Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Senate Voting On the Strategic Defense Initiative: The Impact of the 1991 Gulf War

This paper examines the effects of the success of the Patriot missile system in the 1991 Gulf War on Senate roll call votes for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Previous studies have shown that both Party Identification (PID) and Ideology have had a significant effect on senators' votes on defense weapons systems. Using Logit regression techniques, this paper examines whether PID and Ideology, both of which are central to political identity, remained significant factors in three Senate votes on SDI; this paper is unique compare to previous studies of such matters in that it adds two additional explanatory variables to existing models: (1) the extent to which each state might benefit from SDI and (2) whether or not the senator from each state was up for re-election in 1992 It is hypothesized that the findings will suggest that external factors played a role in the SDI Senate votes in question. Specifically, it is hypothesized that the effects of the Gulf War Patriot missile successes led to greater legislative support (compared to support levels from previous years) for the Strategic Defense Initiative among Democrats, those senators whose states would benefit from SDI funding, and those senators seeking re-election. Journal of International and Global Studies
Prognostic factors and effects of fertility-sparing surgery in women of reproductive age with ovarian clear-cell carcinoma: a propensity score analysis

Objective The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical characteristics of young patients with stage I clear-cell carcinoma (CCC) and evaluate the prognostic factors and effects of fertility-sparing surgery (FSS) using propensity score (PS) adjustment. Methods We conducted a regional multi-institutional study between 1986 and 2017. Among 4,277 patients with ovarian tumor, clinical and pathological data of 103 fertile women with stage I unilateral CCC were collected. We evaluated survival and reproductive outcomes in these patients. Additionally, to analyze the effects of FSS, baseline imbalance between patients with and those without FSS was adjusted with an inverse probability of treatment weighting using PSs involving independent clinical variables. Results The mean patient age was 39.4 years, and the median follow-up period for surviving patients was 55.6 months. In multivariate analysis, stage IC2/IC3 (vs. IA/IC1) was the only independent prognostic factor for recurrence-free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS). FSS was not associated with poorer prognosis when compared to the prognosis with non-preserving surgery with regard to both RFS and OS. No statistical difference in survival outcomes between FSS and other approaches was confirmed after PS adjustment. Among patients who underwent FSS, four deliveries with healthy neonates were noted without any gestational complications. Conclusion FSS can be considered in stage I CCC, specifically in stage IA and IC1 patients who strongly desire to have children in the future. Further clinical research is needed to clarify the optimal application of FSS for CCC.
Risk and Protective Factors for Inpatient Youth Violence The Predictive Value of the SAVRY and the SAPROF-YV in Youth with and without a Psychiatric Disorder

In 2015, 1437 young people entered a JJI in the Netherlands. Many violent incidents occur in the JJIs, which reduce the internal safety in the JJIs. Risk assessment instruments can help to identify the risk and protective factors for future violence for a particular person. Consequently, forensic treatment will be more effective, because the treatment is completely specialized for that particular detainee. This will lead to less recidivism or violent behaviour. This pilot study investigated the effect of having a DBD/ASPD on showing violent incidents in a JJI and the risk and protective factors of the SAVRY and SAPROF-YV. In addition, it was examined if risk and protective factors could predict the occurrence of a violent incident in a JJI in youth with and without a DBD/ASPD. This study examined the patient file of 37 detainees (23 with DBD/ASPD), mean age 17.35 years old. Risk and protective factors were scored retrospectively based on patient file information, using the SAVRY and SAPROF-YV. These instruments were scored at the start of the treatment. The registered violent incidents of the following five months were used. Despite the small sample size, it can be cautiously concluded that detainees with a DBD/ASPD might have significantly more risk than the group without DBD/ASPD. In addition it seems that the risk factors could predict the occurrence of an incident for the total sample. Due to the preliminary nature of this study no hard conclusion can be drawn, however these results are promising for future (prospective) research.
Multidecadal Rainfall Variability in Sahel

The African Sahel is a water vulnerable region located in northern Africa. It exhibits strong inter-annual rainfall variability on several different time scales. During the 20th century the Sahel region experienced extended dry periods and severe droughts, with devastating effects on the livelihoods of the people in the region. In this study the multidecadal variability of Sahel precipitation is examined in the gridded observational dataset CRU and in the 20th-century reanalysis ERA20C. Additionally, we use the Hadley sea surface temperature and sea level pressure datasets. Our analysis of the Sahel (10−18◦N, 20◦W -30◦E) July-September rainfall observations using CRU shows a clear multidecadal variability with a dominating period of 60-80 years and a high correlation to the annual mean North Atlantic sea surface temperatures on a multidecadal scale. Using a global field correlation and a single value decomposition we could see that the highest correlation between low-pass filtered Sahel rainfall and sea surface temperatures was located along latitudinal bands in the midlatitudes and in the sub-polar region as well as in eastern North Atlantic with values around R = 0.8. Similarly, ERA20C reanalysis dataset exhibits multidecadal rainfall variability in Sahel with a dominating period of 60-80 years, however largely out of phase with the observational dataset and with no correlation to the North Atlantic sea surface temperatures. The composite analysis of low-pass filtered data showed a clear increase of rainfall across Sahel in wet compared to dry years for both the CRU observational and ERA20C reanalysis datasets. The composite difference for the sea level pressure and surface temperature suggest that a strengthening of the thermally driven meridional pressure gradient between Sahara and the Coast of Guinea in wet compared to dry years is the driving mechanism for the multidecadal rainfall variability in Sahel for both the observational and reanalysis dataset. The strengthened temperature and pressure gradients both increase the moisture availability in the region through a higher moisture flux from the tropical Atlantic and intensifies the monsoon system through strengthened horizontal and vertical winds, resulting in increased rainfall. The study shows that it is challenging to capture correctly multidecadal Sahel precipitation variability in reanalysis data. Reasons for this behavior are discussed.
F 0 peaks are a necessary condition for German infants ’ perception of stress in metrical segmentation

Infants exposed to stress-timed languages have been demonstrated to use the stressed syllable to localize word beginnings. More recently, intonation has been shown to interfere with stress-based segmentation [1, 2]: For instance, stress-based segmentation was limited to accented words with bell-shaped accents that had the f0 peak aligned with the stressed syllable (“medial-peak” accents); segmentation failed when the f0 peak preceded or followed the stressed syllable in the target word’s contour. Here, we test whether metrical segmentation is caused by the f0 peak on the stressed syllable or by the tonal alternation (LHL, bell-shaped contour in [2]). This allows us to probe whether f0 peaks are necessary cues for metrical segmentation. To this end, we replicated Zahner, et al. [2] but used cup-shaped intonation contours on the targets resulting in a tonal alternation in the opposite direction (HLH). Looking times obtained in a head-turn preference experiment showed no evidence of segmentation for the cupshaped contours. This suggests that an f0 peak is a necessary condition for the stressed syllables to be used in stress-based segmentation, at least for German infants.
Assessment of changes in winter extratropical cyclones with increasing CO2

As part of the general concern about the nature of climate change in a warmer world much attention is being paid to what changes extratropical cyclones would experience with further warming caused by increasing CO in research community. A number of studies using general circulation models (GCMs) seem to be in agreement in predicting a general reduction of cyclone frequency (Zhang and Wang 1997, Carnell and Senior 1998, Sinclair and Watterson 1999, Geng and Sugi 2003). Also they have showed that there is a decrease of the lower-troposphere baroclinicity but an increase in upper tropospheric baroclinicity as the globe warms up due to increasing CO (Hall et al. 1994, Zhang and Wang 1997, Carnell and Senior 1998, Knippertz et al. 2000).
90 COLLEGE STUDENTS ’ INTERPRETATION OF RESEARCH REPORTS ON GROUP DIFFERENCES : THE TALL-TALE EFFECT 1

How does the student untrained in advanced statistics interpret results of research that reports a group difference? In two studies, statistically untrained college students were presented with abstracts or professional associations’ reports and asked for estimates of scores obtained by the original participants in the studies. These estimates were converted to inferred effect sizes and compared with the actual effect sizes. Inferred effect sizes substantially overestimated actual effect sizes for all reports, a phenomenon dubbed the tall-tale effect. The effect was obtained with a variety of reports and statistics. The tall-tale effect could be controlled somewhat with simple changes in wording. This finding suggests a program of research which would better calibrate inferences with those actually obtained in the research.
Semantic Role Labeling in Conversational Chat using Deep Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory Networks with Attention Mechanism

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) has been extensively studied, mostly for understanding English formal language. However, only a few reports exist for informal conversational text, especially for language being used in the chat-bot system. The challenges of informal texting language include a wide variety of slangs and abbreviations, short sentences, as well as disorganized grammars. In this work, we propose an attention mechanism on top of Long Short-Term Memory Networks architecture for solving SRL task on informal conversations. The task is evaluated on informal language used on an Indonesian chatting platform. Our proposed model achieves F1 score of 82.68%.
The Impact of Financing Decisions on Firm Performance

This research investigates the impact of financing decisions on firm performance. Firm financing decision has been an issue of discussion among researchers for decades. However there is no consensus on the optimal mix of debt to equity ratio in firms capital structure, similarly there is mixed evidence on how capital structure variables influences debt to equity decision of a firm. Most of the existing empirical studies were conducted in the US; however few studies were conducted using UK firms. This study has provided evidence base on UK firms where the sample of the study consist of FTSE 100 and FTSE 250. The data for the study were collected from Thomson Reuters DataStream for the fiscal year 2015. Data were analysed using Eviews software and variables were regressed using ordinary least square. The results reveal that leverage decision of UK firms can be influenced by the traditional capital structure determinants in which it reveals evidence in support of trade-off theory. The result shows a strong evidence of positive relationship between profitability and leverage, firm size and leverage as well as debt tax shields with leverage. This suggests that target leverage exist within the UK firms. On the other hand the study finds a strong evidence of negative association between asset tangibility and leverage which contradicts the assumption of collateral power of an asset when raising debt. The result also shows evidence of negative relationship between non-debt tax shields and leverage as well as no relationship between market to book value and leverage. The study has contributed by providing additional evidence on the influence of capital structure variables on UK firms financing decisions. The study recommends further research using large data for a longer period and also to include different variables such as macro-economic variables.
“ Food Security , Nutrition and Sustainable Agriculture-Emerging Technologies ” ( February 14-16 , 2019 ) Genetic analysis of quantitative and quality traits in bacterial wilt resistant genotypes of bell pepper under sub-temperate conditions of north-western Himalayas

The present investigation was carried out to generate information on variability for quantitative and quality traits in bell pepper (Capsicum annuum L. var. grossum Sendt.). The experiment material consisted of 46 genotypes of bell pepper that were evaluated in randomized complete block design during kharif, 2016. The observations were recorded on days to 50 per cent flowering, days to first picking, plant height (cm), primary branches per plant, harvest duration (days), fruit length (cm), fruit width (cm), pericarp thickness (mm), lobes per fruit, average fruit weight (g), fruit yield per plant (g), fruits per plant, marketable fruit yield per plant (g), marketable fruits per plant, capsanthin content (ASTA units), TSS (oBrix) and ascorbic acid content (mg/100g). Significant differences were observed among the genotypes for all the traits, indicated presence of sufficient variation for all the traits. Among all, genotypes DPCBWR-14-39 (644.29 g), DPCBWR-14-36 (610.17 g), DPCBWR-14-31 (601.96 g), DPCBWR-14-35 (517.88 g), DPCBWR-14-11 (510.34 g), DPCBWR-14-7 (510.14 g) and DPCBWR-14-29 (499.47 g) were the highest yielders and these were also among the top genotypes for economic traits viz., marketable fruits per plant, fruit yield per plant, fruits per plant and average fruit weight. The PCV was invariably higher than their corresponding GCV for most of the characters, indicated close association between phenotype and genotype. High PCV as well as GCV was observed for fruit yield per plant, fruits per plant, marketable fruit yield per plant, marketable fruits per plant, capsanthin content and ascorbic acid depicting the presence of substantial variability and would respond better to selection. High heritability alongwith high genetic advance was observed for fruit yield per plant, fruits per plant, marketable fruit yield per plant, marketable fruits per plant, capsanthin content, TSS and ascorbic acid, respectively revealing the importance of additive gene action for the inheritance of these traits, and further improvement could be done through phenotypic selection.
Origin of arsenolipids in sediments from Great Salt Lake

Environmental contextArsenic is a globally distributed element, occurring in various chemical forms with toxicities ranging from harmless to highly toxic. We examined sediment samples from Great Salt Lake, an extreme salt environment, and found a variety of organoarsenic species not previously recorded in nature. These new compounds are valuable pieces in the puzzle of how organisms detoxify arsenic, and in our understanding of the global arsenic cycle. AbstractArsenic-containing lipids are natural products found predominantly in marine organisms. Here, we report the detection of known and new arsenolipids in sediment samples from Great Salt Lake, a hypersaline lake in Utah, USA, using high-performance liquid chromatography in combination with both elemental and molecular mass spectrometry. Sediments from four investigated sites contained appreciable quantities of arsenolipids (22–312ng As g−1 sediment) comprising several arsenic-containing hydrocarbons and 20 new compounds shown to be analogues of phytyl 2-O-methyl dimethylarsinoyl riboside. We discuss potential sources of the detected arsenolipids and find a phytoplanktonic origin most plausible in these algal detritus-rich salt lake sediments.
EFFECT OF LANDING STRATEGIES ON LOWER LIMB JOINT KINETICS DURING LOADED JUMPS

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of landing strategies on the landing kinetics during loaded jumps. Ten male participants performed counter movement jumps with 50% body weight (BW) additional load using four different landing strategies. Landing strategy referred to peak knee joint flexion during landing. Peak vertical force increased up to 50% with decreasing knee joint flexion during landing. No changes were found regarding peak joint moments and powers. Total lower limb joint work increased up to 83% with increasing knee joint flexion during landing. The results suggest that energy dissipation during loaded landing is shifted from active (muscle-tendon system) to passive (skeletal system) as peak knee flexion decreases during landing, resulting in mechanical stress on different body tissues depending on the landing strategy.
Quantitative Proteomic Analysis and Evaluation of the Potential Prognostic Biomarkers in Cholangiocarcinoma

Background & Aims: Cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) patients have poor outcomes since the late diagnosis limits the benefits of surgery therapy and curative treatment options. The present study was designed to screen the biomarkers for CCA patients. Methods: Quantitative iTRAQ proteomic analysis was used to identify differentially expressed proteins between CCA and pericarcineous tissue. We examined the expression profile of PRDX2, BGN, LUM, and PPP3CA in CCA tissue using immunohistochemistry. We further investigated the correlation between PPP3CA expression and the survival of CCA patients (n=91). Results: 2,886 confidential proteins were identified by using the iTRAQ technique, 233 of which were differentially expressed. PRDX2, BGN, PPP3CA, and LUM were expressed in CCA tissue, whereas they were not expressed in choledocal cyst tissue except for LUM. PPP3CA was expressed in the cytoplasm of carcinoma cells in 22 cases (24.2%) of 91 CCA patients. Patients with PPP3CA-positive expression showed a significantly shorter survival period than did non-expressing patients (P = 0.030). The univariate analysis showed that tumor size (P = 0.002), vascular invasion (P = 0.001), histological grading (P = 0.011), and PPP3CA expression (P = 0.033) were statistically significant risk factors affecting the prognosis of CCA patients. The multivariate analysis demonstrated PPP3CA expression (P = 0.009) and vascular invasion (P = 0.012) were statistically significant independent risk factors of CCA patients. Conclusions: The results suggested that the expression of PPP3CA in CCA patients is a new independent factor for poor prognosis and a useful prognostic predictor for patients with CCA.
Book Proposal The European Mayor II : Political Leaders in the Changing Context of Local Democracy ( draft title )

Political leadership at the local level has gained more and more interest in the scholarly and political debate during the last 20 years. Political leadership has been seen as necessary to overcome a highlighted democratic deficit by increasing accountability of core policy makers involved not only in policy making in the city hall but also in governance arrangements in which different societal actors play a crucial role (see e.g. the contribution to the book edited by Haus et al. 2005 and Heinelt et al. 2006). Furthermore, political leadership has been seen as essential for administrative reforms – particularly of those inspired by New public Management ideas (see e.g. Christensen and Lægreid 2011). These debates about the importance of political leadership at the local level has had for instance a clear impact on the introduction of directly elected mayors in a number of European countries.
PREDICTING DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT IN THE RED CRESCENT SOCIETY OF FARS PROVINCE DIRECTORS AND STAFF BASED ON DIMENSIONS OF THEIR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

In the study of organizational behavior, organizational commitment is considered as an attitude that conveys an individual’s feeling about various issues and its importance in organizations is also due to its influence over employees’ behavior. An important factor affecting the self-control, self-efficacy, creativity and innovation in organizations, is their dominant organizational culture. Other factors affecting individuals’ commitment to the organization are personal factors. Emotional intelligence as a set of personal characteristics can also be considered in this context. The objective of this study was to predict the different dimensions of organizational commitment in the Red Crescent Society of Fars province managers and staff based on dimensions of their emotional intelligence and organizational culture. Results showed that among the dimensions of organizational culture, creativity was the only significant and positive predictor of the affective dimension of organizational commitment. The cohesion was the strongest and the adaptation was the weakest predictor of the continuance dimension of organizational commitment. Risk-taking, creativity, identification, managers support and association were not predictors of the continuance dimension of organizational commitment. None of organizational culture dimensions was the predictor of the normative dimension of organizational commitment. Among dimensions of the emotional intelligence, optimism was the only significant and positive predictor of the affective dimension of organizational commitment. Understanding emotions as a dimension of the emotional intelligence was the significant and positive predictor of the continuance dimension of organizational commitment while the social skills dimension was the significant and negative predictor of the continuance dimension of organizational commitment. Controlling emotions and optimism were not predictors of the continuance dimension of organizational commitment. Dimensions of emotional intelligence, in addition, were predictors of the normative dimension of organizational commitment and understanding emotions as a dimension of the emotional intelligence was the only significant and positive predictor of the normative dimension of organizational commitment.
INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS , SCHUMPETERIAN INNOVATIONS AND ENTREPRENEURS ’ HUMAN AND SOCIAL CAPITAL A Survey of Literature

In developing countries, to achieve poverty alleviation, it is important to develop industrial clusters because they not only create substantial survival-type employment opportunities in the manufacturing sector but also seed-beds for further industrial development by creating economies of agglomeration. However, most of the industrial clusters in developing countries have performed poorly relative to what appears to be their growth potentials. In search of what are the decisive factors that affect the dynamic development of a cluster, this short article underscores the importance of Schumpeterian innovations and entrepreneur’s human and social capital for the cluster’s long-term survival, sustainability, and competitiveness. Further, this study suggests that by providing training to entrepreneurs of the existing clustered enterprises, rapid industrial development can be achieved in developing countries.