after attending a patient education course and to explore the association between SOC and sociodemographic and other personal factors. Methods In this longitudinal purposely sampled study, the participants completed questionnaires on the first day of the course and 12 months after course completion. Sixty-eight participants had valid scores on the selected variables at follow-up: SOC, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Relationships were assessed with correlation analyses and paired and independent samples t-tests and predictors with linear regression analyses. Results From baseline to follow-up, the total SOC score and the subdimension scores comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness all increased significantly. At both time points, the SOC scores were low compared to the general population but similar to scores in other chronically ill. At baseline, a multivariate analysis showed that older age, having paid work, and higher self-esteem were directly related to higher total SOC score after controlling for other sociodemographic factors and the participants’ level of self-efficacy. Multivariate analyses of the relationship between baseline predictors of SOC at 12-month follow-up, controlling for baseline SOC scores or sociodemographic or personal factors, revealed that none of these variables independently predicted SOC scores at follow-up. Conclusion The total SOC score and its subdimensions increased significantly at follow-up. SOC may be a useful outcome measure for lifestyle interventions in people with morbid obesity and possibly other health care problems. Subdimension scores may give an indication of what is poorly developed and needs strengthening. This might guide choices for targeted cognitive and psychosocial interventions. Further studies are needed to explore this issue with larger samples.
Patch based local phase quantization of monogenic components for face recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel feature extraction method for Face recognition called patch based Local Phase Quantization of Monogenic components (PLPQMC). From the input image, the directional Monogenic bandpass components are generated. Then, each pixel of a bandpass image is replaced by the mean value of its rectangular neighborhood. Next, LPQ histogram sequences are computed upon those images. Finally, these histogram sequences are concatenated for constituting a global representation of the face image. Using the proposed method for feature extraction, we construct a new face recognition system with Whitened Principal Component Analysis (WPCA) for dimensionality reduction, k-nearest neighbor classifier and weighted angle distance for classification. Performance evaluations on two public face databases FERET and SCface show that our method is efficient against some challenging issues, e.g. expressions, illumination, time-lapse, low resolution, and it is competing with state-of-the-art methods.
Development and validation of Gastropod , a fast radiative transfer model for the advanced sounders

Gastropod is a fast radiative transfer code designed to meet the requirements of a day one radiative transfer operator for AIRS (and eventually IASI) for use in variational data assimilation systems. This paper gives an overview of the model methodology adopted, and summarises the results from line-by-line radiative transfer model validation of the Gastropod forward model and Jacobian code for dependent and independent profile sets. Issues relating to modelled water vapour absorption are described briefly here and treated in detail in a companion paper.
Towards Automatic Discovery of Building Blocks in Genetic Programming

This paper presents an algorithm for the discovery of building blocks in genetic programming (GP) called adaptive representation through learning (ARL). The central idea ARL is the adaptation of the problem representation, by extending the set of terminals and functions with a set of evolvable subroutines. The set of subroutines extracts common knowledge emerging during the evolutionary process and acquires the necessary structure for solving the problem. ARL supports subroutine creation and deletion. Subroutine creation or discovery is performed automatically based on the differential parent-offspring fitness and block activation. Subroutine deletion relies on a utility measure similar to schema fitness over a window of past generations. The techuique described is tested on the problem of controlling an agent in a dynamic and non-deterministic environment. The automatic discovery of subroutines can help scale up the GP technique to complex problems.
HOPE VI'd and On the Move

most distressed public housing developments. Two of the program’s objectives are to improve residents’ living environments and to provide housing that will avoid or decrease the concentration of very low income families (see text box on page 9). The program is up for reauthorization in Congress, and if reauthorized, the program will run for another decade. Based on recent analysis, at least 47,000 to 82,000 distressed public housing units remain across the country (Turner et al. 2007). 1 There is a need for a continued federal effort to address the problems that residents in traditional public housing often report living with: pervasive drug dealing, violent crime, and poor-quality housing. Thus, it is important to understand how successful the HOPE VI program has been in achieving its ambitious objectives. The five public housing developments in the HOPE VI Panel Study were among the most distressed housing in the nation (see text box on page 9). The baseline survey in 2001 showed conditions in these developments were terrible: respondents reported substandard conditions such as peeling paint, mold, inadequate heat, and infestations of cockroaches and other vermin. The surrounding neighborhoods were equally troubled—extremely high poverty, predominantly minority neighborhoods with high rates of unemployment, welfare receipt, crime, and other social ills (Popkin, Harris, and Cunningham 2002). Initially, program designers envisioned that most original residents would move back to the revitalized HOPE VI sites. But the reality has been that relatively few have actually returned, for a variety of reasons both positive and negative. With the shift to mixed-income developments, there are simply fewer public housing units on site. Some sites have imposed relatively stringent screening criteria that have excluded some former residents. And, on the positive side, many former residents who have received vouchers are satisfied with their new housing and are not interested in returning. Finally, at a few more troubled sites, long histories of mismanagement and neglect mean that residents do not trust the housing authority’s promises of better conditions and choose not to return (Buron et al. 2002; Popkin et al. 2004). The net result of these low return rates is that for most original residents, relocation is the major HOPE VI “intervention. ” To determine whether HOPE VI has succeeded in meeting its goal of providing an improved living environment for residents, we need to look at where these relocated residents are living—what type of housing they are living in, the quality of their new housing, and the types of neighborhoods where they are located. In this brief, we examine these three broad questions. We find that for the most part, the story for former residents is positive—they are living in better housing in less-troubled neighborhoods. But a substantial minority continue to live in traditional public housing developments that are only marginally better than the distressed developments from which they moved. HOPE VI’d and On the Move
Variations in Protein Concentration and Nitrogen Sources in Different Positions of Grain in Wheat

The distribution patterns of total protein and protein components in different layers of wheat grain were investigated using the pearling technique, and the sources of different protein components and pearling fractions were identified using 15N isotope tracing methods. It was found that N absorbed from jointing to anthesis (JA) and remobilized to the grain after anthesis was the principal source of grain N, especially in the outer layer. For albumin and globulin, the amount of N absorbed during different stages all showed a decreasing trend from the surface layer to the center part. Whereas, for globulin and glutenin, the N absorbed after anthesis accounted for the main part indicating that for storage protein, the utilization of N assimilated after anthesis is greater than that of the stored N assimilated before anthesis. It is concluded that manipulation of the N application rate during different growth stages could be an effective approach to modulate the distribution of protein fractions in pearled grains for specific end-uses.
Equality and Domain Closure in First-Order Databases

A class of first-order databases with no function signs is considered. A closed database DB is one for which the only existing individuals are those explicitly referred to in the formulas of DB. Formally, this is expressed by including in DB a domain closure axiom (<italic>x</italic>)<italic>x</italic> = <italic>c</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt> ∨···∨ <italic>x</italic> = <italic>c<subscrpt>p</subscrpt></italic>, where <italic>c</italic><subscrpt>1</subscrpt>,…,<italic>c<subscrpt>p</subscrpt></italic> are all of the constants occurring in DB. It is shown how to completely capture the effects of this axiom by means of suitable generalizations of the projection and division operators of relational algebra, thereby permitting the underlying theorem prover used for query evaluation to ignore this axiom. A database is E-saturated if all of its constants denote distinct individuals. It is shown that such databases circumvent the usual problems associated with equality, which arise in more general databases. Finally, it is proved for Horn databases and positive queries that only definite answers are obtained, and for databases with infinitely many constants that infinitely long indefinite answers can arise.
Characterization of a cDNA clone coding for a sea urchin histone H2A variant related to the H2A.F/Z histone protein in vertebrates.

A cDNA clone coding for a sea urchin histone H2A variant has been isolated. The coding region of the clone has been sequenced and the sequence found to be closely related to the H2A.F sequence in chickens. The nucleotide sequence of the sea urchin H2A.F/Z is 74% conserved when compared to chicken H2A.F and 51% conserved compared to sea urchin H2A early and 60% compared to sea urchin H2A late. The nucleotide-derived amino acid comparisons show that H2A.F/Z is 97% homologous with H2A.F in chickens and 57% and 56% homologous when compared to sea urchin H2A early and late respectively. There are between 3-6 copies of the H2A.F/Z sequence in the S. purpuratus genome. The H2A.F/Z gene sequence codes for the previously identified H2A.Z protein. All embryonic stages and adult tissues tested contain mRNA for H2A.F/Z. The mRNA appears in the poly A+ RNA fraction after chromatography over oligo dT cellulose.
VISUALIZING FOR EXPLORATION AND DISCOVERY

In the last few years, libraries have been faced with a harsh reality in which they have been losing their users and their position as a primary information source. In the attempt to improve their services, we have witnessed a growing number of modernized library information systems, tools, and features and while libraries (or at least some of them) have made a significant step forward in this area, there is still a need for improved exploratory and discovery tools. The paper first looks into the concepts of discovery, serendipity, and exploration and how they are supported in the new generation library systems. In the second part, possible role and application of visualization for exploration is discussed and examples given from a number of existing online visual tools and services. The last part then reflects on potential uses of visualization in library information systems and gives some guidelines on designing visualization for discovery. The authors conclude with the thought that libraries should couple visualization with textual data and implement simple and small-scale visualization that would give users some more insight into the library data and at the same time invite them to explore the collections.
Financial Accounting and Corporate Governance: A Discussion

Bushman and Smith (2000) provide a useful review of research on the role of accounting in management compensation contracts and an appealing future research agenda that builds on recent research using a cross-country approach. This paper rounds out their discussion by highlighting some limitations of their research agenda, providing a critical review of the contributions of accounting scholars to governance research and highlighting research opportunities on the role of financial accounting in governance mechanisms other than managerial incentive contracts.
Multilateral Contracting with Externalities

This paper proposes a model for multilateral contracting, where contracts are written and renegotiated over time, and where contracts may impose externalities on other agents. Equilibria always exist and the equilibrium value function is linear and monotonically increasing on the contracts. If the grand coalition, or contracting among all agents, is inefficient, we show that bargaining delays arise in positive-externality games and equilibrium inefficiency may remain bounded away from zero even as bargaining frictions converge to zero. Otherwise, if the grand coalition is efficient, there are no bargaining delays, convergence to the grand coalition occurs in a finite number of contracting rounds, and the outcome becomes efficient as players become more patient. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.