Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Trade Revenue Implications of Trade Liberalization in Pakistan

This study attempts to investigate the effect of free trade on trade tax revenue in case of Pakistan during 1972-2014. For time series analysis, Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model has been used for examining the long run co-integration among the variables and Vector Error-Correction model is used for short run dynamics of the variables. The empirical results show that quantitative trade restriction is positively linked with trade tax revenue. On the basis of empirical findings, this study suggests that trade liberalization has negative impact on trade tax revenue. We improve the volume of average tariff rate; it may cause to increase the trade tax revenue for Pakistan in both short run and long run.
3 RELATEDWORK AND BACKGROUND 3 . 1 Dynamic Time Warping

Exact pattern matching is a method of localizing arbitrarily sized patterns in time series data. To date, the problem of exact pattern matching has only been fully addressed for one query pattern on one time series with a single best match location. This paper addresses the broader problem of finding the top-K pattern matches for a multidimensional time series pattern in a large multidimensional time series. The problem is addressed in two stages using an algorithm that combines ideas from the fields of data mining and bi-clustering. The first stage of the algorithm addresses selecting the dimension subset that matches the query pattern and locating the matching pattern. The second stage of the algorithm addresses the problem of finding the top-K matches of the pattern in the selected time series dimensions. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated against the best single dimensional exact pattern matching algorithm on real and simulated data.
Revisiting the Sustainability Concept of Urban Food Production from a Stakeholders’ Perspective

Urban Food Production (UFP) initiatives are expanding worldwide to enhance urban food production while contributing to the development of sustainable cities in a three-bottom perspective (environment, society, economy). Although the sustainability aspects of UFS have been addressed in the literature, there is a need to set a sustainability framework for UFP based on the concepts and the understanding of the stakeholders as a basis for quantifying their sustainability and for developing effective policy-making. This paper evaluates the concepts of the UFP sustainability from a stakeholders’ perspective through participatory methods and network analyses. Two different workshops were organized in the city of Bologna (Italy), where mind-mapping exercises to define the environmental, economic and social sustainability elements of UFP were performed. This bottom-up approach unveiled a comprehensive and complex vision of sustainable UFP, the relevance of certain sustainability elements and key aspects to take into consideration for the development of UFP and effective policy-making. The existence of bidimensional and tridimensional concepts indicated priorities, synergies and trade-offs among the dimensions of sustainability. The multi-scalar nature of UFP suggested that specific policies can be supported by global schemes (e.g., Sustainable Development Goals) and that UFP can be a local tool for democracy and equity at lower scales.
Hyperostotic tympanic bone spicules in domestic and wild animal species

Hyperostotic tympanic bone spicules" (HTBS), or "mucoperiosteal exostoses" (ME, syn.) are small, globular (≥ 1 mm in diameter), mostly stalked and drumstick-like, bony structures, which arise from the inner wall of the tympanic bulla and project into the middle ear cavity. HTBS present as mineral densities inside the tympanic bulla on radiographs or computed tomographic (CT) images. They have previously been referred to as "otoliths" and were thought to represent mineral concretions secondary to otitis media. Recently, it was shown that HTBS actually consist of regularly composed bone tissue, covered by normal middle ear mucosa. So far, HTBS have only extensively been described in dogs, where they occur with a prevalence of up to > 45%. A recent study detected ME, most likely representing HTBS, in the tympanic cavities of skeletonised skull bones of African lions. To estimate the occurrence of HTBS in other mammal species, the middle ears of adult animals of 78 different domestic, wild, and zoo species undergoing routine necropsy at the Institute of Veterinary Pathology of the LMU Munich, Germany were examined in the present study. HTBS were found in the tympanic bullae of carnivorous species, such as canids (wolf, fox), and in several large felid species (lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah). In contrast, HTBS were not present in domestic cats (more than to 200 cases), small carnivorous species such as mustelids, nor in any primate, ungulate, ruminant, pig, insectivore, or rodent species. The detectability of HTBS by CT of the tympanic bullae of large felids was demonstrated in an African lion. Histologically, HTBS consisted of mature lamellar bone, covered by periosteum and a partially ciliated, flat epithelium, regularly without any apparent inflammatory alterations. The present study demonstrates that HTBS may frequently occur in large felids and in different canid species. These findings should be taken into account when examining the middle ear, or interpret - ing bulla radiographs/CT-images of the respective species. However, the factors triggering the development of HTBS remain to be identified.
A flexible model for training action localization with varying levels of supervision

Spatio-temporal action detection in videos is typically addressed in a fully-supervised setup with manual annotation of training videos required at every frame. Since such annotation is extremely tedious and prohibits scalability, there is a clear need to minimize the amount of manual supervision. In this work we propose a unifying framework that can handle and combine varying types of less demanding weak supervision. Our model is based on discriminative clustering and integrates different types of supervision as constraints on the optimization. We investigate applications of such a model to training setups with alternative supervisory signals ranging from video-level class labels over temporal points or sparse action bounding boxes to the full per-frame annotation of action bounding boxes. Experiments on the challenging UCF101-24 and DALY datasets demonstrate competitive performance of our method at a fraction of supervision used by previous methods. The flexibility of our model enables joint learning from data with different levels of annotation. Experimental results demonstrate a significant gain by adding a few fully supervised examples to otherwise weakly labeled videos.
For richer and for poorer : well-being in Europe before and during crisis

The 2007 European financial crisis causes detrimental effects on its citizens’ well-being. We investigate these effects by comparing two well-being measures i.e. happiness and life satisfaction across European countries before and during the crisis. The European Value Study (EVS) 1999 and 2008 are used to examine these two different economic contexts and we apply multivariate multilevel model to study the effects of the crisis on happiness and life satisfaction simultaneously. The impacts of the crisis on well-being are far from uniform across countries in this area. The decline of well-being appears in several countries in Western Europe and Nordic countries, whereas in Eastern Europe the crisis has less effect on well-being. The larger impacts of the crisis affect more the vulnerable groups, including those with less income, unemployed, and older people. Companionships and social capital are important buffers to maintain well-being during the disruptive economic circumstances in Europe.
Observation of transition metals at shunt locations in multicrystalline silicon solar cells

By employing a combination of analytical tools including lock-in thermography and synchrotron-based x-ray fluorescencemicroscopy,transition metals have been identified at shunting locations in two types of low-cost multicrystalline silicon (mc-Si) solar cellmaterials: cast multicrystalline and ribbon growth on substrate (RGS). At a shunting location in the cast mc-Si cell, silver and titanium, both contact strip materials, have been identified at the shunting location, suggesting a process-induced error related to contact metallization. At a shunting location in the RGS cell, a material-specific shunting mechanism is described, involving channels of inverse conductivity type, where copper and iron are found. The possible roles of these metals in this shunting mechanism are discussed. These results illustrate the wide range of physical mechanisms involved with shunting in solar cells.
Recommendations for the future of recreational fisheries to prepare the social‐ecological system to cope with change

This paper presents conclusions and recommendations that emerged from the 7th World Recreational Fishing Conference (WRFC) held in Campinas, Brazil in September 2014. Based on the recognition of the immense social and economic importance of recreational fisheries coupled with weaknesses in robust information about these fisheries in many areas of the world, particularly in many economies in transition, it is recommended to increase effort to build effective governance arrangements and improve monitoring and assessment frameworks in data-poor situations. Moreover, there is a need to increase interdisciplinary studies that will foster a systematic understanding of recreational fisheries as complex adaptive social-ecological systems. To promote sustainable recreational fisheries on a global scale, it is recommended the detailed suggestions for governance and management outlined in the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization Technical Guidelines for Responsible Fisheries: Recreational Fisheries are followed.
An unusual foreign body in a cat: a case report

Foreign bodies that affect airways are a well-recognised problem in small-animal practice. Cats in par ticular, may be especially at risk of aspiration due to their predatory behaviour. Here, we report a case of an insect as a foreign body, namely a beetle in the tracheal bifurcation of a cat. Radiographs suggested a wide range of possibilities for differential diagnosis, but the presence of a foreign body was initially suspected. A final diagnosis was not pursued by the owner and the cat was euthanised. The presence of a summer chafer was then confirmed. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time such a foreign body and radiographic findings are reported in the literature.
SemanticLock: An authentication method for mobile devices using semantically-linked images

We introduce SemanticLock, a single factor graphical authentication solution for mobile devices. SemanticLock uses a set of graphical images as password tokens that construct a semantically memorable story representing the user`s password. A familiar and quick action of dragging or dropping the images into their respective positions either in a \textit{continous flow} or in \textit{discrete} movements on the the touchscreen is what is required to use our solution. The authentication strength of the SemanticLock is based on the large number of possible semantic constructs derived from the positioning of the image tokens and the type of images selected. Semantic Lock has a high resistance to smudge attacks and it equally exhibits a higher level of memorability due to its graphical paradigm. In a three weeks user study with 21 participants comparing SemanticLock against other authentication systems, we discovered that SemanticLock outperformed the PIN and matched the PATTERN both on speed, memorability, user acceptance and usability. Furthermore, qualitative test also show that SemanticLock was rated more superior in like-ability. SemanticLock was also evaluated while participants walked unencumbered and walked encumbered carrying "everyday" items to analyze the effects of such activities on its usage.
Neural Machine Translation with Key-Value Memory-Augmented Attention

Although attention-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable progress in recent years, it still suffers from issues of repeating and dropping translations. To alleviate these issues, we propose a novel key-value memory-augmented attention model for NMT, called KVMEMATT. Specifically, we maintain a timely updated keymemory to keep track of attention history and a fixed value-memory to store the representation of source sentence throughout the whole translation process. Via nontrivial transformations and iterative interactions between the two memories, the decoder focuses on more appropriate source word(s) for predicting the next target word at each decoding step, therefore can improve the adequacy of translations. Experimental results on Chinese)English and WMT17 German,English translation tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model.
Multiple Consequences Induced by Epidermally-Located Anthocyanins in Young, Mature and Senescent Leaves of Prunus

Anthocyanic morphs are generally less efficient in terms of carbon gain, but, in turn, are more photoprotected than anthocyanin-less ones. To date, mature leaves of different morphs or leaves at different developmental stages within the same species have generally been compared, whereas there is a lack of knowledge regarding different stages of development of red vs. green leaves. Leaves (1-, 7-, and 13-week-old) of red- (RLP) and green-leafed (GLP) Prunus in terms of photosynthetic rate, carbon metabolism and photoprotective mechanisms were compared to test whether anthocyanin-equipped leaves perform better than anthocyanin-less leaves and whether photoprotection is the primary role of epidermally-located anthocyanins, using for the first time a recently-developed parameter of chlorophyll fluorescence (qPd). GLP leaves had a higher photosynthetic rate in 1- and 7-week-old leaves, but RLP leaves performed better at an early stage of senescence and had a longer leaf lifespan. Anthocyanins contributed to leaf photoprotection throughout the leaf development, but were tightly coordinated with carotenoids. Besides photoprotecting, we propose that epidermal anthocyanins may be principally synthetized to maintain an efficient carbon-sink strength in young and senescent leaves, thus extending the RLP leaf lifespan.
Reducing the incidence of acute puerperal metritis in primiparous cows by application of pegbovigrastim in a Holstein dairy herd

In dairy cows, immunosuppression occurs frequently during the periparturient period and is characterised by transient neutropenia and impaired polymorphonuclear neutrophil function. As a consequence, postpartum cows are more susceptible to production-related diseases such as mastitis, retained foetal membranes and metritis. Recently, it has been shown that a double injection with recombinant bovine granulocyte colonystimulating factor covalently bound to polyethylene glycol (PEG rbG-CSF) increased polymorphonuclear neutrophil number and the exocytosis of myeloperoxidase by stimulating polymorphonuclear neutrophil, which also played a role in innate uterine immune defence. The aim of this randomised clinical study was to investigate the effects of two periparturient PEG rbG-CSF injections (IMR; ImrestorTM, Elanco Animal Health, Bad Homburg/Germany) on the incidence of acute puerperal metritis, number of antibiotic doses required for treatment of acute puerperal metritis as well as parameters of milking performance (i.e., milk yield, milk fat, milk protein, and somatic cell count on the first dairy herd improvement test day) in primiparous cows within a dairy herd with an elevated incidence of acute puerperal metritis. In total, 169 heavily pregnant heifers were randomly assigned to the treatment group (IMR: n = 82) who received 15 mg PEG rbG-CSF subcutaneously 10 ± 3 days before the anticipated calving date and within 24 hours after calving, or to the untreated control group (Co: n = 87). In total, data from 157 animals (IMR: n = 75, Co: n = 82) were analysed. Administration of PEG rbG-CSF reduced the incidence of acute puerperal metritis in primiparous cows significantly (IMR: 22.7%, Co: 43.9%, P = 0.003; relative reduction: 48.3%). Moreover, the number of antibiotic doses per calving required for treatment of acute puerperal metritis was significantly lower in the pegbovigastrim group (IMR: 0.32 ± 0.66, Co: 0.59 ± 0.75, P = 0.005). No significant differences regarding incidence of clinical mastitis, milk production or milk composition were observed. These results suggest that further research should be performed to identify herdand animal-specific factors that can be predictors of the beneficial effects of pegbovigrastim in preventing uterine diseases.
Speaker Inconsistency Detection in Tampered Video

With the increasing amount of video being consumed by people daily, there is a danger of the rise in maliciously modified video content (i.e., ‘fake news') that could be used to damage innocent people or to impose a certain agenda, e.g., meddle in elections. In this paper, we consider audio manipulations in video of a person speaking to the camera. Such manipulation is easy to perform, for instance, one can just replace a part of audio, while it can dramatically change the message and the meaning of the video. With the goal to develop an automated system that can detect these audio-visual speaker inconsistencies, we consider several approaches proposed for lip-syncing and dubbing detection, based on convolutional and recurrent networks and compare them with systems that are based on more traditional classifiers. We evaluated these methods on publicly available databases VidTIMIT, AMI, and GRID, for which we generated sets of tampered data.
Theory IIIb: Generalization in Deep Networks

A main puzzle of deep neural networks (DNNs) revolves around the apparent absence of "overfitting", defined in this paper as follows: the expected error does not get worse when increasing the number of neurons or of iterations of gradient descent. This is surprising because of the large capacity demonstrated by DNNs to fit randomly labeled data and the absence of explicit regularization. Recent results by Srebro et al. provide a satisfying solution of the puzzle for linear networks used in binary classification. They prove that minimization of loss functions such as the logistic, the cross-entropy and the exp-loss yields asymptotic, "slow" convergence to the maximum margin solution for linearly separable datasets, independently of the initial conditions. Here we prove a similar result for nonlinear multilayer DNNs near zero minima of the empirical loss. The result holds for exponential-type losses but not for the square loss. In particular, we prove that the weight matrix at each layer of a deep network converges to a minimum norm solution up to a scale factor (in the separable case). Our analysis of the dynamical system corresponding to gradient descent of a multilayer network suggests a simple criterion for ranking the generalization performance of different zero minimizers of the empirical loss.
Mild Prenatal Stress Causes Emotional and Brain Structural Modifications in Rats of Both Sexes

Stress or high levels of glucocorticoids (GCs) during developmental periods is known to induce persistent effects in the neuroendocrine circuits that control stress response, which may underlie individuals’ increased risk for developing neuropsychiatric conditions later in life, such as anxiety or depression. We developed a rat model (Wistar han) of mild exposure to unpredictable prenatal stress (PS), which consists in a 4-h stressor administered three times per week on a random basis; stressors include strobe lights, noise and restrain. Pregnant dams subjected to this protocol present disrupted circadian corticosterone secretion and increased corticosterone secretion upon acute stress exposure. Regarding progeny, both young adult (2 months old) male and female rats present increased levels of circulating corticosterone and hyperactivity of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis to acute stress exposure. Both sexes present anxious- and depressive-like behaviors, shown by the decreased time spent in the open arms of the elevated plus maze (EPM) and in the light side of the light-dark box (LDB), and by increased immobility time in the forced swim test, respectively. Interestingly, these results were accompanied by structural modifications of the bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST) and hippocampus, as well as decreased norepinephrine and dopamine levels in the BNST, and serotonin levels in the hippocampus. In summary, we characterize a new model of mild PS, and show that stressful events during pregnancy can lead to long-lasting structural and neurochemical effects in the offspring, which affect behavior in adulthood.
Retina Multifocal Pupillography Identifies Changes in Visual Sensitivity According to Severity of Diabetic Retinopathy in Type 2 Diabetes

Eccles Institute for Neuroscience, The John Curtin School of Medical Research, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia Department of Endocrinology, Canberra Hospital and The Australian National University Medical School, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia University of Sydney, NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre, Camperdown, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Green Tea Polyphenols as Potential Food Additives

As time has progressed, companies have increasingly produced foods for longer term storage. This has led to an increased use of food preservatives in processed foods. People have now come to expect many foods to have a significantly longer shelf life, and this is a matter of government concern for public health due to foodborne contaminations. Foodborne illnesses have become a common problem caused by bacteria (i.e. Escherichia coli). Finding an effective natural preservative source might be better received by the public and alleviate some health concerns over chemical sources. The most important active ingredient found in green tea is camellia sinensis. Epigallo-cathechin-3-gallate (EGCG) is the primary active polyphenol in camellia sinensis. Palmitoyl-epigallocatechin-3-gallate (P-EGCG), and epigallocatechin-3-gallate-stearate (EGCG-S) are two modified tea polyphenols which were studied in the current experiments. Green tea extracts contain antioxidant, antimicrobial, antimutagenic, and anticarcinogenic properties. In this study, the stability of EGCG, P-EGCG and EGCG-S were determined by the incubation rates of Escherichia coli; Lactobacillus bacillus; and Streptococcus thermophiles. The green tea polyphenols’ antimicrobial properties were evaluated at different temperature and pH conditions. The temperatures used in the current studies were: 27 °C (room temperature); 37°C, 55°C, and 68°C (three pasteurized conditions: 68°C water bath 24h, 30min 68°C water bath before 24h 27°C treating, 30min 68°C water bath after 24h 27°C treating). The nutrient broth (pH=7.0) and clementine orange juice (pH=3.03) were used to determine the stability of EGCG, P-EGCG and EGCG-S. The stable effect of EGCG, P-EGCG and EGCG-S were analyzed through Colony Forming Units (CFU). The next objective of this study was to determine the antioxidant effect of EGCG, P-EGCG and EGCG-S with clementine orange juice through the UV-spectrometer. According to the data analysis, it suggests that P-EGCG is the most effective tea polyphenol in reducing bacteria growth and maintaining antioxidant properties of clementine orange juice during storage. Therefore, P-EGCG could be considered as having the best potential among the tested polyphenols as a citrus juice preservative. GREEN TEA POLYPHENOLS AS POTENTIAL FOOD