Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vulnerability to Multidimensional Poverty: Findings from Households in Melanesia

Abstract This paper examines vulnerability in two Melanesian small island developing states: Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. With large proportions of the population living semi-subsistence lifestyles in rural areas, consumption poverty is notoriously difficult to measure. The paper therefore departs from the standard approach and assesses household vulnerability to multidimensional poverty. The paper employs cross-sectional data from a household survey. Results indicate that vulnerability is more widespread than poverty and that vulnerability stems more from excess volatility in expected wellbeing than a particularly low expected level of wellbeing, per se. Results point to a pressing need for formal social protection policies to be implemented.
Meyda: an Audio Feature Extraction Library for the Web Audio API

There are many existing native libraries and frameworks for audio feature extraction used in multimedia information retrieval. Many are dependent on highly optimised low level code to cope with the high performance requirements of realtime audio analysis. In this paper, we present a new audio feature extractor library, Meyda, for use with the JavaScript Web Audio API, and detail its benchmarking results. Meyda provides the first library for audio feature extraction in the web client, which will enable music information retrieval systems, complex visualisations and a wide variety of technologies and creative projects that previously were relegated to native software. The Meyda project, including source code and documentation is released under an MIT license.
A Question of Balance: A Qualitative Study of Mothers’ Interpretations of Dietary Recommendations

PURPOSE Poor nutrition is an increasing problem for economically deprived families, and mothers play a key role in establishing children’s diets. We explored mothers’ understanding of health-promotion recommendations for healthy eating. METHODS We conducted qualitative semistructured interviews of 46 mothers within a relatively socioeconomically deprived community. Data were subject to framework analysis. RESULTS The basic slogans of health promotion were known by mothers and had been adopted into everyday language. Television was the main source of information on dietary advice. Barriers to making changes were due to practical constraints (time, money, family preferences) and a desire to enhance quality of life through enjoyment of food. Although the headline messages of the importance of a healthy diet and what constitutes a healthy diet had reached mothers, misunderstandings were common and led to inappropriate actions. Many descriptions of what mothers reported as a balanced diet would not satisfy official definitions. Some women willfully adapted their understanding of advice to suit their preferences and the reality of their lives and family circumstances. CONCLUSIONS To provide effective advice and guidance, health professionals need a deeper understanding of how families interpret messages about healthy eating. In addition, they should provide advice based on more individual understandings of diet and take into account patient preferences and life circumstances.
The Independence Paradox: (Im)Possibilities Facing Non-Executive Directors in the Netherlands

The paper adds to our knowledge of what non-executive directors do, knowledge which is still in its infancy. More specifically, it reports the findings of a survey among more than 250 Dutch non-executive directors regarding their roles and limitations. Although the majority agreed that monitoring is their main duty, they also expressed doubts whether they are really able to carry out this "watchdog role" effectively. The primary limitation is sought in the asymmetry of information which gives rise to the so-called "independence paradox": in obtaining adequate information non-executives are dependent on the executives they are expected to supervise and to be independent from.
Do Hedge Funds Supply or Demand Liquidity

Regressing hedge funds’ returns on returns to a long–short contrarian trading strategy, a measure of the returns from providing liquidity, we find that hedge funds typically supply liquidity in the stock market. In the cross-section, strict redemption restrictions and large fund size increase funds’ propensity to supply liquidity. In time series, poor market liquidity and good funding conditions increase funds’ propensity to supply liquidity. Although the hedge funds typically supply liquidity, during crises they demand liquidity. We also find that increases in the amount of speculative capital improve market liquidity and reduce the amount of short-term return reversals and volatility.
Re: Bacillus Calmette-Guerin versus epirubicin for primary, secondary or concurrent carcinoma in situ of the bladder: results of a European Organization for the Research and Treatment of Cancer-Genito-Urinary Group Phase III Trial (30906).

ABSTRACT Purpose: We compared the efficacy and side effects of intravesical instillations of bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) and epirubicin in patients with carcinoma in situ (CIS) of the bladder. Materials and Methods: Patients with primary, secondary or concurrent CIS of the bladder were randomized to 81 mg BCG-Connaught (6 weekly instillations) or 50 mg epirubicin (8 weekly instillations). When a complete response (CR), defined as no Ta/T1 or CIS on biopsy and negative cytology, was obtained, patients in the 2 groups received maintenance instillations at months 3, 6, 12, 18, 24, 30 and 36. When no complete response was observed, the original treatment was repeated, followed again by cystoscopy and biopsies plus cytology. Results: A total of 168 patients were randomized between March 1993 and April 1999 to receive BCG (84) or epirubicin (84), while 4 on epirubicin and 3 on BCG were ineligible. The majority (52%) had concurrent CIS. Primary and secondary CIS was found in 23% and 24% of cases, respectively. The overall CR rate was 56% for epirubicin and 65% for BCG (p = 0.21, 90% CI 21.5 to −2.9). When tumor was found following 2 instillation courses, further treatment was left to the investigator (BCG in 29 cases and epirubicin in 37). Time to bladder tumor recurrence after CR was longer in patients treated with BCG vs epirubicin (median 5.1 vs 1.4 years). CIS recurrences were more frequently observed in complete responders to epirubicin (45% vs 16%). No differences in time to progression or duration of survival were observed. Side effects were more frequently seen in patients on BCG with 26 on BCG and 8 on epirubicin stopping treatment due to side effects. Conclusions: No significant difference in CR rates could be demonstrated with intravesical instillations of epirubicin or BCG. Time to recurrence was significantly longer in patients treated with BCG after having achieved a CR. More CIS recurrences were found in patients treated with epirubicin. For time to progression and survival longer followup is warranted. Side effects were more frequent in patients on BCG.
Path Loss Modeling for Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications have received increasing attention lately, but there is a lack of reported results regarding important quantities such as path loss. This paper presents parameterized path loss models for V2V communications based on extensive sets of measurement data collected mainly under line-of-sight conditions in four different propagation environments: highway, rural, urban, and suburban. The results show that the path loss exponent is low for V2V communications, i.e., path loss slowly increases with increasing distance. We compare our results to those previously reported and find that, while they confirm some of the earlier work, there are also differences that motivate the need for further studies.
Types of Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth

In this paper, we empirically investigate the effect of entrepreneurship on economic growth at the country level. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which provides comparative data on entrepreneurship from a wide range of countries. An important element of this paper is that we compare the effects of entrepreneurial activity on economic growth in high income, transition and low income countries. This dataset also enables us to make a distinction between the effects of entrepreneurship in general and growth-oriented entrepreneurship in particular. We present empirical tests of the impact of entrepreneurial activity on GDP growth over a four year period for a sample of 36 countries. Our empirical analyses suggest that entrepreneurship does not have an effect on economic growth in low income countries, in contrast to transition and high income countries where especially growth-oriented entrepreneurship seems to contribute strongly to macroeconomic growth.
MUTUAL FUND DAILY CONDITIONAL PERFORMANCE

The empirical finance literature reveals that conditional models estimated with monthly data generally improve fund performance. Furthermore, it has been shown that using daily instead of monthly returns in an unconditional framework increases the proportion of abnormal performances relative to timing. In this article, we study conditional performance estimated with daily data in a bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) framework. Our daily conditional alphas and global performances with GARCH are significantly better than those estimated with other parametrizations and they persist over time. Finally, the proportion of abnormal timing performances diminishes significantly when conditional parametrizations are used.
The popularity of prestigious hospitality journals: a Google Scholar approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that prior studies on rating hospitality journals primarily used two major assessment categories. The first category gauges experts' perceptions of a journal's quality in terms of prestige. The second category counts objective measures that reflect journal quality in terms of popularity. The purpose of this study is to introduce a new counting method that uses Google Scholar (GS) to evaluate the citation counts of the leading hospitality journals.Design/methodology/approach – The study began with the top hospitality journals in a recent study that rated journals based on perceived quality by hospitality experts. Next the paper examined the popularity, defined as the citations in Google Scholar (GS), of these leading hospitality journals. The collection of 1960 to 2006 GS citation counts was conducted from February to August 2007.Findings – The ranking of GS citation counts for the selected journals generally followed the perceived ratings. The International J.
Efficacy of liquid nitrogen cryotherapy for Barrett's esophagus after endoscopic resection of intramucosal cancer: A multicenter study

Liquid nitrogen cryotherapy (LNC) allows increased depth of ablation compared with radiofrequency ablation in Barrett's esophagus (BE). Expert centers may use LNC over radiofrequency ablation to ablate Barrett's esophagus after endoscopic resection of intramucosal cancer (IMCA). The aim of our study was to (1) evaluate the safety and efficacy of LNC ablation in patients with BE and IMCA and (2) to evaluate the progression to invasive disease despite therapy.
Decreasing perinatal mortality in The Netherlands, 2000–2006: a record linkage study

Background: The European PERISTAT-1 study showed that, in 1999, perinatal mortality, especially fetal mortality, was substantially higher in The Netherlands than in other European countries. The aim of this study was to analyse the recent trend in Dutch perinatal mortality and the influence of risk factors. Methods: A nationwide retrospective cohort study of 1 246 440 singleton births in 2000–2006 in The Netherlands. The source data were available from three linked registries: the midwifery registry, the obstetrics registry and the neonatology/paediatrics registry. The outcome measure was perinatal mortality (fetal and early neonatal mortality). The trend was studied with and without risk adjustment. Five clinical distinct groups with different perinatal mortality risks were used to gain further insight. Results: Perinatal mortality among singletons declined from 10.5 to 9.1 per 1000 total births in the period 2000–2006. This trend remained significant after full adjustment (odds ratio 0.97; 95% CI 0.96 to 0.98) and was present in both fetal and neonatal mortality. The decline was most prominent among births complicated by congenital anomalies, among premature births (32.0–36.6 weeks) and among term births. Home births showed the lowest mortality risk. Conclusions: Dutch perinatal mortality declined steadily over this period, which could not be explained by changes in known risk factors including high maternal age and non-western ethnicity. The decline was present in all risk groups except in very premature births. The mortality level is still high compared with European standards.
Effect of Amalgambond on cervical sensitivity.

PURPOSE To evaluate in vivo the feasibility of utilizing Amalgambond adhesive agent alone for the treatment of cervical sensitivity on teeth that did not require a restoration. MATERIALS AND METHODS Nineteen subjects were selected from a group of patients reporting sensitivity at the cervical region of anterior or posterior teeth. The degree of sensitivity was determined by tactile sense (scraping an explorer over the surface area) or "fluid-shift" sensitivity determined by an air-blast from a syringe for 5 seconds. Patient reactions to stimuli were qualified as : (1) none; (2) slight; (3) moderate; and (4) severe. Only patients with at least two teeth experiencing moderate or severe sensitivity were used. Each of the patients had at least one sensitive tooth treated with Amalgambond and at least one untreated sensitive tooth to act as control. Results were recorded at 24 hours, 7 days, 1 and 6 months. RESULTS At 6 months, 18 of 19 treated teeth recalled showed decreased sensitivity with 15 showing no sensitivity, and only one remained as sensitive as at baseline. All control teeth remained unchanged from original sensitivity ratings. The teeth with cervical sensitivity treated with Amalgambond adhesive alone had a high probability of decrease or complete loss of sensitivity immediately and the decrease was sustained for at least 6 months (P<0.001).
Advances in the diagnosis and treatment of neuroblastoma

Neuroblastoma, a childhood neoplasm arising from neural crest cells, is characterized by a diversity of clinical behavior, ranging from spontaneous remission to rapid tumor progression and death. To some extent, outcome can be predicted by the stage of disease and age at diagnosis. The molecular events responsible for the variability in response to treatment and rate of tumor growth, however, remain largely unknown. Over the past decade, transformation-linked genetic changes have been identified in neuroblastoma tumors that have contributed to our understanding of tumor predisposition, metastasis, treatment responsiveness, and prognosis. This review discusses the recent advances in the understanding of neuroblastoma at the cellular and molecular levels, and the role that tumor biology plays in determining appropriate risk-based treatment for patients with neuroblastoma.
On Line Service Composition in the Integrated Clinical Environment for eHealth and Medical Systems

Medical and eHealth systems are progressively realized in the context of standardized architectures that support safety and ease the integration of the heterogeneous (and often proprietary) medical devices and sensors. The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) architecture appeared recently with the goal of becoming a common framework for defining the structure of the medical applications as concerns the safe integration of medical devices and sensors. ICE is simply a high level architecture that defines the functional blocks that should be part of a medical system to support interoperability. As a result, the underlying communication backbone is broadly undefined as concerns the enabling software technology (including the middleware) and associated algorithms that meet the ICE requirements of the flexible integration of medical devices and services. Supporting the on line composition of services in a medical system is also not part of ICE; however, supporting this behavior would enable flexible orchestration of functions (e.g., addition and/or removal of services and medical equipment) on the fly. iLandis one of the few software technologies that supports on line service composition and reconfiguration, ensuring time-bounded transitions across different service orchestrations; it supports the design, deployment and on line reconfiguration of applications, which this paper applies to service-based eHealth domains. This paper designs the integration between ICE architecture and iLand middleware to enhance the capabilities of ICE with on line service composition and the time-bounded reconfiguration of medical systems based on distributed services. A prototype implementation of a service-based eHealth system for the remote monitoring of patients is described; it validates the enhanced capacity of ICE to support dynamic reconfiguration of the application services. Results show that the temporal cost of the on line reconfiguration of the eHealth application is bounded, achieving a low overhead resulting from the addition of ICE compliance.
Reliability, Mindfulness, and Information Systems

In a world where information technology is both important and imperfect, organizations and individuals are faced with the ongoing challenge of determining how to use complex, fragile systems in dynamic contexts to achieve reliable outcomes. While reliability is a central concern of information systems practitioners at many levels, there has been limited consideration in information systems scholarship of how firms and individuals create, manage, and use technology to attain reliability. We propose that examining how individuals and organizations use information systems to reliably perform work will increase both the richness and relevance of IS research. Drawing from studies of individual and organizational cognition, we examine the concept of mindfulness as a theoretical foundation for explaining efforts to achieve individual and organizational reliability in the face of complex technologies and surprising environments. We then consider a variety of implications of mindfulness theories of reliability in the form of alternative interpretations of existing knowledge and new directions for inquiry in the areas of IS operations, design, and management.
The Ceec10's Real Convergence Prospects

The Central and Eastern European countries' prospects of becoming EU members depend heavily on, among other things, their per capita GDP levels. It is shown that the neoclassical growth model does not yet adequately describe the growth process in these countries. This makes a direct growth accounting exercise to assess these countries' growth prospects infeasible. Therefore an indirect approach is taken, which maps the Western European growth experience in 10 Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC10). This indirect approach is used to project growth rates of the CEEC10 and the time required to close or narrow the income gaps to the European Union (EU). The sensitivity of the results is analysed by presenting a wide variety of economically meaningful scenarios. Finally, possible beneficial effects of EU membership or pre-accession aids are studied. The effects of these measures on the reduction of the times to converge are computed.
Robust diagonal stabilization: an LMI approach

Addresses the problem of robust diagonal stabilization for discrete-time systems. Linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions are derived for the search of a diagonal solution to the associated Lyapunov equation. This approach can be applied to guarantee stability of quantized systems and to find numerous illustrative applications, e.g., for the design of robust digital filters.
Wideband pyramidal sinuous antenna for reflector antenna applications

This paper presents a wideband pyramidal sinuous antenna, over a conducting ground plane, for use as a reflector antenna feed. Specific attention is given to comparisons with a similar structure where the sinuous shape is instead projected onto a cone. The pyramidal structure is significantly simpler to manufacture, and measured results confirms this where close agreement with simulations is observed.
Quarterly forecasts of the italian business cycle by means of monthly economic indicators

Recent years have witnessed a growing availability of high-frequency indicators which can be used to forecast future economic activity. This paper shows how some of the widely known monthly economic indicators at present available in Italy can be used in a systematic and coordinated manner to forecast the main variables of the National Accounts. In order to reduce as much as possible the amount of judgment in the analysis of the business cycle, a model-based approach is adopted. Thus, a pseudo macro-econometric model of the Italian economy is built, which can be used to produce forecasts one semester ahead of the last National Accounts data release. The model can be used autonomously as well as in combination with the Bank of Italy's quarterly econometric model.
When Nudges Fail: Slippery Defaults

The Korean language version of this paper can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2445107Inspired by the success of “automatic enrollment” in increasing participation in defined contribution retirement savings plans, policymakers have put similar policy defaults in place in a variety of other contexts, from checking account overdraft coverage to home mortgage escrows. Internet privacy appears poised to be the next arena. But how broadly applicable are the results obtained in the retirement savings context? Evidence from other contexts indicates two problems with this approach: the defaults put in place by the law are not particularly sticky, and the people who opt out can be those who would benefit the most from the default. Examining the new default for consumer checking account overdraft coverage reveals that firms can systematically undermine each of the mechanisms that might otherwise operate to make defaults sticky. Comparing the retirement savings default to the overdraft default, four boundary conditions on the use of defaults as a policy tool are apparent: policy defaults will not be sticky when (1) motivated firms oppose them, (2) these firms have access to the consumer, (3) consumers find the decision environment confusing, and (4) consumer preferences are uncertain. Due to Constitutional and institutional constraints, government regulation of the libertarian paternalism variety is unlikely to be capable of overcoming these bounds. Therefore, policy defaults intended to protect individuals when firms have the motivation and means to move consumers out of the default are unlikely to be effective unless accompanied by substantive regulation. Moreover, the same is likely to be true of “nudges” more generally, when motivated firms oppose them.