Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of multiple modalities on the perception of a listening agent

Listening agents are IVAs that display attentive listening behavior to a human speaker. The research into listening agents has mainly focused on (1) automatically timing listener responses; and (2) investigating the perceptual quality of listening behavior. Both issues have predominantly been addressed in an offline fashion, e.g. based on controlled animations that were rated by human observers. This allows for the systematic investigation of variables such as the quantity, type and timing of listening behaviors. However, there is a trade-off between the control and the realism of the stimuli. The display of head movement and facial expressions makes the animated listening behavior more realistic but hinders the investigation of specific behavior such as the timing of a backchannel. To migitate these problems, the Switching Wizard of Oz (SWOZ) framework was introduced in [1]. In online speaker-listener dialogs, a human listener and a behavior synthesis algorithm simultaneously generate backchannel timings. The listening agent is animated based on one of the two sources, which is switched at random time intervals. Speakers are asked to press a button whenever they think the behavior is not human-like. As both human and algorithm have the same limited means of expression, these judgements can solely be based on aspects of the behavior such as the quantity and timing of backchannels. In [1], the listening agent only showed head nods. In the current experiment, we investigate the effect of adding facial expressions. Facial expressions such as smiles and frowns are known to function as backchannels as they can be regarded as a signal of understanding and attention.
Mandatory Disclosure, Voluntary Disclosure, and Stock Market Liquidity: Evidence from the EU Bank Stress Tests

We use the EU stress tests and the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis to study the consequences of supervisory disclosure of banks’ sovereign risk exposures. We test the idea that a mandatory one-time disclosure induces an increase in voluntary disclosures about sovereign risk in the following periods and, through the shift in the voluntary disclosure equilibrium, increases the liquidity of banks’ shares. First, we find that the timing and content of different mandatory disclosure events helps explain the levels of stress-test banks’ voluntary disclosures about sovereign risk. Second, although the bid-ask spreads of stress test participants generally increased after the mandatory stress test in 2011, our results suggest that the decrease in market liquidity is entirely attributable to those stress-test participants that did not commit to voluntarily maintaining the disclosures of sovereign risk exposure.
Institutional and interpersonal trust and entrepreneurship: insights from relationship banking and microfinance in Brazil

We examine the value of trust in entrepreneurship by addressing the context of microfinance. We investigate the cases of three community banks providing microfinance in bottom-of-the-pyramid communities in Brazil. Using qualitative methods, we find that institutional trust seems to facilitate the operation of microfinance organisations that support entrepreneurship, while stimulating consumption within a community and the development of local small businesses. Additionally, interpersonal trust seems to facilitate the development of formal and informal businesses.
A Role for Cathepsin L and Cathepsin S in Peptide Generation for MHC Class II Presentation1

The enzymes that degrade proteins to peptides for presentation on MHC class II molecules are poorly understood. The cysteinal lysosomal proteases, cathepsin L (CL) and cathepsin S (CS), have been shown to process invariant chain, thereby facilitating MHC class II maturation. However, their role in Ag processing is not established. To examine this issue, we generated embryonic fibroblast lines that express CL, CS, or neither. Expression of CL or CS mediates efficient degradation of invariant chain as expected. Ag presentation was evaluated using T cell hybridoma assays as well as mass spectroscopic analysis of peptides eluted from MHC class II molecules. Interestingly, we found that the majority of peptides are presented regardless of CL or CS expression, although these proteases often alter the relative levels of the peptides. However, for a subset of Ags, epitope generation is critically regulated by CL or CS. This result suggests that these cysteinal proteases participate in Ag processing and generate qualitative and quantitative differences in the peptide repertoires displayed by MHC class II molecules.
Bootstrap Monte Carlo simulation study of sugar industry in Bangladesh

Abstract Bootstrap is a powerful technique that can often be used when people do not know enough about the underlying process, or the nature of measurement errors, to do a credible Monte Carlo simulation. Sugar industry is an agro-based industry in Bangladesh. Sales of sugar are one of the important factors for the productivity of the sugar mills. The sales and quality demanded of sugar are determined by its price, the price relative products, consumer income, the size of the population, and tests and preferences. The sales are affected by the usual factors explaining demand. In present paper focus on a more restricted question: what are the mean sales of sugar by the industry, different sugar mills, per year? The distribution of annual sales of sugar per Taka fixed assets is normal for three sugar mills (SSM, JSM and TSM). The distribution of annual sales per employment is also normal for six sugar mills (SSM, RGSM, C&CO., JSM, RSM, NBSM and industry average (16 SM). Similarly, the distribution of annual sales of sugar in relation to production of sugar is also normal for only three sugar mills (RGSM, JSM and NBSM). The fact from Monte Carlo simulation results that the least squares estimate varies from sample to sample reflects the fact that the least square estimator for Models-1, 2 and 3 are a random variable, it has a probability or sampling distribution, which is normal. For a large class of problems, however, the bootstrap does yield easy, very quick, Monte Carlo estimates of the errors in an estimated parameter set.
Iatrogenic causes of falls in hospitalised elderly patients: a case-control study

Objective: To explore risk factors associated with falls and to evaluate a strategy used by nurses to predict and prevent falls in a hospitalised cohort of elderly patients. Design: A case-control study of risk factors for falls in hospital. Setting: A district general hospital in the UK. Subjects: Altogether 181 patients in an acute integrated medical unit who had fallen were matched for age with 181 patients in the next bed who had not fallen. Results: It was found that 46% (84 of 181) of the fallers were taking one or more benzodiazepines compared with 27% (48 of 181) of the control patients (p<0.001). More fallers 20% (34 of 181) had their benzodiazepines prescribed during their current admission compared with 7% (13 of 181) of the control patients (p<0.001). Temazepam was the main benzodiazepine used by over 95% of cases and controls. Overall 25% (45 of 181) of the fallers had fallen before during the current admission. The logistic regression analysis showed that only a previous fall, benzodiazepine intake, and the need for maximum assistance were significant predictors of falling in hospital, odds ratios were 5.6 (95% confidence interval (CI) 2.7 to 11.6), 2.3 (95% CI 1.4 to 3.7), and 3.1 (95% CI 1.9 to 5.2) respectively. Most fallers had been identified at risk of falling (125; 69%) by ward staff and in 113 (90%) of those preventive measures had been undertaken. Falls were least likely to occur during visiting hours with a peak incidence during night-time. Conclusion: There is a need for evidenced based successful fall prevention strategies but our study also reinforces an urgent public health message that an alternative to benzodiazepines should be sought for night sedation for older patients.
Behavior of the Firm under Regulatory Constraint

A recent article in this Review by Averch and Johnson [3] on the fair rate of return regulation in public utilities industries (or more generally "regulated industries") attracted the attention of many economists. In essence, Averch-johnson argues that the introduction of an "active" constraint of a fair rate of return type would induce the firm to invest more than the original profit maximizing value of capital, and this would create an inefficient allocation of inputs. In addition to frequent citations in verbal arguments, it has invited some thieoretical extensions by economists such as WVestfield [8] and Klevorick [5]. All of the writers seem to accept the basic theoretical foundations set by Averch and Johnson. For example, Klevorick [5] recently proposed that the fair rate of return should be inversely related to the size of the capital of a firm. The intuitive basis for this is apparent, for it in effect creates a penalty as the amount of capital used by the firm increases. ' However, it seems to me that AverchJohnson's original arguments are sketchy and contain somewhat ambiguous logic at several important points. Although their conclusion, for which they tried to find empirical support, that a firm will tend to increase its investment with the introduction of an active constraint seems to be correct, it does not follow from their arguments. In particular, there seems to be a serious error which arises from confusing movements along a curve and shifts of a curve. In Section II, we clarify those ambiguities, and if necessary, correct the mistakes. In the third section of this paper, we shall provide a new formulation of the problem. We shall find that the new formulation will give the same answer as AverchJohnson, namely that a firm will tend to invest more with the iiltroductioin of an active constraint. It should be noted however that while the conclusion happens to be the same, this was not the necessity, for we needed a completely new formulation to obtain the old conclusion.
Medical errors in neurosurgery

Background: Medical errors cause nearly 100,000 deaths per year and cost billions of dollars annually. In order to rationally develop and institute programs to mitigate errors, the relative frequency and costs of different errors must be documented. This analysis will permit the judicious allocation of scarce healthcare resources to address the most costly errors as they are identified. Methods: Here, we provide a systematic review of the neurosurgical literature describing medical errors at the departmental level. Eligible articles were identified from the PubMed database, and restricted to reports of recognizable errors across neurosurgical practices. We limited this analysis to cross-sectional studies of errors in order to better match systems-level concerns, rather than reviewing the literature for individually selected errors like wrong-sided or wrong-level surgery. Results: Only a small number of articles met these criteria, highlighting the paucity of data on this topic. From these studies, errors were documented in anywhere from 12% to 88.7% of cases. These errors had many sources, of which only 23.7-27.8% were technical, related to the execution of the surgery itself, highlighting the importance of systems-level approaches to protecting patients and reducing errors. Conclusions: Overall, the magnitude of medical errors in neurosurgery and the lack of focused research emphasize the need for prospective categorization of morbidity with judicious attribution. Ultimately, we must raise awareness of the impact of medical errors in neurosurgery, reduce the occurrence of medical errors, and mitigate their detrimental effects.
Revealing functional regions via joint matrix factorization based model

Various functions in the region are emerging with the process of urbanizations, such as the residential, entertainment or hospital districts, which can be indicated during the urban planning. Recently, researchers try to discover the region functions with the human mobility data based on machine learning and statistical models. However, previous work always employs the single domain data like mobility information or district attributes to measure the functions. In this paper, we will address the problem by integrating multi-domain data, like human trajectories, base station information and Points-of-Interest attributes. For that, we propose a joint nonnegative matrix factorization model to combine the multi-source data and extract the function distribution of each urban region, then the dominated function among the regions can be uncovered based on the clustering process over the extracted distributions. We also evaluate the performance of our method on the real-world dataset to demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model over the baseline methods.
Estrogen signaling pathway and its imaging in human breast cancer

Recent remarkable progress in hormonal therapy has provided great benefit to breast cancer patients, but it also evokes novel issues: how accurately can the efficacy of each hormonal therapy be predicted and how can hormonal therapy–resistant patients be treated? These clinically important issues must be closely related to the biological events in each cancer, such as the alteration of intracellular multiple estrogen signaling pathways and the estrogen‐related cancer microenvironment, which has recently revealed by molecular biological studies on estrogen and its receptors. However, the estrogen signaling status in individual breast cancers has not been clarified yet. Here we present the context of these issues and introduce our study of new tools which enable the visualization of estrogen signals in individual cancers. The assessment of estrogen receptor (ER)‐α activity in individual cancers or ER‐activating ability of the cancer microenvironment in each breast cancer patient revealed several new findings and interesting observations. We hope that these approaches provide new clues about the estrogen‐dependent mechanisms of breast cancer development, and will be useful to advance the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer patients. (Cancer Sci 2009; 100: 1773–1778)
High-Frequency Carrier-Signal Voltage Selection for Stator Winding Fault Diagnosis in Inverter-Fed AC Machines

The diagnosis of stator winding faults in inverter-fed AC machines using an injected high-frequency carrier-signal voltage is analyzed in this paper. Measurement of the resulting carrier signals (either the negative-sequence carrier-signal current or the zero-sequence components) is used to detect turn faults at an incipient stage. The carrier frequency and magnitude are shown to have significant impact on the performance of the method, with the criteria for their selection being presented. The proposed technique shows low sensitivity to the working condition of the machine, i.e., torque level, flux levels, and fundamental excitation frequency.
Issues of Women’s Political Participation and Decision-Making in Local Governance: Perspectives from the Central Region of Ghana

This article suggests that although women participate in voting during district assembly elections and are very active in voluntary associations where the majority of them exhibit their leadership skill, they are marginalized in local governance politics. Their leadership qualities have not been translated into leadership opportunities in local governance because of factors such as patriarchy, poverty, lack of access to financial resources, and illiteracy. The study recommends that more attention should be paid to more training at the grassroots level using women’s voluntary associations to improve women’s agency in contesting for, and participating in, local governance elections.
Goals, Strategic Planning, and Performance in Government Agencies

Abstract The setting of clear goals and strategic planning are characterized as critical roles of public managers that are closely related to the measurement and enhancement of organizational performance. This study investigates the effects of goal properties and strategic planning capacity and their interacting effects on government agency performance, an aspect which has rarely been explored in the public administration field. For this analysis, we use the hierarchical linear modelling method with data from the 2005 Merit Principle Survey and the 2005 Program Assessment Rating Tool. The dependent variable is perceived organizational performance at the individual level. The main independent variables are three types of goal properties – job-goal commitment, job-goal specificity, and mission specificity, measured at the individual level – and strategic planning capacity, measured at the agency level. The results suggest that in the data these goal-related attitudes and activities can make crucial contributions to the enhancement of organizational performance with no interacting effect.
Reversal of FLT 3 Mutational Status and Sustained Expression of NPM 1 Mutation in Paired Presentation , and Relapse Samples in a Patient with Acute Myeloid Leukemia

We report a case of de novo acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with unstable FLT3 gene mutations and stable NPM1 mutation. FLT3/D835 and NPM1 (Type A) mutations were detected upon diagnosis. During the relapse, the FLT3/D835 mutation changed to an FLT3/ITD mutation while the NPM1 (Type A) mutation was retained. Cytogenetic analyses showed the normal karyotype at diagnosis and relapse. Our findings raise interesting questions about the significance of these mutations in the leukemogenic process, about their stability during the evolution of the disease, and regarding the selection of appropriate molecular markers for the monitoring of minimal residual disease.
The Role of Investment Incentives in Regional FDI Reallocation: A Regression-Discontinuity Approach

This paper analyzes the causal effect of investment incentives on regional allocation of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Czech Republic during 2001-2007. Investment incentives institutional setup provided foreign investors with financial incentives depending on the particular district unemployment rate. The identification strategy is based on a regression-discontinuity approach as the scheme design introduces three unemployment thresholds differentiating the amount of the subsidy. The results indicate a positive effect of the investment scheme, but this impact is concentrated only at the lowest available unemployment threshold, increasing annual FDI inflow per capita by 330 euros compared to districts ineligible for the subsidy. However, an impact at higher unemployment thresholds is not found. Attracting FDI into the most distressed regions needs to be complemented with other policy tools and remains to be an important challenge for policymakers. Among other FDI location factors, the share of tertiary educated labor force and wages have significant positive impact on FDI, albeit only during 2001-2004, increasing annual FDI inflow per capita by 25 and 12 euros, respectively.
Hierarchical Packet Scheduling for Satellite Multimedia Broadcasting: An Adaptive QoS-Aware Design

With the unique broadcast nature and ubiquitous coverage of satellite network, the synergy between satellite and terrestrial networks provides new opportunities for delivering wideband services to a wide range of audiences over extensive geographical areas. This paper concerns the optimization techniques pertinent to the packet scheduling to facilitate multimedia content delivery over the satellite with a return channel via terrestrial network. We propose a novel hierarchical packet scheduling (HPS) scheme, which allocates the resources at different parts of the network in an adaptive and QoS-aware manner, in response to traffic dynamics in the networks as well as link variations of each user. Simulations prove that the proposed HPS scheme can effectively improve the end-to-end performance and resource utilization.
The rise of the Chinese ‘Other’ in Japan's construction of identity: Is China a focal point of Japanese nationalism?

Abstract Since 1945, the United States (US) has served as a focal point of both Left-wing and Right-wing Japanese nationalism. Both sides argued that the US was an arrogant hegemon that unjustly robbed Japan of its autonomy, and prevented Japan from achieving its own ideal national identity. Both sides frequently demanded that Japan should be more ‘resolute’ and resist unfair demands emanating from the US. In recent years, however, both camps are increasingly using the same rhetoric to criticise the Japanese government's China policy. China is also being depicted as an overbearing state that unfairly browbeats Japan into making diplomatic concessions. Given the similarities between the portrayal of China and the US, has China now become a nationalist focal point for both the Japanese Left and Right? Utilising constructivist insights, this article seeks to shed light on this question, by examining how the Japanese Right and Left portray China, and explores the implications for Japan's China policy.
Board of director performance: a group dynamics perspective

Purpose – This paper proposes mainly that boards of directors (BOD) are teams that share characteristics with many other kinds of teams. As a consequence, some of the factors that lead to board effectiveness are the same factors that lead to team effectiveness in general. By integrating the organizational behaviour literature on teams with the governance literature, a comprehensive model of BOD performance is proposed.Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper proposes a model to assess the performance of a board and situates board performance as one input into firm performance.Findings – This paper outlines the dynamic interplay between board characteristics, functionality and performance and proposes a comprehensive model, based largely on the group dynamics literature.Research limitations/implications – Suggests that future research attempt to empirically address some (or all) of the items in the conceptual model. Acknowledges that operationalizing certain variables will prove challenging, but.
Numerical investigation of the effect of resonator position etched on defected ground structure composed of a complementary split ring resonator with dumbbell designed for microstrip patch antenna on electrical size

In this study firstly an ordinary microstrip patch antenna is designed at 2,45 GHz resonance frequency as the reference. Then the defected ground structure (DGS) is constructed by etching a Complementary Split Ring Resonator with dumbbell (CSRR-D) on the ground plane of the conventional antenna. The effects of the position on the electrical size are investigated by changing the position of CSRR-D on DGS along vertical direction and the results are compared with reference microstrip antenna. In this study, all the designed antennas are fed by microstrip lines integrated with inset impedance matching technique. The amount of inset is adjusted for each antenna under investigation. Numerical analyses show that DGS composed of CSRR-D provides 45.71 electrical size reduction as compared to ordinary microstrip antenna.