Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exports, Export Destinations, and Skills

This paper explores the links between exports, export destinations and skill utilization by firms. We identify two mechanisms behind these links, which we integrate into a unified theory of export destinations and skills. First, exporting to high-income countries with higher valuation for quality leads to quality upgrades that are skill-intensive (Verhoogen, 2008). Second, exporting requires services such as distribution, transportation, and advertising, activities that are also intensive in skilled labor (Matsuyama, 2007). Depending on the characteristics of the source country (such as income, language), the theories suggest a skill-bias in export destinations: firms that export to high-income destinations hire more skills and pay higher wages than firms that export to middle-income countries or that sell domestically. We test the theory using a panel of Argentine manufacturing firms. The data cover the period 1998-2000 and span the Brazilian currency devaluation of 1999. We use the exogenous changes in exports and export destinations brought about by this devaluation in a major export partner to identify the causal effect of exporting and of exporting to high-income countries on skill utilization. We find that Argentine firms exporting to high-income countries hired a higher proportion of skilled workers and paid higher average wages than other exporters (to non high-income countries) and domestic firms. Instead, we cannot identify any causal effect of exporting per se on skill utilization.
Eating activity recognition for health and wellness: A case study on Asian eating style

In this paper, we propose an unobtrusive a method of daily life monitoring with a triaxial accelerometer embedded in a wrist band. The method recognizes each operation of the activities such as picking up food with chopsticks or eating steamed rice with a spoon and classifies the activities. We believe this method will contribute to the field of innovative health-promoting consumer electronics, which enables consumers to easily and accurately manage their daily life, especially eating activities, and consequently encourage to maintain healthier lifestyle.
The Moderating Role of Knowledge about Riba on Intention to Use E-Money: Findings from Indonesia

Payment transaction is now experiencing revolution as the rapid advancement of financial technology system. There is growing usage of e-money as a mean of payment in Indonesia. Besides, there is also a growing concern on the ethical aspect of e-money from an Islamic perspective, that is riba or usury. Previous studies have examined customers’ behavioral intention to use e-money by implementing Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). However, none of them considering customers’ knowledge about riba that might become ethical aspect detaining them to use e-money as the mode of payment. The objective of this research is to examine the moderating effect of knowledge about riba on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) variabels, such as perceived usefuleness, perceived ease of use and intention to use e-money. Data of this research are collected by distributing online questionnaires. By convenience sampling method, there are total 253 respondents. From the statistical computation, it is found that intention to use e-money is significantly affected by respondents’ perception of e-money usefulness and ease of use. Interestingly, it is also found that customers’ intention to use e-money are moderated by their knowledge about riba. Therefore, as managerial implication, it is suggested for e-money providers to build a Muslim-friendly system that is free from riba. Finally, this research also suggests future research agenda to consider subjective norm and religiosity variabels in a single model.
Passenger Car Unit Values for Urban Mixed Traffic Flow at Signalised Intersections on Two Lane Dual Carriageways in the Tamale Metropolis , Ghana

In many west and east African cities, road traffic mix is characterised by high volumes of two wheeler motorcycles which traverse the roadway without lane discipline. For many years, the Transport Research Laboratory UK (TRL) provided guidelines and parameters for the design of transport facilities based on their research in some countries. In signalised intersection design and traffic operations on roadway facilities, passenger car unit values (PCU) and saturation flows are very important and can vary across cities owing to differences in traffic mix and vehicle characteristics as well as differences in driver behaviour, regulation and enforcement. Local values no matter how crude may be preferred. The traffic mix and performance characteristics on roads in the Tamale metropolis and other northern cities in northern Ghana differ from the other regions due to the high number of motorised two wheeler vehicles in the traffic stream as well as bicycles. Even though this is known, there has not been any research to quantify the Passenger Car Unit values for design. This study aimed to evaluate the local passenger car equivalent unit values which may be used in the design of traffic intersections in order to improve the performance of signalised intersections in Tamale. Two signalised intersections with fixed time control along one of the busiest corridors were studied. Manual counts were used to collect data from three hour video recordings of each intersection under saturation flow conditions played on a laptop computer. The passenger car unit values (PCU) were estimated using multiple regression analysis between the saturation times and vehicle types. PCU values for Motorcycles, Tricycles, Cars and Buses/trucks have been evaluated. It was recommended that a special area should be prepared in front of the signalised intersection stop lines in the metropolis to accommodate the high volumes of motorcycles in the traffic.
Investigation of Gate Sidewall Spacer Optimization From OFF-State Leakage Current Perspective in 3-nm Node Device

In this paper, the structural and material optimization of gate sidewall spacer in the perspective of OFF-state leakage current was performed in a 3-nm node nanoplate FET (NPFET). Gate-induced drain leakage (GIDL) current, a dominant factor of OFF-state leakage current, and active performance (ON-current, ON/OFF current ratio, and dynamic performance) were co-optimized according to the structural correlation of gate sidewall spacer with other structural components such as gate, source, and drain length. By optimizing the structure for gate and spacer, intrinsic delay was improved by 9.8%, GIDL current was reduced by ~78%, and then on/off current ratio (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I}_{\mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle ON}}/{I}_{\mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle OFF}})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> was enhanced by 4.2 times. On-current (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I}_{\mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle ON}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) according to contact resistance (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}_{\text {con}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) and dynamic performance was analyzed in relation to source/drain (S/D) and spacer. Consequently, the intrinsic delay was improved by 10% and GIDL current reduced by about 92%, which enhanced <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I}_{\mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle ON}}/{I}_{\mathrm{\scriptscriptstyle OFF}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> by 7.9 times accordingly. Furthermore, by comparing structural relations between gate spacer and S/D spacer, a better structural optimization method was proposed.
HLA‐B*38:02:01 predicts carbimazole/methimazole‐induced agranulocytosis

Thioamides antithyroid‐drugs (ATDs) are important in hyperthyroid disease management. Identification of the susceptibility locus of ATD‐induced agranulocytosis is important for clinical management. We performed a genome‐wide association study (GWAS) involving 20 patients with ATD‐induced agranulocytosis and 775 healthy controls. The top finding was further replicated. A single‐nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), rs185386680, showed the strongest association with ATD‐induced agranulocytosis in GWAS (odds ratio (OR) = 36.4; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 12.8–103.7; P = 1.3 × 10‐24) and replication (OR = 37; 95% CI = 3.7–367.4; P = 9.6 × 10‐7). HLA‐B*38:02:01 was in complete linkage disequilibrium with rs185386680. High‐resolution HLA typing confirmed that HLA‐B*38:02:01 was associated with carbimazole (CMZ)/methimazole (MMI)‐induced agranulocytosis (OR = 265.5; 95% CI = 27.9–2528.0; P = 2.5 × 10‐14), but not associated with propylthiouracil (PTU). The positive and negative predictive values of HLA‐B*38:02:01 in predicting CMZ/MMI‐induced agranulocytosis were 0.07 and 0.999. Approximately 211 cases need to be screened to prevent one case. Screening for the risk allele will be useful in preventing agranulocytosis in populations in which the frequency of the risk allele is high.
Realizing Reproducible and Reusable Parallel Floating Random Walk Solvers for Practical Usage

Capacitance extraction or simulation has become a challenging problem in the computer-aided design of integrated circuits (ICs), flat panel display, etc. Due to its scalability and reliability, the parallel floating random walk (FRW) based capacitance solver is widely used. In practice, the parallel FRW algorithms involve an issue of reproducibility and may consume a lot of time in the scenario requesting high accuracy. To relieve these issues, techniques are developed in this paper to enhance the reproducibility and reusability of the parallel FRW based simulation. With them we ensure that same result is reproduced while rerunning the parallel FRW solver with same setting. A "jump start" feature is also implemented to reduce the total runtime of simulating same structure with multiple accuracy criteria. Experiments on shared-memory and distributed-memory platforms have validated the effectiveness of the presented techniques. Compared with a synchronization based approach ensuring the reproducibility, the proposed technique with static workload allocation can brings 4.8X more parallel speedup while sacrificing nothing.
Performance of massive MIMO Systems for Future Generation Wireless Systems

Research into 5G enabling technologies has seen much increased activity of late. Among the proposed technologies with much potential for becoming an important underlying aspect of 5G is massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). This paper seeks to evaluate the performance of linear signal processing methods applicable to massive MIMO so as to propose suitable signal processing methods for these applications, and to determine suitable antenna array sizes for a given number of users in a massive MIMO cell. A single cell, and a 16 square cell grid network, were modeled in a MATLAB enviroment with base stations placed at the centre of the 1Km × 1Km square cells and users were randomly deployed in each cell. Monte Carlo simulations were applied with Rayleigh fading channels. Obtainable sum spectral efficiency for various linear signal processing methods were then obtained. Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), Zero Forcing (ZF), Regularized Zero Forcing (RZF) and Maximal Ratio Combining (MR) linear detection methods were evaluated. The aim of the Monte Carlo simulations were to determine the achievable spectral efficiency as a function of the ratio between the number of antennas at a base station and the number of users in a cell. This was done initially for a single cell and then extended to a 16 cell network. Pilot reuse factors, which is the ratio between the pilots allocated to a cell and users in a cell, were varied and spectral efficiency evaluated as a function of increasing number of antennas. The results obtained show that the MMSE has the best performance. As antenna array size increase, RZF and ZF monotonically increase so at to coincide when the ratio of antennas to users increases. MR combining method had the least performance among the four receive combining methods looked at.
Real-time Distributed-Random-Forest-Based Network Intrusion Detection System Using Apache Spark

With the rapid increase in Internet services, network traffic data has become very large and complex, increasing the possibility of intrusions. The traditional intrusion detection system (IDS) cannot detect intrusion behaviors among such high-speed traffic data. A real-time network IDS should be able to process large amounts of network traffic data as quickly as possible to detect malicious traffic as early as possible. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a network intrusion detection framework based on a distributed random forest capable of handling high-speed traffic data. This framework consists of three parts: a data capturing part based on NetFlow, a preprocessing data part and a classification-based intrusion detection part. In this paper, we apply the random forest classification algorithm and adapt it to the Apache Spark distributed processing system to realize real-time detection. To verify the effectiveness of the framework, we implement the system and perform several comparison experiments. The results show that the system has satisfactory efficiency and accuracy compared to existing systems and thus is very suitable for the real-time detection of network intrusion, with a large capacity and high speed.
Graded and dynamic reflex summation of myelinated and unmyelinated rat aortic baroreceptors.

Unmyelinated (C) and myelinated (A) baroreceptor (BR) axons are present in rat aortic depressor nerve (ADN). With graded ADN electrical activation and anodal conduction blockade, reflex responses in anesthetized rats were assessed as changes in mean arterial pressure (MAP) and heart rate (HR). We tested the hypothesis that C-type BR inputs are effective at low frequencies because they outnumber A-type. Anodal current (Ian) reversibly eliminated all MAP and HR responses to A-selective stimuli. High intensities activated all ADN axons (A+C) and decreased MAP at lower frequencies (<10 Hz) than were effective with A-selective stimulation. I(an) reduced only MAP responses to >10-Hz ADN stimulation. Burst patterns significantly augmented A- but not C-selective reflex responses despite identical numbers of shocks per second. A-selective stimuli failed to evoke significant bradycardia even at 200 Hz. Maximum intensity stimuli plus Ian (C selective) evoked less bradycardia than without I(an) (A+C), indicating supra-additive summation unlike the occlusive summation for MAP responses. However, activation of reduced numbers of C-type BRs with all A-type BRs suggests a strong A to C interaction in reflex bradycardia responses. Surprisingly, Ian block of A-type conduction eliminated all reflex bradycardia at such submaximal intensities despite C conduction and depressor responses. A- and C-type BRs act synergistically, and A-type activity is absolutely required in cardiac but not in depressor pathways. Thus greater numbers do not appear to account for C-type BR efficacy, and critical interactions between these two sensory subtypes appear to occur differentially across cardiac and systemic baroreflex effector pathways.
A Transfer Learning Approach for Network Intrusion Detection

Convolution Neural Network (ConvNet) offers a high potential to generalize input data. It has been widely used in many application areas, such as visual imagery, where comprehensive learning datasets are available and a ConvNet model can be well trained and perform the required function effectively. ConvNet can also be applied to network intrusion detection. However, the currently available datasets related to the network intrusion are often inadequate, which makes the ConvNet learning deficient, hence the trained model is not competent in detecting unknown intrusions. In this paper, we propose a ConvNet model using transfer learning for the network intrusion detection. The model consists of two concatenated ConvNets and is built on a two-stage learning process: learning a base dataset and transferring the learned knowledge to the learning of the target dataset. Our experiments on the NSLKDD dataset show that the proposed model can improve the detection accuracy not only on the test dataset containing mostly known attacks (KDDTest $+)$ but also on the test dataset featuring many novel attacks (KDDTest-21) – about 2.68% improvement on KDDTest+ and 22.02% on KDDTest-21 can be achieved, as compared to the traditional ConvNet model.
Cost-effectiveness of peginterferon alfa-2b in combination with ribavirin as initial treatment for chronic hepatitis C in Sweden

The aim of the study was to assess the cost-effectiveness of peginterferon alfa-2b (pegIFN) compared to interferon alfa-2b (IFN), both in combination with ribavirin, as initial therapy for chronic hepatitis C in Sweden. A computer based Markov model describing the natural course of chronic hepatitis C was used to assess costs and quality-adjusted life-y (QALY) for the treatment strategies. Study population was a cohort of hepatitis C patients from the age of 43 y until death. Natural history and response data were obtained from the literature and from Swedish clinical experts. Costs were obtained from different health care providers in Sweden and based on Swedish clinical practice. In our base case analysis for genotype 1 patients, pegIFN plus ribavirin therapy generated 0.29 incremental QALYs and was cost saving (dominant strategy). Corresponding results for genotype 2/3 patients were 0.09 QALYs at an incremental cost of 941 euros (10,500 euros/QALY). A probabilistic sensitivity analysis was performed to study the stability of our results. From the results we conclude that for genotype 1 patients treatment with pegIFN and ribavirin increased quality-adjusted life expectancy and was cost-effective as initial therapy for hepatitis C. The cost-effectiveness for patients infected with genotype 2/3 was less obvious.
Influence of borneol on primary mice oral fibroblasts: a penetration enhancer may be used in oral submucous fibrosis.

BACKGROUND Borneol, a widely used food and cosmetics additive, has analgesic, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and penetration enhancing effects. We try to use it as a penetration enhancer for a formula which we have used to treat oral submucous fibrosis (OSF). To assess its safety, we investigate its effects on primary mice oral fibroblasts. METHODS Primary mice oral fibroblasts were cultured, the effects of borneol on fibroblasts proliferation, cytotoxicity, collagen production, matrix metalloproteinases-2,9 (MMP-2,9) activities and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinase 1 (TIMP-1) production were tested by methyl thiazolyl tetrazolium assay, lactic dehydrogenase activity assay, chloramine T method, gelatin zymography and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, respectively. RESULTS Borneol, from 18.75 to 300 microg/ml, could significantly (P < 0.05) decrease the growth of fibroblasts and very significantly (P < 0.01) inhibit collagen production in a concentration dependant manner. From 18.75 to 150 microg/ml, borneol had no cytotoxicity on mice oral fibroblasts. Moreover borneol could significantly (P < 0.05) decrease MMP-2 activity, and very significantly (P < 0.01) inhibit TIMP-1 production. CONCLUSIONS This study indicates that borneol has anti-fibrosis activity and the mechanism may partly be relevant to its inhibiting effects on fibroblasts mitosis, collagen and TIMP-1 production. It can be safely used as a penetration enhancer for our formula to treat OSF.
Self-Reported Pain Intensity and Associated Distress in Children Aged 4-18 Years on Admission, Discharge, and One-Week Follow Up to Emergency Department

Objectives: Pain is the most common complaint among children presenting to the Emergency Department (ED), yet it is poorly managed. Although the poor management of pain has been documented, no studies have simultaneously determined the distress caused by the presenting pain nor have children been followed after the ED visit to determine whether the pain and distress have resolved. The purpose of this study was to describe pain intensity, distress from pain, and treatment of pain in children presenting to the ED and to follow them 1 week later to describe resolution of their pain. Methods: A survey design with follow up of patients identified with pain in 2 urban university-affiliated pediatric EDs with children between ages 4 and 18 (N = 533). Measures used included the Coloured Analogue Scale (CAS) for both pain and distress related to pain, mobility problems related to pain, and interference with activities of daily living due to pain. Chart reviews were conducted for documentation of pain assessment and analgesic administration and prescription at discharge. Results: Half of the children presenting were experiencing pain due to musculoskeletal injury and two-thirds of the pain problems had an onset within 48 hours of presentation to the ED. Mean pain intensity on admission was 5.2 (SD 2.3) and at discharge was 4.1 (SD 2.7), however, 22% had worsening of pain and for 26%, the pain remained the same. On admission, 12.8% reported pain intensity 8/10 or more but 23% reported distress levels 8/10 or more. Only 39% received analgesics during the visit and 11% were given a prescription for analgesics at discharge. Children (n = 104) were reached 1 week following discharge from ED and only 5% were reporting pain of 4/10 or more but, of those reporting any pain at all, 34% reported distress from their pain of 4/10 or more. Conclusions: A greater proportion of children report high intensity of distress from pain than of pain intensity itself when in the ED. Only a small proportion of children received analgesics during the visit to the ED and only slightly more on discharge. Although pain seems to resolve by 1 week, distress is less likely to have resolved. More attention needs to be paid both to pain children are experiencing in the ED and equally to the accompanying distress.
Estimation of True Malaria Burden in India

Malaria imposes great socio-economic burden on humanity and with six other diseases like diarrhoea, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, measles, hepatitis B and pneumonia account for 85% of Global infectious disease burden. About 36% of the world population, i.e. 2020 million is exposed to the risk of contracting malaria in ~ 90 countries. World Health Organization estimates 300–500 million malaria cases annually and 90% of this burden is in Africa alone. In addition, the estimated annual mortality attributed to malaria ranges from 700,000 and 2.7 million globally and over 75% of them are African children and expectant mothers. Doubts have been expressed about reliability of these estimates as most of the hyperand holoendemic countries, especially in Africa lack credible diagnostic facilities and reporting system. In the south-east Asian Region of WHO, out of about 1.4 billion people living in 11 countries (land area 8,466,600 km, i.e. 6% of global area), 1.2 billion are exposed to the risk of malaria and most of whom live in India (Kondrachine 1992). However, the southeast Asia contributed only 2.5 million cases to the global burden of malaria. Of this, India alone contributed 76% of the total cases. Taking into account clinical episodes, it has now been estimated with the help of epidemiological models, geographical and demographic data that P. falciparum estimates outside Africa, especially in south-east Asia are 200% higher than that reported by the World Health Organization, i.e. 118.94 million out of global estimates of 515 million cases (Snow et al 2005). In addition to this, burden of P. vivax malaria in the world has been calculated at 71–80 million cases of which south-east Asia and western pacific countries contributed 42 million cases (Mendis et al 2001).