Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Manufacturing Wage Behavior with Special Reference to the Period 1962-1966

T HIS paper reports results of a time series study of recent wage behavior in manufacturing. The principal conclusions reached are that labor market variables are of prime importance in determining wage movements and that the wage guideposts did retard wage advances between 1962 and 1966. A novel feature of the paper is that it utilizes wage and unemployment series not previously used in studies of wages. The paper has three main parts. Section I briefly examines recent money wage literature. Some measurement issues are discussed in section II and the main regression results appear in section III.
Energy flow and functional compensation in Great Basin small mammals under natural and anthropogenic environmental change

Significance Small mammals play a critical role in the maintenance of desert ecosystems. Using Quaternary fossils from the Great Basin, we show that energy flow through a small mammal community during today’s heightened climate warming differs from that experienced during natural rapid warming in the past. This discrepancy highlights a modern breakdown in energetic compensation among functional groups, and stresses the importance of novel anthropogenic impacts, such as the replacement of shrublands by invasive annual grasses introduced to North American deserts more than a century ago. Use of the fossil record to untangle the effects of climate and anthropogenic habitat change on ecosystem function today is thus critical for understanding how ecosystems will respond to future environmental change. Research on the ecological impacts of environmental change has primarily focused at the species level, leaving the responses of ecosystem-level properties like energy flow poorly understood. This is especially so over millennial timescales inaccessible to direct observation. Here we examine how energy flow within a Great Basin small mammal community responded to climate-driven environmental change during the past 12,800 y, and use this baseline to evaluate responses observed during the past century. Our analyses reveal marked stability in energy flow during rapid climatic warming at the terminal Pleistocene despite dramatic turnover in the distribution of mammalian body sizes and habitat-associated functional groups. Functional group turnover was strongly correlated with climate-driven changes in regional vegetation, with climate and vegetation change preceding energetic shifts in the small mammal community. In contrast, the past century has witnessed a substantial reduction in energy flow caused by an increase in energetic dominance of small-bodied species with an affinity for closed grass habitats. This suggests that modern changes in land cover caused by anthropogenic activities—particularly the spread of nonnative annual grasslands—has led to a breakdown in the compensatory dynamics of energy flow. Human activities are thus modifying the small mammal community in ways that differ from climate-driven expectations, resulting in an energetically novel ecosystem. Our study illustrates the need to integrate across ecological and temporal scales to provide robust insights for long-term conservation and management.
Sovereign Default Risk and Recovery Rates: What Government Bond Markets Expect for Greece

Bond market data on sovereign bond yields is used to estimate sovereign default risk and the amount of the expected “hair‐cut” for Greece between 2008 and 2011. Using a structural pricing model that relies on compound option theory short‐term and long‐term default probabilities and their dependencies can be inferred. Thereby bond yield spreads for different maturities are integrated. In addition, a reduced form model is applied to infer the recovery rate expected by bond market participants. The paper shows that sovereign default risk and recovery rate dynamics reflect events that are important for Greece's repayment capacity.
PUSTACK: towards an augmented, scalable and personalized interface for paper textbooks

In a developing country such as India, implementing personalized learning poses a challenge due to a large number of learners. Learners still tend to rely on 'authorized content' such as textbooks for their studies. Most learners use paper textbooks for the same. In this demonstration, we present PUSTACK, an interface for augmenting paper textbooks for providing personalized content in a scalable manner. We use a webcam-based setup to augment content from the physical book being read. We augment the content using 'layers' of information gathered from the Internet. We select and prioritize these layers for different learners to personalize the learning experience.
Nitric Oxide Inhibits Ultraviolet B-induced Murine Keratinocyte Apoptosis by Regulating Apoptotic Signaling Cascades

Cytotoxic effects of nitric oxide (NO) derived from inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) are considered to be one of the major causes of inflammatory diseases. On the other hand, protective effects of NO on toxic insults-induced cellular damage/apoptosis have been demonstrated recently. Ultraviolet B (UVB)-induced apoptosis of epidermal keratinocytes leads to skin inflammation and photoageing. However, it has not been elucidated what kind of effects NO has on UVB-induced keratinocyte apoptosis. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the problem and demonstrated that NO from NO donor suppressed UVB-induced apoptosis of murine keratinocytes. In addition, NO significantly suppressed activities of caspase 3, caspase 8 and caspase 9 that had been upregulated by UVB radiation. NO also suppressed p53 expression that had been upregulated by UVB radiation and upregulated Bcl-2 expression that had been downregulated by UVB radiation. These findings suggested that NO might suppress UVB-induced keratinocyte apoptosis by regulating apoptotic signaling cascades in p53, Bcl-2, caspase3, caspase 8 and caspase 9.
Methodological considerations of measuring disability in bipolar disorder: validity of the Multidimensional Scale of Independent Functioning.

OBJECTIVE Recent studies have highlighted the prevalence, severity and persistence of the disability associated with bipolar disorder (BPD). Reliable instruments are needed to support research into the factors associated with disability and treatment response. Contextual factors (e.g., availability of supported employment programs) can affect functionality, posing a challenge to such investigations. We present preliminary findings regarding the validity of the Multidimensional Scale of Independent Functioning (MSIF) in BPD. The MSIF provides discrete ratings of support separate from both role responsibility and performance quality in work, residential and educational environments. These distinctions allow the 'correction' for variability explained by contextual factors that allows the comparison of studies conducted in different environments and time. METHODS Participants with BPD were administered the MSIF, the Social Adjustment Scale II (SAS-II) and an interview recording objective data regarding work, school and residential activities as part of an ongoing longitudinal study of BPD disability. RESULTS Construct validity estimated using standardized Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.76 (n = 58). MSIF global ratings were significantly lower (reflecting higher functionality) for subjects engaged in productive activity compared with participants who were not active (t = -3.6, p = 0.001) demonstrating external validity. Inter-rater reliability estimates ranged from 0.86 to 0.99 (n = 49). Significant, high correlations were demonstrated between comparable MSIF and SAS-II global ratings (criterion validity = 0.70-0.79) and low correlations were found between non-comparable ratings (discriminant validity = -0.07 to -0.35) (n = 14). CONCLUSION We conclude that the MSIF is a valid and reliable instrument optimally designed for studying determinants of disability and treatment response in BPD.
ooDACE toolbox: a flexible object-oriented Kriging implementation

When analyzing data from computationally expensive simulation codes, surrogate modeling methods are firmly established as facilitators for design space exploration, sensitivity analysis, visualization and optimization. Kriging is a popular surrogate modeling technique used for the Design and Analysis of Computer Experiments (DACE). Hence, the past decade Kriging has been the subject of extensive research and many extensions have been proposed, e.g., co-Kriging, stochastic Kriging, blind Kriging, etc. However, few Kriging implementations are publicly available and tailored towards scientists and engineers. Furthermore, no Kriging toolbox exists that unifies several Kriging flavors. This paper addresses this need by presenting an efficient object-oriented Kriging implementation and several Kriging extensions, providing a flexible and easily extendable framework to test and implement new Kriging flavors while reusing as much code as possible.
A geometrical model for the Monte Carlo simulation of the TrueBeam linac

Monte Carlo simulation of linear accelerators (linacs) depends on the accurate geometrical description of the linac head. The geometry of the Varian TrueBeam linac is not available to researchers. Instead, the company distributes phase-space files of the flattening-filter-free (FFF) beams tallied at a plane located just upstream of the jaws. Yet, Monte Carlo simulations based on third-party tallied phase spaces are subject to limitations. In this work, an experimentally based geometry developed for the simulation of the FFF beams of the Varian TrueBeam linac is presented. The Monte Carlo geometrical model of the TrueBeam linac uses information provided by Varian that reveals large similarities between the TrueBeam machine and the Clinac 2100 downstream of the jaws. Thus, the upper part of the TrueBeam linac was modeled by introducing modifications to the Varian Clinac 2100 linac geometry. The most important of these modifications is the replacement of the standard flattening filters by ad hoc thin filters. These filters were modeled by comparing dose measurements and simulations. The experimental dose profiles for the 6 MV and 10 MV FFF beams were obtained from the Varian Golden Data Set and from in-house measurements performed with a diode detector for radiation fields ranging from 3 × 3 to 40 × 40 cm2 at depths of maximum dose of 5 and 10 cm. Indicators of agreement between the experimental data and the simulation results obtained with the proposed geometrical model were the dose differences, the root-mean-square error and the gamma index. The same comparisons were performed for dose profiles obtained from Monte Carlo simulations using the phase-space files distributed by Varian for the TrueBeam linac as the sources of particles. Results of comparisons show a good agreement of the dose for the ansatz geometry similar to that obtained for the simulations with the TrueBeam phase-space files for all fields and depths considered, except for the 40 × 40 cm2 field where the ansatz geometry was able to reproduce the measured dose more accurately. Our approach overcomes some of the limitations of using the Varian phase-space files. It makes it possible to: (i) adapt the initial beam parameters to match measured dose profiles; (ii) reduce the statistical uncertainty to arbitrarily low values; and (iii) assess systematic uncertainties (type B) by using different Monte Carlo codes. One limitation of using phase-space files that is retained in our model is the impossibility of performing accurate absolute dosimetry simulations because the geometrical description of the TrueBeam ionization chamber remains unknown.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspectives of leading firms in Ghana

Purpose – Corporate social responsibility (CSR) research has blossomed in this new millennium. This has been due to: the increasing concern expressed by policy makers about corporate social responsibility; the pressure exerted on firms to demonstrate high ethical standards; and for developing countries, the increasing demands on their firms exporting to Europe and other western countries to document adherence to high ethical standards in order to be competitive. This study sought to ascertain and document the extent of recognition, nature and content of socially responsible actions by firms located in Ghana.Design/methodology/approach – The study used a sample of companies listed in the Ghana Club 100 database, an annual ranking of the most prestigious firms in Ghana. The study adopted an in‐depth, exploratory and comparative approach in examining the CSR issues from the perspectives of local versus internationally‐connected firms in Ghana.Findings – The key findings of the study were that, although local.
Sequence Student-Teacher Training of Deep Neural Networks

Copyright © 2016 ISCA. The performance of automatic speech recognition can often be significantly improved by combining multiple systems together. Though beneficial, ensemble methods can be computationally expensive, often requiring multiple decoding runs. An alternative approach, appropriate for deep learning schemes, is to adopt student-teacher training. Here, a student model is trained to reproduce the outputs of a teacher model, or ensemble of teachers. The standard approach is to train the student model on the frame posterior outputs of the teacher. This paper examines the interaction between student-teacher training schemes and sequence training criteria, which have been shown to yield significant performance gains over frame-level criteria. There are several possible options for integrating sequence training, including training of the ensemble and further training of the student. This paper also proposes an extension to the studentteacher framework, where the student is trained to emulate the hypothesis posterior distribution of the teacher, or ensemble of teachers. This sequence student-teacher training approach allows the benefit of student-teacher training to be directly combined with sequence training schemes. These approaches are evaluated on two speech recognition tasks: a Wall Street Journal based task and a low-resource Tok Pisin conversational telephone speech task from the IARPA Babel programme.
Examining the relationship of communication service utilisation and productivity of labour in the developing country: A case study of Thailand

It is widely acknowledged that there is a relationship between the use of ICT and economic growth. A number of works of literature point out such fact in the developed country. This study, however, attempts to examine the relationship of the use of ICT and labour productivity, which is one of the factors indicating the economic growth, in the developing country. Thailand is selected for the investigation with the country's data in the period of 1999 - 2010. The ICT is represented by communications consumption and investment throughout the paper. The author presumably proposes a framework in order to verify the relationship in an intuitive way. The quantitative analyses of OLS estimation and the bivariate autoregressive model, or the Granger-causality test, support the validity of the framework and clearly point out the one-way causal relationship flowing from the communications consumption to labour productivity; the communications investment to labour productivity, and the communications consumption to communications investment.
VERY SHORT-TERM LOAD FORECASTING USING EXPONENTIAL SMOOTHING AND ARIMA MODELS

TAutoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and exponential smoothing are one of the most popular linear models in time series forecasting during the past three decades. This paper uses 30-minutes Australian electricity demand observations to evaluate methods for prediction 30 minutes ahead. For comparison was designed “industry” model. Keywords: very short-term electricity load forecasting, prediction, autocorrelation analysis, ARIMA model, Box-Jenkins methodology, exponential smoothing, back propagation neural network.
An Assessment of the Positive Theory of 'Congressional Dominance'

The positive theory of "congressional dominance" argues that Congress controls the bureaucracy. This article offers a critical assessment, in two parts. The first outlines the logical foundation of the theory, suggests why it is unsuited to an analysis of bureaucratic control, and argues that any conclusions of congressional dominance are logically unwarranted. The second addresses in detail the theory's best known empirical application-a study of the FTC, as reported in various articles by Weingast, Calvert, and Moran-and argues that it does not in fact support the theory's claims.
10-bit 100-MS/s Pipelined ADC Using Input-Swapped Opamp Sharing and Self-Calibrated V/I Converter

A 31 mW, 10-bit 100-MS/s pipelined analog-to-digital converter (ADC), which alleviates the memory effect occurring in the opamp-sharing technique, and automatically corrects the current error of the V/I converter, has been developed. The proposed ADC achieves low-power consumption, high noise immunity, and has a small area, by employing an input-swapped opamp-sharing technique that switches the summing node in an multiplying digital-to-analog converter and a V/I converter with a process, supply voltage, and temperature condition detector. The ADC shows a differential nonlinearity of less than 0.48 LSB, and an integral nonlinearity of less than 0.95 LSB. Also, an signal-to-noise-and-distortion ratio of 56.2 dB is measured with a 1 MHz input frequency. This has been implemented in a 0.18-μm CMOS process, and occupies 1.6 × 0.8 mm2 of active area.
Genetic variants in the MicroRNA biosynthetic pathway Gemin3 and Gemin4 are associated with a risk of cancer: a meta-analysis

The effects of the microRNA (miRNA) processing genes Gemin3 and Gemin4 on cellular signaling pathways could have a major impact on the risk of cancer. Several studies concerning the association between the Gemin3 rs197412, Gemin4 rs7813 and Gemin4 rs2740348 polymorphisms with cancer susceptibility have been published. The present meta-analysis summarized this evidence and evaluated the precision of these relationships. Relevant studies (published prior to December 16th, 2015) without language restriction were identified using the PubMed, Web of Science and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) on-line databases. The data were extracted from the eligible studies and were processed using Stata 12.0 software. Seven studies (2,588 cases and 2,549 controls) indicated that the rs7813 polymorphism was significantly associated with increased cancer risk (TT vs TC + CC, OR = 1.18 95% CI [1.05–1.32]). Six studies (1,314 cases and 1,244 controls) indicated that rs2740348 was associated with an increased cancer risk (GG vs. GC + CC, OR = 1.41 95% CI [1.00–1.83]). However the rs197412 polymorphism was not associated with an increased cancer risk (OR = 0.97 95% CI [0.80–1.19]). Our results suggest that the Gemin4 rs7813 T > C and rs2740348 G > C polymorphisms are associated with cancer susceptibility.
Physiological and biological factors associated with a 24 h treadmill ultra‐marathon performance

The purpose of this study was to examine the physiological and biological factors associated with ultra‐endurance performance. Fourteen male runners volunteered to run on a treadmill as many kilometers as possible over a 24‐h period (24TR). Maximal oxygen uptake (V̇O2max), velocity associated with V̇O2max () and running economy (RE) at 8 km/h were measured. A muscle biopsy was also performed in the vastus lateralis muscle. The subjects ran 149.2 ± 15.7 km in 18 h 39 ± 41 min of effective attendance on the treadmill, corresponding to 39.4 ± 4.2% of . Standard multiple‐regression analysis showed that performance was significantly (R2=0.82; P=0.005) related to V̇O2max and specific endurance, i.e. the average speed sustained over the 24TR expressed in . V̇O2max was associated with a high capillary tortuosity (R2=0.66; P=0.01). Specific endurance was significantly related to RE and citrate synthase activity. It is concluded that a high V̇O2max and an associated developed capillary network are essential for ultra‐endurance running performance. The ability to maintain a high %V̇O2max over a 24TR is another factor associated with performance and is mainly related to RE and high mitochondrial oxidative capacity in the vastus lateralis.
Compact dual band microstrip antenna design using slits

This Paper presents the design and implementation of a microstrip patch antenna working for concurrent devices. Those devices are particularly targeted in this work whose operating frequency is 2.7GHz and 4.5GHz. Slits on the structure are placed to lengthen the current path on the surface which results in size reduction. The designed patch has compact size (16×14×1.6 mm3) that makes it beneficial for the size constrained electronic devices. To enhance the gain of the antenna, single patch was extended in the form of an array using corporate feed. The gain thus, increased from -4.32dBi to 3.05dBi. Simulations of the presented antenna are carried out using High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) and it is fabricated on FR-4 substrate. Antenna is tested using Vector Network Analyzer (VNA).
A test of bunched beam stochastic cooling in the Fermilab Tevatron collider

In order to double the integrated luminosity of the Tevatron collider in the next running period, a 4-8-GHz bunched-beam betatron stochastic cooling system has been designed. The horizontal and vertical emittances of the protons and antiprotons will be cooled to counteract the effects of power supply noise, beam-beam interaction, and intrabeam scattering. A vertical proton test system has been installed in the Tevatron and tested. In addition to measurement results, details of the hardware and cooling calculations are reviewed. Improvements coming from experience with this test configuration are being incorporated into the construction of the full system. <<ETX>>
DNA-DNA hybridization assay for detection of Salmonella spp. in foods

We have developed a DNA-DNA hybridization test for the presence of Salmonella spp. in foods. This test requires an initial pre-enrichment of food samples in nutrient broth but does not require selective enrichment. Samples of food cultures are collected on membrane filters and assayed by molecular hybridization to labeled probes. The probes consist of DNA sequences which are unique to the genus Salmonella and are widely distributed in the genus. A diverse panel of foods was assayed successfully by this methodology.
One Household/Two Systems

Under China's dual-track approach to reform, "one household/two systems", or combining state and private employment within a family, connotes having the best of both worlds. Drawing upon work history data for 5000 households, the present study looks at who is employed in the private sector. Findings are that marriage to a state-employed spouse actually reduces the probability of one's holding a private sector job and that the effects of living with a state-connected parent are mixed. Were households more actively pursuing a one-household/two-systems strategy, the transition from state dependence would be expedited.