Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gaussian-Smoothed Optimal Transport: Metric Structure and Statistical Efficiency

Optimal transport (OT), and in particular the Wasserstein distance, has seen a surge of interest and applications in machine learning. However, empirical approximation under Wasserstein distances suffers from a severe curse of dimensionality, rendering them impractical in high dimensions. As a result, entropically regularized OT has become a popular workaround. However, while it enjoys fast algorithms and better statistical properties, it looses the metric structure that Wasserstein distances enjoy. This work proposes a novel Gaussian-smoothed OT (GOT) framework, that achieves the best of both worlds: preserving the 1-Wasserstein metric structure while alleviating the empirical approximation curse of dimensionality. Furthermore, as the Gaussian-smoothing parameter shrinks to zero, GOT $\Gamma$-converges towards classic OT (with convergence of optimizers), thus serving as a natural extension. An empirical study that supports the theoretical results is provided, promoting Gaussian-smoothed OT as a powerful alternative to entropic OT.
Clinic Study on Treatment of Malignant Thoracic Hydrops by Carboplatin Combined with HAS

Objective To observe and evalutate the clinical effect of carboplatin and highly agglutinative staphylococcin (HAS)in treating malignant thoracic hydrops.Methods 38 patients were applied with thoracical puncturing and piping,closed chest drainage and then chest injection of the medicine. They were randomly divided into two groups: Group A with carboplatin combined with HAS and Group B with only carboplatin.Once every three weeks is a period and 1~3 periods.Observe the effect and bad response after 2 weeks.Results Total effct rate for carbopolatin combined with HAS is 90% while that for carboplatin is 61.1%. There exists obvious difference between the two(P0.05)and the bad response of Group A is lower than Group B.Conclusion Carboplatin combined with HAS have a good effect in treating malignant thoracic hydrops with slight side effect and good endurance from the patients.
RESIDENTIAL RENT PREDICTIONS

This paper examines the predictive power of five linear hedonic pricing models for the residential market with varying complexity in their spatial and temporal structure. In contrast to similar studies, we extend the out-of-sample forecast evaluation to one-day-ahead predictions with a rolling estimation window, which is a reasonable setting for many practical applications. We can show that in-sample fit and cross-validation prediction accuracy improve significantly when we account for spatial heterogeneity. In particular, for one-day-ahead forecasts, the spatiotemporal autoregressive (STAR) model demonstrates its superiority compared to model specifications with alternating spatial and temporal heterogeneity and dependence structures. In addition, sub-market fixed-effects, constructed on the basis of statistical TREE methods, further improve the results of predefined local rental markets. JEL classification: C 1, C 2, R3.
Must magmatic intrusion in the lower crust produce reflectivity?

The F&roe–Iceland Ridge (FIR) provides a laboratory in which to investigate the reflectivity and velocity structure of thick crust generated above a mantle plume in order to constrain models of underplating and the origins of lower-crustal layering in an environment dominated by young igneous processes. Over 600 km of common midpoint (cmp) data were collected along and across the FIR using a large airgun array with a 240-channel streamer. The interpretation of these data has been integrated with a velocity model of the crust and upper mantle along the FIR obtained from wide-angle seismic arrivals into ocean bottom and land seismometers. Due to the intermediate water depths and the presence of basalt near the water bottom, specialized processing steps were required for the cmp data. A wave equation-based multiple attenuation scheme was applied to the prestack data, which used a forward model of the multiple series to predict and attenuate multiple energy. Array simulations were applied in the shot and receiver domains in order to minimize spatial aliasing and reduce low apparent-velocity noise. Most of the sections over the central (oceanic) portion of the FIR show no pronounced reflectivity, although occasional Moho and/or lower-crustal reflections are observed. We believe that the poor reflectivity results largely from a lack of physical property contrasts rather than being an effect of acquisition or processing, although we also conclude that residual energy from strong multiple reflection remains in the final sections. Amplitude decay and reflection strength vary along the FIR, but there is good signal-to-noise ratio to travel times of at least 9 s (i.e., into the lower crust), implying that the reduced reflectivity beneath the main part of the FIR is not an artifact of signal penetration loss. We conclude that the addition of melt to the lower crust along the trace of the plume apparently did not produce strong physical property contrasts in the lower crust, where little reflectivity is apparent. Perhaps this was because the entire crust was hot at the time of formation. In contrast, igneous intrusion into preexisting continental crust (at the F&roe Islands end of the FIR) and into older igneous crust (at the Iceland end of the FIR) produces significant lower-crustal reflectivity. Strong lower-crustal reflectivity elsewhere beneath the northwestern European continental margins may have a similar intrusive origin. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Epidemiology of Gout: Perspectives from the Past

Gout is an ancient disease with a prevalence that has increased dramatically worldwide over recent years. This paper briefly reviews the recent literature on the frequency of gout and geographic variation in contemporary populations and attempts to provide a synthesis of reported cases of gout in the past. The palaeopathological evidence of gout in the Asia Pacific region is focussed on and the biocultural context of food and ritual influencing the selection of hyperuricaemia is discussed. It is proposed that the prehistoric selection pressures leading to the high prevalence of diabetes and other 'diseases of modernisation' may also, at least in part, explain the high frequencies of hyperuricaemia and gout in modern Pacific Islanders.
An examination of the attitudes of accident & emergency clinicians toward children who deliberately self-harm

Recent years have seen an increase in self-harm behaviours amongst children and young people. In tandem, the amount of research on the phenomenon has also grown. However, despite the evident importance of care staff attitudes in the treatment of those who self-harm, an examination of the literature indicated a limited number of studies on how clinicians view such behaviour in the young. The aim of this thesis was to examine the attitudes of health care staff toward child self-harm. Within the study, it is argued that factors pertaining to both patients (age, gender and rate of admission) and care staff (role and clinical experience), will influence how an incidence of child self-harm is viewed. To answer the question, both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed. Within the former, a questionnaire was developed that contained hypothetical case vignettes of child self-harm. Once constructed, the instrument was distributed to the care staff of four Accident and Emergency departments, each of which treated self-harming children. Examination of the completed questionnaires (n = 152), showed significant differences in both staff and patient variables, confirming that attitudes toward child self-harm should not be viewed as a single entity but rather as constituent parts of a whole phenomena, each worthy of examination in its own right. In order to explore these issues in more detail, a series of focus groups were undertaken amongst care staff. Use was made of a Foucauldian discourse analysis framework devised by Kendall and Wickham (1999). This revealed intrinsic differences in the way clinicians view self-harm in children and the constituent parts therein. Comparison of both experienced and inexperienced nurses and physicians
Assimilation of IcT-led Innovation in the Public Sector of Bangladesh: an Empirical Investigation on Single-stage Assimilation Process

A BSTRACT ICT has become one of the major push factors for modern governments around the world for improving service delivery and gaining competitive advantage. In this study, we used the Diffusion of Innovation theory (DOI) and the Institutional theory to develop a conceptual framework to investigate the critical factors that affect the assimilation of ICT-led innovation in the public sector organizations of Bangladesh. Nine factors identified from the review of literature were then integrated into a TOE framework to establish a conceptual model for this study. Subsequently, 417 respondents from 175 public sector organizations took part in the survey. Then, an in-depth analysis was carried out. The findings of this research enrich the current literature and enhance practitioners’ understanding of the decision-making processes involved in the process of assimilation. It sheds new light on how ICT-led innovation becomes shaped and routinized within organizational settings and beyond their boundaries.
MOOD AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS ON SNS Glancing Up or Down: Mood Management and Selective Social Comparisons on Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites (SNS) provide opportunities for mood management through selective exposure. This study tested the prediction that negative mood fosters self-enhancing social comparisons to SNS profiles. Participants were induced into positive or negative moods and then browsed manipulated profiles on an experimental SNS. Profiles varied in a 2x2 within-subjects design along two dimensions, ratings of career success and attractiveness, allowing for upward comparisons (high ratings) and downward comparisons (low ratings). Selective exposure was measured in seconds spent viewing profiles. Negative mood led to less exposure to upward comparisons and more to downward comparisons than positive mood. The comparison dimension did not influence selective exposure. Thus, in a negative mood, SNS users prefer selfenhancing social comparisons to manage their mood.
THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA NEDLANDS, WESTERN AUSTRALIA 6907 EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF SELF-EMPLOYMENT

This paper presents a review of empirical studies of self-employment for the Australian, Canadian, Dutch, U.K. and U.S. labour markets. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies are analysed. Analyses using cross-sectional data examine the propensity to be self-employed at any one point in time, whereas longitudinal studies focus on the transition into self-employment from wage/salary employment and the survival rate in this state over time. Various hypotheses advanced in the economics and sociology literatures on self-employment are tested. These include the relationship between managerial ability and the propensity to be self-employed and the impact of financial constraints on entry into self-employment stressed in economic models of entrepreneurship, and the relationships between self-employment choice and the nature of the work and group characteristics (e.g., ethnic enclaves) stressed in sociological models of entrepreneurship. The evidence shows that self-employment outcomes are significantly affected by factors such as individual abilities, family background, occupational status, liquidity constraints and ethnic enclaves. EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF SELF-EMPLOYMENT
Self-Critical Sequence Training for Image Captioning

Image captioning aims at generating a natural language description of an image. Open domain captioning is a very challenging task, as it requires a fine-grained understanding of the global and the local entities in an image, as well as their attributes and relationships. The recently released MSCOCO challenge [1] provides a new, larger scale platform for evaluating image captioning systems, complete with an evaluation server for benchmarking competing methods. Deep learning approaches to sequence modeling have yielded impressive results on the task, dominating the task leaderboard. Inspired by the recently introduced encoder/decoder paradigm for machine translation using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) [2], [3], and [4] use a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to encode the input image, and a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) [5] RNN decoder to generate the output caption. These systems are trained end-to-end using back-propagation, and have achieved state-of-the-art results on MSCOCO. More recently in [6], the use of spatial attention mechanisms on CNN layers to incorporate visual context—which implicitly conditions on the text generated so far—was incorporated into the generation process.
Propaganda and Protest in Autocracies

Does propaganda reduce the rate of popular protest in autocracies? To answer this question, we draw on an original dataset of state-run newspapers from thirty countries, encompassing six languages and over four million articles. We find that propaganda diminishes the rate of protest, and that its effects persist over time. By increasing the level of pro-regime propaganda by one standard deviation, autocrats have reduced the odds of protest the following day by 15%. The half-life of this effect is between five and ten days, and very little of the initial effect persists after one month. This temporal persistence is remarkably consistent with campaign advertisements in democracies.
COPD_A_226268 2777..2785

Yuki Yoshimatsu 1 Kazunori Tobino Takuto Sueyasu Saori Nishizawa Yuki Ko Mina Yasuda Hiromi Ide Kosuke Tsuruno Hiroyuki Miyajima 1Department of Respiratory Medicine, Iizuka Hospital, Fukuoka 820-8505, Japan; 2Department of Respiratory Medicine, Juntendo University Graduate School of Medicine, Tokyo 113-8431, Japan Introduction: Predicting phenotypes at risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbation is extremely important. Dysphagia is becoming recognized as one of these phenotypes. A convenient method of screening for dysphagia and COPD exacerbation risk is desired. The repetitive saliva swallowing test (RSST) is one of the least invasive dysphagia screening methods. We previously reported the possible relation between the RSST result and COPD exacerbation in a retrospective study. Based on this, we performed a prospective study to evaluate the efficacy of RSST as a predictor of COPD exacerbation and to determine its optimal cut-off value for COPD. Methods: Seventy patients with COPD were recruited. Patients underwent the following dysphagia screening tests: the 10-item Eating Assessment Tool, Frequency Scale for the Symptoms of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, RSST, water swallowing test, and simple swallow provocation test. After one year, they were classified into two groups according to the presence of COPD exacerbation during the follow-up period. Results: Twenty-seven patients had one or more exacerbations in the past year. During the follow-up period, 28 patients had one or more exacerbations (E group), and 42 had none (non-E group). There were no significant differences between the groups except for the presence of past exacerbations and the results of the RSST, when the cut-off value was set at 2, 3, 4, or 5 swallows. The number of swallows in the RSST was significantly lower in the E group than in the Non-E group. A cut-off value of 5 was the most effective. The time to first exacerbation was significantly longer in those with an RSST value of >5. The RSST was more reliable for differentiating the E group and non-E group than the presence of exacerbation in the past year (hazard ratios: 13.78 and 2.70, respectively). Conclusion: An RSST cut-off value of 5 may be a strong predictor of COPD exacerbation.
KEIO/KYOTO JOINT GLOBAL CENTER OF EXCELLENCE PROGRAM Raising Market Quality-Integrated Design of “Market Infrastructure” KEIO/KYOTO GLOBAL COE DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES

Do regional policies for promoting periphery development attract highor low-productivity firms? Though whether policies improve the core-periphery productivity gap hinges on this question, no consensus is found in theoretical models. This paper uses plant-level data covering all regions in Japan during the period of active relocation policies. Our estimation results from plant-level regressions and propensity-score matching show that the average productivity of plants is significantly low in regions targeted by relocation policy programs. By comparing productivity distributions across plants before and after the start of each policy program, we find that low-productivity plants are attracted to targeted regions. JEL classifications: R12; R58; H32
Efficiency, Competition and Financial Resilience of Malaysian Insurance Industry

This paper is aimed to study the financial resilience of Malaysian insurance companies and Takaful operators hence determine how it is determined by the efficiency of the firms. This paper also examines how competition affects financial resilience. Hence, we test the Charter Value Hypothesis where resilience is determined by the number of competitors and choice of technology. In addition, we also test the Strategic focus versus conglomeration hypotheses about financial resilience. We compute the efficiency and financial resilience of 42 general insurers and 28 life insurers from 2005 to 2016 using DEA and Z-score, respectively. Competition is computed using HHI, and the link between them is estimated using static panel modelling. We find that the industry is well equipped to deal with volatilities, where z-score for life insurance averages between 4.16 and 14.63 while for general insurance is between 3.45 and 16.21. Market concentration for general insurance is rather stable while that of life insurance has decreased hence increased competition. On the one hand, we find competition may help life insurers by improving the effect of efficiency on financial soundness. On the other hand, we find concentration is preferred to the solvency of general insurers, and this concentration eliminates the influence of efficiency on the financial soundness of general insurers. This paper contributes to the limited pool of literature on the nexus between efficiency, competition and financial resilience on the insurance industry, and we believe it is the first in Malaysia. Plus, it encompasses both branches of insurance, life and general and both conventional and Islamic insurance. Article Information: This paper was first presented at the First International Conference on Management and Social Sciences (ICMSS 2019), organised by the School of Human Resource Development and Psychology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia, on 27 April 2019. Published after peer review: November 2019.
Urban Tree Mortality: A Literature Review

Tree survival is a performance metric for urban forestry initiatives, and an understanding of the factors that influence mortality can help managers target resources and enhance survival. Furthermore, urban tree planting investments depend on tree survival to maximize ecosystem services. In this literature review, we categorized factors commonly associated with urban tree mortality and summarized mortality rates published in 56 studies, focusing on studies of trees along streets, in yards, and in landscaped parks. Study designs included quantitative field monitoring of uneven-aged tree populations and tracking planting cohorts of even-aged trees, as well as qualitative analyses. Annual mortality rates ranged from 0.6 to 68.5% for cohort studies and 0 to 30% for repeated inventories of uneven-aged trees. The 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quartiles of annual mortality were 2.8 to 3.8%, 4.4 to 6.5%, and 7.1 to 9.3% for planting cohorts, and 1.6%, 2.3 to 2.6%, and 3.0 to 3.3% for repeated inventories of uneven-aged trees (ranges reflect studies that reported a range for the time period or mortality rate). For cohort studies, annual mortality tended to be highest during the first five years after planting. The most commonly cited biophysical factors associated with mortality were taxa (15 articles), tree size/age (13 articles), and site characteristics (12 articles). The most commonly cited human-related factors were stewardship, maintenance, and vandalism (15 articles). More long-term studies are needed to investigate how site characteristics influence mortality, including rarely examined soil and microclimate characteristics. Future research should also examine institutional structures related to mortality outcomes, as well as parcel-level sociodemographic factors and resident behaviors.
A Novel Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine for Distributed & Utility Deployment

KR Windpower, Inc. has developed a patented vertical-axis wind turbine line for both utility and distributed applications. Utility-scale turbines (1.5MW) are currently being installed in wind projects in Asia, while concomitant certification is ongoing. The KR wind technology has very high power-to-swept area efficiency and therefore works especially well around houses and buildings and in other applications where traditional three-blade horizontal axis turbines do not. Additionally, due to its low rotor speed (but with high torque, even at low wind speeds) and optimal rotor design, KR’s patented turbine is vitually noiseless, making it especially attractive for installation in residential and recreational areas. Field testing of 1, 3, and 5kW turbines has resulted in cut-in speed of 2.5m/s and rated speeds of 9~12.5m/s. Thus, electricity is generated even at low wind speeds. This paper presents measured performances of a small-scale, vertical, wind turbine rated as 1 kW which has a tail consisted of a stabilizer and a rudder. Compared with the maximum power coefficient of 0.59 for a downsized model measured in a closed-type wind tunnel, the maximum turbine power coefficient averaged 0.5 at a tip-speed ratio of 0.5-0.6 in an open-type wind tunnel. The KR small-class turbines are based on IEC wind turbine class III, which specifies that the highest 10 minute-mean wind speed is 37.5m/s or less for the last 50 years. However, steady loadings by the extreme wind model of 52.5m/s were implemented, and the turbine was proven to be safe by its furling tail. A key element of KR Windpower’s strategy is to provide a turbine product, including a wind/solar hybrid concept, which addresses power and aesthetic needs of developers and communities.
Buckling of beverage cans under axial loading

Wrinkling is one of the major defects in sheet metal forming processes. It may become a serious obstacle to implementing forming process and assembling the parts, and may also play a significant role in the wear of the tool. Wrinkling is a local buckling phenomenon that results from compressive stresses (compressive instability) e.g., in the hoop direction for axisymmetric systems such as beverage cans. In the present work, we have studied the buckling of ideal (no imposed imperfections like dents) beverage cans under axial loading both by laboratory testing and finite element analysis. Our laboratory test showed that 2 out of 11 cans fail by sidewall buckling. We have developed finite element models to study the effect of a couple of manufacturing parameters on the buckling of beverage cans. Further we have studied the buckling of dented beverage cans under axial compression through both laboratory testing and finite element analysis using Abaqus and LS-Dyna. Our results show that Abaqus did not predict sidewall buckling during axial compression of beverage cans while LS-Dyna predicted buckling in a few cases.