Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Performing ‘Green Europe’? A narrative analysis of European Fisheries Policy

In terms of the pursuit of sustainability objectives, the EU fisheries policy is a complete disaster, according to all scholars analyzing it. While the EU appeared to seek to create and sustain an image as moral leader and vanguard in global environmental governance in a range of policy fields in the last decades, first and foremost global climate policy, the EU fisheries policy did not benefit from such efforts. Indeed, the EU fisheries policy seemed to fit critical observers’ claims that EU environmental policy is dominated by narratives about efficiency, technological modernization and a notion of development that privileges economic growth over ecological sustainability rather than a “green leader” narrative. In 2013/2014, however, the EU adopted a major reform of its fisheries policy, which, at least on the surface, suggests significant improvements in sustainability efforts. The jury on the actual effects of these reforms is still out. Nevertheless, we are interested in their potential sources, assuming for now that the reforms will indeed make a difference. With little change in the interests and constellations of the relevant national and economic interests immediately observable, we wonder to what extent a change in underlying narratives may have paved the way for these reforms. Has the green leader argument finally arrived in the EU fisheries policy or become more dominant among contending narratives? Accordingly, this paper aims to identify and interpret developments in the relevant narratives in the EU fisheries policy.
A semantic framework for extracting taxonomic relations from text corpus

Nowadays, ontologies have been exploited in many current applications due to the abilities in representing knowledge and inferring new knowledge. However, the manual construction of ontologies is tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, the automated ontology construction from text has been investigated. The extraction of taxonomic relations between concepts is a crucial step in constructing domain ontologies. To obtain taxonomic relations from a text corpus, especially when the data is deficient, the approach of using the web as a source of collective knowledge (a.k.a web-based approach) is usually applied. The important challenge of this approach is how to collect relevant knowledge from a large amount of web pages. To overcome this issue, we propose a framework that combines Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and web approach to extract taxonomic relations from a domain-text corpus. This framework consists of two main stages: concept extraction and taxonomic-relation extraction. Concepts acquired from the concept-extraction stage are disambiguated through WSD module and passed to stage of extraction taxonomic relations afterward. To evaluate the efficiency of the proposed framework, we conduct experiments on datasets about two domains of tourism and sport. The obtained results show that the proposed method is efficient in corpora which are insufficient or have no training data. Besides, the proposed method outperforms the state of the art method in corpora having high WSD results.
Marginal Product of Capital and FDI under Financial Frictions

This paper empirically examines how external financial needsmeasured at the sector leveland financial development at the country level interact to shape the aggregate marginal product of capital of a country (MPK) and its foreign direct investment inflows (FDI). Using new available data we construct annual aggregate MPK for 60 developing and developed countries during 1995-2009; we use industry-level data to construct an annual country-level measure of external financial dependence and assess its effects on MPK conditional on the level of financial development. Second, using bilateral FDI over 2001-2010 we analyze how external financial dependence and financial development determine FDI inflows in developing countries. Our findings imply that financial development seems to be a necessary condition -and certainly not a sufficient onein order for production in financially dependent sectors to positively affect aggregate MPK and FDI in developing countries. These results taken altogether contribute to some extent to explaining the Lucas’ Paradox of why aggregate capitals don’t flow from rich to poor countries. JEL Classification codes: E22, F11, F21, F32, F41, F63, O11, O16, O47.
Cross-border Majority Investments of GCC Sovereign Wealth Funds: a Threat for the Economy?

In this paper we examine the investment strategy of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. GCC SWFs are considered as relatively opaque investors and strongly politicized, raising some concerns for perceived political and security risks. We investigate what are the drivers of majority cross-border equity acquisitions made by GCC SWFs over the period 2006-2015. Using a logit model and an ordered logit, we test if usual determinants of SWFs investments still stand when we look at influential (> 10%) or majority (> 50%) acquisitions made by GCC SWFs. We find that GCC SWFs’ do not consider financial characteristics of the targeted firms when they acquire large cross-borde stakes but rather the characteristics of the country (countries in the European union and/or countries with a high level of shareholders protection), suggesting that their motives may go beyond pure profit maximization. We also find that transparent funds are more likely to take influential or majority stakes and that they do so predominantly in non-strategic sectors. Overall, our results indicates that even if GCC SWFs don’t seek only for financial returns, acquiring majority stakes is not a lever for GCC governments to get strategic interests in the targeted country. JEL classification: F310; F31; G15
Curve Skeleton Extraction From 3D Point Clouds Through Hybrid Feature Point Shifting and Clustering

Curve skeleton is an important shape descriptor with many potential applications in computer graphics, visualization and machine intelligence. We present a curve skeleton expression based on the set of the cross‐section centroids from a point cloud model and propose a corresponding extraction approach. We first provide the substitution of a distance field for a 3D point cloud model, and then combine it with curvatures to capture hybrid feature points. By introducing relevant facets and points, we shift these hybrid feature points along the skeleton‐guided normal directions to approach local centroids, simplify them through a tensor‐based spectral clustering and finally connect them to form a primary connected curve skeleton. Furthermore, we refine the primary skeleton through pruning, trimming and smoothing. We compared our results with several state‐of‐the‐art algorithms including the rotational symmetry axis (ROSA) and L1‐medial methods for incomplete point cloud data to evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of our method.
Optimally Sample-Efficient Phase Retrieval with Deep Generative Models

We consider the phase retrieval problem, which asks to recover a structured n-dimensional signal from m quadratic measurements. In many imaging contexts, it is beneficial to enforce a sparsity prior on the signal to reduce the number of measurements necessary for recovery. However, the best known methodologies for sparse phase retrieval have a sub-optimal quadratic dependency on the sparsity level of the signal at hand. In this work, we instead model signals as living in the range of a deep generative neural network G : ℝk → ℝn. We show that under the model of a d-layer feed forward neural network with Gaussian weights, m = O(kd2 log n) generic measurements suffice for the ℓ2 empirical risk minimization problem to have favorable geometry. In particular, we exhibit a descent direction for all points outside of two arbitrarily small neighborhoods of the true k-dimensional latent code and a negative reflection of it. Our proof is based on showing the sufficiency of two deterministic conditions on the generator and measurement matrices, which are satisfied with high probability under random Gaussian ensembles. We corroborate these results with numerical experiments showing that enforcing a generative prior via empirical risk minimization outperforms sparse phase retrieval methods.
Defects of CTLA-4 Are Associated with Regulatory T Cells in Myasthenia Gravis Implicated by Intravenous Immunoglobulin Therapy

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is a CD4+ T cell-dependent autoimmune disease resulting from aberrant immune response mediated by circulating autoantibodies at the neuromuscular junction. Intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg) is an expensive and commonly used immunotherapeutic approach to treat patients with MG. The mechanisms of actions involved in IVIg treatment, however, remain to be investigated. In an effort to examine the roles of various subsets of CD4+ T cells in the periphery blood of MG and uncover the mechanisms that contribute to the therapeutical effects of IVIg, we first demonstrated that a subset of CD4+ T cells, CTLA-4-expressing regulatory T (Treg) cells, were underrepresented and functionally defective in MG patients. The dynamic profiling during the IVIg therapy course further revealed an inverse relationship between the frequency of CTLA-4+ Treg and the quantitative MG (QMG) score that represents disease severity. Our mechanistic studies indicated that IVIg expands CTLA-4-Treg cells via modulating antigen-presenting dendritic cells (DCs). To determine the molecular defects of CTLA-4 in abnormities of Treg in MG patients, we demonstrated hypermethylation at -658 and -793 CpGs of CTLA-4 promoter in MG Tregs. Interestingly, IVIg therapy significantly reduced the methylation level at these two sites in MG patients. Overall, our study may suggest a role of CTLA-4 in functionally defected Treg cells in MG and its actions involved in IVIg therapy.
Glass and other vitreous materials through history

Early vitreous materials include homogeneous glass, glassy faience, faience and glazed stones. These materials evolved slowly into more specialized substances such as enamels, engobes, lustres, or even modern metallic glass. The nature and properties of vitreous materials are summarized briefly, with an eye to the historical evolution of glass production in the Mediterranean world. Focus is on the evolution of European, Egyptian, and Near East materials. Notes on Chinese and Indian glass are reported for comparison. The most common techniques of mineralogical and chemical characterization of vitreous materials are described, highlighting the information derived for the purposes of archaeometric analysis and conservation.
Empirical Evidence of Anchoring Effect in Litigations†

Given its wide acceptance, it is surprising that the empirical, rather than experimental, evidence for anchoring effect is rare and inconclusive. We offer the first large-scale court evidence for anchoring in judicial decision-making. Using Taiwan’s court cases on trespassing, matched with transaction data of lands and another dataset on judge experience, we provide evidence that the plaintiff’s claim strongly anchors the court’s judgment: Both the plaintiff’s claim and defendant’s counter-claim significantly influence the decisions of the less-experienced judges, but not the more-experienced judges. Therefore, we not only provide evidence for anchoring in litigation, but also suggest experience as a crucial debiaser.
A proposed roadmap for the control of infections in wildlife using Chlamydia vaccine development in koalas Phascolarctos cinereus as a template

Vaccination strategies provide a crucial tool for managements of disease risks in wildlife, but have been utilized mostly for domestic species. However, a significant body of work has now been published describing the successful development of an anti-chlamydial vaccine for the koala Phascolarctos cinereus, Goldfuss, 1817. As such, vaccinations against these infections in the koala, can provide important insights into the use of vaccines for wildlife. Chlamydia infections in the koala have been intensively studied for over 30 years. Infections cause severe disease states, such as kerato-conjunctivitis (blindness) and reproductive tract disease (infertility), and/or mortality; and are contributing significantly to population declines. We aim to use the plethora of data available from koala chlamydial studies as a template to propose a roadmap for the development of vaccines for other wildlife species, especially in this era of antibiotic resistance. As such we have outlined the important steps that have led to significant milestones resulting in the successful development of a vaccine against an infectious disease in a non-domestic species. We hope to thus provide, not only a timely review on Chlamydia vaccines in koalas, but also an important conservation and management roadmap to help guide future researchers that are considering the development of a vaccine for a wild species.
Investment and financial constraints: Does analyst coverage matter?

The goal of the paper is to check whether analyst coverage of a firm relaxes its financial constraint. Using a data set that includes Small and Middle Enterprises (SME) from six European countries between 2000 and 2015, we check whether analyst following reduces the sensitivity of investment expenses to cash-flow. We show that firms with a large coverage are less sensitive to cash-flow. We also obtain that the favorable effect of coverage on investment sensitivity to cash-flow is stronger for low-capitalization firms. Our findings suggest that analyst coverage mitigates information asymmetries and relaxes firms’ financial constraint, especially for SME.
Is Cheating a National Pastime? Experimental Evidence

The decision to cheat is a frequent and relatively mundane economic decision that individuals make on a regular basis in their everyday lives. We observe individuals from the U.K., Russia and Chile making multiple cheating decisions in a public goods game. The majority of subjects in each country exhibit stable cheating behaviors: they either cheat maximally all the time; never cheat; or cheat partially all the time. The distribution of these behaviors varies across countries. Some correlates of cheating exhibit considerable stability across three countries: Both ability and selfish behavior in the Dictator Game are strong and consistent predictors of maximal, but not partial, cheating. Those exhibiting a proclivity to cheat in the public goods game are also more likely to cheat in a classic dierolling game. Treatments aimed at moderating the extrinsic and intrinsic costs of cheating had little, if any, effect on subject behavior.
Understanding observations of selected environmental changes in communities surrounding the Bering Sea Authors: Paula Williams, Alaska Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research

Data in remote Arctic communities is sparse and can be unreliable. Proposals have been made to use Community-Based Observing Network and Systems (CBONS) as human sensor-arrays to increase collection of data and knowledge in the Arctic. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that natural selection has not shaped our perceptions to be an accurate representation of objective reality, but to be a species-specific guide to behaviors that we need to survive and reproduce. An understanding of which human perceptions are more or less reliable is essential if human-arrays are to be used. This study sought to investigate the correspondence between observations made by community members selected based on their length of residence or amount of time spent on the land and the sea, to local instrumented data. Interviews were conducted in communities bordering the Bering Sea in the Russian Federation: Nikolskoye, Tymlat and Kanchalan; and in Alaska: St. George, Togiak, Sand Point, Savoonga and Gambell.
Taylor Rules and inflation anchoring

The Taylor principle plays a central role in the analysis of inflation anchoring in New Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium models. Ensuring determinacy of equilibria, the Taylor principle attributes to the central bank the power of anchoring inflation. A by-product of this approach is that the Taylor principle sharply reduces inertia in inflation, as it allows to achieve steady state equilibrium with a stroke of a pen. In this paper, we empirically analyse the relationship between inflation inertia and the Taylor rule, focusing on a sample covering the US starting from the 1970s. Two main results of our empirical analysis stand out. First, we find that inflation persistence increased over time across a number of inflation indexes. Second, we find evidence of parameter instability in the monetary policy rule followed by the Federal Reserve Bank across a variety of econometric methods. Building on recent extensions of the standard New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model in which the central bank sets its policy rate on a liquid asset, we propose a parsimonious model that sheds light on our empirical findings. The model, which does not require the Taylor principle for determinacy, reproduces the behaviour of the standard 3-equation New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model (NKSGE) as well as the increased persistence in simulated inflation retrieved in the data. ∗PSE Paris School of Economics, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Contact: emanuele.franceschi@psemail.eu
Diagnostic value of ultrasonography on acute occlusion of radial artery after percutaneous coronary intervention

Objective To investigate the diagnostic value of high-frequency ultrasonography on acute occlusion of radial artery after percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods After percutaneous coronary intervention via the radial artery, 34 patients with acute occlusion of radial artery and 34 healthy subjects were enrolled. The internal diameters before the intervention in patients with post-interventional occlusion of radial artery were detected by ultrasonography,and they were compared with the control group. Differences between touching pulse and ultrasonography in the diagnostic accuracy of assessing the occlusion of radial artery were compared. Results The internal diameter of radial artery before the intervention in occlusion group was(2.03±0.25)mm,and it was(2.48±0.44)mm in control group. There was a significant difference between the two groups (P0.001). In occlusion group,20 cases of radial artery without pulse were detected by clinical touching pulse method. The diagnosis rate was 58.82%. Thirty-four cases of radial artery occlusion were diagnosed by ultrasonography. The diagnosis rate was 100% ,which was higher than the former,the difference was statistically significant (P0.001). Small flow from collateral circulation was found in 5 of 34 cases. Conclusion Ultrasonography is more conducive to the diagnosis of radial artery occlusion after coronary intervention.
Does Country Risk Affect FDI to GCC Countries?

This paper examines the long-and short-term impacts of country risk on FDI using cointegration and error correction models in GCC countries for the period from 2002 to 2015. We use three proxies for country risk: corruption, regulatory quality and political stability and absence of violence. The evidence suggests a positive long-term impact of fighting corruption and improving political stability and absence of violence on the attractiveness of host countries to FDI. Surprisingly, quality of regulations variable negatively affects FDI. The results of our study suggest that policy makers could attract more FDI to GCC countries through directing efforts toward combatting corruption and enhancing political stability which may help GCC economies attract more FDI.
A Men Who Have Sex With Men–Friendly Doctor Finder Hackathon in Guangzhou, China: Development of a Mobile Health Intervention to Enhance Health Care Utilization

Background Mobile health (mHeath)–based HIV and sexual health promotion among men who have sex with men (MSM) is feasible in low- and middle-income settings. However, many currently available mHealth tools on the market were developed by the private sector for profit and have limited input from MSM communities. Objective A health hackathon is an intensive contest that brings together participants from multidisciplinary backgrounds to develop a proposed solution for a specific health issue within a short period. The purpose of this paper was to describe a hackathon event that aimed to develop an mHealth tool to enhance health care (specifically HIV prevention) utilization among Chinese MSM, summarize characteristics of the final prototypes, and discuss implications for future mHealth intervention development. Methods The hackathon took place in Guangzhou, China. An open call for hackathon participants was advertised on 3 Chinese social media platforms, including Blued, a popular social networking app among MSM. All applicants completed a Web-based survey and were then scored. The top scoring applicants were grouped into teams based on their skills and content area expertise. Each team was allowed 1 month to prepare for the hackathon. The teams then came together in person with on-site expert mentorship for a 72-hour hackathon contest to develop and present mHealth prototype solutions. The judging panel included experts in psychology, public health, computer science, social media, clinical medicine, and MSM advocacy. The final prototypes were evaluated based on innovation, usability, and feasibility. Results We received 92 applicants, and 38 of them were selected to attend the April 2019 hackathon. A total of 8 teams were formed, including expertise in computer science, user interface design, business or marketing, clinical medicine, and public health. Moreover, 24 participants self-identified as gay, and 3 participants self-identified as bisexual. All teams successfully developed a prototype tool. A total of 4 prototypes were designed as a mini program that could be embedded within a popular Chinese social networking app, and 3 prototypes were designed as stand-alone apps. Common prototype functions included Web-based physician searching based on one’s location (8 prototypes), health education (4 prototypes), Web-based health counseling with providers or lay health volunteers (6 prototypes), appointment scheduling (8 prototypes), and between-user communication (2 prototypes). All prototypes included strategies to ensure privacy protection for MSM users, and some prototypes offered strategies to ensure privacy of physicians. The selected prototypes are undergoing pilot testing. Conclusions This study demonstrated the feasibility and acceptability of using a hackathon to create mHealth intervention tools. This suggests a different pathway to developing mHealth interventions and could be relevant in other settings.