Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing the Impact of Globalization on Poverty and Inequality: Using a New Lens on an Old Puzzle

A persistent puzzle in the debate over globalization is the gap between econ omis s' assessments of the aggr gate benefits of the process and th more pessimistic assessments that are typical of the general public? or at least typical of the debate among the vocal subset of the public that expresses opinions on the topic. Study after study confirms the benefits for poor countries of integrating into the world economy, albeit placing different degrees of emphasis on the importance of initial conditions and institutional endowments in achieving growth and poverty reduction.1 Yet public perceptions of the globalization process? reported in opinion polls and reflected in public demonstrations in cities such as Seattle, Prague, and Porto Alegre? are much more negative.2 Analyses of trends based on aggregate, income-based measures provide impor tant benchmarks for assessing the impact of globalization on poverty and inequality. The research presented in this paper complements these benchmarks by using alternative measures to highlight different trends. These trends include short-term movements in and out of poverty, changes in the distribution over the life or earnings cycle, distributional shifts at the sector and cohort level, the role of relative as well as absolute differences, and changes in reported well-being.
In vitro antibacterial activity of fluoroquinolones against Porphyromonas gingivalis strains.

OBJECTIVES The objective of the study was to evaluate the in vitro activity of ciprofloxacin, gatifloxacin and moxifloxacin against 16 Porphyromonas gingivalis strains. METHODS MICs of the quinolones were established by Etest and the agar dilution technique. Experiments focused on determination of the spontaneous mutation rate and the induction of resistant strains, using 0.25-fold MIC of antibiotic. Fragments of gyrA and gyrB as well as of parC were sequenced. RESULTS Moxifloxacin and gatifloxacin had very low MIC values. Subinhibitory concentrations of the fluoroquinolones rapidly induced mutations. The spontaneous mutation rate was strain- and quinolone-dependent; the lowest rate was encountered after moxifloxacin. The predicted serum concentrations of the quinolones were bactericidal to wild-type strains, but 100 mg/L of each tested quinolone was insufficient to kill a mutant exhibiting moderate resistance. Often the mutants exhibited high resistance to >/=32 mg/L. All these mutants bore a Ser-83-->Phe substitution in GyrA. CONCLUSIONS DNA gyrase is the primary target of fluoroquinolones in P. gingivalis. In terms of the achievable level in the gingival fluid and the MICs, moxifloxacin might prevent the development of resistance and may be an alternative in the antibiotic treatment of P. gingivalis-associated periodontitis.
Nominal Interest Rate Rules under Heterogeneous Beliefs

This paper presents simple models with competitive markets, fully flexible prices and fully observable macro-economic variables. Agents hold heterogeneous beliefs because the exogenous shocks are stable but non-stationary and the true law of motion is unknown to agents. We show that the diversity of beliefs enables monetary policy to have real effects and the fluctuations in beliefs cause excess volatilities in real economy. By log-linearization we derive a version of the aggregate supply curve which relates aggregate employment to the discrepancies between the market forecast of inflation rate and the stationary forecast of it. The computational results demonstrate that monetary policy rules can dramatically reduce consumption volatility and there is a tradeoff between stability of consumption and inflation. The results are thus comparable with Kurz - Jin - Motolese (2003).
Neutrophil CD64 Is a Sensitive Diagnostic Marker for Early-Onset Neonatal Infection

This prospective study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic utilities of neutrophil CD64 expression for the identification of early-onset clinical infection and pneumonia in term infants and to define the optimal cutoff value so that it may act as a reference with which future studies can be compared. Term newborns in whom infection was suspected when they were <72 h of age were recruited into the study. C-reactive protein (CRP) and expression of CD64 on neutrophils were measured at 0 h (at the time of sepsis evaluation) and 24 h. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value (NPV) of CRP, CD64, and the combination of these two markers for predicting neonatal sepsis were determined. A total of 338 infants with suspected clinical sepsis were investigated, 115 of whom were found to be clinically infected. CRP and CD64 in infected infants were both significantly elevated at 0 and 24 h compared with noninfected infants (p < 0.001). The calculated optimal cutoff value for CD64 was 6136 antibody-phycoerythrin molecules bound/cell. CD64 has a very high sensitivity (96%) and NPV (97%) at 24 h. The addition of CRP only marginally enhanced the sensitivity and NPV (97 and 98%, respectively). In conclusion, neutrophil CD64 is a very sensitive diagnostic marker for the identification of early-onset clinical infection and pneumonia in term newborns. The results strongly suggest that measurement of neutrophil CD64 may allow neonatal clinicians to discontinue antibiotic treatment at 24 h in infants who are clinically stable and whose CD64 expressions are below the optimal cutoff level.
A : Artificial Intelligence Connectomics : Neural Structure Reconstruction from Fluorescence Imaging of Neural Activity Project Proposal

Understanding the topology underlying neural connections and the associated changes induced by defects is often deemed a promising approach to deciphering the puzzle of neuro-pathologies, eg. epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease. In this work, we would like to reconstruct the network structure of the brain from time-series activity of the neurons. Since the connections are directed in nature, the fundamental obstacle the task entails is that of inferring statistical causality from time-series data.
Love is a battlefield: ‘maternal’ emotions and white catharsis in Baz Luhrmann's post-Apology ‘Australia’

In Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008), audiences encounter emotive scenes including depictions of an Indigenous child stolen from a white ‘mother’ in a time of war. Given that the film is framed with reference to the history of the Stolen Generations and the Apology, this paper explores the functions of such a narrative in constructions of the white imaginary. Inverting truths around the destruction of Indigenous families and policies of assimilation, management and control requires in this instance the appropriation of the maternal domain of the Indigenous mother by the white female body; an English woman reclaiming ‘her’ land. Through such a repositioning, anxieties around belonging and guilt may undergo a form of catharsis via the apparent empathetic engagement with a ‘stolen’ maternal love. Drawing on Ghassan Hage's insights into the possessive logic of the ‘white’ nation and Sara Ahmed's analysis of emotional politics, this article analyses the connection between the films Australia and Jedda (1955), critiquing the potential for such a cinematic catharsis to assuage shame, and reify national virtue. I contend that there is a violence inherent in colonising ‘love’ through such fantasies that inhabit the locus and stories of ‘the other’ at the moment of ‘Apology’, neutralising threats to negative conceptions of self as benevolent bodies at ‘home’ in the imaginary landscape of Australia.
Welfare Reform, Jobcentre Plus and the Street-Level Bureaucracy: Towards Inconsistent and Discriminatory Welfare for Severely Disadvantaged Groups?

A defining feature of UK welfare reform has been concerted moves towards greater conditionality and sanctioning which has stimulated much academic debate. However, few policy articles have sought to examine how welfare reforms are actually implemented. Lipsky (1980) has shown that the intentions of policy makers may be frustrated by the behaviour of public service workers operating in a ‘corrupted world of service’. This article draws upon the findings of the evaluation of the Jobseekers Mandatory Activity to discuss how key welfare reforms are likely to be implemented. It argues that that discretion remains a significant feature of front-line practice with potentially profound implications for severely disadvantaged groups.
Investigating Organisational Innovativeness: Developing a Multidimensional Formative Measure

To survive competition, it is vital for firms to be innovative. As a firm's cultural predisposition, organisational innovativeness provides an environment that fosters innovations and thus actively supports new product or service development. The purpose of this study is to measure organisational innovativeness and its multiple dimensions from a cultural-strategic perspective on a multifaceted formative scale which we develop theoretically and by means of qualitative interviews. Furthermore, we empirically validate the newly developed construct by investigating how innovativeness and its dimensions translate into innovation success by examining the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance in depth. Our findings suggest that a strategic focus on innovations, an extrinsic motivation system, openness in communication, as well as management encouragement are all dimensions of organisational innovativeness. Further, our results support the need for a proficient innovation process as a mechanism to systematically and continuously translate innovativeness into successful innovations. Innovation process proficiency fully mediates the relationship between innovativeness and innovation performance, while the contingency factor competitive intensity enhances this performance impact.
[Herpes zoster incidence in diabetic patients].

BACKGROUND To assess the risk of herpes zoster in people with diabetes mellitus in comparison with the general population. METHODS Using computerized clinical reports form primary health care in Navarre, Spain, we analyzed the incidence of herpes zoster in people aged over 30 years in 2006 by diagnosis of diabetes, and adjusting for age and sex. RESULTS Among 26,793 diabetes patients 409 cases of herpes zoster were diagnosed (15 per 1000). Nineteen point three percent of cases occurred in diabetes patients. Diabetes presented an adjusted relative risk of 2.1 (95% CI 1.9-2.4), and increased to 3.7 (95% CI 2.0-6.8) in the 30-44 year age group. Of the total number of cases of herpes zoster in the population, 7.2% were attributable to diabetes. CONCLUSION Diabetes increases the risk of, and has a relevant role in, the incidence of herpes zoster.
Economic Development and the Quality of Life of Children*

RESUMEN Los estudios históricos muestran que el crecimiento secular de la estatura media de los niños europeos occidentales comenzó en 1850 y fue precedido por cien años de declive y estancamiento. Conjeturamos que la caída inicial en las estaturas está relacionada con la transición demográfica y mostramos que una extensión del modelo neoclásico de crecimiento económico puede explicar el fenómeno. Verificamos que las predicciones del modelo se cumplen en el presente para un corte transversal de países y encontramos que, en países con bajo ingreso por habitante, la estatura media de los niños está negativamente asociada con el ingreso per capita y con la fecundidad. Como ejercicio final, nos preguntamos si estas estimaciones explican el cambio en la estatura media observado en el último siglo y medio. ABSTRACT Historical studies show that the average height of Western European children began its secular growth in 1850 only after a period of decline and stagnation which had started around 1750. We argue that the initial downturn in heights is related to the demographic transition, and show that an extension of the neoclassical model of economic growth can explain the observed phenomena. We test whether the predictions of the model hold for a cross-section of contemporary countries, and we find that stature is indeed negatively associated with income per capita and fertility for countries with an income per capita below a given threshold. As a final exercise, we ask whether these cross-country estimates explain the improvement in children's height observed in the last hundred and fifty years.
The adjustment process of Spanish repatriates: a case study

Little empirical research has focused on the repatriation process of international employees despite the increasing number of expatriations that take place and the consequences of its failure. Based on a ten cases study, this research provides an in-depth analysis of the adjustment difficulties repatriates face when they come back from international assignments. Findings suggest that these adjustment problems could lead to turnover intentions. The study also shows that work adjustment difficulties can be caused by differences between the host and the domestic organizational culture and it can be moderated by some organizational practices. Implications and recommendations for human resources practitioners and researchers are discussed.
Toward A Speaker-Independent Real-Time Affect Detection System

The ability to detect the human affective states is rapidly gaining interests among researchers and industrial developers since it has a broad range of applications. This paper reports the advances of human affect detection from acoustic signals in Motorola Labs. We focus on two parts of affect detection: emotion detection and conversational engagement detection. The emotion detection part is the major component of our system. The system is based only on acoustic information, that is to say, there is no recognizer and no linguistic or semantic information available. Given the truth that speech is a short-time stationary signal, we employ the hidden Markov model (HMM) to capture the variation and trend of acoustic signal structures caused by affective states. The affect-sensitive segmental features such as pitch, energy, zero crossing rate and energy slope are extracted to capture the finer structures of acoustic signals. Each state of the HMM is modeled by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), which captures the range, mean, median and variability of above affect-sensitive measures. Besides testing the algorithm in the LDC databases, we implement a real-time conversation monitor, which can recognize and express the eight basic human emotions and can detect the conversational engagement level
Measuring Innovative Work Behaviour

Both scientists and practitioners emphasize the importance of innovative work behaviour (IWB) of individual employees for organizational success, but the measurement of IWB is still at an evolutionary stage. This article is concerned with developed a measure of IWB with four potential dimensions: the exploration, generation, championing and implementation of ideas. From a pilot survey among 81 research professionals and their supervisors, we derived an initial version of ten items. Next, analysis of validity drew on survey data from 703 matched dyads of knowledge workers and their supervisors in 94 knowledge intensive services firms. It included confirmatory factor analyses and hierarchical multilevel regressions to test hypothesized relationships of IWB with related constructs, including participative leadership, external work contacts and innovative output. These analyses demonstrated sufficient reliability and criterion validity. Evidence for the distinctiveness of the four dimensions was, however, weak, suggesting that IWB is one-dimensional. We conclude that further research on this issue is merited.
Rational Addictive Behavior and Cigarette Smoking

Cigarette demand equations accounting for tolerance, reinforcement, and withdrawal are derived using the Becker-Murphy model of rational addiction and are estimated using data from the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Estimates imply that smoking is addictive, individuals are not myopic, and price increases would reduce demand. Implications concerning time preference and addiction are tested by estimating the demand separately for samples based on age and education. Less educated (younger) individuals are found to behave more myopically than more educated (older) individuals, whereas more addicted (myopic) individuals are found to respond more to price, in the long run, than less addicted (myopic) individuals.
The measurement of work–family culture in Spain and some applications to other economies

This investigation adapts the scales assessing work–family culture to consider several characteristics found in Spanish organizations (e.g. extended schedules and a high value attributed to working long hours). Organizational phenomena not included in other scales are integrated into a modified instrument (e.g. managers efforts to inform about the available work–family benefits, being considered more efficient when working many hours). Suggestions on the measurement of these new features in other economies are provided. Two studies are conducted: one to develop the scale and another to validate it. The resulting instrument comprehends three components: managerial support, career consequences and supervisor support.
Identification of 54 Mycobacterial Species by PCR-Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism Analysis of the hsp65Gene

ABSTRACT A total of 121 reference and clinical strains of both slowly and rapidly growing mycobacteria belonging to 54 species were studied for restriction fragment length polymorphism of a PCR-amplified 439-bp segment of the gene encoding the 65-kDa heat shock protein. Restriction digests were separated by 10% polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE). By including a size standard in each sample, the restriction fragment profile was calculated using a computer-aided comparison program. An algorithm describing these 54 species (including 22 species not previously described) is proposed. We found that this assay based on 10% PAGE provided a more precise estimate than that based on agarose gel electrophoresis of the real size of restriction fragments as deduced from the sequence analysis and allowed identification of mycobacteria whose PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis patterns were unequivocally identified by fragments shorter than 60 bp.
Anti-Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) Antibodies 2F5 and 4E10 Require Surprisingly Few Crucial Residues in the Membrane-Proximal External Region of Glycoprotein gp41 To Neutralize HIV-1

ABSTRACT The conserved membrane-proximal external region (MPER) of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) gp41 is a target of two broadly neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies, 2F5 and 4E10, and is an important lead for vaccine design. However, immunogens that bear MPER epitopes so far have not elicited neutralizing antibodies in laboratory animals. One explanation is that the immunogens fail to recreate the proper molecular environment in which the epitopes of 2F5 and 4E10 are presented on the virus. To explore this molecular environment, we used alanine-scanning mutagenesis across residues 660 to 680 in the MPER of a pseudotyped variant of HIV-1JR-FL, designated HIV-1JR2, and examined the ability of 2F5 and 4E10 to neutralize the Ala mutant viruses. The results show that the only changes to produce neutralization resistance to 2F5 occurred in residue D, K, or W of the core epitope (LELDKWANL). Likewise, 4E10 resistance arose by replacing one of three residues; two (W and F) were in the core epitope, and one (W) was seven residues C-terminal to these two (NWFDISNWLW). Importantly, no single substitution resulted in resistance of virus to both 2F5 and 4E10. Surprisingly, 8 out of 21 MPER Ala mutants were more sensitive than the parental pseudovirus to 2F5 and/or 4E10. At most, only small differences in neutralization sensitivity to anti-gp120 monoclonal antibody b12 and peptide T20 were observed with the MPER Ala mutant pseudoviruses. These data suggest that MPER substitutions can act locally and enhance the neutralizing activity of antibodies to this region and imply a distinct role of the MPER of gp41 during HIV-1 envelope-mediated fusion. Neutralization experiments showing synergy between and T20 and 4E10 against HIV-1 are also presented. The data presented may aid in the design of antigens that better present the MPER of gp41 to the immune system.
Why do R&D investments differ in different high-tech enterprises? The role of board background

Despite the key role of R&D investments in building and maintaining innovative capabilities, the R&D investments in different enterprises differ significantly. Why do R&D investments differ in different high-tech enterprises? To answer this question, we focus our research on the effects of board background on the R&D investments of high-tech enterprises based on resource dependence theory and upper echelons theory. Using the samples of the listed high-tech enterprises in China from 2007 to 2009 and the method of multiple linear regressions, we find that education degree of board, output-oriented professional background of board and heterogeneity degree of board's occupational background are all positively correlated with R&D investments. The result suggests that board background is one of the important reasons why R&D investments differ in different high-tech enterprises, which can provide some references for board construction in China.
INNOVATION TYPE AND DIFFUSION: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

This paper presents the first empirical test of innovation type and diffusion in local government. Five types of innovations – one product, three process and one ancillary – were tested in a multivariate model that included environmental, organizational and diffusion variables. The research was conducted on 120 upper tier English local authorities using a multiple informant survey instrument. Results indicate that adoption of innovation is both complex and contingent – different factors drive the diffusion of different types of innovation across upper tier English local government. These findings suggest that further research is required on the interactions of types of innovation in public organizations and that policy instruments developed to assist adoption need to be sensitive to variations between innovations.