Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Foray Search: An Effective Systematic Dispersal Strategy in Fragmented Landscapes

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, population models generally assume that the dispersal trajectories of animals are random, but systematic dispersal could be more efficient at detecting new habitat and may therefore constitute a more realistic assumption. Here, we investigate, by means of simulations, the properties of a potentially widespread systematic dispersal strategy termed “foray search. ” Foray search was more efficient in detecting suitable habitat than was random dispersal in most landscapes and was less subject to energetic constraints. However, it also resulted in considerably shorter net dispersed distances and higher mortality per net dispersed distance than did random dispersal, and it would therefore be likely to lead to lower dispersal rates toward the margins of population networks. Consequently, the use of foray search by dispersers could crucially affect the extinction‐colonization balance of metapopulations and the evolution of dispersal rates. We conclude that population models need to take the dispersal trajectories of individuals into account in order to make reliable predictions.
Does the disclosure of corporate governance structures affect firms' earnings quality?

Purpose - The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) mandated a variety of corporate governance mechanisms to improve the transparency of financial reporting quality. This paper's aim is to investigate whether SOX's recently mandated disclosure of corporate governance structures affects the market's perception of earnings informativeness and firms' earnings management. Design/methodology/approach - Since the first compliant disclosure of the Act would be found in firms' 2002-2003 financial reports, the authors retrieve the post-SOX data (pre-SOX data) from the 2002 to 2003 (2001-2002) period. Further, the study adopts Anderson Findings - It is found that the market valuation of earnings surprises is significantly higher for firms which disclose stronger corporate governance functions. It is also found that the effectiveness of corporate governance in monitoring earnings management is improved after the mandated disclosure. Originality/value - The empirical evidence shows that the quality of accounting earnings is increased after the SOX's mandated disclosure, which strengthens the link between financial reporting and corporate governance functions.
Voting as a Positive Right: A Reply to Flanders

This brief symposium piece, written in response to an article by Chad Flanders, asks: Can a state allow write-in votes, but discourage them by making them difficult to cast? I argue that the answer is no – for reasons that highlight two fundamental, but underappreciated, aspects of election law.
Knowledge Creation and New Product Performance: The Role of Creativity

This research is concerned with how knowledge creation influences new product performance through creativity, which includes novelty and appropriateness. The following relationships are examined in our proposed model: (1) the influence of knowledge creation on new product performance; (2) the influence of novelty and appropriateness on new product performance; and (3) the influence of knowledge creation on novelty and appropriateness. A questionnaire was designed and mailed to the sampled Taiwanese manufacturing companies. The analysis results show that knowledge creation helps research and development personnel create novel and appropriate products, which in turn increase new product success. New product performance is affected by both novelty and appropriateness, the former of which has a greater influence. Through additional exploratory analyses, in which socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization are antecedents, we show that socialization's effect on new product performance is fully mediated by novelty and appropriateness, but internalization's influence is only partially mediated. Meantime, the influence of externalization on performance is fully mediated by novelty, but not by appropriateness. Combination has a direct influence on new product performance. Finally, this research provides theoretical and managerial implications based on these results.
The Learning Organization, Power, Politics and Ideology Introduction

Three main criticisms of the 'learning organization' are developed in this paper. First, it is argued that the concept is badly flawed because of its proponents' apolitical assumptions. This leads them to neglect the political activity likely to be encountered in a learning organization, activity which will tend to frustrate the learning aims. Second, while their model allows for greater employee empowerment the amount will probably be relatively modest in real terms. On the other hand, the power of managers, especially those at the apex of the organization, is likely to be enhanced by their privileged access to any extra informational and symbolic resources that are created by individual and collective learning processes. The third, and potentially the most damning, criticism is that the concept of the 'learning organization' is expressed in ways that provide raw material for managerial ideology, potentially constraining the meanings and actions of other employees so that they support the interests of the dominant coalition.
Contemporary outcomes of urgent coronary artery bypass graft surgery following non-ST elevation myocardial infarction: urgent coronary artery bypass graft surgery consistently outperforms Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events predicted survival.

OBJECTIVES The Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE) registry reported that the in-hospital risk of death from non-ST elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) is 5%, with an 11% mortality by 6 months. Prospective Registry of Acute Ischaemic Syndromes in the UK demonstrated that the overall risk of death from NSTEMI over 4 years is 25%. In GRACE, while 28% of patients received percutaneous intervention, only 10% received coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). Results of urgent CABG surgery following NSTEMI are difficult to interpret as these often include patients who have had STEMIs and urgent surgery. With increasing multidisciplinary assessment of patients with acute coronary syndromes (ACS), accurate data collection on the outcome of such patients could inform correct revascularization strategy. METHODS Three hundred and forty-two consecutive patients who had undergone urgent CABG from April 2004 to April 2009 at a single institution were identified. The GRACE predicted mortality was calculated from hospital records and patients categorized into three groups based upon their predicted risk. Late survival data were obtained from the UK Office of National Statistics. RESULTS The GRACE score could be calculated in 270 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of NSTEMI. Of the 304 probable patients with NSTEMI, there were 5 in-hospital deaths (1.6%). Survival at 6 months was higher than GRACE predicted mortality in all groups. At 6 months the predicted versus observed mortality in the low-risk group was 4 versus 2% (P = 0.05), in the medium-risk group it was 12.5 versus 1.9% (P = 0.0001) and in the high-risk group it was 25 versus 20% (P = 0.45). CONCLUSIONS In-hospital CABG performed after NSTEMI is associated with a low-mortality risk and survival significantly better than that predicted by the GRACE score.
The effects of over, required and under-education on earnings in manufacturing

This paper presents returns to education by taking into account the quality of jobs match held by workers in the manufacturing sector of Malaysia. This type of study is quite rare not only in the country but also across developing nations.Using the Second Malaysia Productivity Investment Climate Survey (PICS-2), nearly 20 per cent and 30 per cent of workers employed in jobs for which they are over-educated and under-educated, respectively.Further findings indicated that over-education is more acute among-st highly-educated workers whilst under-education is more evident for lowly educated workers.By gender, women have a higher proportion of over-educated workers compared to men.Consequently, over-education leads to lower productivity in terms of earnings.In the study, augmented Mincer earnings equation, i.e. the ORU model clearly showed that although returns to surplus education was positive ( ), the return was lower than the returns to required education ( ), approximately 6 per cent against 10 per cent. This means that overeducated workers earn significantly lower than their co-workers who are in similar jobs but who have less education, but well matched. Moreover, the ORU model signified that returns to required education was much greater than returns to actual educational attainment.All of these implied that the rate of return to education depends on the allocation of skills over jobs where earnings is not fully embodied but is (partly) determined by job characteristics and/or by the quality of the match between skills supplied by the worker and skills required by the job.Nevertheless, the situation of over-education among highly educated workers in the Malaysian labour market may impede the country’s intention to move toward the state of being a high-income country, as outlined in the “New Economic Model” blueprint, since it reduces individuals’ productivity.
From School to University: The Demand for Post-Compulsory Education in Britain

* The work reported here was done at the Centre for Labour Economics, LSE, and it is a revision of earlier work done at the National Bureau of Economic Research. This revision owes much to the comments and suggestions of Richard Layard and to the technical expertise of George Alogoskoufis. Thanks are also due to the Department of Education and Science for their comments and help with the data, and to the Manpower Services Commission, the Department of Employment, and the Ford Foundation for finance.
When and How Do Domestic Constraints Matter?

Recent studies of uncertainty in international relations treat nation-states as unitary actors, but it may be more realistic to suppose that uncertainty also arises from domestic decision-making processes. By formalizing Putnam's theory of two-level games, this article attempts to integrate the studies of uncertainty and the “second image. ” The distinction between domestic and international asymmetric information turns out to be subtle yet important. When there is complete information and international asymmetric information, domestic constraints may or may not enhance bargaining power; but they do not make successful ratification difficult. On the other hand, when there is incomplete domestic information, successful ratification is not guaranteed although the expected payoffs of the constrained negotiators may be still greater than without domestic constraints.
Aspects of Rational Insurance Purchasing

Problems concerned with purchasing of insurance coverage appear to be a fascinating and potentially fruitful field for application and testing of theories of riskbearing. In this note we shall analyze a series of such problems from the point of view of an individual facing certain risks. Given his risk situation and his economic background (as measured by his initial wealth), his problem is to decide whether he should provide for in­surance coverage and, if so, how much.
A Transient Protection Scheme for HVDC Transmission Line

The relation between the parameters of dc transmission line and the variation of transient energy has been analyzed under various fault conditions in this paper. According to that, a new transient energy protective scheme is proposed. It is developed based on the distributed parameter line model in which the transient energy distribution over the line can be obtained from the voltage and current measurements at both terminals and the fault can be recognized from the calculated value simply. The test system is modeled based on the CIGRE benchmark and considered the distributed parameters of the dc transmission line. Comprehensive test studies show that the performance of transient energy protection scheme is encouraging. It can not only identify internal fault and external faults correctly and quickly, but can also respond to the high ground resistance fault. Finally, two main factors, including fault resistance and transmission distance, that affect the performance of the protection are also discussed.
An attribute-based model of quality satisfaction for Internet self-service technology

Many factors may contribute to consumers' satisfaction with Internet shopping, but the issue has rarely been addressed from the perspective of customer participation. Drawing on the attribute-based model, this article examines the attributes important for consumer satisfaction with Internet-based self-service technology (ISST). In addition, the current study argues that the importance of the attributes in determining consumers' satisfaction would vary as a function of their readiness to adopt technology. A survey was conducted to collect data from experienced users of online travel agencies or bookstores. The results based on 459 participants show that efficiency, ease of use, performance, perceived control and convenience are attributes having significant impacts on users' satisfaction with ISST. This study also identifies three consumer segments among ISST users based on their scores on technology-readiness drivers and inhibitors. As predicted, the importance of each attribute at determining user satisfaction varies across the three segments. Finally, implications for managers and researchers are discussed.
The Subnational Politics of Economic Adjustment

Existing research has failed to address the impact of subnational politics on economic adjustment. This article attempts to fill this gap by outlining theoretical reasons for anticipating policy divergences across levels of government and by offering three hypotheses to account for variation at the subnational level. The authors explore these ideas on the basis of the Argentine experience. The study traces the impact of subnational policy on Argentine economic adjustment and tests hypotheses about subnational policy variation on the basis of provincial fiscal data. The authors' findings underline the importance of subnational policy choice for national performance and suggest a revised understanding of the role of political competition in the economic adjustment process. The authors find considerable evidence that interactions between party competition and the structure of the public sector shape provincial fiscal performance and thereby condition the capacity for economic adjustment at the national level.
Farsighted Coalitional Stability of a Price Leadership Cartel

This paper analyzes the farsighted behaviour of firms that form a dominant price leadership cartel. We consider stability concepts such as the farsighted core, the farsighted stable sets, and the largest consistent set. We show that: (i) the farsighted core is either an empty set or a singleton set of the grand cartel; (ii) any Pareto efficient cartel is itself a farsighted stable set; and (iii) the set of cartels in which fringe firms enjoy higher profits than the firms in the minimal Pareto efficient cartel is the largest consistent set.
Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image

This paper focuses on semantic scene completion, a task for producing a complete 3D voxel representation of volumetric occupancy and semantic labels for a scene from a single-view depth map observation. Previous work has considered scene completion and semantic labeling of depth maps separately. However, we observe that these two problems are tightly intertwined. To leverage the coupled nature of these two tasks, we introduce the semantic scene completion network (SSCNet), an end-to-end 3D convolutional network that takes a single depth image as input and simultaneously outputs occupancy and semantic labels for all voxels in the camera view frustum. Our network uses a dilation-based 3D context module to efficiently expand the receptive field and enable 3D context learning. To train our network, we construct SUNCG - a manually created largescale dataset of synthetic 3D scenes with dense volumetric annotations. Our experiments demonstrate that the joint model outperforms methods addressing each task in isolation and outperforms alternative approaches on the semantic scene completion task. The dataset and code is available at http://sscnet.cs. princeton.edu.
Reverse Auctions for Agri-Environmental Improvements: Bid-Selection Rules and Pricing for Beneficial Management Practice Adoption

Le rejet de nutriants dans les bassins hydrographiques est l’un des impacts possibles de l’élevage. Dans cette étude, nous examinons, à l’aide de méthodes d’économique expérimentale, l’efficacité des enchères inversées comme moyen de réduire ces rejets. Nous avons établi nos paramètres expérimentaux en nous basant sur une pratique utilisée dans un bassin du Manitoba et reconnue pour ses bons résultats. Grâce à ces paramètres, nous avons analysé trois règles de sélection des offres et deux règles de prix. Nos résultats montrent que la pratique utilisée au Manitoba donne d’aussi bons résultats quand les cibles fixées sont liées au bétail que quand elles correspondent à des objectifs de réduction des rejets sur les fermes. Les enchères qui maximisent la participation des producteurs donnent de piètres résultats aux niveaux tant environnemental qu’économique. Et la règle du prix unique donne de meilleurs résultats que la règle du prix discriminatoire.
The orthopedic aspects of the fetal alcohol syndrome.

Eight cases of the fetal alcohol syndrome are presented with emphasis on their frequent orthopedic anomalies, i.e. hypoplastic toenails (100%), shortened fingers, usually the fifth (75%), radioulnar synostosis, camptodactyly of fingers, clinodactyly of toes, and flexion contractures of the elbow (all 50%). These are in addition to 7 other orthopedic anomalies observed less frequently and some 18 general characteristics had an extensive endocrine, biochemical and genetic work-up and no abnormalities were found to explain the snydrome other than the teratogenicity of the maternal alcohol abuse. Since the orthopedist may be the first physician to see these patients, diagnosis of these musculoskeletal anomalies should include a social history and investigation for fetal alcohol syndrome.
Response: Commentary: How to Make the Ghosts in my Bedroom Disappear? Focused-Attention Meditation Combined with Muscle Relaxation (MR Therapy)—A Direct Treatment Intervention for Sleep Paralysis

Citation: Jalal B (2017) Response: Commentary: How to Make the Ghosts in my Bedroom Disappear? Focused-Attention Meditation Combined with Muscle Relaxation (MR Therapy)—A Direct Treatment Intervention for Sleep Paralysis. Front. Psychol. 8:760. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017. 00760 Response: Commentary: How to Make the Ghosts in my Bedroom Disappear? Focused-Attention Meditation Combined with Muscle Relaxation (MR Therapy)—A Direct Treatment Intervention for Sleep Paralysis
The Site of Spontaneous Ectopic Spike Initiation Facilitates Signal Integration in a Sensory Neuron

Essential to understanding the process of neuronal signal integration is the knowledge of where within a neuron action potentials (APs) are generated. Recent studies support the idea that the precise location where APs are initiated and the properties of spike initiation zones define the cell's information processing capabilities. Notably, the location of spike initiation can be modified homeostatically within neurons to adjust neuronal activity. Here we show that this potential mechanism for neuronal plasticity can also be exploited in a rapid and dynamic fashion. We tested whether dislocation of the spike initiation zone affects signal integration by studying ectopic spike initiation in the anterior gastric receptor neuron (AGR) of the stomatogastric nervous system of Cancer borealis. Like many other vertebrate and invertebrate neurons, AGR can generate ectopic APs in regions distinct from the axon initial segment. Using voltage-sensitive dyes and electrophysiology, we determined that AGR's ectopic spike activity was consistently initiated in the neuropil region of the stomatogastric ganglion motor circuits. At least one neurite branched off the AGR axon in this area; and indeed, we found that AGR's ectopic spike activity was influenced by local motor neurons. This sensorimotor interaction was state-dependent in that focal axon modulation with the biogenic amine octopamine, abolished signal integration at the primary spike initiation zone by dislocating spike initiation to a distant region of the axon. We demonstrate that the site of ectopic spike initiation is important for signal integration and that axonal neuromodulation allows for a dynamic adjustment of signal integration. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Although it is known that action potentials are initiated at specific sites in the axon, it remains to be determined how the precise location of action potential initiation affects neuronal activity and signal integration. We addressed this issue by studying ectopic spiking in the axon of a single-cell sensory neuron in the stomatogastric nervous system. Action potentials were consistently initiated at a specific region of the axon trunk, near a motor neuropil. Spike frequency was regulated by motor neuron activity, but only if spike initiation occurred at this location. Neuromodulation of the axon dislocated the site of initiation, resulting in abolishment of signal integration from motor neurons. Thus, neuromodulation allows for a dynamic adjustment of axonal signal integration.
China and the WTO: Will the Market Economy Status Make Any Difference after 2016?

China’s Protocol of Accession to the World Trade Organization, signed on December 2001, allowed other country members to consider China as a Non-Market Economy (NME) until the end of 2016. The aim of this article is to answer the following question: Can the Market Economy Status (MES) Recognition be measured in its compliance? The proxy used for that compliance was the number of antidumping investigations initiated per country. The expectation is that countries recognizing Chinese MES would initiate fewer antidumping investigations than countries still treating China as a NME. This would explain why the Chinese government has been campaigning vigorously since 2001 to gain MES among its economic partners. Using count-models, we demonstrate that MES had a positive impact in reducing the number of antidumping investigations against Chinese products.