Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Is the course of neurocysticercosis modified by treatment with antihelminthic agents?

BACKGROUND Neurocysticercosis, occasionally associated with long-term neurologic sequelae such as epilepsy or hydrocephalus, is more often a condition characterized by a benign course and spontaneous remission without permanent neurologic symptoms. This variability in outcome has led to difficulties in the interpretation of studies of the effectiveness of drugs used to treat this condition. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the relative efficacy of two antihelminthic agents against each other and against symptomatic treatment alone. METHODS Randomized clinical trial of treatment of patients with newly identified active neurocysticercosis with oral prednisolone alone (27 patients), praziquantel with prednisolone (54 patients), or albendazole with prednisolone (57 patients). RESULTS At 6 months and at 1 year after treatment, there were no differences in the three treatment groups in terms of the proportion of patients who were free of cysts or the relative reduction of number of cysts. At 2 years, there was no difference in the proportion of patients free of seizures during the entire follow-up period. Early and late sequelae occurred in a higher proportion of patients treated with praziquantel and albendazole, compared with those receiving only prednisolone. CONCLUSIONS Previous reports of favorable response to treatment of neurocysticercosis with either praziquantel or albendazole are by no means definitive and may be a reflection of the natural history of the condition. The present study, with randomized treatment assignment and including a control group, raises questions as to what extent and in whom treatment with these drugs is effective, and suggests that treatment with antihelminthic agents may be associated with an increased frequency of long-term sequelae.
Sensitivity of ocean acidification and oxygen to the uncertainty in climate change

Due to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and associated climate change, the global ocean is undergoing substantial physical and biogeochemical changes. Among these, changes in ocean oxygen and carbonate chemistry have great implication for marine biota. There is considerable uncertainty in the projections of future climate change, and it is unclear how the uncertainty in climate change would also affect the projection of oxygen and carbonate chemistry. To investigate this issue, we use an Earth system model of intermediate complexity to perform a set of simulations, including that which involves no radiative effect of atmospheric CO2 and those which involve CO2-induced climate change with climate sensitivity varying from 0.5 °C to 4.5 °C. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is prescribed to follow RCP 8.5 pathway and its extensions. Climate change affects carbonate chemistry and oxygen mainly through its impact on ocean temperature, ocean ventilation, and concentration of dissolved inorganic carbon and alkalinity. It is found that climate change mitigates the decrease of carbonate ions at the ocean surface but has negligible effect on surface ocean pH. Averaged over the whole ocean, climate change acts to decrease oxygen concentration but mitigates the CO2-induced reduction of carbonate ion and pH. In our simulations, by year 2500, every degree increase of climate sensitivity warms the ocean by 0.8 °C and reduces ocean-mean dissolved oxygen concentration by 5.0%. Meanwhile, every degree increase of climate sensitivity buffers CO2-induced reduction in ocean-mean carbonate ion concentration and pH by 3.4% and 0.02 units, respectively. Our study demonstrates different sensitivities of ocean temperature, carbonate chemistry, and oxygen, in terms of both the sign and magnitude to the amount of climate change, which have great implications for understanding the response of ocean biota to climate change.
Flexible corrections of juror judgments: Implications for jury instructions.

The Flexible Correction Model (FCM, D. T. Wegener & R. E. Petty, 1997; D. T. Wegener, R. E. Petty, & M. Dunn, 1998) conceptualizes efforts at bias correction (i.e., attempts to remove influences that are perceived as illegitimate or unwanted) as guided by people's naive theories (perceptions) of the influences at work in that judgment setting. In this article, the authors present this model, discuss the general support for this model outside of courtroom judgment, and discuss a variety of implications of this model for courtroom judgment in general and for the impact of judges' instructions to juries in particular.
Ensuring Profitability of Energy Storage

Energy storage (ES) is a pivotal technology for dealing with the challenges caused by the integration of renewable energy sources. It is expected that a decrease in the capital cost of storage will eventually spur the deployment of large amounts of ES. These devices will provide transmission services, such as spatiotemporal energy arbitrage, i.e., storing surplus energy from intermittent renewable sources for later use by loads while reducing the congestion in the transmission network. This paper proposes a bilevel program that determines the optimal location and size of storage devices to perform this spatiotemporal energy arbitrage. This method aims to simultaneously reduce the system-wide operating cost and the cost of investments in ES while ensuring that merchant storage devices collect sufficient profits to fully recover their investment cost. The usefulness of the proposed method is illustrated using a representative case study of the ISO New England system with a prospective wind generation portfolio.
Determinants of Productivity Growth in the Malaysian Manufacturing Sector

The objective of this study is to examine the influence of trade policies and industry charac teristics on productivity growth of the Malaysian manufacturing sector between 1986-91. The results show that productivity growth in the Malaysian manufacturing sector was influ enced positively and significantly by the rate of growth in output, exports as well as by for eign investment. In contrast, increasing capital intensity is seen to have a negative impact on productivity growth. Examining the labour situation in Malaysia reveals severe labour con straints that may have hindered the absorption of the productivity gains from the increases in capital Hence trade policies need to be complemented by appropriate industrial policies in the nation's pursuit of higher productivity growth.
IPCC Sres Revisited: A Response

Mr. Castles and Mr. Henderson have criticized the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) and other aspects of IPCC assessments. It is claimed that the methodology is “technically unsound” because market exchange rates (MER) are used instead of purchasing power parities (PPP) and that the scenarios themselves are flawed because the GDP growth in the developing regions is too high. The response is: The IPCC SRES reviews existing literature, most of which is MER based, including that from the World Bank, IEA and USDoE. Scenarios of GDP growth are typically expressed as MER (the preferred measure for GDP growth, as opposed to PPP which is a preferred measure for assessing differences in economic welfare). IPCC scenarios did include PPP-based scenarios, which Mr. Castles and Mr. Henderson have conveniently ignored. Contrary to what Mr. Castles and Mr. Henderson claim, IPCC scenarios are consistent with historical data, including that from 1990 to 2000, and with the most recent near term (up to 2020) projections of other agencies. Long-term emissions are based on multiple, interdependent driving forces, and not just economic growth. Mr. Castles and Mr. Henderson need to look beyond GDP. The IPCC scenarios provided information for only four world regions, and not for specific countries. Mr. Castles' and Mr. Henderson's critique is not of IPCC scenarios but of ongoing unpublished work in progress that is not part of SRES. We therefore show that Mr. Castles and Mr. Henderson have focused on constructing a “problem” that does not exist. SRES scenarios are sound and the IPCC has responded seriously and conscientiously. We detail our response below in nine sections. After an introduction (Section 1), we outline the SRES methodology for measuring economic output (Section 2). Section 3 compares SRES to long-historical economic development and provides five responses to the critics. Section 4 addresses the issue of country-level economic projections even if not part of SRES. Sections 5, 6 and 7 validate the SRES scenarios by comparing them with recent trends for economic and CO2 emission growth, as well as more recent scenarios available in the literature. Section 8 refutes the argument that lower economic growth in developing countries would lower GHG emissions correspondingly. Section 9 concludes.
The Response of Private Consumption to Different Public Spending Categories: VAR Evidence from UK

This paper performs a Structural VAR analysis on UK economy using quarterly non-interpolated data from 1981 to 2005 in the attempt to verify and quantify private consumption’s response to different components of public expenditure (government consumption, social spending and wage component). Our findings suggest that any empirical support of competing theoretical models on the issue would probably benefit from a disaggregation of government expenditure, rather than focusing on the aggregate measure. In fact, while shocks to pure government consumption trigger a RBC-like reduction in private consumption, shocks to the non-systematic component of social spending generate positive reaction, in line with the “credit-constrained-agents” approach. The cumulative impact on GDP after three years of a government spending shock (close to a negative 1% of GDP) is twice as much the social spending shock, with opposite sign. Government wage shocks do not seem to have any significant effects on private consumption. Public expenditure composition, rather than level, seems to be actually playing the most crucial role when it comes to aggregate demand support via effects on private consumption.
Preferences for Stock Characteristics As Revealed by Mutual Fund Portfolio Holdings

This investigation of the cross-section of mutual fund equity holdings for the years 1991 and 1992 shows that mutual funds have a significant preference towards stocks with high visibility and low transaction costs, and are averse to stocks with low idiosyncratic volatility. These findings are relevant to theories concerning investor recognition, a potential agency problem in mutual funds, tests of trend-following and herd behavior by mutual funds, and corporate finance. Copyright 1996 by American Finance Association.
Agriculture, Environmental Services and Agro-Tourism in the Dominican Republic

This paper analyzes the links between agriculture and tourism. A contingent valuation study assesses tourist’s willingness to pay (WTP) for agro-tourism and agriculture’s positive environmental services and related positive externalities. The paper analyzes factors influencing tourist preferences in the Dominican Republic (DR) -- tourist income, the local tourist destination, sex, and nationality stand out among these factors. Estimates are given for different WTP scenarios according to farming systems. The study argues that a well developed agro-tourism industry would result in a market mechanism generating additional income of US $251 to US $364 million annually. Agro-tourist activities would have the added benefit of promoting sustainable agricultural practices.
Synchronized state in networks of digital phase-locked loops

Clock distribution networks of synchronized oscillators are an alternative approach to classical tree-like clock distribution methods. Each node of the network may consist of a phase-locked loop (PLL) trying to match the phase of its neighbors. Then a network of independent oscillators takes the place of the centralized clock source, providing separate clock signals to the physically distant parts of the system. In the discrete case, the digital filter is necessarily operated asynchronously: each operation is triggered by a rising edge of the locally-generated clock, the frequency and phase of which vary as the whole system tries to synchronize. The locking behavior, the synchronous state and the stability conditions of such a system are analyzed. Similarly, the synchronization of an autonomous network of two self-sampled PLLs is studied. Surprisingly, its analysis is much simpler than that of the single PLL.
Corruption, Democracy, Economic Freedom, and State Strength

While it is widely acknowledged that corruption has negative effects on economic growth, investment, and social welfare, the structural causes of corruption have received very little quantitative country-level cross-national analysis. Our structural equation-based analysis of data for 91 nations includes several important determinants of cross-national variation in perceived levels of corruption. Our analyses yield four major findings: 1) democracy, as measured by indicators of political rights, civil liberties, and press freedom, has a positive effect on perceived level of corruption control; 2) state strength has a positive direct effect; 3) openness of the economy, as measured by economic freedom, has a positive effect; and 4) ethnolinguistic fractionalization has both direct and indirect negative effects.
The impact of foreign direct investment on new firm survival in the UK: evidence for static versus dynamic industries

The paper examines the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the survival of business start-ups. FDI has potential for both negative displacement/competition effects as well as positive knowledge spillover and linkage effects on new ventures. We find a net positive effect for the whole dataset. However, a major contribution of the paper is to outline and test an argument that this effect is likely to be comprised of a net negative effect in dynamic industries (high churn: firm entry plus exit relative to the stock of firms) alongside a net positive effect in static (low churn) industries. We find evidence to support this view. The results identify new effects of globalisation on enterprise development with associated challenges for industrial policy.
Optimal starting times for end-of-season sales and optimal stopping times for promotional fares

Many industries face the problem of selling a fixed stock of items over a finite horizon. These industries include airlines selling seats before planes depart, hotels renting rooms before midnight, theaters selling seats before curtain time, and retailers selling seasonal goods such as air-conditioners or winter coats before the end of the season. Given a fixed number of seats, rooms, or coats, the objective for these industries is to maximize revenues in excess of salvage value. When demand is price sensitive and stochastic, pricing is an effective tool to maximize revenues. In this paper we address the problem of deciding the optimal timing of a single price change from a given initial price to either a given lower or higher second price. Under mild conditions, we show that it is optimal to decrease resp. , to increase the initial price as soon as the time-to-go falls below resp. , above a time threshold that depends on the number of yet unsold items.
Asian currency union? An investigation into China's membership with other Asian countries

This paper applies Optimum Currency Area (OCA) theory to investigate the suitability of Asian currency union and its membership, in which China is taken as the central country. Cluster analysis is applied for this study. Both hierarchical clustering and fuzzy clustering approaches are used. The study finds that Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are most converged with China, and these countries are more likely to be the member countries of the Asian Currency Union.
Hamstring tendon grafts for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament: biomechanical evaluation of the use of multiple strands and tensioning techniques.

BACKGROUND Our hypothesis that multiple, equally tensioned strands of hamstring graft used for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament are stronger and stiffer than ten-millimeter patellar ligament grafts was tested biomechanically with use of tendons from cadavera. METHODS In the first part of the study, we measured the strength and stiffness of one, two, and four-strand hamstring grafts, from fresh-frozen cadaveric knees, that had been tensioned equally when clamped. In the second part of the study, we compared four-strand grafts to which tension had been applied by hand and then clamped with similar grafts to which tension had been applied with weights and then clamped. The grafts for the two experiments were obtained from thirty-four paired and ten unpaired knees. We also studied the effects of cooling on the biomechanical properties of grafts by comparing patellar ligament grafts tested at 13 degrees Celsius with those tested at room temperature. RESULTS Two equally tensioned gracilis strands had 185 percent of the strength and 210 percent of the stiffness (1550+/-428 newtons and 336+/-141 newtons per millimeter, respectively) of one gracilis strand (837+/- 138 newtons and 160+/-44 newtons per millimeter, respectively). Two equally tensioned semitendinosus strands had 220 percent of the strength and 220 percent of the stiffness (2330+/-452 newtons and 469+/-185 newtons per millimeter, respectively) of one semitendinosus strand (1060+/-227 newtons and 213+/-44 newtons per millimeter, respectively). Four combined strands (two gracilis strands and two semitendinosus strands) that were equally tensioned with weights and clamped had the additive tensile properties of the individual strands. With the numbers available, four combined strands that were manually tensioned and clamped were not found to be significantly stronger or stiffer than two semitendinosus strands that were equally tensioned with weights (p>0.07). CONCLUSIONS Four combined strands that were equally tensioned with weights and clamped were stronger and stiffer than all ten-millimeter patellar ligament grafts that have been described in previous reports. All strands of a hamstring graft must be equally tensioned for the composite to have its optimum biomechanical properties. CLINICAL RELEVANCE Because of the well recognized donor-site morbidity associated with the use of patellar ligament grafts for reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament, multiple-strand hamstring-tendon grafts have become an increasingly popular choice. Our data demonstrate that equally tensioned four-strand hamstring-tendon grafts have initial tensile properties that are higher than those reported for ten-millimeter patellar-ligament grafts; thus, from a biomechanical point of view, they seem to be a reasonable alternative.
Political Power, Fiscal Crises, and Decentralization in Latin America: Federal Countries in Comparative Perspective (and some Contrasts with Unitary Cases)

What factors shape decentralization processes in Latin American federations? This work reviews and statistically analyzes current approaches on the topic, questions some claims of generality in their theoretical frameworks, and presents an argument to explain variation in decentralization processes across these federations. The main hypothesis is that the degree of decentralization (in fiscal and administrative terms) in Latin American federations has been shaped by the political power of the national executive and sub-national actors and the fiscal context in which they interact. The article presents statistical evidence (for federal and unitary countries between 1979 and 1998) to sustain some of the expectations in the argument and discusses some of its limitations. Copyright 2008, Oxford University Press.
Study of motivational constructs, learning orientations and goals affecting engineering students' learning process

Engineering is perceived to be a challenging course for many students. Their achievements are related to the efforts spent in pursuing their learning objectives. Their efforts are a function of their motivation and rewards. Inappropriate motivation does not promote autonomy and mastery. This paper presents the findings of a study of the interplay between motivational constructs, learning orientations and goals setting affecting students in the electrical and computer engineering program. Expectancy and value related motivations are explored using the Naylor-Pritchard-Ilgen theory of motivation. Results from this study can be used to encourage students to adopt more productive learning behaviors.
Union Participation, Job Satisfaction, and Employee Turnover: An Event-History Analysis of the Exit-Voice Hypothesis

This study examines the exit-voice hypothesis by applying event-history analysis to data from a sample of 674 unionized public school teachers from 405 schools. Union participation (i.e., voice) and job satisfaction had significant negative main effects on turnover. In contrast to the original formulation of the exit-voice hypothesis, a test for interaction revealed that union participation had significant negative effects on quit behavior for members displaying both low and high satisfaction. The existing conclusions regarding the role of unions in reducing employee quits by providing voice mechanisms implicitly assume that union members actually use these mechanisms. Mechanisms such as attending union meetings and serving on a committee provide opportunities for members to express how they feel about their wages and working conditions. In this article we examine the influences of union participation and job satisfaction on individuals' decisions to quit working for an organization using event-history analysis. Unlike existing research, the present study focuses on member participation in a range of union activities (i.e., voting in union elections, attending union meetings, serving in a union office or on a committee, and seeking assistance from the union) to analyze the effect of union voice on employee quits. We further investigate how union participation and job satisfaction may interact to influence employee turnover over time, controlling for demographic, job-related, environmental, and contextual variables across 405 research sites.
The Common Agricultural Policy and EU Enlargement: Implications for Agricultural Production in the Central and East European Countries

This article focuses on the potential consequences of an extension of the Common Agricultural Policy with respect to agricultural production in the Central and East European countries (CEECs). It reviews the evidence of recent attempts to quantify the potential impacts of accession on production levels in the CEECs. It also takes into account results from previous studies in order to analyze the importance of structural constraints can have to the capacity of the CEECs' agricultural sectors to respond to supply incentives under accession to the EU, and to examine some research questions that are still unanswered in relation to the supply potential of the CEECs. Finally, some conclusions and policy recommendations are presented.
Does purchasing power parity hold in emerging markets? Evidence from a panel of black market exchange rates

We examine the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis using a unique panel of monthly data on black market exchange rates for 34 emerging market economies. We apply a large number of recent heterogeneous panel unit root and cointegration tests. Panel unit root tests reject mean reversion in black market real exchange rates for most (but not all) emerging market economies. On the other hand, all panel cointegration tests provide strong evidence of cointegration between the nominal black market exchange rate and domestic and foreign prices for both individual countries and the full panel. Since we believe that the findings from unit root tests may be affected by the imposition of the joint symmetry and proportionality restriction due to trade restrictions and measurement errors, we test for such a restriction using likelihood ratio tests and find that it is strongly rejected. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.