Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Simple proxies for estimating the concentrations of monoterpenes and their oxidation products at a boreal forest site

Abstract. The oxidation products of monoterpenes likely have a crucial role in the formation and growth of aerosol particles in boreal forests. However, the continuous measurements of monoterpene concentrations are usually not available on decadal timescales, and the direct measurements of the concentrations of monoterpene oxidation product have so far been scarce. In this study we developed proxies for the concentrations of monoterpenes and their oxidation products at a boreal forest site in Hyytiala, southern Finland. For deriving the proxies we used the monoterpene concentration measured with a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS) during 2006–2013. Our proxies for the monoterpene concentration take into account the temperature-controlled emissions from the forest ecosystem, the dilution caused by the mixing within the boundary layer and different oxidation processes. All the versions of our proxies captured the seasonal variation of the monoterpene concentration, the typical proxy-to-measurements ratios being between 0.8 and 1.3 in summer and between 0.6 and 2.6 in winter. In addition, the proxies were able to describe the diurnal variation of the monoterpene concentration rather well, especially in summer months. By utilizing one of the proxies, we calculated the concentration of oxidation products of monoterpenes by considering their production in the oxidation and their loss due to condensation on aerosol particles. The concentration of oxidation products was found to have a clear seasonal cycle, with a maximum in summer and a minimum in winter. The concentration of oxidation products was lowest in the morning or around noon and highest in the evening. In the future, our proxies for the monoterpene concentration and their oxidation products can be used, for example, in the analysis of new particle formation and growth in boreal environments.
The resistible rise of the temporary employment industry in France

This article is an historical account of the contested growth of the temporary employment agency sector in France. It utilises a variegated capitalism conceptual framework to explain the evolution of a distinctive temporary employment agency sector and regulatory environment under French politico-institutional conditions that was contingent upon global developments. The article charts the role of large agencies in constructing a market for agency labour despite wide-scale cultural, political and trade union opposition. In order to build legitimacy, agencies sought partners in the labour movement from the late 1960s onwards. By the late 1990s, the sector had grown significantly within a gradually more permissive regulatory framework, despite ongoing but fragmenting opposition. The article demonstrates that the growth of agency labour was not an inevitable outcome of global pressure for labour market deregulation. It also reveals how national regulatory institutions alone are not a sufficient bulwark against global labour market pressures.
Education and Economic Growth: A Panel Cointegration Approach in OECD Countries (1980-2008)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the long-run relationship between education and economic growth in the 25 OECD countries over the period from 1980 to 2008 by utilizing the Pedroni and Kao panel cointegration, Pedroni DOLS and FMOLS and Canning-Pedroni causality methods. According to DOLS results the elasticity coefficients of education and economic growth are %0.283 and %2,931 respectively. According to FMOLS results the elasticity coefficients of education and economic growth are %0.25 and %2.82 respectively. While the results of Lamda-Pearson statistics indicate the long-run bilateral causality between education and economic growth, Group statistics indicate the long-run uni-directional causality from economic growth to education. It is concluded that there is a strong cointegration relationship between education and economic growth.
Political Investments and the Price of Credit Risk: Evidence from Credit Default Swaps

We show that political investments, defined as political contributions and lobbying expenditure, have a large impact on the firm’s credit risk. Firms that invest in politics, on average, have significantly and economically lower CDS spreads. We address endogeneity issues by utilizing a quasi-natural experiment and an instrumental variable approach to obtain exogenous variations in political investments, and find that political investments reduce the price of credit risk. The reduction in spreads is greater for firms that are more sensitive to government policies. In addition, and consistent with agency conflicts, political investments by weakly governed firms are relatively less effective at reducing the market price of credit risk.
Assessing The Effects of Public Expenditure Shocks on the Labor Market in the Euro-Area

The core of the paper is a medium-scale DSGE model calibrated for the Euro-Area with a detailed fiscal sector including both public consumption and public investment. The financing of the spending can be tax-based or debt-based. In the case of a debt-funded expenditure expansion, I find strong negative multipliers on the unemployment rate for the public consumption shock, around -0.6% at the peak, and more ambiguous results for a public investment shock. In both cases, the effects on the unemployment rate are short-lasting. With a sensitivity analysis exercice, it is shown than the parameters included in households’ preferences do not drammatically change the results in the case of the public consumption shock but the results are very sensitive to these parameters for the public investment shock. Finally, with the introduction of some distortive taxes and assuming that they fund the half of the deficit engendered by public spending expansion, I show that the multipliers little vary little even if the cumulated unemployment fiscal multiplier can become significantly positive with a raise of public investment.
A STUDY OF PROPORTION OF DISABILITY AND ITS DETE RMINANTS AMONG LEPROSY PATIENTS

BACKGROUND: Widespread implementation of MDT has clearly been extremely successful in curing and reducing the prevalence of leprosy throughout the world including India. However, social stigma remains a major obstacle to self-reporting and early treatment. OBJECTIVES: 1) To study the proportion of disabilities as per the WHO definition in newly detected leprosy patients. 2) To know the determinants of disabilities in newly detected leprosy patients. METHODOLOGY: A cross sectional study was conducted in urban leprosy center Hubli. Data was collected by 500 leprosy patients who had registered between December 2008 to 2013. Demographic profile of the patients, presence and type of disability and determinants of disability were collected from the register maintained in urban leprosy center Hubli. RESULTS: 100 deformity cases (20%) were found among 500 cases. The majority of deformity cases were in the age group of 20-30 years (24%), 78% were male patients. 74% had grade-2 deformity, with claw hand in 37%, foot drop in 9%, trophic ulcer in 27%, 1% ocular deformity and 26% grade 1 deformity seen (loss of sensation). Out of 100 deformity cases, borderline leprosy cases were 80(80%), tuberculoid type 1(1%), lepromatous type were 3(3%), 13(13%) were pure neuritic type, 2(2%) were indeterminate type, 1(1%) histoid type. New cases (Not on the treatment) with deformity were 70%, old cases (On treatment) with deformity were 30%. CONCLUSION: Proportion of Disabilities among leprosy patients were 20%. Disabilities were more common among males, borderline leprosy cases and new cases.
The Earth's Hum Variations From a Global Model and Seismic Recordings Around the Indian Ocean

The Earth's hum is the continuous oscillations of the Earth at frequencies between 2 and 20 mHz in the absence of earthquakes. The hum strongest signal consists mainly of surface waves. These seismic waves can be generated by infragravity waves propagating over a sloping ocean bottom close to the coast. So far, this theory has only been tested quantitatively using European seismic stations. We use seismic data recorded all around the Indian Ocean together with an ocean wave model that provides time‐frequency varying hum sources. We show that seasonal variations of the hum sources are smaller in the southern hemisphere than the northern hemisphere. Using these sources, we model Rayleigh wave root‐mean‐square amplitudes in the frequency band 3.5–20 mHz, and the good agreement with seismic data on the vertical component confirms the theory of hum generation. Because the Indian Ocean is uniquely connected to the southern hemisphere oceans but lies partly in northern hemisphere latitudes, the seasonal pattern of the hum recorded there is particular and shows no significant seasonal variations. At ~10 mHz the hum is strongly influenced by local events, such as the passage of a cyclone close to a seismic station.
Systematic Review of Literature on Effect of Liquidity on Bank

This study carries out a systematic review on related empirical literature on the role of liquidity on banks’ performance as well as risk-taking. The review of existing literature revealed that bank’s liquidity has significant influence on banking outcomes such as banks performance, banks risk-taking behaviour, moral hazard, and other financial risks. However, we find that empirical evidence on all these is majorly skewed toward developed market. Therefore, we recommend that further studies in this area to provide additional insight for understanding of the impact of liquidity on the performance as well as the risk-taking behaviour and moral hazard. Thus, policy makers, banking regulators shareholder and other stakeholders will be properly guided on the potential impact of banks’ liquidity and their performance and risk-taking behaviour.
Yield Curve and Momentum Effects in Monthly U.S. Equity Returns: Some Nonparametric Evidence

In this paper, two largely familiar stock market anomalies – the yield curve and the momentum effects - are re-examined for the S&P 500 index by using nonparametric regression. The results essentially confirm the existence of both of these phenomena, but also indicate that the stochastic linkages between the explanatory variables and future index returns are nonlinear and mutually dependent. It hence turns out that the greater flexibility offered by nonparametric regression enables the detection and characterisation of some features of the underlying relationship that would have been gone unnoticed under the linearity and additivity assumptions underlying simpler regression approaches.
The Relationship of the Quality Data Warehousing to Enhanced Perceived Net Profits and Decision Quality in the Enterprises

Data warehousing is a result of business needs and technological advances. This study will investigate the extent to which DW quality relates to perceived net benefit and decision quality. This paper hopes to identify the strength of the relationships of the quality data warehouse to enhancing decision quality in the enterprise. The results showed that impact on decision quality eventually have some perceived net benefits from the use the warehouse. Moreover, it should add to the body knowledge on data warehouse.
Expression profile of Wnt/β-Catenin Signalling Molecules and the Wnt Antagonist Secreted Frizzled-Related Protein 4 in Apoptosis in Breast Cancer Tissue Micro-Arrays

Wnt proteins are often up-regulated in cancer. The secreted frizzled-related proteins (sFRPs) can abrogate Wnt signalling and are involved in apoptosis. We investigated the expression of Wnt1, b-Catenin, and an antagonist, sFRP4, as well as apoptosis in breast cancer using tissue micro-arrays (TMAs) comprising 191 tissue cores. Results demonstrated stronger staining intensity for Wnt1 in tumour versus non-tumour samples (p<0.05). Epithelial sFRP4 did not differ between invasive and non-invasive tissue; however, there was increased sFRP4 expression in the blood vessels and lymphocyte cells of tumour compared to non-tumour tissue. These data suggest Wnt involvement in determining the breast cancer phenotype and highlight a potential new role for sFRP4 as a diagnostic/prognostic marker.
The Effects of Panel Location, Target Size, and Gender on Efficiency in Simple Direct Manipulation Tasks

In recent years there was a big increase in the number of personal computers used worldwide. At the same time a lot of research have been conducted on usability of more and more sophisticated interactive systems. On the other hand some (e.g. Whittaker et al., 2000) have argued that too much focus was given to modern styles of human-computer interaction, since the usefulness of these proposals is very limited (Hartson, 1998). Simultaneously, the in-depth exploration of standard means of communication between human beings and computer programs are very often neglected. The presented research involves the ‘search and click’ technique, which is a core component of a direct manipulation style of human-computer interaction (Shneiderman, 1982, 1983). Although currently there exist many other methods, the direct manipulation is still one of the most popular, especially among graphical interfaces. The study described in this publication may be situated in the trend of research related both to visual search and visually controlled motor activity (compare Grobelny et al., 2005; Michalski et al., 2006; Michalski & Grobelny, 2008). This area is a combination of the traditional Fitts’ approach (Fitts, 1954; Fitts & Peterson, 1964), in which only the movement time related to graphical object selection is taken into account, and the situation where the time of visual search for a particular target among the group of distractors is of a main concern. The rationale of including these two activities simultaneously in the experimental setup arise from the observations presented in the work of Hoffmann & Lim (1997). The researchers argue that concurrent decision and movement tasks are complex, and they should not be analysed separately. Their suggestions were backed up by experimental results. Additionally, there are some evidence at the neural level (Wurtz et al., 1982; Kustov & Robinson, 1996; Colby & Goldberg, 1999) suggesting that a manual response to a stimulus may influence the cognitive processes. This study is mainly focused on the problem of graphical panel position on the screen and its impact on the accomplishment of simple ‘search and click’ tasks. Despite some previous works dealing with this subject, there are still several issues that need to be addressed. The earlier research results are not always consistent. Let us take for instance locations of web site menus. McCarthy et al. (2003) demonstrated that the left menu location is faster
Gabor Orientation Histogram for Face Representation and Recognition

Recently the Gabor-based features have been successfully used for face representation and recognition. In these methods, the face image is filtered with the multi-scale multi-orientation Gabor filter bank to generate multiple Gabor magnitude images (GMIs), and then the down-sampled GMIs or the LBP (local binary pattern) histograms of GMIs are stacked to form the feature. The stacking procedure makes the dimensions of these features very high, which causes extreme computing and storage load. In this paper, a novel Gabor-based feature termed Gabor orientation histogram (GOH) is proposed, which greatly reduces the feature dimension. Unlike stacking, GOH takes the structure underlying different GMIs into account by regarding the GMIs of different orientations at the same point as a whole, namely orientation vector, to represent the point. Moreover, GOH takes the structure of local region into account by calculating the orientation histogram based on the orientation vectors of points in the local region to describe the region, which is robust to local deformation and noises. The experimental results on the FERET and FRGC databases show that the proposed GOH reduces the feature extraction and recognition time significantly while retains the high recognition performance, which makes a progress toward the practical applications of Gabor-based features for face representation and recognition.
Histological studies on the kidney of Marwari Sheep (Ovis aries)

The microscopic studies of kidneys of 6 Marwari sheep showed that the thick fibrous capsule consisted of two layers. The outer layer of dense collagenous fibres with a few elastic fibres. Fibroblast and some smooth muscle cell were also present in outer layer. The inner layer consisted predominantly of reticular fibres with collagenous fibres and had a distinct thick smooth muscle layer. Interstitial tissue contained network reticular fibres which extended from the capsule to the apex of papilla. The juxtaglomerular structure and basement membranes were P.A. S. positive. The papillary duct lined with simple columnar epithelium which become transitional before opening into the papilla.
Sailing the Ship through the Storm. Necessary and S ufficient Conditions for the Breakdown and Survival of Electoral Regimes in the Interwar Y ears

Based on a configurational analysis this paper iden tifies, which conditions are necessary and which are sufficient for the breakdown and survival of non-autocratic electoral regimes in the interwar period. It turns out that economic, politi cal and social stress might well be the main reason why there was an authoritarian “reverse wave ” in the interwar period, but this factor does not help us to explain why some democracies in this period survived while others failed. The results are as complex as historic reality. Str uctural factors do matter as well as institutions and actors. It turns out that under th e preconditions that an electoral regime had a strong labor-repressive agrarian elite, was not hig hly developed and had no electoral and constitutional tradition before the First World War and no leading politician acted in favor of democracy during a times of crisis, and, the regime broke down if there was either no Charlemagne heritage or a leading politician acted in favor of autocracy in a time of crisis or there was a strong president. Conversely, a non-aut ocratic electoral regime survived the interwar years under the preconditions that it had a tradition of a strong and effective state apparatus (Charlemagne heritage) and no territorial loss and there was no pro-autocratic action of a leading politician in a economic and/or political crisis, if it either established a constitutional democracy pre World War I or there was a pro-democratic action of a leading politician in a time of crisis or the democratic re gime was parliamentarian.
The determinants of capital structure among SMEs in Malaysia

At present there is limited number of studies into capital structure among small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Most theoretical and empirical studies of this topic are focused on large corporations. However, increasing importance of economic contributions of SMEs around the world, particularly in developing countries necessitates better understanding of capital structure decisions among SMEs. This research investigates the determinants of capital structure among SMEs in Malaysia, among SMEs within the list of Enterprise 50 award winners from 1998 to 2010. Electronic surveys were conducted with a response rate of 29.5%. Result shows that the average debt-to-equity ratio among these SMEs is 57 to 43. Factors determining firm's capital structure are investigated through selected firm's characteristic which focuses on the possible association between these characteristics with firm's capital structure. Overall, three out of seven selected firm's characteristics were found to have statistically significant relationship with firm's capital structure, and all these three variables were also found to have an ability in explaining variations in the firm's capital structure. Bivariate and multiple regression analysis revealed that non-debt tax shields, tangibility of assets and firm's level of liquidity to have a statistically significant relationship with (and an ability to explains) firm's capital structure. This research enhances the existing body of knowledge of financial practices of SMEs, particularly within the context Malaysian SMEs by providing the information on determinants of firm's capital structure.
Prevalence and Factors Associated to Depression Among Ambo University Students, Ambo, West Ethiopia

Background Depressionamong university students is extremely prevalent and wide spread problem across the world (1,2). University students are special group of people that are during a critical transitory period in which they are going from adolescence to adulthood and can be one of the most stress full times in person’s life. As a reaction trying to fit and maintaining good grades, plan for the future and be away from home some students get depressed (4 &5). The average age of on set is also on the decline, making depression a particularly silent problem area for university student populations (6). The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence of depression and its associated factors among Ambo university students by using CESD’s questioner to measure depression. Results The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence of depression and its associated factors among Ambo university students by using CESD’s questioner to measure depression. The study result showed that among the study participant 32.2% were depressed. Being female is Four times more likely to be depressed when compared with male(AOR 4.02,95%,C/I 1.22,4.03),current use of Khat is three times more likely to be depressed (AOR 3.05, 95%,C/I 2.05,6.02),Being first year student when compared with the academic year is three times more likely to be depressed (AOR 3.00,95%,C/I 3.02,7.25). Methods Institution based cross-sectional quantitative study design involving the administration of English version of the pre-tested structured self-administered questionnaire was used to collect information Depression prevalence and factors associated to it. The source population was stratified based on their year of study. The study population was selected using simple random sampling technique. Conclusion The prevalence of Depression in this study was high compared to study done at Jimma University, Ethiopia and Iran but lower when compared to study done at Michigan University, America. In this study being Female was associated to depression; Current user khat and being first year student. Recommendation: Ambo University should create awareness about the effect of psychoactive substance like Khat since it can cause depression and also help first year students to adapt to the new environment because they separated from their family and previous environment.