Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Safety Net Investments in Children

ABSTRACT:In this paper, we examine what groups of children are served by core childhood social safety net programs—including Medicaid, EITC, CTC, SNAP, and AFDC/TANF—and how they have changed over time. We find that virtually all gains in spending on the social safety net for children since 1990 have gone to families with earnings, and to families with income above the poverty line. These trends are the result of welfare reform and the expansion of in-work tax credits. We review the available research and find that access to safety net programs during childhood improves outcomes for children and society over the long run. This evidence suggests that the recent changes to the social safety net may have lasting negative effects on the poorest children.
Molecular mechanisms of isoniazid resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium bovis

Genetic and biochemical studies have suggested a link between reduced catalase activity and resistance to isoniazid in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In this study, we examined the molecular mechanisms of resistance to isoniazid with six in vitro mutants of the M. tuberculosis complex (Mycobacterium bovis and M. tuberculosis). Five of six mutants resistant to isoniazid were negative by catalase assays. Immunoblot analyses using a polyclonal antibody against the katG gene product (catalase-peroxidase) demonstrated that the enzyme is not produced in four of these isoniazid-resistant strains. A complete deletion of the katG gene was detected in only one of these isoniazid-resistant M. tuberculosis complex strains by Southern blot analyses. In two other resistant strains, partial deletions of the katG gene were identified. A point mutation which resulted in the insertion of a termination codon in the katG coding sequence caused a catalase-negative phenotype in a fourth strain. Of the two resistant strains which produce the enzyme, one was shown to be negative by a catalase assay. Single-stranded conformational polymorphism and DNA sequence analyses identified a mutation in the katG gene of this strain which may contribute to reduced enzymatic activity and subsequent isoniazid resistance. These data demonstrate that genetic alterations to the katG gene other than complete deletions are prevalent and may contribute significantly to the number of cases of isoniazid-resistant tuberculosis.
Military Spending, Conflict and External Debt in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT The damaging economic effects of the debt crises on Africa in the late 1980s encouraged considerable research on the determinants of external debt in developing economies. Although sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) debt was cut by two-thirds by 2008, through two debt relief programmes, debt in the region has since been rising at an increasingly rapid pace. This study provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of external debt in SSA over the period 1960–2016, using dynamic panel methods. It also considers two potentially important factors that have received relatively little attention. One is military spending, rarely considered, despite a number of well-publicised scandals over the procurement of unnecessary and expensive high-tech weapons systems. A second, is the possibility that the countries studied have been involved in conflict. The empirical results point to a positive impact of military spending on external debt, but with some evidence of heterogeneity across the countries. Furthermore, findings indicate that the positive effect of military expenditure on debt becomes more marked in countries that have been affected by conflict. These results imply that policies to improve security and reduce military spending could be beneficial in reducing external debt and, potentially, improving economic performance in the region.
$Q$ Evaluation of Antennas in an Electrically Conductive Medium

The quality factor is analyzed for the spherical modes which represent fields of an antenna in an electrically lossy medium. Like the previous approach in free space, the stored energy in the evanescent field is represented by subtracting the energy associated with the radiation field from the total field energy. Instead of evaluating the stored energy over the whole space, simple equations on Q using the radiation efficiency and the medium property are derived using the concept of power dissipation in a lossy medium and the relation between Q of TM and TE modes. The theory is verified by the comparison of Q's evaluated from the impedance bandwidths of TM and TE modes and the proposed equations in a lossy medium.
The Politics of Financial Booms and Crises

The persistence of policy switches—whereby presidents renege on campaign promises shortly after winning elections—30 years after Latin America’s redemocratization defies established notions of democratic representation, and poses a puzzle to analysts and voters alike. In this article, I advance current explanations for switches, by arguing they can only be understood in the context of currency booms and crises, typical of Latin American economies after their reintegration into world finance in the 1970s. To test my propositions empirically, I examine elections held in the region between 1978 and 2006 and find evidence consistent with the claim that switches are more likely to occur in periods of dollar scarcity, when the need to attract financial capital to the economy pushes leftist presidents into adopting policies opposed to the programs they announced during campaign.
Structure and function of yeast Atg20, a sorting nexin that facilitates autophagy induction

Significance Autophagy is a cellular process that results in the capture of cytosolic material in double-membrane vesicles, which subsequently fuse with lysosomes to degrade the captured contents. Autophagy is essential to maintain cellular homeostasis, respond to cellular stress, and prevent the accumulation of material that could damage the cell. The initiation of autophagy is carried out by the Atg1 complex. Whereas recent work has provided functional and mechanistic insight into many components of the Atg1 complex, one member of this complex—Atg20—has remained relatively uncharacterized. Here we report a detailed investigation into the structure and function of Atg20, including the identification of an amphipathic helix in Atg20 that is required for efficient autophagy and membrane tubulation. The Atg20 and Snx4/Atg24 proteins have been identified in a screen for mutants defective in a type of selective macroautophagy/autophagy. Both proteins are connected to the Atg1 kinase complex, which is involved in autophagy initiation, and bind phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate. Atg20 and Snx4 contain putative BAR domains, suggesting a possible role in membrane deformation, but they have been relatively uncharacterized. Here we demonstrate that, in addition to its function in selective autophagy, Atg20 plays a critical role in the efficient induction of nonselective autophagy. Atg20 is a dynamic posttranslationally modified protein that engages both structurally stable (PX and BAR) and intrinsically disordered domains for its function. In addition to its PX and BAR domains, Atg20 uses a third membrane-binding module, a membrane-inducible amphipathic helix present in a previously undescribed location in Atg20 within the putative BAR domain. Taken together, these findings yield insights into the molecular mechanism of the autophagy machinery.
THREE ESSAYS ON COLLEGE EARNINGS PREMIUM AND CHINA’S HIGHER EDUCATION EXPANSION

OF DISSERTATION THREE ESSAYS ON COLLEGE EARNINGS PREMIUM AND CHINA’S HIGHER EDUCATION EXPANSION My dissertation consists of three essays that study the college premium in China and how it has been affected by China’s higher education expansion. In the first essay, I utilize the high education expansion as exogenous source to estimate the college premium. The rapidly changing access to college provides a rare opportunity to estimate a local treatment effect (LATE) of college education on earnings by utilizing the drastic increase in college admission rate in 1999. I also utilize the yearly admission rate as an instrumental variable for the endogenous college education. Using China Household Income Project 2013, the two IV estimates of college premium are 75.7 and 57.5 log points respectively. The second essay examines the trends of the college earnings premium by age groups from 1995 to 2013 in China. Specifically, based on China Household Income Projects, the college premium for the younger group (age 25-34) stagnated, while the college premium for the older group (age 45-54) increased substantially. I attribute the stagnation for the younger group to the fast-growing relative supply of younger college workers due to China’s higher education expansion. Holding the age cohort and survey year constant, a one unit increase in log relative size of college workers leads to 10.3 log points decrease in college premium. The third essay further explores the channel through which the cohort size affects the college premium. Using Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition, I find that, for all survey years and age groups, the differential of the higher-skilled occupations share between college and non-college educated workers only explains a small part of college premium, 10%-30%. The part due to the higher-skilled occupational premium is negligible. Over 70% of the college premium is contributed by the college premium among the workers with lower-skilled occupations.
Long-term Outcomes of Penetrating Keratoplasty for Keratoconus With Resolved Corneal Hydrops

Purpose: To address the controversial issue of whether the occurrence of corneal hydrops adversely affects the fate of subsequent penetrating keratoplasty (PK), this study compared the long-term outcomes of PK in keratoconic eyes with resolved corneal hydrops with those without prior corneal hydrops. Methods: This was a retrospective chart review of 102 eyes of 102 patients with keratoconus who underwent PK. The primary outcome measure was endothelial rejection–free allograft survival and the secondary outcomes were vision, postoperative complications, and histopathologic findings of corneal buttons obtained during PK. Results: The mean follow-up after PK was 5.5 ± 3.3 years. The Kaplan–Meier endothelial rejection–free allograft survival at 1 and 5 years post-PK were 93.7% ± 4% and 82.6% ± 7%, respectively, in 32 eyes with hydrops and 100% and 98% ± 2%, respectively, in 70 eyes without hydrops (P = 0.04). Multivariate analysis showed that the risk of endothelial rejection episodes was greater in eyes with longer duration of corneal hydrops (P = 0.019) and coexistent ocular allergy (P = 0.012). All rejection episodes were reversed medically and only 1 allograft failed because of postoperative endophthalmitis. More than 90% of eyes achieved a visual acuity of better than 20/40. Common postoperative complications were cataract and graft infiltrate. Histopathology in cases of resolved hydrops after intracameral gas showed unique compression artifacts like folding and burial of the broken ends of Descemet membrane in the stroma. Conclusions: Although endothelial rejection episodes are more common in eyes with resolved corneal hydrops, long-term allograft survival and visual results after PK in eyes with keratoconus are excellent, irrespective of prior corneal hydrops.
What Drives Policyholders' Relative Willigness to Pay? Empirical Analysis under Default Probability and Varying Coverage

Based on empirical data acquired by using an online survey, we investigate which parameters are key drivers for policyholders’ relative willingness to pay against the background of high insured values. Our research is conducted from the insurer’s perspective to understand which policyholder groups exhibit a high relative willingness to pay or do not cover the insurer’s expected expenses. We find that the certainty effect underlies for probabilistic insurance but not for underinsurance. This implies no relevant impact of the insurance coverage on the relative willingness to pay. Furthermore, the relative willingness to pay for high insured values decreases significantly with a higher default probability, higher age, lower risk aversion, or lower wealth. In addition, the average relative willingness to pay for individuals with medium financial literacy is close to 1 (fair premium), but policyholders with the highest financial literacy pay substantially less (0.621). We also find that for overinsurance and full coverage, policyholders significantly deviate from expected utility equilibria. This insight is independent of the initial wealth and the degree of risk aversion. Concerning underinsurance, the deviation is less significant or even not significant at all.
Deep Neural Network Approximation using Tensor Sketching

Deep neural networks are powerful learning models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on many computer vision, speech, and language processing tasks. In this paper, we study a fundamental question that arises when designing deep network architectures: Given a target network architecture can we design a smaller network architecture that approximates the operation of the target network? The question is, in part, motivated by the challenge of parameter reduction (compression) in modern deep neural networks, as the ever increasing storage and memory requirements of these networks pose a problem in resource constrained environments. In this work, we focus on deep convolutional neural network architectures, and propose a novel randomized tensor sketching technique that we utilize to develop a unified framework for approximating the operation of both the convolutional and fully connected layers. By applying the sketching technique along different tensor dimensions, we design changes to the convolutional and fully connected layers that substantially reduce the number of effective parameters in a network. We show that the resulting smaller network can be trained directly, and has a classification accuracy that is comparable to the original network.
Market Integration, Country Institutions and IPO Underpricing

We extend the IPO literature analysing the role of financial market integration in the development of IPO markets and the pricing of newly listed stocks. Using a hierarchical linear model, we show that differences in underpricing between markets with high and low financial integration levels are economically significant and may explain the choice of location in the listing process. Firstly, market integration negatively affects the level of IPO underpricing by increasing the importance and efficiency of the financial intermediation process via tradable securities. Secondly, the presence of a deeper market integration has a moderation effect, which weakens the explanatory power of country institutions in the cross-country variation of IPO underpricing. Finally, we suggest a hierarchical structure be assumed for the modelling of cross-country IPO studies with heterogeneous country characteristics. Our results are robust to alternative measures of financial integration and several model specifications.
Zinc is a key factor in controlling alternation of two types of L31 protein in the Bacillus subtilis ribosome

We have analysed changes in the composition of ribosomal proteins during cell growth in Bacillus subtilis. Ribosome fractions were prepared from B. subtilis cells at different phases of growth and were separated by radical‐free and highly reducing (RFHR) two‐dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. We identified 50 ribosomal proteins, including two paralogues of L31 protein (RpmE and YtiA). Although the ribosome fraction extracted from exponentially growing cells contained RpmE protein, this protein disappeared during the stationary phase. In contrast, YtiA was detected in the ribosome fraction extracted after the end of exponential growth. Expression of the ytiA gene encoding YtiA was found to be negatively controlled by Zur, a zinc‐specific transcriptional repressor that controls zinc transport operons. Analysis by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP‐MS) indicated that RpmE contains one zinc ion per molecule of protein. In addition, mutagenesis of the rpmE gene encoding RpmE revealed that Cys‐36 and Cys‐39, located within a CxxC motif, are required not only for binding zinc but also for the accumulation of RpmE in the cell. Taken together, these results indicate that zinc plays an essential role in the alternation between two types of L31 protein in the ribosome of B. subtilis.
Finding near-optimal configurations in product lines by random sampling

Software Product Lines (SPLs) are highly configurable systems. This raises the challenge to find optimal performing configurations for an anticipated workload. As SPL configuration spaces are huge, it is infeasible to benchmark all configurations to find an optimal one. Prior work focused on building performance models to predict and optimize SPL configurations. Instead, we randomly sample and recursively search a configuration space directly to find near-optimal configurations without constructing a prediction model. Our algorithms are simpler and have higher accuracy and efficiency.
Relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition and blood pressure in school children.

BACKGROUND The purpose of this comparative and correlational cross-sectional study was to describe the associations between cardiorespiratory fitness, blood pressure and body composition in Portuguese school children. METHODS The sample comprised 529 children (246 males and 283 females) aged 8-15 years-old. Body height and body mass were determined by standard anthropometric METHODS Blood pressures were measured with children sitting after at least 5 min rest. The maximal multistage 20 m shuttle run test was carried-out to predict maximal aerobic power. RESULTS The present study shows that boys were more fit (p= or <0.05) and less fat than girls (p= or <0.05). Multiple regression analysis reveals that weight and age explained significantly (p= or <0.01) the amounts of systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). In girls, percentage of fat (%F) showed an influence on the variance in SBP (4.9%, p= or <0.05). In addition, weight (14.5%) and age (9.8%) account significantly (p= or <0.01) for the amount of variance to DBP in males. For girls, age (11.4%) and BMI (2.4%) account significantly to the variance found in DBP. However, the independent variables, for both sexes, account less than 50% of the overall variance found in blood pressures values. CONCLUSIONS In conclusion, the present study shows that boys were more fit and had less fat than girls. The level of cardiorespiratory fitness does not seem to be an important correlate of blood pressure variation across age groups and gender.
Effect of ultrasonic and microwave disintegration on physico-chemical and biodegradation characteristics of waste-activated sludge

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of ultrasonic and microwave disintegration on physico-chemical and biodegradability properties of waste-activated sludge (WAS) from a municipal wastewater treatment plant. Another aim was to carry out particle size distribution (PSD) analysis as an integral component of sludge characterization to highlight the transformation mechanisms involved in pretreatment processes and better understand the biodegradation patterns of sonicated and irradiated WAS liquids examined by means of respirometric measurements. Various combinations of sonication and microwave irradiation parameters were applied to optimize operating conditions. The optimum ultrasonic density was determined as 1.5 W/mL, and energy dosages lower than 30,000 kJ/kg TS resulted in a fairly linear increase in the soluble chemical oxygen demand (SCOD) release. An irradiation time of 10 min and a temperature of 175°C were selected as the optimum microwave pretreatment conditions for sludge liquefaction. The most apparent impact of ultrasonication on the PSD of COD was the shifting of the peak at the particulate fraction (>1600 nm) toward the lowest size range (<2 nm). Microwave heating at the selected experimental conditions and ultrasonic pretreatment at 30,000 kJ/kg TS exhibited comparable size distribution and biodegradation characteristics to those of domestic sewage.
Evidence for Bicarbonate Secretion by Ameloblasts in a Novel Cellular Model

Formation and growth of hydroxyapatite crystals during amelogenesis generate a large number of protons that must be neutralized, presumably by HCO3− ions transported from ameloblasts into the developing enamel matrix. Ameloblasts express a number of transporters and channels known to be involved in HCO3− transport in other epithelia. However, to date, there is no functional evidence for HCO3− transport in these cells. To address questions related to HCO3− export from ameloblasts, we have developed a polarized 2-dimensional culture system for HAT-7 cells, a rat cell line of ameloblast origin. HAT-7 cells were seeded onto Transwell permeable filters. Transepithelial resistance was measured as a function of time, and the expression of transporters and tight junction proteins was investigated by conventional and quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. Intracellular pH regulation and HCO3− transport were assessed by microfluorometry. HAT-7 cells formed epithelial layers with measureable transepithelial resistance on Transwell permeable supports and expressed claudin-1, claudin-4, and claudin-8—key proteins for tight junction formation. Transport proteins previously described in maturation ameloblasts were also present in HAT-7 cells. Microfluorometry showed that the HAT-7 cells were polarized with a high apical membrane CO2 permeability and vigorous basolateral HCO3− uptake, which was sensitive to Na+ withdrawal, to the carbonic anhydrase inhibitor acetazolamide and to H2DIDS inhibition. Measurements of transepithelial HCO3− transport showed a marked increase in response to Ca2+- and cAMP-mobilizing stimuli. Collectively, 2-dimensional HAT-7 cell cultures on permeable supports 1) form tight junctions, 2) express typical tight junction proteins and electrolyte transporters, 3) are functionally polarized, and 4) can accumulate HCO3− ions from the basolateral side and secrete them at the apical membrane. These studies provide evidence for a regulated, vectorial, basolateral-to-apical bicarbonate transport in polarized HAT-7 cells. We therefore propose that the HAT-7 cell line is a useful functional model for studying electrolyte transport by ameloblasts.
Bortezomib enhances fatty liver preservation in Institut George Lopez‐1 solution through adenosine monophosphate activated protein kinase and Akt/mTOR pathways

The aim of this study is to investigate the protective mechanisms induced by bortezomib added to Institut George Lopez (IGL)‐1 preservation solution to protect steatotic livers against cold ischaemia reperfusion injury and to examine whether these mechanisms occur through the activation of adenosine monophosphate activated protein kinase (AMPK), Akt/mTOR pathways.