Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Kindling in Alcohol Withdrawal

In many alcoholics, the severity of withdrawal symptoms increases after repeated withdrawal episodes. This exacerbation may be attributable to a kindling process. Kindling is a phenomenon in which a weak electrical or chemical stimulus, which initially causes no overt behavioral responses, results in the appearance of behavioral effects, such as seizures, when it is administered repeatedly. Both clinical and experimental evidence support the existence of a kindling mechanism during alcohol withdrawal. Withdrawal symptoms, such as seizures, result from neurochemical imbalances in the brain of alcoholics who suddenly reduce or cease alcohol consumption. These imbalances may be exacerbated after repeated withdrawal experiences. The existence of kindling during withdrawal suggests that even patients experiencing mild withdrawal should be treated aggressively to prevent the increase in severity of subsequent withdrawal episodes. Kindling also may contribute to a patient’s relapse risk and to alcohol-related brain damage and cognitive impairment.
Herding in a Laboratory Asset Market with a Rich Action Set

This paper experimentally examines the efficiency of information aggregation in a simple asset market. Traders decide how to allocate an endowment of 1000 eurocent between two assets. Only one asset will be successful and that will pay back the amount invested in it. The experiment carried out here is original in that it considered a very rich action set. We find that when the action set is sufficiently rich, traders' actions, most of the time, perfectly reveal their private information. Further, the participants in the experiment performed probability matching and took such actions, which were broadly consistent with Bayesian learning.
Feature Extraction and Selection for Automatic Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery

In this work we present three feature extraction models used in vibratory data from rotating machinery for bearing fault diagnosis. V ibrations signals are acquired by accelerometers which are then submitted to differe nt feature extraction modules. Our tests suggest that pooling heterogeneous feature sets achieve better results than using a single extraction model. Besides, different cl assifiers are used for performance optimization, K-Nearest-Neighbor and Support Vecto r Machine.
Web-based psychoeducational intervention for persons with schizophrenia and their supporters: one-year outcomes.

OBJECTIVE This study examined the use of a uniquely designed Web site and home computers to deliver online multifamily psychoeducational therapy to persons with schizophrenia and their informal supports (family and friends). Web site usage and outcome benefits are reported. METHODS Thirty-one persons with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 24 support persons were randomly assigned to the online intervention (telehealth) or treatment as usual (usual care) condition. At three, six, and 12 months, interviewer-administered assessments were conducted with participants. Intention-to-treat analyses compared persons with schizophrenia in the two study conditions on severity of positive symptoms and knowledge of schizophrenia. Support persons in the two study conditions were compared on knowledge of schizophrenia. Each participant's usage of the Web site was logged. RESULTS Persons with schizophrenia in the telehealth condition had a large and significant reduction in positive symptoms (p=.042, d=-.88) and a large and significant increase in knowledge of schizophrenia compared with their counterparts in the usual care condition. Support persons in the telehealth condition showed a large and significant increase in knowledge about prognosis compared with those in the usual care condition (p=.036, d=1.94). Persons with schizophrenia used the Web site to a much greater extent (pages viewed and time spent) than support persons. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that online delivery of psychotherapeutic treatment and educational resources to consumers' homes has considerable potential to improve consumer well-being and offers several advantages over standard clinic-based delivery models.
Staircases or Treadmills?: Labor Market Intermediaries and Economic Opportunity in a Changing Economy

Staircases or Treadmills emerges at the intersection of three important trends: (1) mounting concern that the traditional institutions, most importantly unions, but also pro-labor public policy, that have historically protected workers are becoming irrelevant in the modern economy; (2) rising awareness that individual workers are increasingly subjected to market forces and that jobs are less likely to be located in protected internal labor markets; and (3) growing recognition of the increasing numbers and varieties of intermediaries playing a role in the external labor market. For scholars, policy makers, and advocates concerned with labor rights, economic opportunity, and poverty eradication, these trends indicate a need to understand the precise role that intermediaries play at the bottom of the labor market. Do labor market intermediaries help facilitate upward mobility, or do they trap workers in low-paying dead-end jobs?
Phase-Modulated Waveform Design for Extended Target Detection in the Presence of Clutter

The problem to be addressed in this paper is a phase-modulated waveform design for the detection of extended targets contaminated by signal-dependent noise (clutter) and additive noise in practical radar systems. An optimal waveform design method that leads to the energy spectral density (ESD) of signal under the maximum signal-to-clutter-and-noise ratio (SCNR) criterion is introduced first. In order to make full use of the transmission power, a novel phase-iterative algorithm is then proposed for designing the phase-modulated waveform with a constant envelope, whose ESD matches the optimal one. This method is proven to be able to achieve a small SCNR loss by minimizing the mean-square spectral distance between the optimal waveform and the designed waveform. The results of extensive simulations demonstrate that our approach provides less than 1 dB SCNR loss when the signal duration is greater than 1 μs, and outperforms the stationary phase method and other phase-modulated waveform design methods.
Enjoying a Good Port with a Clear Conscience: Geographic Indicators, Rent Seeking and Development

The European Union is attempting to have the protection of geographic indicators strengthened in the WTO. There may be sufficient rents and other benefits available to justify this strategy in the negotiations. To achieve its rent-seeking goals, however, the European Union needs allies at the negotiations. It has been courting developing countries by touting the benefits of geographic indicators for their products. For most products originating in developing countries, the opportunities for rents will first have to be created, a resource-intensive and problematic activity. Further, even if rents can be created in the short run, the forces of competition are likely to erode them. Scarce resources might be better utilized on other development strategies that are more likely to yield sustainable development.
Rational Opacity

A key motivation for disclosure and supervision regulations is the perception that corporations are not as transparent as they could be. Traditional arguments attribute this lack of transparency to agency problems between managers on one side and stakeholders and/or outsiders on the other. We propose an alternative theory founded on the simple idea that agents who invest in long-term projects face a trade-o between information and liquidity. When secondary markets are shallow, more information can reduce the expected payo of agents who need to liquidate their positions. Even given direct and costless control over information design, these very stakeholders choose to incentivize managers to withhold interim information. In such an environment, imposing transparency can lower investment and welfare.
D-Nets: Beyond patch-based image descriptors

Despite much research on patch-based descriptors, SIFT remains the gold standard for finding correspondences across images and recent descriptors focus primarily on improving speed rather than accuracy. In this paper we propose Descriptor-Nets (D-Nets), a computationally efficient method that significantly improves the accuracy of image matching by going beyond patch-based approaches. D-Nets constructs a network in which nodes correspond to traditional sparsely or densely sampled keypoints, and where image content is sampled from selected edges in this net. Not only is our proposed representation invariant to cropping, translation, scale, reflection and rotation, but it is also significantly more robust to severe perspective and non-linear distortions. We present several variants of our algorithm, including one that tunes itself to the image complexity and an efficient parallelized variant that employs a fixed grid. Comprehensive direct comparisons against SIFT and ORB on standard datasets demonstrate that D-Nets dominates existing approaches in terms of precision and recall while retaining computational efficiency.
Explaining the Demand for Money by Non-Financial Corporations in the Euro Area: A Macro and a Micro View

This paper analyses euro area non-financial corporations (NFCs) money demand, both from a macro and a microeconomic point of view. At a macro level, money holdings are modelled as a function of real gross added value, the price level, the long-term interest rate on bank lending to non-financial corporations, the own rate of return on M3 and the real capital stock of NFCs. The results indicate that NFCs money holdings adjust quickly when deviations from their long-run level are registered, and that the large increase observed recently in NFCs money holdings has been driven by changes in their fundamentals and hence they stand in line with their long-run equilibrium level. The disaggregated analysis also shows that cash holdings are linked to balance-sheet ratios (such as non-liquid short term assets, tangible assets or indebtedness) and other variables such as the firm’ cash flow, its volatility or the size of the firm, which cannot be taken into account in the macro analysis. Likewise, results indicate that the main drivers of the increase in NFCs cash holdings in the last years have been cyclical factors, captured by gross-added value and the cash-flow respectively. Variations in the opportunity cost of holding money, have also contributed to explain M3 developments but more modestly than at the end of the nineties, when its increase contributed negatively to cash accumulation.
Managing Technology Selection and Development Risk in Competitive Environments

Managing development decisions for new products based on dynamically evolving technologies is a complex task, especially in highly competitive industries. Product managers often have to choose between introducing an incrementally better, safe new product early and a superior, yet highly risky, product later. Recommendations for managing such performance vs. time‐to‐market trade‐offs often ignore competitive reactions to development decisions. In this paper, we study how a firm could incorporate the presence of a strategic competitor in making technology selection and investment decisions regarding new products. We consider a model in which an innovating firm and its rival can introduce a new product immediately or pursue a more advanced product for later launch. Further, the firm can reduce the uncertainty surrounding product development by dedicating more resources; the effectiveness of this investment depends on the firm's innovative capacity. Our model generates two sets of insights. First, in highly competitive industries, firms can adopt different technologies and effectively use introduction timing to mitigate the effects of price competition. More importantly, the firm could strategically invest in the advanced product to influence its rival's technology choice. We characterize equilibrium development and investment decisions of the firms, and derive innovative capacity hurdles that govern a firm's choice between the risky and safe alternatives. The effects of development flexibility—where firms might have the option to revert to the safe product if the advanced product fails—are also considered.
A new human chromogranin 'A' immunoradiometric assay for the diagnosis of neuroendocrine tumours

We investigated whether plasma chromogranin A (CgA), measured by a new immunoradiometric assay, may be a sensitive and specific marker of phaeochromocytoma and of other neuroendocrine tumours. This study involved 121 patients of whom 20 with phaeochromocytoma, 28 with other neuroendocrine tumours (19 gastroenteropancreatic tumors, 3 medullary thyroid and 6 small cell lung carcinomas), 25 with solid nonfunctioning adrenocortical tumours and 48 with essential hypertension. In addition, 130 normal subjects were taken as controls. Plasma catecholamines were measured by using high-performance liquid chromatography, and CgA by a two-site sandwich immunoradiometric assay involving monoclonal antibodies raised against the unprocessed central domain (145–245) of human CgA. Plasma CgA in controls (49.0 ± 3.1 ng ml–1, mean ± SE) and in essential hypertensives (50.8 ± 3.5 ng ml–1) was lower (P< 0.0001) than in adrenocortical tumours (91.8 ± 13.2 ng ml–1), in phaeochromocytomas (254 ± 49 ng ml–1) and in patients with other neuroendocrine tumours (469 ± 84 ng ml–1). Plasma CgA and catecholamines identified 13 and 18 out of 20 phaeochromocytomas with sensitivity of 65% and 90%, respectively. Combined measurement of both markers improved sensitivity up to 100%. In the other neuroendocrine tumours, CgA was abnormal in 23/28 cases (sensitivity 82%) and in 6 it was the only circulating marker of disease. In gastroenteropancreatic tumours, CgA measurement identified all cases (sensitivity 100%). Specificity of CgA in patients with essential hypertension was 98%. In conclusion, CgA determination showed high sensitivity in identifying gastroenteropancreatic tumours and, in association with catecholamines, in detecting patients with phaeochromocytoma. CgA sometimes appeared to be the only circulating marker of disease. Since the specificity of CgA proved to be excellent, this assay may be useful for diagnosis both of functioning and non-functioning neuroendocrine tumours. © 2001 Cancer Research Campaign
Phenotypic characterization of rhizobia isolated from chickpea (Cicer arietinum) growing in Moroccan soils

Cinquante six souches de rhizobium nodulant deux cultivars de pois chiche (Cicer arietinum L.) et isolees de differentes regions du Maroc, ont ete caracterisees sur le plan phenotypique. L'analyse de leur tolerance a la salinite, aux temperatures elevees, aux pH acides et alcalins, aux antibiotiques, aux metaux lourds ainsi que leurs caracteristiques symbiotiques et culturales ont permis de mettre en evidence une large diversite physiologique au sein de ces populations de rhizobium nodulant le pois chiche. L'analyse numerique de ces caracteristiques phenotypiques a montre qu'a un niveau de 82 % de similarite, ces souches bacteriennes se sont reparties en cinq groupes distincts. Des souches interessantes pour les essais d'inoculation ont ete identifiees. Elles sont efficientes et capables de tolerer des pHs allant de 5 a 8, des concentrations en NaCl de 1 a 1,5 % et des temperatures maximales comprises entre 30 a 35 °C.
How Do Regional Third-Party Logistics Firms Innovate? A Cross-Regional Study

In this paper, the authors examine innovation and new service development for regional third party logistics (3PL) firms in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Sweden. They present a comparative analysis of how regional 3PL firms interact with their clients to generate innovation and new services. The authors discover that the three firms focused on what clients demand and create differentiated services, rather than simply providing standard services. The authors also note that while each firm has developed new services for its clients and thus achieved greater customer satisfaction, the innovative offerings also helped the 3PLs keep existing clients loyal while at the same time attracting new clients.
On the Complexity of Safe, Elementary Hornets

In this paper we study the complexity of Hornets, an algebraic extension of object nets. We define a restricted class: safe, elementary Hornets, to guarantee finite state spaces. It will turn out, that the reachability problem for this class requires exponential space, which is a major increase when compared to safe, elementary object nets, which require polynomial space.
Piloting an Empirical Study on Measures forWorkflow Similarity

Service discovery of state dependent services has to take workflow aspects into account. To increase the usability of a service discovery, the result list of services should be ordered with regard to the relevance of the services. Means of ordering a list of workflows due to their similarity with regard to a query are missing. This paper presents a pilot of an empirical study on the influence of different measures on workflow similarity. It turns out that, although preliminary, relations between different measures are indicated and that a similarity definition depends on the application scenario in which the service discovery is applied
Cosmological parameter constraints from galaxy-galaxy lensing and galaxy clustering with the SDSS DR7

Recent studies have shown that the cross-correlation coefficient between galaxies and dark matter is very close to unity on scales outside a few virial radii of galaxy haloes, independent of the details of how galaxies populate dark matter haloes. This finding makes it possible to determine the dark matter clustering from measurements of galaxy–galaxy weak lensing and galaxy clustering. We present new cosmological parameter constraints based on large-scale measurements of spectroscopic galaxy samples from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release 7. We generalize the approach of Baldauf et al. to remove small-scale information (below 2 and 4 h^(−1) Mpc for lensing and clustering measurements, respectively), where the cross-correlation coefficient differs from unity. We derive constraints for three galaxy samples covering 7131 deg^2, containing 69 150, 62 150 and 35 088 galaxies with mean redshifts of 0.11, 0.28 and 0.40. We clearly detect scale-dependent galaxy bias for the more luminous galaxy samples, at a level consistent with theoretical expectations. When we vary both σ_8 and Ω_m (and marginalize over non-linear galaxy bias) in a flat Λ cold dark matter model, the best-constrained quantity is σ_8(Ω_m/0.25)^(0.57) = 0.80 ± 0.05 (1σ, stat. + sys.), where statistical and systematic errors (photometric redshift and shear calibration) have comparable contributions, and we have fixed n_s = 0.96 and h = 0.7. These strong constraints on the matter clustering suggest that this method is competitive with cosmic shear in current data, while having very complementary and in some ways less serious systematics. We therefore expect that this method will play a prominent role in future weak lensing surveys. When we combine these data with Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7-year (WMAP7) cosmic microwave background (CMB) data, constraints on σ_8, Ω_m, H_0, w_(de) and ∑m_ν become 30–80 per cent tighter than with CMB data alone, since our data break several parameter degeneracies.
Earnings Management and Market Efficiency: Re-examining the Post-Merger Performance Puzzle

Earnings management by acquirers may affect the terms of a deal, whether a bid succeeds, which management team emerges from the market for corporate control in command of the target’s assets, and can therefore have irreversible consequences for industrial structure and the distribution of gains between target and acquirer shareholders. Using a sample of UK acquirers, the study documents opportunistic behaviour in the periods preceding the announcement of a takeover bid. If acquiring firms do engage in earnings management activities, the following question naturally arises: Is earnings management successful? Furthermore, given that income-increasing manipulation inevitably requires equal offsetting changes in later years, if prospective bidders indeed resort to such creative accounting devices, to what extent could then the evidence on poor post-merger performance be attributed to the reversal of the effects of past earnings management? Dr Antonia Botsari Department of Banking and Financial Management University of Piraeus Piraeus 185 34 Grecce Email: abotsari@unipi.gr
The effectiveness of racket-sport intervention on visual perception and executive functions in children with mild intellectual disabilities and borderline intellectual functioning

Background This study aimed to investigate the effects of table tennis training (TTT) versus standard occupational therapy (SOT) on visual perception and executive functions in school-age children with mild intellectual disabilities and borderline intellectual functioning. Subjects and methods Children (n=91) were randomly assigned to intervention with either SOT (n=46, 20 females, mean age =10.9±3.9 years) or TTT (n=45, 21 females, mean age =10.6±3.6 years), while another 41 (18 females, mean age =10.7±4.0 years) served as controls. Both the SOT and TTT programs were administered 60 minutes per session, three times a week, for 16 weeks. The Test of Visual Perceptual Skill–third edition (TVPS-3) was used to evaluate visual perception, and executive functions were assessed by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test 64-card version (WCST-64) and the Stroop test. Results At postintervention, the two intervention groups significantly outperformed the control group on all measures of visual perception and executive functions. Participants in the TTT group had significantly greater before–after changes on all measures of the TVPS-3, WCST-64, and the Stroop test compared to the SOT and controls. Conclusion Table tennis could be considered a therapy option while treating cognitive/perceptual problems in children with mild intellectual disabilities and borderline intellectual functioning. Implications for clinical professionals and recommendations for further research are discussed.
Multimodal Integration (Image and Text) Using Ontology Alignment

Problem statement: This study proposed multimodal integration method at the concept level to investigate information from multimodalities. The multimodal data was represented as two separate lists of concepts which were extracted from images and its related text. The concepts extracted from image analysis are often ambiguous, while the concepts extracted from text processing could be sense-ambiguous. The major problems that face the integration of the underlying modalities (image and text) were: The difference in the coverage and the difference in the granularity level. Approach: This study proposed a novel application using ontology alignment to unify the underlying ontologies. The said lists of concepts were represented in a structured form within the corresponding ontologies then the two structural lists are enriched and matched based on the alignment, this matching represent the final knowledge. Results: The difference in the coverage was solved in this study using the alignment process and the difference in the granularity level was solved using the enrichment process. Thus, the proposed integration produced accurate integrated results. Conclusion: Thus, integration of these concepts allows the totality of the knowledge be expressed more precisely.