Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trade and Growth in East Asian Countries: Cause and Effect?

Estimates of growth equations have found a role for openness, particularly in explaining rapid growth among East Asian countries. But major concerns of simultaneous causality between growth and trade have been expressed. This study aims to deal with the endogeneity of trade by using as instrumental variables the exogenous determinants from the gravity model of bilateral trade, such as proximity to trading partners. We find that the effect of openness on growth is even stronger when we correct for the endogeneity of openness than in standard OLS estimates. We conclude with estimates of how much has been contributed to East Asian growth both by the exogenous or geographical component of openness and by the residual or policy component.
Racial and ethnic differences in health care access and health outcomes for adults with type 2 diabetes.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate health care access and utilization and health status and outcomes for type 2 diabetic patients according to race and ethnicity and to determine whether health status is influenced by health care access and utilization. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS National samples of Caucasians, African-Americans, and Mexican-Americans were studied in the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Information on medical history and treatment of diabetes, health care access and utilization, and health status and outcomes was obtained by structured questionnaires and by clinical and laboratory assessments. RESULTS Almost all patients in each race and ethnic group had one primary source of ambulatory medical care (92-97%), saw one physician at this source (83-92%), and had at least semiannual physician visits (83-90%). Almost all patients > or = 65 years of age had health insurance (99-100%), and for those patients < 65 years of age, Caucasians (91%) and African-Americans (89%) had higher rates of coverage than Mexican-Americans (66%). Rates of treatment with insulin or oral agents (71-78%), eye examination in the previous year (61-70%), blood pressure check in the previous 6 months (83-89%), and the proportion of hypertension that was diagnosed (84-91%) were similar for each race and ethnic group. Lower proportions of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans self-monitored their blood glucose (insulin-treated, 27 vs. 44% of Caucasians), had their cholesterol checked (62-68 vs. 81%), and had their dyslipidemia diagnosed (45 vs. 58%). African-American and Mexican-American patients had a somewhat higher proportion than Caucasian patients, with HbA1c > or = 7% (58-66 vs. 55%), blood pressure > or = 140/90 mmHg among those with diagnosed hypertension (60-65 vs. 55%), and clinical proteinuria (11-14 vs. 5%). In contrast, they had better levels of total cholesterol (> or = 240 mg/dl) (28 -30 vs. 34%) and HDL cholesterol (> or = 45 mg/dl) (46 -59 vs. 38%), and African-American and Mexican-American men were less overweight than Caucasian men (BMI > or = 30) (34-37 vs. 44%), although the opposite was true for women. LDL cholesterol levels and the proportion of patients who smoked cigarettes or were hospitalized in the past year were similar among all three groups. In logistic regression analysis, there was little evidence that levels of blood glucose, blood pressure, lipids, or albuminuria were associated with access to or utilization of health care or with socioeconomic status. CONCLUSIONS There are some differences by race and ethnicity in health care access and utilization and in health status and outcomes for adults with type 2 diabetes. However, the magnitude of these differences pale in comparison with the suboptimal health status of all three race and ethnic groups relative to established treatment goals. Health status does not appear to be influenced by access to health care.
The Heterogeneity of Memory Dysfunction in Schizophrenia

Objective: To characterize the memory dysfunction of schizophrenic patients. Method: The components of the human memory system are described, and then a review of the various memory deficits identified among patients suffering from schizophrenia is presented. Finally, an overview of the latest developments in the comprehension of schizophrenia and a discussion on certain proposals advanced by various researchers in the field intended to shed light on the disorder is provided. Results: Schizophrenia appears to be an amalgamation of many different disorders. No single model for identifying the disorder has been able to encompass every aspect of schizophrenia. Conclusion: Future studies will need to consider new ways of selecting and grouping schizophrenic patients.
Analysis and Prediction of the Critical Regions of Antimicrobial Peptides Based on Conditional Random Fields

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are potent drug candidates against microbes such as bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses. The size of AMPs ranges from less than ten to hundreds of amino acids. Often only a few amino acids or the critical regions of antimicrobial proteins matter the functionality. Accurately predicting the AMP critical regions could benefit the experimental designs. However, no extensive analyses have been done specifically on the AMP critical regions and computational modeling on them is either non-existent or settled to other problems. With a focus on the AMP critical regions, we thus develop a computational model AMPcore by introducing a state-of-the-art machine learning method, conditional random fields. We generate a comprehensive dataset of 798 AMPs cores and a low similarity dataset of 510 representative AMP cores. AMPcore could reach a maximal accuracy of 90% and 0.79 Matthew’s correlation coefficient on the comprehensive dataset and a maximal accuracy of 83% and 0.66 MCC on the low similarity dataset. Our analyses of AMP cores follow what we know about AMPs: High in glycine and lysine, but low in aspartic acid, glutamic acid, and methionine; the abundance of α-helical structures; the dominance of positive net charges; the peculiarity of amphipathicity. Two amphipathic sequence motifs within the AMP cores, an amphipathic α-helix and an amphipathic π-helix, are revealed. In addition, a short sequence motif at the N-terminal boundary of AMP cores is reported for the first time: arginine at the P(-1) coupling with glycine at the P1 of AMP cores occurs the most, which might link to microbial cell adhesion.
Safe domain and elementary geometry

A classical problem of mechanics involves a projectile fired from a given point with a given velocity whose direction is varied. This results in a family of trajectories whose envelope defines the border of a ‘safe’ domain. In the simple cases of a constant force, harmonic potential and Kepler or Coulomb motion, the trajectories are conic curves whose envelope in a plane is another conic section which can be derived either by simple calculus or by geometrical considerations. The case of harmonic forces reveals a subtle property of the maximal sum of distances within an ellipse.
How is emotion change reflected in manual and automatic annotations of different modalities

The SEMAINE database consists of recordings of persons talking to different virtual characters. Each of the virtual characters speaks and behaves according to a repertoire of utterances. The repertoire designed the verbal and nonverbal behaviors of virtual character to influence the emotional state of persons via the conversational interaction. There are four characters - Obadiah, Poppy, Spike, and Prudence. The Obadiah character is gloomy and tries to make other person feeling depressed, whereas Poppy character is cheerful and is defined to make other person talking to it happily as well. The Spike character is angry and is intended to provoke other persons. The Prudence character is sensible. It tries to make other people sensible, too. The recordings have been annotated manually in several dimensions which indicating the emotional state of the person as it changes over the interaction. The first goal of the thesis is to find out whether the emotions of the participants align with the character they interact with. Since there are 4 different characters, it is possible to explore how these characters differ in changing the emotions of participants. In the manual annotations, the emotional states were indeed changed among characters. The changes in the dimensions of the Happiness, the Sadness, the Anger, and full rating dimensions (except the Intensity) were statistically different. The Poppy and Spike characters had unique impacts in the Happiness dimension. Compared to Poppy and Prudence characters, the Obadiah character had different impacts in the Sadness dimension. The Anger character had more advantages than Obadiah and Poppy characters in influencing the anger emotion of participants. The second goal of the thesis is to investigate whether automatic emotion recognition tools assign the same emotions to the persons as the manual annotations. The selected tools included the FaceReader - a software program that recognizes the emotion of a person based on the detected facial expressions, and the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) - a tool which is based on the words used by a person. The emotions recognized by FaceReader match the annotated emotions more closely than the emotions recognized by LIWC. In the results of FaceReader, the dimensions of the happy, the sad, and the angry emotions were correctly correlated with the manual annotations in most characters. The FaceReader achieved almost 42% accuracy. In the results of LIWC, only the dimension of the Posemo (happy) well correlated with the Semaine annotation. The LIWC only had 33% accuracy. The whole thesis is divided into four steps as follows. In the first step, we preprocess the samples to ensure the data is well organized. The second step is the Phase I which selected the facial expression and the pair of virtual characters (Obadiah and Poppy) with the strongest contrast of emotional impacts. The third step is the Phase II which increased the types of virtual characters (Spike and Prudence). The last step is the Phase III which added the modality of text into the analysis.
Impact of Topology on Performance and Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks for Source Extraction

In this paper, the problem of source extraction in bandwidth-constrained wireless sensor networks is considered. The sensor observations are assumed to be instantaneous linear mixtures of sources in a sensing field, possibly corrupted by noise. Because of the bandwidth constraint, the observations are quantized before being transmitted. Three kinds of sensor network topologies (cluster-based sensor network, sensor network with a fusion center, and concatenated sensor network) are considered in order to show the impact of topology on the performance and energy efficiency. The mixtures are reconstructed based on the received quantized data, and source extraction is performed by using a fast fixed-point algorithm with prewhitening. This algorithm was proposed by Hyvarinen and Oja, published in Neural Computation, and has the advantage of simplicity and fast convergence. The case of source extraction where the sensed data are undistorted is used as the performance benchmark. The results show that in all these sensor networks, the performance can be close to that of the benchmarking case. The energy efficiency and lifetime of these sensor networks are compared when the same source extraction task is executed. The effects of sensor failure and link failure on the performance are also discussed.
Fast plane detection and polygonalization in noisy 3D range images

A fast but nevertheless accurate approach for surface extraction from noisy 3D point clouds is presented. It consists of two parts, namely a plane fitting and a polygonalization step. Both exploit the sequential nature of 3D data acquisition on mobile robots in form of range images. For the plane fitting, this is used to revise the standard mathematical formulation to an incremental version, which allows a linear computation. For the polygonalization, the neighborhood relation in range images is exploited. Experiments are presented using a time-of-flight range camera in form of a Swissranger SR-3000. Results include lab scenes as well as data from two runs of the rescue robot league at the RoboCup German Open 2007 with 1,414, respectively 2,343 sensor snapshots. The 36ldr106, respectively 59ldr106 points from the two point clouds are reduced to about 14ldr103, respectively 23ldr103 planes with only about 0.2 sec of total computation time per snapshot while the robot moves along. Uncertainty analysis of the computed plane parameters is presented as well.
Buys, Holds, and Sells: The Distribution of Investment Banks' Stock Ratings and the Implications for the Profitability of Analysts' Recommendations

This paper analyzes the distribution of stock ratings at investment banks and brokerage firms and examines whether these distributions can be used to predict the profitability of analysts' recommendations. Consistent with prior work, we find that the percentage of buy recommendations increased substantially from 1996-2000. Starting in mid-2000, however, the percentage of buys decreased steadily. Our analysis strongly suggests that this is due, at least in part, to the implementation of NASD Rule 2711, which requires brokers' ratings distributions to be made public. Notably, over our sample period the difference between the percentage of buy recommendations of the large investment banks singled out for sanction in the Global Research Analyst Settlement and that of the non-sanctioned brokers is economically quite small. Additionally, we find that a broker's stock ratings distribution can predict the profitability of its recommendations. Upgrades to buy issued by brokers with the smallest percentage of buy recommendations significantly outperformed those of brokers with the greatest percentage of buys, by an average of 50 basis points per month. Further, downgrades to hold or sell coming from brokers issuing the most buy recommendations significantly outperformed those of brokers issuing the fewest, by an average of 46 basis points per month.
En E

In a previous paper we defined the “deep structure” of a constraint satisfaction problem to be that set system produced by collecting the nogood ground instances of each constraint and keeping only those that are not supersets of any other. We then showed how to use such deep structure to predict where, in a space of problem instances, an abrupt transition in computational cost is to be expected. This paper explains how to augment this model with enough extra details to make more accurate estimates of the location of these phase transitions. We also show that the phase transition phenomenon exists for a much wider class of search algorithms than had hitherto been thought and explain theoretically why this is the case.
Understanding the Effect of Customer Relationship Management Efforts on Customer Retention and Customer Share Development

Scholars have questioned the effectiveness of several customer relationship management strategies. The author investigates the differential effects of customer relationship perceptions and relationship marketing instruments on customer retention and customer share development over time. Customer relationship perceptions are considered evaluations of relationship strength and a supplier's offerings, and customer share development is the change in customer share between two periods. The results show that affective commitment and loyalty programs that provide economic incentives positively affect both customer retention and customer share development, whereas direct mailings influence customer share development. However, the effect of these variables is rather small. The results also indicate that firms can use the same strategies to affect both customer retention and customer share development.
BAK ’ S WORK ON LOWER K-THEORY OF RINGS

This paper is a survey of contributions of Anthony Bak to Algebra and (lower) Algebraic K-theory and some of their consequences. We present an overview of his work in these areas, briefly describe the setup and problems as well as the methods introduced by Bak to attack these problems and state some of the crucial theorems. The aim is to analyze in details some of his methods which are quite important and promising for further work in the subject. Among the topics covered are 1) definition of unitary/general quadratic groups over form rings, 2)structure theory and stability for classical groups and their generalisations, 3) quadratic K2 and the quadratic Steinberg groups 4) nilpotent K-theory and localisation-completion 5) Intermediate subgroups 6) congruence subgroup problem , and 7) dimension theory. On the other hand, we do not touch work of Bak pertaining to or motivated by topology, including global actions, surgery theory, transformation groups and smooth actions. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, To TONY BAK; with respect and affection
Own Experience in Treatment of Patients with Penile Cancer Using Photodynamic Therapy

Penile cancer is a rare pathology. For penile cancer surgical treatment, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and combined modality treatment are available. Because of great importance of this organ for mental condition of patient, the development of organ-preserving methods allowing to minimize impact on patient's quality of life without compromising of oncological results is desirable. In the Center of Laser and Photodynamic diagnosis and treatment of tumors in P.A. Herzen Moscow Cancer Research Institute the methods of photodynamic therapy in patients with penile cancer have been developed. From 2011 to 2013 the treatment was conducted in 11 patients with precancer and cancer of penile. The average age was 56.6. According to morphological diagnosis photodynamic therapy (PDT) was performed using two methods. One method included topical application of agent for PDT and the second intravenous administration of photosensitizer. For topical application alasens was used and for intravenous injection we applied radachlorine. All patients had no complications. Complete regression was achieved in 9 patients, and partial regression in 2. Thus, the results showed that photodynamic therapy for penile cancer stage Tis-1N0M0 permits performing organ-preserving treatment with satisfactory oncological results and no impairment of patient's quality of life.
Investigating EFL learners’ situational and perceived interest in reading different types of texts

This paper reports a classroom-based empirical study that aimed to establish the level of situational and perceived interest generated by EFL learners while reading three types of texts (General Comprehension, Culture Focus and Narrative texts). Situational interest was defined as comprising five Sources of Interest, that is Text Cohesion, Prior Knowledge, Engagement, Ease of Recollection, and Emotiveness. The analysis of the students’ ratings of the questionnaire statements for the particular texts has revealed the main effect of Text Type, with the highest level of the students’ interest gained for Narrative texts. The level of interest was also dependent on Sources of Interest, with the highest mean gained for Cohesion. Narrative was the type of text perceived by the students as the most interesting of the three they worked with. The results of the study showed that the role of situational and perceived interest in reading different text types needs to be adequately approached by FL specialists as a vital factor in reading and learning tasks.
Topological symmetry breaking of self-interacting fractional Klein–Gordon field theories on toroidal spacetime

Quartic self-interacting fractional Klein–Gordon scalar massive and massless field theories on toroidal spacetime are studied. The effective potential and topologically generated mass are determined using zeta-function regularization technique. Renormalization of these quantities are derived. Conditions for symmetry breaking are obtained analytically. Simulations are carried out to illustrate regions or values of compactified dimensions where symmetry-breaking mechanisms appear.
Lagrangian Analysis and Predictability of Coastal and Ocean Dynamics 2000

Abstract The first Lagrangian Analysis and Predictability of Coastal and Ocean Dynamics (LAPCOD) meeting took place in Ischia, Italy, 2–6 October 2000. The material presented at LAPCOD 2000 indicated both a maturing of Lagrangian-based observing systems and the development of new analysis and assimilation techniques for Lagrangian data. This summary presents a review of the state-of-the-art technology in Lagrangian exploration of oceanic and coastal waters that was presented at the meeting.
Improving speaker identification robustness to highly channel-degraded speech through multiple system fusion

This article describes our submission to the speaker identification (SID) evaluation for the first phase of the DARPA Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech (RATS) program. The evaluation focuses on speech data heavily degraded by channel effects. We show here how we designed a robust system using multiple streams of noise-robust features that were combined at a later stage in an i-vector framework. For all channels of interest, our combination strategy presents up to a 41% relative improvement in miss rate at a 4% false alarm rate with respect to the best-performing single-stream system.
Financial Reporting in UAE-Analysis and Implications

The paper is an empirical study which investigates the extent of Internet Financial Reporting (IFR)among United Arab Emirates (UAE) companies listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX). The population of the study consists of all the 65 companies listed on the first market of ADX, divided into ten (10) sectors based on ADX classification. The study also expands its scope to investigate the significant determinants of IFR in the companies studied. The findings show that 89% of the listed companies have websites while 11% do not have web-sites. Also, 60% of the ADX-listed companies having web-sites revealed financial information on-line whereas the remaining 40% did not disclose financial information on their web-sites. Logistic regression has been employed as the method of estimation on the cross-sectional data collected as on 31 December 2010. The researchers examine the effect of eight (8) selected characteristics on companies that report financial information on their web-sites. These characteristics are size, profitability, liquidity, financial leverage, ownership concentration, type of ownership, corporate governance and company age. Results reveal that profitability and corporate governance act as significant determinants of IFR in the sample studied.