Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Power of Active Disclosure: The Effect of Self-Certification on the Private Student Loan Market

An active disclosure is a mandatory disclosure that requires the consumer to fill out individual-specific information related to product usage on a standardized form. Active disclosures may enhance comprehension more than static informational disclosures by requiring that consumers engage with form content, much like students engage with a problem sets, and since they do not require firms to individualize information, may be less costly to implement than alternatives that convey similar information. This paper considers the effectiveness of active disclosures empirically by evaluating the 2010 implementation of the US Department of Education’s Private Education Loan Applicant Self-Certification Form (SelfCert), which requires a potential private student loan (PSL) borrower to fill out a form describing his financial need, as defined by the Department of Education and the institution the student attends. The introduction of Self-Cert effectively created a disclosure that oriented borrowers towards federal sources of financial aid and imposed an individualized borrowing limit on PSL. Using a unique loan level data set of PSL originations combined with publicly available administrative data from the Department of Education, I evaluate the effects of Self-Cert using difference-in-difference and propensity score matching techniques. I find that the implementation of Self-Cert is effective at reducing PSL origination counts and dollar volumes substantially for students of all levels at non-profit and for-profit schools. For borrowers with comparable characteristics, PSL loan amounts decrease for undergraduate borrowers at not-forprofit schools, but increase at for-profit schools and do not change significantly for graduate students. These results are corroborated by analysis of the 2008 and 2012 waves of the Department of Education’s ∗The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau nor those of the staff.
The Contribution of Payroll Taxation to Wage Inequality in France

Over the 1967-2015 period, net wage inequality has decreased in France by 25%, in contrast to the significant increase experienced by most developed countries. Less well known is the fact that labor cost inequality has actually increased by 8% over the same period. We show that, (a) standard demand-side explanations for the rise in inequality apply in France when tested using measures of labor cost (as they should be); (b) reforms to payroll taxation, jointly with increases in the minimum wage, can explain a large part of the decrease in net wage inequality, in the context of increasing market inequality.
Tropilaelaps clareae females can survive for four weeks when given open bee brood of Apis mellifera

SUMMARYFemale Tropilaelaps clareae mites were released into small petri dishes without food, or on small pieces of brood comb containing several Apis mellifera larvae 1–4. days old. On each day of the experiement the piece of brood comb was exchanged for a new one containing larvae of the age being tested. In dishes with no food only 5.5% of mites survived for two days. Survival of gravid female mites was significantly higher than that of thin females. On bee larvae 1, 3 and 3.5 days old, 0%, 9% and 47% of T. clareae females survived until the second day. None survived until the fourth day. However, on bee larvae four days old, 89%, 68%, 32%, 7% and 4% of females were alive on the 2nd, 5th, 10th, 19th and 28th day respectively. Thus, T. clareae females can survive for up to four weeks on bee larvae four days old. The amount of brood pheromones on larvae 4–5. days old is greater than that on younger larvae, probably stimulating feeding and thereby supporting mite survival. Fertilized female mites quickly b.
Effect of sowing time and rainfall distribution on yield of rainfed groundnut (Arachis hypogea L.) in southern agro-climatic zone of Andhra Pradesh

A field experiment was conducted during Kharif, 2005 at RARS, Tirupati on alfisols with two groundnut varieties (Vemana and TPT-4) sown at three different times (II FN of June, I FN of July and II FN of July). Varieties did not exert significant influence on yield and yield attributes of groundnut. Among the three times of sowing, crop sown during 1st fort night (I FN) of June recorded higher yield and yield attributes over the other two dates of sowing.
Effect of tillage and moisture levels on growth, yield and nodulation of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) and mungbean (Phaseolus radiatus) in the dry season

A field experiment was conducted at the Experimental farm of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, over 2 dry seasons (May-August 1999 and 2000) to evaluate the impact of tillage and soil moisture on growth, yield and nodulation of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and mungbean (Phaseolus radiatus L). The legumes were grown in tilled or compacted soils, under rainfed or irrigated conditions, which corresponded to low or high soil- moisture regimes. Germination of the small-seeded mungbean was reduced by soil compaction and low moisture. Crop growth of mungbean was also reduced to a greater extent by soil compaction and moisture stress. In contrast, the adverse impact of soil compaction and moisture stress was greater on pod yields of com- mon bean than on seed yields of mungbean. Tillage promoted root branching to a greater extent than root dry weights of both species, especially in the low soil-moisture regime. Nodulation was reduced to a greater extent by soil-moisture stress especially in common bean, the poor nodulating species.
Shoring up Economic Refugees: Venezuelan Migrants in the Ecuadoran Labor Market

Ecuador became the third largest receiver of the 4.3 million Venezuelans who left their country in the last five years, hosting around 10 per cent of them. Little is known about the characteristics of these migrants and their labor market outcomes. This article fills this gap by analyzing a new large survey (EPEC). On average, Venezuelan workers are highly skilled and have high rates of employment, compared with Ecuadorans. However, their employment is of much lower quality, characterized by low wages, and high rates of informality and temporality. Venezuelans have experienced significant occupational downgrading, relative to their employment prior to emigration. As a result, despite their high educational attainment, Venezuelans primarily compete for jobs with the least skilled and more economically vulnerable Ecuadoran workers. Our simulations suggest that measures that allow Venezuelans to obtain employment that matches their skills, such as facilitating the conversion of education credentials, would increase Ecuador’s GDP between 1.6 and 1.9 per cent and alleviate the pressure on disadvantaged native workers. We also show that providing work permits to Venezuelan workers would substantially reduce their rates of informality and increase their average earnings.
ASSESSMENT OF MORPHOLOGICAL ATTRIBUTES OF DATE PALM ACCESSIONS OF DIVERSE AGRO-ECOLOGICAL ORIGIN

Sixteen Pakistani date palm cultivars from diverse origins were characterized morphologically to assess the similarity level, the overall point of polymorphism and important agronomic traits existing in the germplasm present in Pakistan. Forty two qualitative and quantitative features were explored and subjected to multivariate analyses. The results brought out important differences in phenotypic characters in all date palm cultivars. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicated that trunk length and diameter, total number of leaves, rachis length, leaflets length and width, number of leaflets per side, number of pinnae planes, length and grouping of spines were highly divergent. Similarly cluster analyses (CA) also revealed phenotypic diversity among date palm cultivars and, some close association or heterogeneity was also observed within cultivars of the same origin.
Anomalous Energy Transport in FPU- β Chain

This paper is devoted to the derivation of a macroscopic fractional diffusion equation describing heat transport in an anharmonic chain. More precisely, we study here the so-called FPU- β chain, which is a very simple model for a one-dimensional crystal in which atoms are coupled to their nearest neighbors by a harmonic potential, weakly perturbed by a quartic potential. The starting point of our mathematical analysis is a kinetic equation: Lattice vibrations, responsible for heat transport, are modeled by an interacting gas of phonons whose evolution is described by the Boltzmann phonon equation. Our main result is the rigorous derivation of an anomalous diffusion equation starting from the linearized Boltzmann phonon equation.
Structure, Diversity and Regeneration Potential of Oak Dominant Conifer Mixed forest along an Altitudinal Gradient in Garhwal Himalaya

Temperate forest structure, species composition, dispersion, diversity and regeneration behaviour in relation to the physico-chemical properties of soil were studied in the Oakmixed coniferous forest in a part of Garhwal Himalaya during the year 2000. The study indicated that the total density and basal cover values in the tree layer varied from 630 to 1,590 stems/ ha and 20.04 to 82.51 m 2 /ha respectively. The maximum number of saplings and seedlings (520 and 720 stems/ha respectively) were observed on the highest altitude (2,100m asl), whereas, the minimum number of saplings and seedlings (200 and 100 stems/ha respectively), on the lowest altitude (1600m asl). The study further revels that the moist temperate forest is characterized by a patchy distribution of species and individuals with mixed species composition and the sites are represented by different dominants and codominant species. The values of diversity and concentration of dominance oscillated between 1.33 to 2.01 and 0.27 to 0.45, respectively. Physico- chemical properties of soils were found to be promising for the growth of forest. Availability of higher average organic carbon and nitrogen contents might have given birth to higher total basal cover values on 1,700m and 1,800m altitudes, whereas, lesser prevalence of these parameters on 1,900m and 2,000m altitudes apparent to lower total basal cover values.
Muscle Vectors as Temporally Dense "Labels"

Consider a human who interacts with the physical world to autonomously learn in a task non-specific way through lifetime. It seems obvious that the fully autonomous learner does not have the luxury to have the mother to provide temporally dense state labels, but the context/state at every frame is beneficial (e.g., to generate attention for the next frame). How can we enable the learner to generate frame-wise contexts/states on the fly? Our past work on Developmental Network (DN-1) has shown that frame-wise state labels (e.g., stages within a phoneme) are useful to generate temporally sparse label (the type of the phoneme). However, such dense and sparse labels were handcrafted from a static data set, using human identified frame-wise equivalence. In this paper, we study a conceptually challenging problem — how to enable an autonomous learner to generate frame-wise states autonomously without human handcrafting dense labels at all. We propose that frame-wise muscle actions (e.g., producing a sound) are not only temporally dense and high-dimensional, but also natural as dense labels. However, it is unknown how a neural network can use such high-dimensional vectors as dense labels. In this work, we provide a model for this new issue and experiment with Developmental Network-2 (DN-2) for imitation of audio sequences. Our experimental results showed DN-2 can successfully emerge high-dimensional real-valued vector actions. These actions provide DN-2 with frame-wise temporal context information. This work corresponds to a key step toward our goal to enable the agent to fully autonomously generate frame-wise actions without human-provided dense labels and with only a few human-provided sparse labels.
Learning DAGs with Continuous Optimization

Learning the structure of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs, also known as Bayesian networks) from data is an important and classical problem in machine learning, with prominent applications in causal inference, fairness, interpretability,and biology, etc. This is a challenging problem since the search space of DAGs is combinatorial and scales superexponentially with the number of nodes. Existingapproaches often rely on various local heuristics for enforcing the acyclicity constraint. By contrast, structure learning for undirected graphical models (e.g. Gaussian MRF) is recognized as a tractable optimization problem nowadays, and achieved huge success in various practical domains such as bioinformatics. In this thesis, we take a first step towards bridging this gap between directed and undirected graphical models. We begin by introducing a fundamentally different strategy for Bayesian network structure learning: We formulate the problem as a purely continuous optimization program over real matrices that avoids the combinatorial constraint entirely. This is achieved by a novel characterization of acyclicity that is not only smooth but also exact. The resulting problem canbe efficiently solved by standard numerical algorithms, without imposing any structural assumptions on the graph such as bounded treewidth or in-degree. We then study the generalization of the above continuous algorithm to learningnonparametric DAGs. We extend the algebraic characterization of acyclicity to nonparametric structural equation model (SEM) by leveraging nonparametricsparsity based on partial derivatives, resulting in a continuous optimization problem that can be applied to a variety of nonparametric and semiparametric models including GLMs, additive noise models, and index models as special cases. Lastly, we introduce a unified view of score-based and ICA-based methods based on the proposed continuous optimization framework. In particular, weshow that the popular ICA-based methods that exploits non-Gaussianity of the independent noise distribution can be handled by the continuous optimization framework, which is conceptually clearer and easier to incorporate prior knowledge, and has the potential to be generalized to allow for models with hidden confounders and feedback loops.
HPV DNA in Routine Cervical Scraping Samples in Malaysia

Incidence of cervical cancer in developing countries is common where its accounts for 15% of female cancers with a risk of 1.5% at age below 65 years old (Parkin and Bray, 2006). As for developed countries, cervical cancer accounts for only 3.6% of new cancers, with a cumulative risk of 0.8% (<65 years) (Parkin and Bray, 2006). Cancer of the cervix was the third most common cancer among women and fifth most common cancer in the entire general population of Malaysia (NCR, 2011). There are about 9 million women eligible to be screened [age 22-60 years] for cervical cancer and the presence of abnormal smears in routine cervical scrapings cytology accounts to 4-7%. Cervical cancer incidence rate increased after 30 years old and peaks at ages 65-69 years. Currently, though there is no national screening program available, around 30-40% coverage is achieved by opportunistic screening. HPV infection is now a well-established causal agent in the development of a variety of epithelial lesions,
Epidémiologie des schistosomoses du bétail au Sénégal

Parmi les schistosomoses du betail seuls Schistosoma bovis et S. curassoni ont ete identifies au Senegal a ce jour. Ils se rencontre dans presque toutes les regions. S. bovis parasite surtout les bovins (15 a 62 p. 100) alors que les petits ruminants sont faiblement touches. S. curassoni est plus frequente chez les ovins at les caprins (2 a 16 p. 100) mais peut quelquefois egalement parasiter les bovins. Les lesions provoquees par S. curassoni au niveau du foie sont plus frequentes et plus nettes, surtout chez les petis ruminants, que celles causees par S. bovis, Bulinus forsakalii et B. globosus sont les hotes intermediaires naturels de S. bovis, de meme que B. umbilicatus est l'hote de S. curassoni. L'etude experimentale du cycle de ses schistosomes a montre que B. forskalii (taux d'infestation 48,9 p. 100) et B. tuncatus (63,6 p. 100) sont d'excellents hotes intermediaires pour S. bovis, alors que B. umbilicatus et B. globosus ont reagi positivement a S. curassoni avec respectivement 70 et 12,5 p. 100 d'infestations reussies. Des hotes vertebres experimentaux indemnes de toutes trematodoses ont ete infestes : bovin, ovin, lapins, hamster et souris avex S. bovis et ovin et souris avex S. curassoni ; tous ont reagi positivement a ces schitosomes. Des vers adultes et des oeufs matures ont ete recoltes et etudies du point de vue systematique (Resume d'auteur)
Effect of weather variability on growth and yield of wheat crop under semi-arid region of India ANANTA VASHISTH, AVINASH GOYAL and P. KRISHANAN

For generating different weather conditions during various phenological stages, experiments were conducted on two varieties of wheat (HD-2967 and HD-3086) sown on three different dates at the research farm of IARI, New Delhi during rabi 2015-16 and 2016-17. Soil temperature, soil moisture, leaf area index, biomass, chlorophyll content, radiation interceptions were measured during different crop growth stages. Number of days taken for each phenological stage was observed and thermal time for different phenological stages were calculated. Results showed that first sown crop had higher value of crop growth parameters and yield as compared to second and third sown crop.HD-3086 had higher value of LAI, biomass and yield than HD-2967. Grain yield had significant positive correlation with growing degree days during grain filling stage. Soil temperature measured at 2.21 PMat 5, 10, 15, 20 cm depth had 1-5°C lower value than the air temperature. Soil moisture measured at 0-15, 15-30, 30-45 and 45-60 cm depths had slightly higher soil moisture for HD-3086 as compared to corresponding value in HD2967 during emergence, flowering and grain filling stages. Percentage relative water content in HD-2967 was found to be higher in first sown crop followed by second and third sown crop. However, in HD-3086, percentage relative water content was found to be higher in first sown crop followed by third and second sown crop. Grain yield had significant positive correlation with relative water content during different phenological stages. HD-3086hadhigherradiation use efficiency as compared to HD-2967 in all weather conditions.
Influence of organic manures and inorganic fertilizers on growth and yield parameters of sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum L.)

A study was conducted to investigate the effect of organic manures and inorganic fertilizers on growth and yield parameters of sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum L.). The research was conducted during the early summer season of 2019 with ten treatments which has the organic manures and inorganic fertilizers in combination and in alone in randomized complete block design with three replications. The experiments results showed that organic manures and inorganic fertilizers have a significant effect on growth and yield parameters of sweet basil. The treatment i.e. 50% RDN through urea + 50% RDN through poultry manure recorded the higher plant height (79.67 cm), number of primary branches per plant (21.11), number of leaves (1393), fresh herbage yield per plant (701.21 g) and per hectare (36.43 t), dry herbage yield per plant (145.18 g) and per hectare (7.54 t) and oil yield (168.52 kg/ha) followed by 50% RDN through urea + 50% RDN through neem cake.
Moral Hazard in Remote Teams

We re-examine the ability of teams to credibly self-impose group punishments and prevent free-riding when individual inputs are unobservable. Holmström (1982) shows that group punishments are not credible in static games. We formulate self-imposed group punishments as performance under-reporting by the team, and we ask whether the team can credibly under-report in a repeated game. We develop simple strategies that sustain under-reporting, and show that the threat of under-reporting improves welfare only if team members’ preferences between shirking and team output consumption are non-separable. Our results suggest that self-assessments can replace increased managerial monitoring and mitigate free-riding in remote work environments.
Livestock Markets in West Africa: Potential Tools for Poverty Reduction?

I Abstract: Drawing on surveys of traders and weekly sales transactions data collected from January 2000 – June 2001 in three frontier markets linking four countries, this paper evaluates how livestock markets currently function in relation to poor livestock producers and traders in the central corridor of West Africa. Empirical analysis indicates that although market preferences appear to be well transmitted through prices to small-scale livestock producers, they are still largely unable to supply in sufficient quantity top quality animals demanded by buyers. Limited own financial resources and access to external finance prevent small-scale livestock traders from expanding their business activities at the same time that high transport and handling costs and taxes hinder the performance of large-scale traders engaged in cross-border trade. This information provides insights into the challenges confronting market participants and how they can be assisted through program and policy interventions to take advantage of market opportunities.
The Pattern of Breastfeeding among a Group of Neonates in Yaoundé, Cameroon

Breastfeeding is a physiological process which is necessary for growing neonates. We aimed to describe the process of breastfeeding among a group of Cameroonian neonates and their mothers. A descriptive study was carried out over a six-month period, from December 2018 to May 2019 at the Yaounde Gynaeco-Obstetric and Paediatric hospital. We enrolled 250 neonates and mothers. The mean gestational age was 38.4 ± 1.6 weeks, with an average birth weight of 3168.6 ± 508.7g. The average time for breastfeeding initiation was 2 hours and 97 (38.8%) neonates were put to the breast within the first hour after birth. All neonates with delayed breastfeeding initiation suffered inadequate breastfeeding practices: 153 (61.2%). Sixty women (39.2%) originated from the Centre region, with 37 (61.6%) having traditional beliefs and practices antagonizing breastfeeding. The rate of caesarean delivery was 31.2% (78 out of 250), and 92.3 % of such women had inadequate breastfeeding practices. Breast pathologies occurred in 85 women (55.5%), and all had inadequate breastfeeding practices. Sixteen (16) mothers out of 18 (88.9%) with HIV infection had poor breastfeeding practices. Among neonates with delayed breastfeeding initiation, 38 (24.8%) were hospitalized within 7 days, of which 21 (55.2%) were related to sepsis and 6 (15.7%) to metabolic disorders. Such neonates with inadequate breastfeeding represented 83.3% (15 out of 18) infants with hypotrophy. In conclusion, the rate of poor breastfeeding practices was high. Improving women education, as well as perinatal counselling on good breastfeeding practices and its advantages may be helpful