Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fiscal Stimulus: A Neoclassical Perspective

Can a large-scale defcit spending program speed up recovery after recession? To answer that question we calibrate a standard neoclassical growth model with US data and assume that an exogenous shock has driven aggregate output far below steady-state level. We calibrate the model such that a permanent increase of government expenditure is effective in raising output. We then show that "fiscal stimulus", i.e. a temporary increase of government expenditure is not only ineffective but detrimental. Even before the spending program expires, aggregate output is lower than it could be without fiscal stimulus. We show the generality of this result w.r. t. size and persistence of the shock, size of the government spending multiplier, and the scale and duration of the stimulus program. Using a phase diagram we provide the economic intuition for our unpleasant finding and explain why, generally, private capital stock reaches its lowest level when a deficit spending program expires. We also show how an accompanying temporary cut of capital income taxes helps to prevent the negative repercussion of deficit spending on economic recovery.
Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.) seeds - nutritional composition, protein quality and health benefits.

Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa Linn) is a herbal shrub plant reported native to tropical Africa and grown in warm countries including Malaysia. This plant is grown for the calyces or petals of the flower which are mainly used to prepare herbal drink, beverages, jam and jellies. After removing the calyces, the velvety capsules containing the seeds are disposed as a by-product. In addition, it is a waste if the seeds are left untouched, without effort to exploit its usefulness and benefits. Moreover, with limited research on the usefulness of roselle seeds, no review paper on this topic has ever published. Thus, we took the initiative to prepare a review on this subject based on findings from most of our work from 2003-2007. In this paper, the most important aspects namely, nutritional composition, including antioxidant properties, protein quality and the effect of seeds on lipid profiles of hypercholesterolemic rats have been reviewed. Based on the compositional analysis, roselle seeds are rich in nutritional components especially proteins, oil and dietary fiber. The seeds are rich in lysine, arginine, leucine, phenylalanine and glutamic acid. The antioxidative effect of roselle seed extract increases when combined with other antioxidant compounds compared to when used alone. The protein quality of roselle seed powder prepared from dried and boiled seeds is similar. Roselle seeds were also reported to possess anti-hypercholesterolemia effects tested using an animal model. To exploit the seeds which contain high value health-promoting components as functional ingredients, their possible application in food products should be studied.
Are momentum traders different? Implications for the momentum puzzle

This article examines the puzzlingly high unexploited momentum returns from a new perspective. We analyse characteristics of momentum traders in a sample of 692 fund managers. We find that momentum traders are ‘defined’ by their short-term horizon, by a behavioural view on the market and by a somewhat lower degree of risk aversion, whereas they are like other fund managers with respect to sophistication. This is consistent with the interpretation that momentum returns may compensate for the risk of momentum trading on short-term horizons and that the short-term oriented momentum traders are not in a position to perform long-term arbitrage.
Effects of prenatal stress on anxiety‐ and depressive‐like behaviours are sex‐specific in prepubertal rats

The foetal brain is highly susceptible to stress in late pregnancy, with lifelong effects of stress on physiology and behaviour. The present study aimed to determine the physiological and behavioural effects of prenatal stress during the prepubertal period of female and male rats. We subjected pregnant Sprague‐Dawley rats to a restraint stress protocol from gestational day 14 to 21, a critical period for foetal brain susceptibility to stress effects. Male and female offspring were subsequently assessed at postnatal day 24 for anxiety‐ and depressive‐like behaviours, as well as spontaneous social interaction. We also assessed maternal behaviours and 2 stress markers: basal vs acute‐evoked stress levels of serum corticosterone and body weight gain. Prenatal stress did not affect the maternal behaviour, whereas both female and male offspring had higher body weight gain. On the other hand, lower levels of corticosterone after acute stress stimulation, as well as anxiety‐ and depressive‐like behaviours, were only evident in stressed males compared to control males. These results suggest that prenatal stress induced sex‐specific effects on hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis activity and on behaviour during prepuberty. The HPA axis of prenatally stressed male rats was less active compared to control males, and they were also more anxious and experienced depressive‐like behaviours. These results are useful with respect to studying the neurobiological basis of childhood depression at a preclinical level.
A pilot study of the influence of Natrum muriaticum 6cH and 30cH in a standardized culture of Phaseolus vulgaris L.

The use of highly diluted and agitated solutions is widespread. Its use extends to all living beings including plants, acting effectively in the latter’s primary and secondary metabolism. Aims: this is a pilot study designed to assess the action of Natrum muriaticum in dilutions 6 CH and 30 CH in comparison to the action of 5.0% NaCl solution administered separately to a population of Phaseolus vulgaris L. (common bean). Materials and methods: it was determined the relative growth rate (RGR) of the bean population treated for 6 weeks and subdivided into 4 groups (5 vases each): P1 (control) treated with 30% alcohol solution only; P2, treated with aqueous 5.0% NaCl solution; P3, treated with Nat-m 6 CH; P4, treated with Nat-m 30 CH. Results: it was seen an increase in the salinity of the soil that caused the inhibition of the development of the bean population P2. In addition, the use of Nat-m promoted a significant increase in vegetable growth, chiefly in dilution 6 CH (P3), causing a significant increase in the RGR of the bean population. Conclusion: high dilutions of Nat-m showed to be efficient to stimulate the growth of common bean.
AMORE-UPF at SemEval-2018 Task 4: BiLSTM with Entity Library

This paper describes our winning contribution to SemEval 2018 Task 4: Character Identification on Multiparty Dialogues. It is a simple, standard model with one key innovation, an entity library. Our results show that this innovation greatly facilitates the identification of infrequent characters. Because of the generic nature of our model, this finding is potentially relevant to any task that requires the effective learning from sparse or imbalanced data.
An Empirical Investigation of Australian Share Buybacks

Discussion of share buybacks or repurchases is topical. Yet share buybacks are a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia. Until 1989, they were prohibited. In this article we undertake the first empirical investigation of Australian share buybacks. The article commences by reviewing the Australian debate on buybacks and examines why so few buybacks have been undertaken in Australia. We then discuss reasons why companies undertake buybacks and, as part of this discussion, survey the results of prior studies undertaken in the United States which investigate reasons for buybacks in that country. This is followed by an explanation of the data and methodology that we employ in our own study and the results of the study. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for the legal regulation of buybacks.
A Study of the Information Practices of Afghan Newcomer Youth in the Contexts of Leisure and Settlement

This exploratory, qualitative study examines the information seeking, sharing and use of young Afghan newcomers to Canada. Through in-depth interviews with seven youth, supplemented by key informant interviews and extensive participant observation, I examined the information practices of youth in the contexts of leisure and settlement. The findings point to the challenges youth faced in meeting their information needs, as well as the complexity, nuance and tension youth found in their leisure pursuits. Leisure was not a single, unified concept for newcomer youth, and the activities youth took part in included a wide range of pleasures, with some constraints and even contradictions as well. By offering a snapshot of the lives and information practices of a group of newcomer youth, this research makes a contribution to information studies research as it adds to the growing body of human information behaviour (HIB) literature regarding the information practices of immigrants and refugees. It documents the information practices and leisure of newcomers, focusing on two understudied groups refugees and youth but also uniquely situates these practices within the broader context of settlement. The contextualization of HIB research on immigrants and refugees is vital if we are to better understand newcomers’ lives and practices, as well as design and deliver services that meet their
Self-Paced Prioritized Curriculum Learning With Coverage Penalty in Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, a new training paradigm is proposed for deep reinforcement learning using self-paced prioritized curriculum learning with coverage penalty. The proposed deep curriculum reinforcement learning (DCRL) takes the most advantage of experience replay by adaptively selecting appropriate transitions from replay memory based on the complexity of each transition. The criteria of complexity in DCRL consist of self-paced priority as well as coverage penalty. The self-paced priority reflects the relationship between the temporal-difference error and the difficulty of the current curriculum for sample efficiency. The coverage penalty is taken into account for sample diversity. With comparison to deep Q network (DQN) and prioritized experience replay (PER) methods, the DCRL algorithm is evaluated on Atari 2600 games, and the experimental results show that DCRL outperforms DQN and PER on most of these games. More results further show that the proposed curriculum training paradigm of DCRL is also applicable and effective for other memory-based deep reinforcement learning approaches, such as double DQN and dueling network. All the experimental results demonstrate that DCRL can achieve improved training efficiency and robustness for deep reinforcement learning.
Monitoring the cementitious materials subjected to sulfate attack with optical fiber excitation Raman spectroscopy

Abstract. Formation of ettringite and gypsum from sulfate attack together with carbonation and chloride ingress have been considered as the most serious deterioration mechanisms of concrete structures. Although electrical resistance sensors and fiber optic chemical sensors could be used to monitor the latter two mechanisms on site, currently there is no system for monitoring the deterioration mechanisms of sulfate attack. In this paper, a preliminary study was carried out to investigate the feasibility of monitoring sulfate attack with optical fiber excitation Raman spectroscopy through characterizing the ettringite and gypsum formed in deteriorated cementitious materials under an optical fiber excitation + objective collection configuration. Bench-mounted Raman spectroscopy analysis was also conducted to validate the spectrum obtained from the fiber-objective configuration. The results showed that the expected Raman bands of ettringite and gypsum in the sulfate-attacked cement paste can be clearly identified by the optical fiber excitation Raman spectrometer and are in good agreement with those identified from bench-mounted Raman spectrometer. Therefore, based on these preliminary results, it is considered that there is a good potential for developing an optical fiber-based Raman system to monitor the deterioration mechanisms of concrete subjected to sulfate attack in the future.
Resource Interoperability for Sustainable Benchmarking: The Case of Events

With the continuous growth of benchmark corpora, which often annotate the same documents, there is a range of opportunities to compare and combine similar and complementary annotations. However, these opportunities are hampered by a wide range of problems that are related to the lack of resource interoperability. In this paper, we illustrate these problems by assessing aspects of interoperability at the document-level across a set of 20 corpora annotated with (aspects of) events. The issues range from applying different document naming conventions, to mismatches in textual content and structural/conceptual differences among annotation schemes. We provide insight into the exact document intersections between the corpora by mapping their document identifiers and perform an empirical analysis of event annotations showing their compatibility and consistency in and across the corpora. This way, we aim to make the community more aware of the challenges and opportunities and to inspire working collaboratively towards interoperable resources.
Group Role Assignment With Cooperation and Conflict Factors

Collaboration is complex. To solve a problem occurring in collaboration, using computers, we must first define and specify the problem. This paper presents a challenging problem in collaboration, called group role assignment with cooperation and conflict factors (GRACCFs). This problem’s solution aims at creating a high-performance group by role assignment with consideration of cooperation and conflicts between agents. The contribution of this paper is the formalization of the proposed problem, a confirmation of the complexity of the problem, a practical solution that uses the IBM ILOG CPLEX optimization package (ILOG), a verification of the benefits of solving the GRACCF problem by simulations and a practical way of collecting the required factors to support decision makers in solving such a problem within a real-world scenario. Experiments are used to verify the efficiency of the proposed ILOG solution.
Optimization and evaluation of pluronic lecithin organogels as a transdermal delivery vehicle for sinomenine

Abstract The purpose of the present study was to prepare and optimize sinomenine (SIN) pluronic lecithin organogels system (PLO), and to evaluate the permeability of the optimized PLO in vitro and in vivo. Box–Behnken design was used to optimize the PLO and the optimized formulation was pluronic F127 of 19.61%, lecithin of 3.60% and SIN of 1.27%. The formulation was evaluated its skin permeation and drug deposition both in vitro and in vivo compared with gel. Permeation and deposition studies of PLO were carried out with Franz diffusion cells in vitro and with microdialysis in vivo. In vitro studies, permeation rate (Jss) of SIN from PLO was 146.55 ± 2.93 μg/cm2/h, significantly higher than that of gel (120.39 μg/cm2/h) and the amount of SIN deposited in skin from the PLO was 10.08 ± 0.86 μg/cm2, significantly larger than that from gel (6.01 ± 0.04 μg/cm2). In vivo skin microdialysis studies showed that the maximum concentration (Cmax) of SIN from PLO in “permeation study” and “drug-deposition study” were 150.27 ± 20.85 μg/ml and 67.95 μg/ml, respectively, both significantly higher than that of SIN from gel (29.66 and 6.73 μg/ml). The results recommend that PLO can be used as an advantageous transdermal delivery vehicle to enhance the permeation and skin deposition of SIN.
BPEmb: Tokenization-free Pre-trained Subword Embeddings in 275 Languages

We present BPEmb, a collection of pre-trained subword unit embeddings in 275 languages, based on Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE). In an evaluation using fine-grained entity typing as testbed, BPEmb performs competitively, and for some languages bet- ter than alternative subword approaches, while requiring vastly fewer resources and no tokenization. BPEmb is available at this https URL
Educational Tourism - The Case of Eastern European Students: Driving Forces, Consequences, and Effects on the Tourism Industry

This article was written in order to give an insight into the subject of the educational tourism. The main focus was set on the case of the Eastern European foreign students (educational tourists). The research conducted during June-August 2014 was taken as a basis for writing the present article. Identification and examination of the motives and reasons of foreign students to participate in different educational programmes and to continue their studying abroad, and determination of consequences of such decision were determined as final goals of the executed study. Interviews were chosen for data collection as one of qualitative research methods, and further coding, categorization, and grounded theory approach were applied for data analysis. Stereotypes, seek of challenges, and personal reasons were defined as common motivational forces for the educational tourists. A wide range of benefits for both participants and destination countries were explored and relevant conclusions and recommendations were suggested.
Relating images and 3D models with convolutional neural networks. (Mise en relation d'images et de modèles 3D avec des réseaux de neurones convolutifs)

The recent availability of large catalogs of 3D models enables new possibilities for a 3D reasoning on photographs. This thesis investigates the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for relating 3D objects to 2D images.We first introduce two contributions that are used throughout this thesis: an automatic memory reduction library for deep CNNs, and a study of CNN features for cross-domain matching. In the first one, we develop a library built on top of Torch7 which automatically reduces up to 91% of the memory requirements for deploying a deep CNN. As a second point, we study the effectiveness of various CNN features extracted from a pre-trained network in the case of images from different modalities (real or synthetic images). We show that despite the large cross-domain difference between rendered views and photographs, it is possible to use some of these features for instance retrieval, with possible applications to image-based rendering.There has been a recent use of CNNs for the task of object viewpoint estimation, sometimes with very different design choices. We present these approaches in an unified framework and we analyse the key factors that affect performance. We propose a joint training method that combines both detection and viewpoint estimation, which performs better than considering the viewpoint estimation separately. We also study the impact of the formulation of viewpoint estimation either as a discrete or a continuous task, we quantify the benefits of deeper architectures and we demonstrate that using synthetic data is beneficial. With all these elements combined, we improve over previous state-of-the-art results on the Pascal3D+ dataset by a approximately 5% of mean average viewpoint precision.In the instance retrieval study, the image of the object is given and the goal is to identify among a number of 3D models which object it is. We extend this work to object detection, where instead we are given a 3D model (or a set of 3D models) and we are asked to locate and align the model in the image. We show that simply using CNN features are not enough for this task, and we propose to learn a transformation that brings the features from the real images close to the features from the rendered views. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on two standard datasets: the IKEAobject dataset, and a subset of the Pascal VOC 2012 dataset of the chair category, and we show state-of-the-art results on both of them
From Chemicals to IPM Against the Mediterranean Fruit Fly Ceratitis capitata (Diptera, Tephritidae)

In Tunisia, the Citrus culture is important especially in the region of Cap-bon that is located in the North-eastern tip of Tunisia, and which is the main production area with about 15300 ha. In this region, the main source of income of approximately 25 000 rural households comes from Citrus farms, although most farmers have small orchards less than 5 ha (Zekri and Laajimi, 2000). The Citrus production reached during the campaign 2010/2011 an average of 354 000 T. The production of the oranges Maltaise that is the main variety, is about 50% of the total production. The other varieties most cultivated are the oranges Thomson, the clementines, the lemons, then the oranges Meski and Valencia late. Most of the production (80-90%) is sold in the local market, providing it in fresh fruits for up to 6 months per year. Some varieties and particularly the oranges Maltaise, are annually exported mainly to European Union with an average of about 23 000 T (Jemmazi, 2011 pers. com.).
Analyses of social and environmental reporting as a practice of accountability to stakeholders

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the structures of current corporate governance are supporting a balanced view of companies’ responsibilities not only to shareholders and other financial suppliers, that is, capital suppliers, but also to non-owner stakeholders. The study adopts the theory of governance based on transaction costs theory to set out the offering of governance as demanded by company financial responsibility. The theory of governance embraces agency theory when describing relations between companies and shareholders and other financial suppliers. The concept of libertarian stakeholder theory modifies the theory of governance to facilitate the offering of governance for nonfinancial responsibility. The resource-based view of strategy assists to define the proxy of company priorities. The results of non-parametric tests suggest discord in the relations for companies that have recognised both financial and non-financial responsibilities and for those that operate under stakeholderoriented corporate governance. Furthermore, actual corporate governance structures at companies that recognise only financial responsibility and those at companies with shareholder-oriented corporate governance suggest the maintenance of financial supplies rather than the serving of non-financial responsibility. These results suggest a limited possibility of achieving a balanced view of companies’ responsibilities in current corporate governance practices and thus, accountability to non-owner stakeholders. The study ends with suggestions to investigate choices that the management of companies make as contingent to vast different variables and as stewardship choices.