Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contagion: Understanding How It Spreads

Much of the current debate on reforming the international financial architecture is aimed at reducing the risks of contagion best defined as a significant increase in cross market linkages after a shock to an individual country (or group of countries). This definition highlights the importance of other links through which shocks are normally transmitted including trade and finance. During times of crisis, the ways in which shocks are transmitted do seem to differ, and these differences appear to be important. Empirical work has helped to identify the types of links and other macroeconomic conditions that can make a country vulnerable to contagion during crisis considerations periods, although less is known about the importance of microeconomic and institutional factors in propagating shocks. Empirical research has helped to identify those countries that are at risk of contagion as well as some, albeit quite general, policy interventions that can reduce risks.
The dynamics of labor earnings over the life course : a comparative and longitudinal analysis of Germany and Poland

The study presents recent labor market theories and applies them to the experiences of German and Polish employees during the post-war period. Human capital theory, search and efficiency wage theories, as well as the theory of labor market segmentation are combined with a cohort perspective to explain the dynamics of labor earnings over the life course. German and Polish life history data are used to distinguish three basic labor market processes: (1) wages at entry into the labor market, (2) wage changes at times of job change and (3) wage growth on-the-job. The application of a historically incorporated comparison of results shows the mechanism of wage differentiation between men and women at entry into the labor market in West Germany. These wage differentials which occur at first entry into the labor market structure subsequent career patterns. Later job shifts can only partly compensate disadvantages experienced at earlier stages of the life course. Labor earnings vary a lot between industrial sectors. Despite the fact that the level of wages is generally higher in Germany than in Poland, the basic structure of earnings trajectories across industrial segments in Poland during socialist rule was similar to the one found in advanced industrialized countries. Rates of return to cohort-specific human capital investments were generally higher in Germany during the post-war period. The study developed and applied a dynamic socio-economic view of both the individual and society to explain labor market phenomena. The results based on retrospective life history data indicate the need for a historically incorporated cohort perspective to disentangle individual level, cohort and time period effects in the analysis of labor market processes. Concluding remarks advocate the application of a historically incorporated socio-economic analysis to evaluate labor market processes and policies trying to influence these processes.
Spontaneous functional network dynamics and associated structural substrates in the human brain

Recent imaging connectomics studies have demonstrated that the spontaneous human brain functional networks derived from resting-state functional MRI (R-fMRI) include many non-trivial topological properties, such as highly efficient small-world architecture and densely connected hub regions. However, very little is known about dynamic functional connectivity (D-FC) patterns of spontaneous human brain networks during rest and about how these spontaneous brain dynamics are constrained by the underlying structural connectivity. Here, we combined sub-second multiband R-fMRI data with graph-theoretical approaches to comprehensively investigate the dynamic characteristics of the topological organization of human whole-brain functional networks, and then employed diffusion imaging data in the same participants to further explore the associated structural substrates. At the connection level, we found that human whole-brain D-FC patterns spontaneously fluctuated over time, while homotopic D-FC exhibited high connectivity strength and low temporal variability. At the network level, dynamic functional networks exhibited time-varying but evident small-world and assortativity architecture, with several regions (e.g., insula, sensorimotor cortex and medial prefrontal cortex) emerging as functionally persistent hubs (i.e., highly connected regions) while possessing large temporal variability in their degree centrality. Finally, the temporal characteristics (i.e., strength and variability) of the connectional and nodal properties of the dynamic brain networks were significantly associated with their structural counterparts. Collectively, we demonstrate the economical, efficient, and flexible characteristics of dynamic functional coordination in large-scale human brain networks during rest, and highlight their relationship with underlying structural connectivity, which deepens our understandings of spontaneous brain network dynamics in humans.
Endogenous Effort and Intersectoral Labour Transfers Under Industrialization

This paper takes as its point of departure the claim in the literature that strong Asian growth performance is accounted for largely by the accumulation of factor inputs (financial savings and human capital accumulation). This stands in sharp contrast to Polanyi’s (1944) interpretation of European growth being a “great transformation” from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Our objective is to find models in which intersectoral transfers in Asia do account for significant portions of observed growth performance, besides factor input growth and residually calculated productivity growth. We begin with traditional Lewis models, where an efficiency gain results from transferring labour from the traditional (family based) agricultural sector, in which labour receives its average product, to the modern (industrial) sector in which labourers are paid their marginal product. We show that as one moves closer to Pareto Optimality in this system (say bytaxing the traditional sector’s output), there is a gain but this is typically small. We then formulate Lewis type models in which the product of effort and labour enters each sector’s production function, and individuals in the traditional sector only receive a fraction of the return to their incremental effort due to average product pricing of labour. In this case, the level of effort in each sector, is endogenously determined along with the intersectoral allocation of labour, since the representative household is modeled as having a utility function defined over goods along with the disutility of effort. Differences in effort levels across sectors support accompanying differences in average and marginal products of labour. We use this model to analyze growth processes in Thailand and South Korea over the period between the 1960s and 1990s. Results suggest significant contributions to growth from intersectoral labour transfers in Lewis models with endogenous effort, and negligible contributions from models without endogenous effort
Translational control of gurken mRNA in Drosophila development

Localised mRNA translation is a widespread mechanism for targeting protein synthesis, important for cell fate, motility and pathogenesis. In Drosophila, the spatiotemporal control of gurken/TGF-α mRNA translation is required for establishing the embryonic body axes. A number of recent studies have highlighted key aspects of the mechanism of gurken mRNA translational control at the dorsoanterior corner of the mid-stage oocyte. Orb/CPEB and Wispy/GLD-2 are required for polyadenylation of gurken mRNA, but mis-localised gurken mRNA in the oocyte is not fully polyadenylated1. At the dorsoanterior corner, Orb and gurken mRNA have been shown to be enriched at the edge of Processing bodies, where translation occurs2. Over-expression of Orb in the adjacent nurse cells, where gurken mRNA is transcribed, is sufficient to cause mis-expression of Gurken protein3. In orb mutant egg chambers, reducing the activity of CK2, a Serine/Threonine protein kinase, enhances polarity defects, consistent with a phenotype relating to a mutation of a factor involved in gurken translation4. Here we show that sites phosphorylated by CK2 overlap with active Orb and with Gurken protein expression. We also consolidate the current literature into a working model for gurken mRNA translational control and review the role of kinases, cell cycle factors and polyadenylation machinery highlighting a multitude of conserved factors and mechanisms in the Drosophila egg chamber.
Genetic Disruption of Protein Kinase A Anchoring Reveals a Role for Compartmentalized Kinase Signaling in Theta-Burst Long-Term Potentiation and Spatial Memory

Studies of hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP), a cellular model of memory storage, implicate cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) in presynaptic and postsynaptic mechanisms of LTP. The anchoring of PKA to AKAPs (A kinase-anchoring proteins) creates compartmentalized pools of PKA, but the roles of presynaptically and postsynaptically anchored forms of PKA in late-phase LTP are unclear. In this study, we have created genetically modified mice that conditionally express Ht31, an inhibitor of PKA anchoring, to probe the roles of anchored PKA in hippocampal LTP and spatial memory. Our findings show that at hippocampal Schaffer collateral CA3–CA1 synapses, theta-burst LTP requires presynaptically anchored PKA. In addition, a pool of anchored PKA in hippocampal area CA3 is required for spatial memory. These findings reveal a novel and significant role for anchored PKA signaling in cellular mechanisms underlying memory storage.
Efficient searching and annotation of metabolic networks using chemical similarity

MOTIVATION The urgent need for efficient and sustainable biological production of fuels and high-value chemicals has elicited a wave of in silico techniques for identifying promising novel pathways to these compounds in large putative metabolic networks. To date, these approaches have primarily used general graph search algorithms, which are prohibitively slow as putative metabolic networks may exceed 1 million compounds. To alleviate this limitation, we report two methods--SimIndex (SI) and SimZyme--which use chemical similarity of 2D chemical fingerprints to efficiently navigate large metabolic networks and propose enzymatic connections between the constituent nodes. We also report a Byers-Waterman type pathway search algorithm for further paring down pertinent networks. RESULTS Benchmarking tests run with SI show it can reduce the number of nodes visited in searching a putative network by 100-fold with a computational time improvement of up to 10(5)-fold. Subsequent Byers-Waterman search application further reduces the number of nodes searched by up to 100-fold, while SimZyme demonstrates ∼ 90% accuracy in matching query substrates with enzymes. Using these modules, we have designed and annotated an alternative to the methylerythritol phosphate pathway to produce isopentenyl pyrophosphate with more favorable thermodynamics than the native pathway. These algorithms will have a significant impact on our ability to use large metabolic networks that lack annotation of promiscuous reactions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Python files will be available for download at http://tyolab.northwestern. edu/tools/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Alpha lipoic acid attenuates inflammatory response during extracorporeal circulation

Aim Extracorporeal circulation (ECC) of blood during cardiopulmonary surgery has been shown to stimulate various pro-inflammatory molecules such as cytokines and chemokines. The biochemical oxidation/reduction pathways of a-lipoic acid suggest that it may have antioxidant properties. Methods In this study we aimed to evaluate only patients with coronary heart disease and those planned for coronary artery bypass graft operation. Blood samples were obtained from the patients before the operation (P1) and one (P2), four (P3), 24 (P4) and 48 hours (P5) after administration of a-lipoic acid (LA). The patients were divided into two groups, control and LA treatment group. Levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) and -8 (IL-8), complement 3 (C3) and 4 (C4), anti-streptolysin (ASO), C-reactive protein (CRP) and haptoglobin were assessed in the blood samples. Results Cytokine IL-6 and IL-8 levels were significantly higher after surgery. Compared with the control groups, LA significantly decreased IL-6 and IL-8 levels in a time-dependent manner. CRP levels did not show significant variation in the first three time periods. CRP levels were higher after surgery, especially in the later periods. These results demonstrate that CRP formation depends on cytokine release. C3 and C4 levels were significantly higher after surgery than in the pre-operative period. LA treatment decreased C3 and C4 levels. Therefore, LA administration may be useful for the treatment of diseases and processes where excessive cytokine release could cause oxidative damage. Conclusions Our findings suggest a possible benefit of using LA during cardiac surgery to reduce cytokine levels.
Combining Crowd Contributions with Machine Learning to Detect Malicious Mobile Apps

Android is undoubtedly becoming the most popular smartphone platform. The popularity of Android, unfortunately, has also made the devices become the target of malware. Most of existing malicious mobile apps feature stealthy operations such as collecting user privacy, sending premium SMS messages and making unauthorized http connections with no legal notice to the affected user. However, transmission of sensitive data cannot indicate malicious behavior because some benign applications also need sensitive data to improve the user experience. Existing malware detection approaches focus on static or dynamic analysis without crowd user contributions. In this paper, we propose a novel technique which combining crowd contributions with machine learning to detect malicious mobile apps. We model privacy transmission as user-determined and undetermined with the help of real user decisions based on crowdsourcing. We apply static analysis to extract application basic information such as permissions and suspicious API calls. Then we use dynamic instrumentation technique to trace real API calls at runtime and collect the crowd user decisions to the prompted sensitive data transmission. Finally, we employ several different learning-based algorithms, such as SVM, Bayesian Network, Decision Tree and KNN to detect malicious apps. Experiments with 100 real application samples show that our system was capable of detecting malicious mobile apps: our system can detect 85% to 97% of the malware with low false positive rate.
Automotive radar interference mitigation by reconstruction and cancellation of interference component

Automotive radar interference is an issue arising with the increasing amount of radar systems in automotive scenarios. Interference can influence the functionality of a radar system, e.g. decrease its detection capability. To ensure functionality in critical situations, interference countermeasures are applied. This paper proposes a countermeasure for chirp sequence modulated radars interfering one another estimating an interfering signals' parameters to afterwards reconstruct and remove the interference.
Mainstreaming Microfinance: How Lending to the Poor Began, Grew and Came of Age in Bolivia

Drawing on participant interviews, Beth Rhyne details how Bolivia's special breed of social entrepreneurs found the keys to unlock the huge unmet demand of informal clients. She explores how the beliefs of these social activists shaped the character of the variety of institutions that now dominate Bolivia's microfinance sector, and traces how these institutions proved that lending to microenterprises could become a commercial business. Rhyne investigates the transformation of NGOs into formal financial institutions, led by the creation of BancoSol, and closely examines microfinance under the conditions of commercialization and competition that have altered the dynamics of the new industry.
Robust Vector Quantizer Design Using Competitive LearningNeural

Neural Networks Seyed Bahram ZAHIR AZAMI Ecole Nationale Sup erieure des T el ecommunications 46, rue Barrault 75634 Paris cedex 13, France Tel: +33 1 45 81 76 77 zahir@com.enst. fr Gang FENG Institut de la Communication Parl ee INPG / Universit e Stendhal 38040 Grenoble cedex 9, France Tel: +33 4 76 82 43 38 feng@icp.grenet. fr Abstract In this paper we propose a new method to design vector quantizers for the noisy channels. Competitive learning neural networks are known for their e ectiveness in voice and image data compression; we use the competitive learning algorithm to create a topological similarity between the input space and the index space. This similarity reduces the e ect of channel noise because any single bit error in a transmitted index will be translated to a close codevector in the input space which yields relatively small distortion. For an 8-bit vector quantizer, the proposed system resulted in about 4.6 dB spectral distortion for a highly noisy channel while a simple LBG, LBG with splitting and Kohonen map have resulted in 5.9, 5.4 and 5.0 dB of distortion, respectively.
Parallel main-memory indexing for moving-object query and update workloads

We are witnessing a proliferation of Internet-worked, geo-positioned mobile devices such as smartphones and personal navigation devices. Likewise, location-related services that target the users of such devices are proliferating. Consequently, server-side infrastructures are needed that are capable of supporting the location-related query and update workloads generated by very large populations of such moving objects. This paper presents a main-memory indexing technique that aims to support such workloads. The technique, called PGrid, uses a grid structure that is capable of exploiting the parallelism offered by modern processors. Unlike earlier proposals that maintain separate structures for updates and queries, PGrid allows both long-running queries and rapid updates to operate on a single data structure and thus offers up-to-date query results. Because PGrid does not rely on creating snapshots, it avoids the stop-the-world problem that occurs when workload processing is interrupted to perform such snapshotting. Its concurrency control mechanism relies instead on hardware-assisted atomic updates as well as object-level copying, and it treats updates as non-divisible operations rather than as combinations of deletions and insertions; thus, the query semantics guarantee that no objects are missed in query results. Empirical studies demonstrate that PGrid scales near-linearly with the number of hardware threads on four modern multi-core processors. Since both updates and queries are processed on the same current data-store state, PGrid outperforms snapshot-based techniques in terms of both query freshness and CPU cycle-wise efficiency.
Modeling reputation for service-oriented AmI environments

Service reputation is a key factor for services selection and services composition in Service-Oriented AmI system, and the calculation of reputation in AmI system should fully reflect the feature of multi-rating fusion and rating's utility value dynamic attenuation mechanism. A good model is important for reputation computing. The paper proposes three models from different views. Conceptual data model gives the constitution of reputation using the UML class diagram; Conceptual layered model classifies the related conceptual which involve in the reputation computing into different layers; Computation model gives the core algorithms which are used to computing the reputation. These models provide a reference guide for reputation computing in service-oriented AmI.
United Nations Global Compact

The UN Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption. With over 10,000 corporate participants and other stakeholders from over 130 countries, it is the largest voluntary corporate responsibility initiative in the world. The Global Compact pursues two complementary objectives: 1. Mainstream the ten principles in business activities around the world, 2. Catalyze actions in support of broader UN goals, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Participation in the Global Compact is open to degree-granting academic institutions such as universities, colleges, and business schools; and other academic organizations which are committed to implementing the ten principles of the Global Compact in their organization and which are willing to collaborate as strategic partners in the progress of the initiative. Academia adds critical dimensions to the UN Global Compact's operations. Through thought leadership, research, educational resources, learning know-how, and educational infrastructure, this sector can increase knowledge and understanding of corporate responsibility.
Relationship Between Photochemical Quenching and Non-Photochemical Quenching in Six Species of Cyanobacteria Reveals Species Difference in Redox State and Species Commonality in Energy Dissipation

Although the photosynthetic reaction center is well conserved among different cyanobacterial species, the modes of metabolism, e.g. respiratory, nitrogen and carbon metabolism and their mutual interaction, are quite diverse. To explore such uniformity and diversity among cyanobacteria, here we compare the influence of the light environment on the condition of photosynthetic electron transport through Chl fluorescence measurement of six cyanobacterial species grown under the same photon flux densities and at the same temperature. In the dark or under weak light, up to growth light, a large difference in the plastoquinone (PQ) redox condition was observed among different cyanobacterial species. The observed difference indicates that the degree of interaction between respiratory electron transfer and photosynthetic electron transfer differs among different cyanobacterial species. The variation could not be ascribed to the phylogenetic differences but possibly to the light environment of the original habitat. On the other hand, changes in the redox condition of PQ were essentially identical among different species at photon flux densities higher than the growth light. We further analyzed the response to high light by using a typical energy allocation model and found that ‘non-regulated’ thermal dissipation was increased under high-light conditions in all cyanobacterial species tested. We assume that such ‘non-regulated’ thermal dissipation may be an important ‘regulatory’ mechanism in the acclimation of cyanobacterial cells to high-light conditions.
Analysis of a Grounding System Under a Lightning Stroke

This paper studies the electric response of a common lattice tower when it is hit by a lightning stroke. Although some studies have been already done about this subject, the novelty of this one lies in the usage of a highly accurate electric model of an actual lattice tower. This model allows to calculate the impedance variation with different frequencies by using an adaptation of the well-known method of moments. Moreover, the authors also analyze how the impedance is affected when the grounding parameters and the connection to ground conditions are modified. These results are lately used to explain the electric behavior of the tower under two kinds of lightning impulses and different grounding configurations.