Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Destination place identity and regional tourism policy

Tourism is essentially place-based and involves the production of destination identity at different scales. At any one time, organizations at national, regional and local levels are actively engaged in presenting and promoting place identity in order to attract tourists and increase market share. The drive to establish distinct destination identity in the tourism market place is derived from a range of complex and competing interests manifested at global and local scales. This paper focuses upon interconnections between place identity and the institutions of tourism planning and policy-making at the regional level. In New South Wales, Australia, regional tourism organizations are contentious. It is argued that more profound insights into the problems and challenges of regional tourism organizations can be gained by examining the global–local dialectic.
Internal Capital Markets and the Competition for Corporate Resources

This paper examines the role of corporate headquarters in allocating scarce resources to competing projects in an internal capital market. Unlike a bank lender, headquarters has control rights that give it both the authority and the incentive to engage in 'winner-picking' -- the practice of actively shifting funds from one project to another. By doing a good job in the winner-picking dimension, headquarters can create value even when its own relationship with the outside capital market is fraught with agency problems and it therefore cannot help at all to relax overall firm- wide credit constraints. One implication of the model developed here is that internal capital markets may function more efficiently when companies choose relatively focused strategies.
Happiness Adaptation to Income: Evidence from Canada

Using longitudinal data from the Canadian National Population Health Survey (1994-2009), this study examined the short run and long run effects of a one-time increase in income on individual happiness. To control for the unobserved individual specific heterogeneity, this study utilized an individual specific fixed effects method. In the estimation, this study uses three specifications: without controlling year effects and province fixed effects; controlling year effects, but not province fixed effects; and controlling both year effects and province fixed effects. In all of the specifications, current income has a significant positive effect on individual happiness. However in all specifications, the sums of the lags were negative, suggesting a presence of adaptation effects. In other words, this study suggests that an increase in income temporarily increases people's happiness, but the effects wear off as people get used to new levels of income. The study also estimated the happiness model separately for male and female samples. In both cases, this study found evidence of adaptation of happiness with respect to changes in income.
The Role of Household Factors in Direct Selling of Farm Produce in France

The last ten years have witnessed a crisis in European agriculture and most farmers have re-evaluated their farming strategies. This re-evaluation has taken place within an internal and external farm environment. Traditionally, the key factors within this environment were seen to be economic ones related to the Common Agricultural Policy. In contrast a growing number of research studies have revealed that farm household factors, like age, family lifecycle and family background may be just as important in decision-making. This paper reports on research that examined a number of household factors, which the literature had indicated might be important in distinguishing those French farms that participate in direct selling of farm produce, as an alternative farming strategy. Generally, it was found that background and education were of paramount importance, followed by attitudes to profits, suggesting the need for a less economically dominated approach to examining farm decision-making behaviour.
Impact of planned water resource development on current and future water demand in the Koshi River basin, Nepal

The water resources of the Koshi Basin (87,311 km2) are largely untapped, and while proposals for their development exist, their impacts on current and future water demand are not quantified. The current study is the first to evaluate the impacts of 11 proposed development projects for hydropower generation and water storage. We find that 29,733 GWh of hydropower could be generated annually and 8382 million m3 of water could be stored. This could satisfy unmet demand in the current (660 million m3) basin situation and in future scenarios – i.e. population, agricultural and industrial growth – that are projected to have 920, 970 and 1003 million m3 of unmet demand, respectively, by 2050.
Learning and Forgetting: the Dynamics of Aircraft Production

This paper introduces a new cost dataset for a commercial aircraft firm and uses this data to analyze the dynamics of learning in commercial aircraft production. This dataset is found to be inconsistent with the simple learning hypothesis, and particularly the prediction that a firm's unit cost must decline with its cumulative production. Instead, strong support is found for the hypothesis of organizational forgetting, a more general learning model where unit costs are similarly dependent on a firm's past production experience, but where that experience depreciates over time. Additionally, it is found that some, but not all, of a firm's production experience transfers from one generation of an aircraft to the next. This evidence adds to our understanding of productivity in industries with learning and thus has implications to many fields of economics.
Alignments grow, secondary structure prediction improves

Using information from sequence alignments significantly improves protein secondary structure prediction. Typically, more divergent profiles yield better predictions. Recently, various groups have shown that accuracy can be improved significantly by using PSI‐BLAST profiles to develop new prediction methods. Here, we focused on the influences of various alignment strategies on two 8‐year‐old PHD methods. The following results stood out. (i) PHD using pairwise alignments predicts about 72% of all residues correctly in one of the three states: helix, strand, and other. Using larger databases and PSI‐BLAST raised accuracy to 75%. (ii) More than 60% of the improvement originated from the growth of current sequence databases; about 20% resulted from detailed changes in the alignment procedure (substitution matrix, thresholds, and gap penalties). Another 20% of the improvement resulted from carefully using iterated PSI‐BLAST searches. (iii) It is of interest that we failed to improve prediction accuracy further when attempting to refine the alignment by dynamic programming (MaxHom and ClustalW). (iv) Improvement through family growth appears to saturate at some point. However, most families have not reached this saturation. Hence, we anticipate that prediction accuracy will continue to rise with database growth. Proteins 2002;46:197–205. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Psychographic and Demographic Profiles of Niche Market Leisure Travelers

This study examined leisure travelers'interests in 11 tourism niche offerings and provided psychographic and demographic profiles of individuals interested in the various niches. Telephone interviews were conducted with 417 respondents in 12 U.S. states. The activities that received the highest interests were outdoor recreation, local fairs and festivals, art and cultural attractions, pioneer and frontier history sites, and cowboy and old West attractions. The results of discriminant analyses indicated that individuals cannot be successfully classified into groups of “enthusiasts,” “interested,” and “uninterested” for any of the tourism niches on the basis of psychographic characteristics. However, the results of MANOVAs revealed distinctive psychographic and demographic profiles of leisure travelers who were attracted to each of the tourism niches.
Simultaneous melting and compaction in deformable two-phase media

SUMMARY Melt generation and extraction are typically modelled using the two-phase equations developed by McKenzie or Scott and Stevenson. Various approximations are often made to simplify the problem which may lead to some unphysical results (e.g. thermodynamically inconsistent conditions of melting and unrealistic porosity profiles). We discuss a generalized version of the set of equations introduced by Bercovici et al. that allows for mass transfer between the two phases in a single component system and consider a self-consistent set of equations. In our description the two phases, solid and melt, are submitted to individual pressure fields whose difference is related to the surface tension at the interfaces, changes in porosity and the melting rate. A kinetic relation for the melting rate arises from the second law of thermodynamics. The condition of chemical equilibrium corresponds to the usual univariant equality of the chemical potentials of each phase when the matrix and melt are motionless. In the most general form, phase equilibrium is influenced by both the Gibbs‐Thomson effect that arises naturally from thermodynamic considerations on surface tension and by the viscous deformation of the phases. We apply these new equations to a steady state problem of pressure release melting in a univariant system. We treat melting and compaction simultaneously and observe several new effects including multiple domains near the onset of melting that correspond to various force balances. A consequence of matrix compaction and melt expulsion (or matrix dilation and melt accumulation) is a pressure difference between melt and solid that facilitates (inhibits) melting. For parameters corresponding to mid-oceanic ridge magmatism, compaction permits melting to start as much as ∼ 2k m below the standard solidus. Numerical solutions are necessary to determine the magnitude of the melt zone shift. Numerical results support the boundary layer solutions obtained analytically and suggest that in most of the melting zone the movement of melt and matrix should be close to the Darcy equilibrium where the buoyancy of melt is balanced by the viscous drag between the phases. The Darcy equilibrium follows an initial stage where the matrix viscous stresses balance Darcy drag. In all situations the steady state porosity profile remains a monotonic function of depth. The existence of a compaction layer following a melting zone where the porosity is maximum as described in various earlier publications has never been found.
Molecular Characterization and Imidacloprid Selectivity of Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptor Subunits from the Peach‐Potato Aphid Myzus persicae

Abstract: The recent introduction of the chloronicotinyl insecticide imidacloprid, targeting insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs), emphasises the importance of a detailed molecular characterisation of these receptors. We are investigating the molecular diversity of insect nAChR subunit genes in an important agricultural pest, the peach‐potato aphid Myzus persicae. Two M. persicaeα‐subunit cDNAs, Mpα1 and Mpα2, have been cloned previously. Here we report the isolation of three novel α‐subunit genes (Mpα3‐5) with overall amino acid sequence identities between 43 and 76% to characterised insect nAChR subunits. Alignment of their amino acid sequences with other invertebrate and vertebrate nAChR subunits suggests that the insect α subunits evolved in parallel to the vertebrate neuronal nAChRs and that the insect non‐α subunits are clearly different from vertebrate neuronal β and muscle non‐α subunits. The discovery of novel subtypes in M. persicae is a further indicator of the complexity of the insect nAChR gene family. Heterologous co‐expression of M. persicae nAChR α‐subunit cDNAs with the rat β2 in Drosophila S2 cells resulted in high‐affinity binding of nicotinic radioligands. The affinity of recombinant nAChRs for [3H]imidacloprid was influenced strongly by the α subtype. This is the first demonstration that imidacloprid selectively acts on Mpα2 and Mpα3 subunits, but not Mpα1, in M. persicae.
An 'Art', Not a 'Science'? Central Bank Management in Portugal Under the Gold Standard, 1863-87

As long as Portugal was on the gold standard, the Bank of Portugal, sought to stabilize the currency at the exchange rate to which the country was committed. Because it was subject to political and other constraints, the Bank carried out discount rate interventions excessively sparingly, although in accordance with what could be termed the contemporary ‘science’ of central banking. Consequently, it had to intervene constantly in the currency markets, usually in covert fashion, repeatedly infringing the gold standard’s ‘rules of the game’, in order to conciliate the needs of convertibility with a frequently unorthodox stance towards the gold standard.
Thyroid cell irradiation by radioiodines: a new Monte Carlo electron track-structure code

The most significant impact of the Chernobyl accident is the increased incidence of thyroid cancer among children who were exposed to short-lived radioiodines and 131-iodine. In order to accurately estimate the radiation dose provided by these radioiodines, it is necessary to know where iodine is incorporated. To do that, the distribution at the cellular level of newly organified iodine in the immature rat thyroid was performed using secondary ion mass microscopy (NanoSIMS50). Actual dosimetric models take only into account the averaged energy and range of beta particles of the radio-elements and may, therefore, imperfectly describe the real distribution of dose deposit at the microscopic level around the point sources. Our approach is radically different since based on a track-structure Monte Carlo code allowing following-up of electrons down to low energies (» 10eV) what permits a nanometric description of the irradiation physics. The numerical simulations were then performed by modelling the complete disintegrations of the short-lived iodine isotopes as well as of 131I in new born rat thyroids in order to take into account accurate histological and biological data for the thyroid gland.
Antigen receptor‐induced apoptosis of human germinal center B cells is targeted to a centrocytic subset

The outcome of the signals transduced through the B cell antigen receptor (BCR) depends both on their maturational stage and on the extent of receptor cross‐linking. It is established that the BCR‐mediated apoptosis of immature B cells represents an important mechanism for tolerance induction in the pre‐immune B cell compartment. We show here that mature germinal center (GC) B cells can re‐acquire sensitivity to BCR‐induced cell death following CD40 ligation. In contrast, neither virgin nor memory B cells become susceptible to antigen receptor‐triggered apoptosis upon CD40 stimulation, suggesting that this phenomenon may play a role in the shaping of the mature B cell repertoire in GC. Our data reveal that the death signal evoked through the BCR does not involve the Fcγ receptors, does not operate through the Fas/Fas ligand system, and can be blocked by interleukin‐4. Finally, we found that the acquisition of sensitivity to the death‐promoting effect of anti‐Ig antibodies in CD40‐stimulated GC B cell cultures correlates with the induction of a centrocytic phenotype. We propose that negative regulatory signals via the BCR may delete somatically mutated centrocytes with self‐reactivity.
Determinants of Inbound Tourism to South Africa

South Africa has experienced a significant increase in tourist arrivals over the past ten years. The challenge is to sustain this growth and therefore it is important to understand the factors that influence inbound tourism to South Africa. The purpose of this article is to identify the various determinants of inbound tourism to South Africa from different source markets (categorized in continents). Time series quarterly data from 1993 to 2004 is used in the analysis of tourist arrivals. Cointegration analysis in a multivariate framework is used and the authors find that income, relative prices and travel cost are strong determinants of tourist arrivals (as with other destinations). They also find that climate and capacity play significant roles.
Forecasting forward defaults: a simple hazard model with competing risks

A forward default prediction method based on the discrete-time competing risk hazard model (DCRHM) is proposed. The proposed model is developed from the discrete-time hazard model (DHM) by replacing the binary response data in DHM with the multinomial response data, and thus allowing the firms exiting public markets for different causes to have different effects on forward default prediction. We show that DCRHM is a reliable and efficient model for forward default prediction through maximum likelihood analysis. We use actual panel data-sets to illustrate the proposed methodology. Using an expanding rolling window approach, our empirical results statistically confirm that DCRHM has better and more robust out-of-sample performance than DHM, in the sense of yielding more accurate predicted number of forward defaults. Thus, DCRHM is a useful alternative for studying forward default losses on portfolios.
Reconsidering gender and public administration: five steps beyond conventional research

: In this paper, we propose a needed reconceptualization of the study of gender and public administration that is sensitive to emerging issues of public-service renewal. Five central themes are examined and new research directions illustrated. The first theme is the nature of commitment. We argue in favour of the development of new social ecological models for the study of work and suggest ways in which personal projects analysis as a methodology can illuminate the nature of commitment and efficacy. Second, we challenge the utility of studying fixed job needs and motivations, arguing that examination of “free traits” and organizational niches may provide a deeper understanding of the pursuits of public servants. Third, we urge researchers to move beyond assumptions about chilly organizational climates. Our finding of a striking linkage for women between perceptions of climate and appraisals of work projects adds a new dimension to the study of organizational climate. Fourth, the paper suggests that, rather than focusing on different management styles, future research should concentrate on the nature of and organizational support for projects of “managing people. ” Fifth, we address the question of whether things are getting better for women in the public service. We conclude that a sensitive answer to this question goes beyond numbers and beyond conventional research. Sommaire: Dans cet article, nous proposons une reformulation necessaire de l'etude des questions concernant le sexe et l'administration publique, afin de mieux tenir compte de la nouvelle problematique du renouveau de la fonction publique. Nous examinons cinq grands themes et nous esquissons de nouvelles orientations de recherche. Le premier themes et nous esquissons de nouvelles orientations de recherche. Le premier theme est celui de la nature de l'engagement. Nous preconisons la mise au point de nouveaux modeles socioecologiques pour l'etude du travail, et proposons des moyent par lesquels la methodologie de l'analyse individuelle des projets peut eclairer la nature de l'engagement et de l'efficacite. Deuxiemement, nous mettons en doute lutilite d'etudier les besoins et motivations fixes d'emploi, car l'emamen des «traits de personnalite non-permanents» et des creneaux organisationnels permerttrait peut-ětre de mieux comprendre les actions des fonctionnaires. Troisiemement, nous encourageons les chercheurs a aller au-dela d'assomptions concernant un climat organisationnel rebarbatif. Nous avons constate un lien frappant, chez les femmes, entre la perception de ce climat et l'evaluartion des projets de travail, ce qui vient ajouter une nouvelle dimension a l'etude du climat organisationnel. Quatriemement, plutot que de s'attarder sur les differents styles de gestion, la recherche future devrait proter sur la nature des projets de «gestion des personnes» et sur leur soutien organisationnel. Cinquiemement, nous essayons de concluons que, pour repondre a cette question, il faut aller au-dela des chiffres et des recherches traditionnelles.
Both CD4+ FoxP3+ and CD4+ FoxP3− T cells from patients with B‐cell malignancy express cytolytic markers and kill autologous leukaemic B cells in vitro

Cytotoxic CD4+ T cells have been found in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) and seem to be involved in the regulation of malignant B cells. The CD4+ T regulatory cells (Tregs) can regulate various immune cells, including B cells, by inducing their apoptosis. Hence, different subgroups of CD4+ T cells may be involved in the regulation of malignant B cells. In this study, the cytotoxic phenotype and function of various CD4+ T‐cell subgroups were investigated in patients with B‐cell malignancies. Peripheral blood was collected from patients with CLL, various B‐cell lymphomas, healthy adult donors, children with precursor B‐cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (pre‐B ALL) and from healthy children. CD4+ T cells (CD3+ CD4+ FoxP3−), Tregs (CD3+ CD4+ CD127low FoxP3+) and CD127high FoxP3+ T cells (CD3+ CD4+ CD127high FoxP3+) were analysed for their expression of the cytolytic markers CD107a and Fas ligand. Patients with CLL had increased CD107a expression on all tested T‐cell subgroups compared with healthy donors. Similar results were found in patients with B‐cell lymphomas whereas the CD107a expression in children with pre‐B ALL was no different from that in healthy controls. Fas ligand expression was similar between patient cells and cells of healthy donors. CD4+ T cells and Tregs from patients with CLL and healthy donors were subsequently purified and cultured in vitro with autologous B cells. Both subgroups lysed B cells and killing was confirmed by granzyme ELISAs. In conclusion, cytotoxic populations of CD4+ T cells, including Tregs, are present in patients with B‐cell malignancy and may be an important factor in immune‐related disease control.
A Theory of the Welfare State

The welfare state can be seen as an insurance device that makes lifetime careers safer, increases risk taking and suffers from moral hazard effects. Adopting this view, the paper studies the trade-off between average income and inequality, evaluating redistributive equilibria from an allocative point of view. It identifies the properties of an optimal welfare state and shows that constant returns to risk taking are likely to imply a redistribution paradox where more redistribution results in more inequality. In general, optimal taxation will either imply that the redistribution paradox is present or that the economy operates at a point of its efficiency frontier where more inequality implies a lower average income.
Determinants of Group Lending in the Credit Union Industry in Ghana

Using binomial logistic analysis, the authors analyze data on 222 credit unions (CUs) drawn from the CU industry in Ghana in the 2008 financial year and find that CUs that have larger size of management, lower repayment performance, no delinquent loans over 30 days, better liquidity positions, and have been in the CU business for a long time, are more likely to adopt group lending. The findings of this study also show that the gender structure of a CU does not influence its group lending decision. The authors argue that CUs adopt group lending to improve their loan repayment performance, consistent with the literature.