Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Charge-carrier collective motion in germanium detectors for -decay searches

The time analysis of the signal induced by the drift of charge carriers in high purity germanium detectors provides information on the event topology. Millions of charge carriers are produced in a typical event. Their initial distribution, stochastic diffusion and Coulomb self-repulsion affect the time structure of the signal. We present a comprehensive study of these effects and evaluate their impact on the event discrimination capabilities for the three geometries which will be used in the Legend experiment for neutrinoless double-beta decay.
S0033291718002222jra 1..9

Background. Approximately seven million people in the UK are engaged in informal caregiving. Informal caregivers are at risk of poorer mental and physical health. However, less is known about how the relationship between the informal caregiving and psychological distress changes over time. The aim of this study was to investigate longitudinal associations between the informal caregiving and psychological distress amongst UK men and women aged 16+. Methods. Data were analysed from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS, n = 9368), a nationally representative study of UK households. Longitudinal linear mixed modelling was used to estimate associations between the longitudinal patterns of informal caregiving (non-caregiver/one episode of 1–2 years/intermittent caregiving/3+ years caregiving) and trajectories of psychological distress across seven waves of UKHLS data. Results. Informal caregiving was not associated with psychological distress for men. Women engaged in long-term (⩾3 years) or intermittent caregiving had higher levels of psychological distress at the point of initiation, compared with women who were not caregivers throughout the study period (3+ years caregiver: regression coefficient 0.48, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.07–0.89; intermittent caregiver: regression coefficient 0.47, 95% CI 0.02–0.92). Trajectories of psychological distress changed little over time, suggesting a plateau effect for these caregiving women. Conclusions. Women engaged in long-term or repeated shorter episodes of informal caregiving reported more symptoms of psychological distress than non-caregiving women. Given the increased risk of reporting psychological distress and the increasing importance of the informal care sector, the risk of poorer mental health of informal caregivers should be a priority for public health.
The Comparison of Volatile Components in Peel Oil from Four Species of Navel Orange

ネーブル果皮精油の香気成分の品種間差異を検討する目的で,ワシントン,福本紅,大三島,白柳の4品種のネーブル果皮から連続蒸留抽出法により精油成分を分離した. GCおよびGC/MSにより,香気成分として炭化水素化合物12成分,含酸素化合物65成分を同定した. さらに,これら4品種間の精油成分の比較およびにおい特性の差異を検討した結果, 4品種の果皮精油のにおいの差異は香気成分間相互の量的関係に起因し,それらの香気としての寄与程度の差によると推定した.
Chondroitin Sulphate Preteoglycan mediates palatal shelf adhesion

In mammals, the adhesion and fusion of the palatal shelves are essential mechanisms in the development of the secondary palate. Failure of any of these processes leads to the formation of cleft palate. The mechanisms underlying palatal shelf adhesion are poorly understood, although the presence of filopodia on the apical surfaces of the superficial medial edge epithelial (MEE) cells seems to play an important role in the adhesion of the opposing MEE. We demonstrate here the appearance of chondroitin sulphate proteoglycan (CSPG) on the apical surface of MEE cells only immediately prior to contact between the palatal shelves. This apical CSPG has a functional role in palatal shelf adhesion, as either the alteration of CSPG synthesis by -D-Xyloside or its specific digestion by chondroitinase AC strikingly alters the in vitro adhesion of palatal shelves. We also demonstrate the absence of this apical CSPG in the clefted palates of transforming growth factor beta 3 (TGF3) null mutant mice, and its induction, together with palatal shelf adhesion, when TGF3 is added to TGF3 null mutant palatal shelves in culture. When chick palatal shelves (that do not adhere in vivo nor express TGF3, nor CSPG in the MEE) are cultured in vitro, they do not express CSPG and partially adhere, but when TGF3 is added to the media, they express CSPG and their adhesion increases strikingly. We therefore conclude that the expression of CSPG on the apical surface of MEE cells is a key factor in palatal shelf adhesion and that this expression is regulated by TGF3. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)
Multi-Objective Software Effort Estimation: A Replication Study

Replication studies increase our confidence in previous results when the findings are similar each time, and help mature our knowledge by addressing both internal and external validity aspects. However, these studies are still rare in certain software engineering fields. In this paper, we replicate and extend a previous study, which denotes the current state-of-the-art for multi-objective software effort estimation, namely CoGEE. We investigate the original research questions with an independent implementation and the inclusion of a more robust baseline (LP4EE), carried out by the first author, who was not involved in the original study. Through this replication, we strengthen both the internal and external validity of the original study. We also answer two new research questions investigating the effectiveness of CoGEE by using four additional evolutionary algorithms (i.e., IBEA, MOCell, NSGA-III, SPEA2) and a well-known Java framework for evolutionary computation, namely JMetal (rather than the previously used R software), which allows us to strengthen the external validity of the original study. The results of our replication confirm that: (1) CoGEE outperforms both baseline and state-of-the-art benchmarks statistically significantly (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$p <0.001$</tex-math><alternatives><mml:math><mml:mrow><mml:mi>p</mml:mi><mml:mo><</mml:mo><mml:mn>0</mml:mn><mml:mo>.</mml:mo><mml:mn>001</mml:mn></mml:mrow></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="sarro-ieq1-3083360.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>); (2) CoGEE’s multi-objective nature makes it able to reach such a good performance; (3) CoGEE’s estimation errors lie within claimed industrial human-expert-based thresholds. Moreover, our new results show that the effectiveness of CoGEE is generally not limited to nor dependent on the choice of the multi-objective algorithm. Using CoGEE with either NSGA-II, NSGA-III, or MOCell produces human competitive results in less than a minute. The Java version of CoGEE has decreased the running time by over 99.8 percent with respect to its R counterpart. We have made publicly available the Java code of CoGEE to ease its adoption, as well as, the data used in this study in order to allow for future replication and extension of our work.
Enhance Curvature Information by Structured Stochastic Quasi-Newton Methods

In this paper, we consider stochastic second-order methods for minimizing a finite summation of nonconvex functions. One important key is to find an ingenious but cheap scheme to incorporate local curvature information. Since the true Hessian matrix is often a combination of a cheap part and an expensive part, we propose a structured stochastic quasi-Newton method by using partial Hessian information as much as possible. By further exploiting either the low-rank structure or the kronecker-product properties of the quasi-Newton approximations, the computation of the quasi-Newton direction is affordable. Global convergence to stationary point and local superlinear convergence rate are established under some mild assumptions. Numerical results on logistic regression, deep autoencoder networks and deep convolutional neural networks show that our proposed method is quite competitive to the state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Test Case Generation for RESTful APIs through Seeded Sampling

To validate the quality of software, test cases are used. These test cases are often manually-written, which is labor-intensive. To avoid this problem, automated software testing was invented. Search-based software testing is a useful tool for developers to automatically generate test cases. However, improvements are still needed to create test cases that compete with manually-written ones. EvoMaster is a tool that generates system-level test cases for RESTful APIs using the MIO algorithm. An important aspect of this algorithm is sampling new test cases. Currently, EvoMaster employs random and smart sampling to achieve this goal. This paper aims to improve the coverage of the generated tests by expanding the sampling methods with seeded sampling. This method consists of extracting sequences of HTTP requests from manually-written tests and using these to sample new test cases. Seeded sampling is evaluated on two RESTful APIs with 7 different parameter sets. We show that the addition of seeded sampling can improve the coverage achieved by EvoMaster compared to the current combination of sampling techniques. Nonetheless, this paper has some limitations. It only takes two RESTful APIs into account and has a small amount of benchmark runs to back its ﬁndings.
RMHP_A_298256 861..868

1University of Gondar Comprehensive and Specialized Referral Hospital, University of Gondar, Gondar, Ethiopia; 2Department of Health Systems and Policy, Institute of Public Health, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Gondar, Gondar, Ethiopia Background: Globally, about 1.3 billion people lack access to effective and affordable healthcare and 150 million people in 44 million households face financial catastrophe. Health insurance schemes are an effective financing mechanism to help people who are unable to use healthcare services. However, the government employee’s Willingness to Pay (WTP) for the proposed premium for health insurance were not well investigated. Methods: A facility-based cross-sectional study was conducted from April to May, 2018 among teachers at governmental schools of Gondar town. The participants were selected using a simple random sampling technique using their payroll list as a sampling frame. Data were cleaned, coded, and entered into EPI-INFO version 7 software and exported to SPSS version 20 for analysis. A P-value less than 0.05 and Adjusted Odds Ratio (AOR) with 95% Confidence Interval (CI) were used to identify variables significantly associated with the outcome variable. Results: Overall, 62.0% of teachers were willing to pay 3% or more of their monthly salary for SHI. In this study, teachers whose monthly salary was more than US$215.6 (AOR=2.12; 95% CI=1.07–4.17), first degree (AOR=4.44; 95% CI=2.89–6.83), masters (AOR=4.91; 95% CI=1.14–11.09), history of illness in the past 6 months (AOR=2.13; 95% CI=1.37–3.31), not facing difficulty covering medical bills (AOR=0.49; 95% CI=0.35–0.84), heard about SHI (AOR=1.73, 95% CI=1.09–2.73), and favorable attitude towards SHI (AOR=1.82; 95% CI=1.22–2.72) were significantly associated with WTP for the proposed price of the scheme. Conclusion: The majority of teachers were WTP the proposed amount of premium for the scheme. Factors such as level of education, monthly salary, attitudes, difficulty of covering medical bills, information, and history of illness were significantly associated with WTP for SHI. Therefore, awareness creation (sensitization activities) about SHI and increasing the educational status of the participant could improve WTP.
Private equity buyouts, credit constraints, and firm exports

We analyse the impact of private equity buyouts on firm exports, on a panel of UK non-financial firms over 2004--2017. Using difference-in-differences estimations, we show that private equity ownership increases the probability of exporting, the value of exports, and the export to sales ratio. We further show that the positive impact of private equity ownership on exports holds only after private-to-private buyouts, or acquisitions of small or young target firms. Our findings suggest that private equity investors mitigate the credit constraints faced by their portfolio companies, hence boosting their exports.
The Value of Intangibles for Decision Analysis under the Influence of a Pandemic

The abandonment option under various capital budgeting models are discussed in this manuscript to bring forth the notion that present value of cash flows is often improperly estimated in the financial models utilized in the decision analytic process. In this study, intellectual property rights and other intangible assets often are often not considered in accounting estimation processes utilized in financial accounting. A decision maker often utilizes misestimates of the present value of cash flow resulting in less-than-optimum capital budgeting decisions. Decisions to abandon for salvage and other similar decisions improve when the present value of intangibles and property rights are included in the decision process. This last statement is the goal of this study as well as to present well-founded processes to improve abandonment and similar decisions in capital budgeting decisions. The estimation problem in financial accounting is included in the analysis to accomplish this goal. In addition the role of a Pandemic is emphasized
Investigating the Effect of Graduate Business Programs of the Schools of Business in Jordan in Forming Soft-Power Leadership Conceptualization among MBA Students

The main objective of the study is to explore the extent of the conceptualization of soft-power leadership among graduate business students, and the degree to which they apply the concept in their study programs in the Jordanian universities. In precise, to explore the effect of curriculums and courses, learning style, and the way the business program is managed in forming the concept of soft power leadership in students. The analysis was extended to investigate the variation in the relationship between curriculums, learning style, and program management as independent variables and soft-power leadership concept as dependent variable due to the moderating variables gender, background education, and work sector. A sample of 350 students was drawn from two representative universities in Jordan. Data were collected by a self-designed questionnaire based on literature, Amos 21 was used in the analysis, and findings were as follows: Students have positive attitudes toward soft-power leadership conceptualization with a satisfactory level of belief. Learning style and curriculums have been found to be of significant effect in soft-power conceptualization. This indicates that the American Model of Management Education (AMME) is applied in both curriculums and learning styles in business schools in Jordan. With regards to the moderating effect of gender, background education, and job sector of students it was found that gender significantly affects the relationship between learning style and soft-power concept, and it does affect the relationship between program management and soft-power concept, Background education significantly affects the relationship between both curriculums and program management, and soft-power concept, while the job sector that students belong to in their work only affects significantly the relationship between program management and soft-power concept.
Phytoremediating potential of the chicura (Ambrosia ambrosioides) in soils contaminated by heavy metals

The objective of the present research work was to evaluate the phytoremediation potential of Ambrosia ambrosioides soil, determine the absorption of heavy metals (cadmium, copper and lead) in the plant under different concentrations 0, 20, 40, and 60 mg L applied in the irrigation water The analyzes were performed by atomic absorption, and with the data obtained the translocation factor and bioconcentration factor were calculated. The development of the experiment and laboratory analysis were performed at the Autonomous Agrarian University Antonio Narro Laguna Unit in the year 2018. A 3-by-4 factorial design with 4 repetitions was used, with factor A being heavy metal and B being the concentration of metal, 12 treatments were taken in total. The results showed that in root, stem and leaf the higher concentrations occurred in the treatment of copper at 20 mg L with values of 15 827.2, 13 030.9 and 4 979.4 mg kg respectively. Copper was the metal that more absorbed the plant followed by cadmium and lead. The biological translocation factor indicated that cadmium is an element that the plant translocates towards its leaves more easily followed by copper. In Ambrosia ambrosioides the translocation of lead is null. The bioconcentration factor exceeded the comparative value of 1 in all treatments, this indicates that high phytoextraction was performed and that Ambrosia ambrosioides can be used in phytoremediation and soil health.
The Art of Abstention: Selective Prediction and Error Regularization for Natural Language Processing

In selective prediction, a classifier is allowed to abstain from making predictions on low-confidence examples. Though this setting is interesting and important, selective prediction has rarely been examined in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To fill this void in the literature, we study in this paper selective prediction for NLP, comparing different models and confidence estimators. We further propose a simple error regularization trick that improves confidence estimation without substantially increasing the computation budget. We show that recent pre-trained transformer models simultaneously improve both model accuracy and confidence estimation effectiveness. We also find that our proposed regularization improves confidence estimation and can be applied to other relevant scenarios, such as using classifier cascades for accuracy–efficiency trade-offs. Source code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/castorini/transformers-selective.
Private Equity and Bank Capital Requirements: Evidence from European Firms

Using firm-level data from 16 euro-area countries over 2008-2014, we investigate how the growth and investment of bank-affiliated private equity-backed companies evolve after the European Banking Authority (EBA) increases capital requirements for their parent banks. We find that portfolio companies connected to affected banks reduce their investment, asset growth, and employment growth following the capital exercise. We further show that the effect is stronger for companies likely to face financial constraints. Finally, the findings indicate that the negative effect of the capital exercise is muted when the private equity sponsor is more experienced.
Do role models increase student hope and effort?
Evidence from India

This paper offers experimental evidence on the significance of role-models on fostering hope, increasing effort and improving the academic performance of primary school students in India. Students from private schools were individually randomised to a treatment or a placebo group. Treated students watch a short film produced as a part of the experiment in Jaipur, Rajasthan the study location. The placebo group students watch a television show for kids, ‘Malgudi Days’. I find a 0.17 standard deviation (s.d.) increase in student hope and 0.25 s.d increase in their effort, immediately after the intervention. The one-off treatment leads to a 0.16 s.d. increase on standardised test scores in English, six-weeks after the intervention. Along with hope, I find significant improvements in students’ self-efficacy or optimism and happiness. A cost-effectiveness analysis highlights role-models as a promising treatment intervention tool that can have an effect on student motivation and their learning outcomes.
DDDT_A_294779 1055..1066

1Graduate School, Program of BioVeterinary Science, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen, Nakorn Pathom, Thailand; 2Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand; 3Department of Large Animal and Wildlife Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Kasetsart University, Kamphaeng Saen Campus, Nakorn Pathom, Thailand Purpose: Ischemic/reperfusion (I/R) injury is the principal mechanism during Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD). The key modulator of I/R injury is dysregulation of mitochondria function. Germinated Brown Rice (GBR) has been recommended as a bio-functional food and has clarified the potential properties in several effects. However, the effect of GBR mediated cardioprotective properties, focusing on mitochondrial function’s role, remains unexplored. Thus, this study aims to investigate the cardioprotective effects of GBR pretreatment against simulated I/R injury. Methods: H9c2 cardiomyocytes were incubated with GBR at a five ƞg/mL concentration for 24 hours and simulated I/R (sI/R) for 40 minutes. Cell viability and cell apoptosis were assessed by 7-AAD staining and Annexin V/PI staining, respectively. The mitochondrial membrane potential was determined by JC-1 staining and mitochondrial respiration represented by oxygen consumption rate (OCR) using Seahorse Flux analyzer. Results: The results revealed that the administration of GBR before sI/R significantly decreased the percentage of cell death and total cell apoptosis in H9c2 during stimulation of ischemic/reperfusion. Besides, pretreatment of cardiomyocytes with GBR remarkably stabilized mitochondrial membrane potential and improved impaired mitochondrial respiration in simulated-H9c2 injury. Conclusion: The present research is the first study to report the effective cardioprotection of GBR. Pretreatment of GBR potentially protects H9c2 cardiomyocytes against sI/R injury through mitochondrial function. The underlying therapeutic activities are possibly associated with its bio-functional compounds. However, the underlying mechanism on the cardioprotective effects of GBR needs further studies.
Faraway, so close: a spatial account of the Conte I government formation in Italy, 2018

Abstract The formation of the ‘yellow-green’ government that took office in Italy after the general election held on 4 March 2018 looked puzzling to many commentators as the two coalition partners – the Five Star Movement and the League – appeared to be quite distant on the left–right continuum. In this article, we argue that despite being widely used in the literature, a unidimensional representation of parties' policy positions on the encompassing left–right scale is inadequate to explain the process of coalition governments' formation. We focus first on coalition outcomes in Italy in the period 2001–18. Our statistical analysis including, among other variables, parties' policy distance on the left–right dimension performs rather well until 2013 but fails to predict the coalition outcome in 2018. To solve the puzzle, we propose a two-dimensional spatial account of the Conte I government formation in which the first dimension coincides with the economic left–right and the second one is related to immigration, the European Union issues and social conservatism. We show that the coalition outcome ceases to be poorly understandable once parties' policy positions are measured along these two dimensions, rather than on the general left–right continuum.