Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Dynamics of Visual Reweighting in Healthy and Fall-Prone Older Adults

ABSTRACT Multisensory reweighting (MSR) is an adaptive process that prioritizes the visual, vestibular, and somatosensory inputs to provide the most reliable information for postural stability when environmental conditions change. This process is thought to degrade with increasing age and to be particularly deficient in fall-prone versus healthy older adults. In the present study, the authors investigate the dynamics of sensory reweighting, which is not well-understood at any age. Postural sway of young, healthy, and fall-prone older adults was measured in response to large changes in the visual motion stimulus amplitude within a trial. Absolute levels of gain, and the rate of adaptive gain change were examined when visual stimulus amplitude changed from high to low and from low to high. Compared with young adults, gains in both older adult groups were higher when the stimulus amplitude was high. Gains in the fall-prone elderly were higher than both other groups when the stimulus amplitude was low. Both older groups demonstrated slowed sensory reweighting over prolonged time periods when the stimulus amplitude was high. The combination of higher vision gains and slower down weighting in older adults suggest deficits that may contribute to postural instability.
Convergence in Provincial-Level South African House Prices: Evidence from the Club Convergence and Clustering Procedure

This empirical study analyses the long run behaviour of provincial house prices in South Africa based on the club convergence and clustering procedure of Phillips and Sul (2007). Using quarterly data covering the period of 1974Q1 to 2012Q4, 1976Q2 to 2012Q4, 1974Q1 to 2012 Q4 and 1977Q3 to 2012Q4 for the entire, large, medium and small-middle segments of the housing market, respectively, we test the law of one price across nine provinces. The empirical findings suggest that the nine provinces do not form a homogeneous convergence club. In particular, the aggregate housing market supports the presence of three convergence clubs with the tendency of provinces to converge or diverge varying across subsequent segments. Unlike the middle-small segment which consists of two convergence clubs of seven and two provinces, the middle-large and middle-medium segments are consistent with three convergence clubs corresponding to three segmented independent local markets. The first convergence club consists of four and five provinces, respectively. The second convergence club is made of four and three provinces, respectively, while the third convergence club comprises only one province.
Efficient Rules for Monetary Policy

This paper defines an efficient rule for monetary policy as one that minimises a weighted sum of output variance and inflation variance. It derives several results about the efficiency of alternative rules in a simple macroeconomic model. First, efficient rules can be expressed as "Taylor rules" in which interest rates respond to output and inflation. But the coefficients in efficient Taylor rules differ from the coefficients that fit actual policy in the United States. Second, inflation targets are efficient. Indeed, the set of efficient rules is equivalent to the set of inflation-target policies with different speeds of adjustment. Finally, nominal-income targets are not merely inefficient, but disastrous: they imply that output and inflation have infinite variances.
Ultra-processed food consumption and excess weight among US adults

Abstract Ultra-processed foods provide 58 % of energy intake and 89 % of added sugars in the American diet. Nevertheless, the association between ultra-processed foods and excess weight has not been investigated in a US sample. The present investigation therefore aims to examine the association between ultra-processed foods and excess weight in a nationally representative sample of US adults. We performed a cross-sectional analysis of anthropometric and dietary data from 15 977 adults (20–64 years) participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2005–2014. Dietary data were collected by 24-h recall. Height, weight and waist circumference (WC) were measured. Foods were classified as ultra-processed/non-ultra-processed according to the NOVA classification. Multivariable linear and logistic regression was used to evaluate the association between ultra-processed food consumption (% energy) and BMI, WC and odds of BMI≥25 kg/m2, BMI≥30 kg/m2 and abdominal obesity (men: WC≥102 cm, women: WC≥88 cm). Prevalence of BMI≥25 kg/m2, BMI≥30 kg/m2 and abdominal obesity was 69·2, 36·1 and 53·0 %, respectively. Consuming ≥74·2 v. ≤36·5 % of total energy from ultra-processed foods was associated with 1·61 units higher BMI (95 % CI 1·11, 2·10), 4·07 cm greater WC (95 % CI 2·94, 5·19) and 48, 53 and 62 % higher odds of BMI≥25 kg/m2, BMI≥30 kg/m2 and abdominal obesity, respectively (OR 1·48; 95 % CI 1·25, 1·76; OR 1·53; 95 % CI 1·29, 1·81; OR 1·62; 95 % CI 1·39, 1·89, respectively; P for trend<0·001 for all). A significant interaction between being female and ultra-processed food consumption was found for BMI (F 4,79=4·89, P=0·002), WC (F 4,79=3·71, P=0·008) and BMI≥25 kg/m2 (F 4,79=5·35, P<0·001). As the first study in a US population, our findings support that higher consumption of ultra-processed food is associated with excess weight, and that the association is more pronounced among women.
Comparing monetary policy reaction functions: ECB versus Bundesbank

This paper compares the European Central Bank’s (ECB) conduct of monetary policy with that of the Bundesbank. Estimated monetary policy reaction functions show that the ECB reacts similarly to expected inflation but significantly stronger to the output gap than the Bundesbank did. Theoretical considerations suggest that this stronger response to the output gap may rather be due to a higher interest rate sensitivity of the German output gap than to a higher weight given to output stabilisation in the objective function of the ECB. Counterfactual simulations based on the estimated interest rate reaction functions reveal that German interest rates would not have been lower under a hypothetical Bundesbank regime after 1999. However, this conclusion crucially depends on the assumption of an unchanged long-run real interest rate for the EMU period and is reversed when the Bundesbank reaction function is adjusted for the lower long-run real interest rate estimated for the ECB regime.
Path independence of climate and carbon cycle response over a broad range of cumulative carbon emissions

Abstract. Recent studies have identified an approximately proportional relationship between global warming and cumulative carbon emissions, yet the robustness of this relationship has not been tested over a broad range of cumulative emissions and emission rates. This study explores the path dependence of the climate and carbon cycle response using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity forced with 24 idealized emissions scenarios across five cumulative emission groups (1275–5275 Gt C) with varying rates of emission. We find the century-scale climate and carbon cycle response after cessation of emissions to be approximately independent of emission pathway for all cumulative emission levels considered. The ratio of global mean temperature change to cumulative emissions – referred to as the transient climate response to cumulative carbon emissions (TCRE) – is found to be constant for cumulative emissions lower than ∼1500 Gt C but to decline with higher cumulative emissions. The TCRE is also found to decrease with increasing emission rate. The response of Arctic sea ice is found to be approximately proportional to cumulative emissions, while the response of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation does not scale linearly with cumulative emissions, as its peak response is strongly dependent on emission rate. Ocean carbon uptake weakens with increasing cumulative emissions, while land carbon uptake displays non-monotonic behavior, increasing up to a cumulative emission threshold of ∼2000 Gt C and then declining.
Fair Work Australia: The Commission Reborn? 1

Fair Work Australia is a new institution created in 2009 to perform a range of functions under the Fair Work legislation – although it is far from the ‘one-stop shop’ that Labor had originally promised. It has much in common with the body it principally replaced, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, not least in terms of its personnel. Yet, at the same time, it has the freedom to operate in ways that have more in common with two other antecedents, the Workplace Authority and the Australian Fair Pay Commission. This article explores the character of the new agency and the processes it has chosen to adopt for four key functions: the approval of enterprise agreements; the resolution of unfair dismissal claims; wage fixation; and the setting and variation of minimum standards.
A Note on Competition and Turnout in the American States

T HE CLOSE RELATIONSHIP of electoral competition and voter turnout at the individual level and at the system level is a frequently verified proposition, bordering upon the status of a law. ' The system level evidence is principally from comparative studies of state politics. For example, Lester Milbrath reports a . 807 correlation between turnout rankings (1952-1960) and interparty competition rankings (1938-1958) at the state level.2 Thomas Dye shows that the relationship is independent of the level of economic development of the state; there is a . 75 partial correlation between gubernatorial turnout and competition, averaged over the years
Accountants’ Whistle‐Blowing Intentions: The Impact of Retaliation, Age, and Gender

Accounting practices and the role of auditors have been widely implicated in many corporate scandals. Accountants are likely to witness serious wrongdoings at their workplace, presenting them with a difficult choice as to whether or not to whistle-blow. This study reports online survey results of whistle-blowing intentions of the members of Certified Practising Accountants of Australia. The study provides data on the effect of threat of retaliation, age and gender on accountants’ propensity to blow the whistle. The results show a complex interaction effect of retaliation, participants’ age, and gender on their propensity to blow the whistle. Among the early career accountants, male accountants are more likely than female accountants to blow the whistle. Accountants in the mid-age group are not only likely to whistle-blow when there is retaliation but also tend to be more willing to do so when that retaliation involves a direct personal loss rather than a loss to their associates. Accountants in the age group of 45 years or above respond to retaliation differently depending on their gender. Specifically, female accountants’ propensity to blow the whistle in this age group tends to decline as the retaliation threat increases from weak to strong, yet the change in retaliation threat has little impact on male accountants’ propensity to blow the whistle. These results and their implications are discussed.
Impaling Dracula: How EU Accession Empowered Civil Society in Romania

Europeanisation scholars increasingly debate when and in what ways the European Union influences domestic politics. This article adopts a ‘bottom-up’ design and the process-tracing method to examine the influence of the EU enlargement context over the political power of the new social movements in Romania between 2000 and 2004 when the EU acquis was being negotiated. It finds that domestic civil society empowerment resulted from the nexus of three interacting causal pathways: the Executive's desire to accede to the EU; a transnational advocacy network, which included domestic NGOs, reinforcing the Executive's anticipatory self-constraint; and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Executive's self-identification with certain elements of the advocacy network, reinforced by a general concern for their external reputation.
Effects of Age and Working Memory Load on Syntactic Processing: An Event-Related Potential Study

Cognitive changes in aging include working memory (WM) decline, which may hamper language comprehension. An increase in WM demands in older adults would probably provoke a poorer sentence processing performance in this age group. A way to increase the WM load is to separate two lexical units in an agreement relation (i.e., adjective and noun), in a given sentence. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from Spanish speakers (30 older adults, mean age = 66.06 years old; and 30 young adults, mean age = 25.7 years old) who read sentences to detect grammatical errors. The sentences varied with regard to (1) the gender agreement of the noun and adjective, where the gender of the adjective either agreed or disagreed with the noun, and (2) the WM load (i.e., the number of words between the noun and adjective in the sentence). No significant behavioral differences between groups were observed in the accuracy of the response, but older adults showed longer reaction times regardless of WM load condition. Compared with young participants, older adults showed a different pattern of ERP components characterized by smaller amplitudes of LAN, P600a, and P600b effects when the WM load was increased. A smaller LAN effect probably reflects greater difficulties in processing the morpho-syntactic features of the sentence, while smaller P600a and P600b effects could be related to difficulties in recovering and mapping all sentence constituents. We concluded that the ERP pattern in older adults showed subtle problems in syntactic processing when the WM load was increased, which was not sufficient to affect response accuracy but was only observed to result in a longer reaction time.
International Trade, Offshoring and Heterogeneous Firms

Recent trade models determine the equilibrium distribution of firm-level efficiency endogenously and show that freer trade shifts the distribution towards higher average productivity due to entry and exit of firms. These models ignore the possibility that freer trade also alters the firm-size distribution via international firm migration (offshoring); firms must, by assumption, produce in their 'birth nation. ' We show that when firms are allowed to switch locations, new productivity effects arise. Freer trade induces the most efficient small-nation firms to move to the large nation. The big country gets an 'extra helping' of the most efficient firms while the small nation's firm-size distribution is truncated on both ends. This reinforces the big-nation productivity gain while reducing or even reversing the small-nation productivity gain. The small nation is nevertheless better off allowing firm migration.
PKS 1502+106: A New and Distant Gamma-ray Blazar in Outburst Discovered by the Fermi Large Area Telescope

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered a rapid (about 5 days duration), high-energy (E >100 MeV) gamma-ray outburst from a source identified with the blazar PKS 1502+106 (OR 103, S3 1502+10, z=1.839) starting on August 05, 2008 and followed by bright and variable flux over the next few months. Results on the gamma-ray localization and identification, as well as spectral and temporal behavior during the first months of the Fermi all-sky survey are reported here in conjunction with a multi-waveband characterization as a result of one of the first Fermi multi-frequency campaigns. The campaign included a Swift ToO (followed up by 16-day observations on August 07-22, MJD 54685-54700), VLBA (within the MOJAVE program), Owens Valley (OVRO) 40m, Effelsberg-100m, Metsahovi-14m, RATAN-600 and Kanata-Hiroshima radio/optical observations. Results from the analysis of archival observations by INTEGRAL, XMM-Newton and Spitzer space telescopes are reported for a more complete picture of this new gamma-ray blazar.
Returns to policy-related social science research in agriculture:

Policy research is valuable as a source of information for decisionmakers. The value of research is the expected social gain from policy decisions influenced by the information generated. The gain from a decision depends on choosing the best policy given the state of the world, which is uncertain. The output of policy research is a conclusion about that state. Taking a Bayesian approach, the ex ante value of a research program is estimated from information about decisionmakers' prior probabilities of the state of the world and the likelihood of correct and incorrect research findings. Case studies of U.S. agricultural policy research cover consequences of trade liberalization, farm commodity program analysis, effects of publicly supported commodity promotion, and the value of publicly funded crop forecasting and research on agricultural technology. The quantification of the value of these research programs is highly conjectural, but consideration of their likely magnitude, as compared to the costs of the research, suggests that there are substantial net social gains.
‘Because it kind of falls in between, doesn’t it? Like an acute thing and a chronic’: The psychological experience of anaphylaxis in adulthood

Anaphylaxis is a serious, rare condition increasing in prevalence. This study explored the psychological experience of adult-onset anaphylaxis from patient, family and staff perspectives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 participants. Two global themes emerged from thematic analysis: ‘controllability’ (‘an unknown and distressing experience’, ‘the importance of control over triggers’ and ‘responsibility but no control: the impact on others’) and ‘conflict’ (‘rejecting illness identity’, ‘minimisation of risk’, ‘accessing specialist care: running in slow motion’ and ‘patient-centred versus service-centred care’). Findings highlight the importance of perceived control and emphasise the presence of conflict in the experience of this complex, episodic condition.
The Architectural Designs of a Nanoscale Computing Model

A generic nanoscale computing model is presented in this paper. The model consists of a collection of fully interconnected nanoscale computing modules, where each module is a cube of cells made out of quantum dots, spins, or molecules. The cells dynamically switch between two states by quantum interactions among their neighbors in all three dimensions. This paper includes a brief introduction to the field of nanotechnology from a computing point of view and presents a set of preliminary architectural designs for fabricating the nanoscale model studied.
Effects of Musical Cadence in the Acute Physiologic Adaptations to Head-Out Aquatic Exercises

Barbosa, TM, Sousa, VF, Silva, AJ, Reis, VM, Marinho, DA, and Bragada, JA. Effects of musical cadence in the acute physiologic adaptations to head-out aquatic exercises. J Strength Cond Res 24(1): 244-250, 2010-The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationships between musical cadence and the physiologic adaptations to basic head-out aquatic exercises. Fifteen young and clinically healthy women performed, immersed to the breast, a cardiovascular aquatic exercise called the “rocking horse. ” The study design included an intermittent and progressive protocol starting at a 90 b·min−1 rhythm and increasing every 6 minutes, by 15 b·min−1, up to 195 b·min−1 or exhaustion. The rating of perceived effort (RPE) at the maximal heart rate achieved during each bout (HRmax), the percentage of the maximal theoretical heart rate estimated (%HRmax), and the blood lactate concentration ([La-]) were evaluated. The musical cadence was also calculated at 4 mmol·L−1 of blood lactate (R4), the RPE at R4 (RPE@R4), the HR at R4 (HR@R4), and the %HRmax at R4 (%HRmax@R4). Strong relationships were verified between the musical cadence and the RPE (R2 = 0.85; p < 0.01), the HRmax (R2 = 0.66; p < 0.01), the %HRmax (R2 = 0.61; p < 0.01), and the [La-] (R2 = 0.54; p < 0.01). The R4 was 148.13 ± 17.53 b·min−1, the RPE@R4 was 14.53 ± 2.53, the HR@R4 was 169.33 ± 12.06 b·min−1, and the %HRmax@R4 was 85.53 ± 5.72%. The main conclusion is that increasing musical cadence created an increase in the physiologic response. Therefore, instructors must choose musical cadences according to the goals of the session they are conducting to achieve the desired intensity.
The inhibitory influence of the lateral habenula on midbrain dopamine cells: Ultrastructural evidence for indirect mediation via the rostromedial mesopontine tegmental nucleus

The lateral habenula (LHb) provides an important source of negative reinforcement signals to midbrain dopamine (DA) cells in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area (VTA). This profound and consistent inhibitory influence involves a disynaptic connection from glutamate neurons in the LHb to some population of γ‐aminobutyric acid (GABA) cells that, in turn, innervates DA neurons. Previous studies demonstrated that the GABA cells intrinsic to the VTA receive insufficient synaptic input from the LHb to serve as the primary source of this intermediate connection. In this investigation, we sought ultrastructural evidence supporting the hypothesis that a newly identified region of the brainstem, the rostromedial mesopontine tegmental nucleus (RMTg), is a more likely candidate for inhibiting midbrain DA cells in response to LHb activation. Electron microscopic examination of rat brain sections containing dual immunoreactivity for an anterograde tracing agent and a phenotypic marker revealed that: 1) more than 55% of the synapses formed by LHb axons in the RMTg were onto GABA‐labeled dendrites; 2) more than 80% of the synapses formed by RMTg axons in the VTA contacted dendrites immunoreactive for the DA synthetic enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase; and 3) nearly all RMTg axons formed symmetric synapses and contained postembedding immunoreactivity for GABA. These findings indicate that the newly identified RMTg region is an intermediate structure in a disynaptic pathway that connects the LHb to VTA DA neurons. The results have important implications for understanding mental disorders characterized by a dysregulation of reward circuitry involving LHb and DA cell populations. J. Comp. Neurol. 519:1143–1164, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Understanding individual responses to failure by the organisation to fulfil its obligations: examining the influence of psychological capital and psychological contract type

This study advances both psychological contract (PC) and psychological capital (PsyCap) research by testing a novel theoretical model predicting likely worker response, as a joint function of an individual's level of PsyCap and PC type, to perceived failure by the organisation to meet its obligations to the worker–organisation relationship. With a large emergency services organisation using volunteer workers as the research context, the study presents the first empirical evidence from a sample of 592 volunteers that the integrated application of PC and PsyCap theory can contribute to a better understanding of individual responses to an organisation's failure to affirm ongoing support for the volunteer–organisation relationship.