Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information Theory Performance of Reed-Solomon codes in concatenated schemes with nonideal interleaving

The prediction of the performance of a Reed–Solomon (RS) code has an analytical solution in case of statistical independence of the errors at the input of the RS decoder (RSD). In concatenated schemes, this condition is often obtained through an interleaving device disrupting the correlation between erroneous symbols. Sometimes the ideal depth of such interleaver is too large to implement and the RSD must operate in sub-optimal conditions, for which no analytical formulas are available. In this paper, we propose a statistical model that can manage under-dimensioned interleavers. With a mild set of hypotheses on the behaviour of the inner decoder (ID), we derive analytical expressions for the performance of the concatenated code. Input data for the model can be analytical or can be obtained by simulation. We apply the method to two different types of inner codes, namely turbo codes and RS codes, and we compare the results predicted by the model with those obtained through simulation, when available, showing a very good agreement. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Evaluation of serologic screening of blood donors in India reveals a lack of correlation between anti‐HBc titer and PCR‐amplified HBV DNA

BACKGROUND: Transfusion associated‐HBV (TAHBV) is estimated at approximately 1.5 percent in postsurgical recipients and 50 percent or more in multiple‐transfusion recipients in India. Not transfusing blood with high‐titer anti‐HBc, which reportedly correlates with the presence of HBV DNA, helped reduce TAHBV in Japan. This study tested anti‐HBc‐reactive donors for PCR‐amplified HBV DNA and its correlation with anti‐HBc titers.
Transitional Care Strategies From Hospital to Home

Hospitals are challenged with reevaluating their hospital’s transitional care practices, to reduce 30-day readmission rates, prevent adverse events, and ensure a safe transition of patients from hospital to home. Despite the increasing attention to transitional care, there are few published studies that have shown significant reductions in readmission rates, particularly for patients with stroke and other neurologic diagnoses. Successful hospital-initiated transitional care programs include a “bridging” strategy with both predischarge and postdischarge interventions and dedicated transitions provider involved at multiple points in time. Although multicomponent strategies including patient engagement, use of a dedicated transition provider, and facilitation of communication with outpatient providers require time and resources, there is evidence that neurohospitalists can implement a transitional care program with the aim of improving patient safety across the continuum of care.
Promoting Responsible Fatherhood Initiative: COPES Final Evaluation Report

Funding for this project was provided by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Grant: 90FR0015.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families.
The Effect of Nature-based Tourism, Destination Attachment and Property Ownership on Environmental-friendliness of Visitors: A Study in Thailand

This study examines whether international visitors' pro-environment attitudes is enhanced by the experience of nature-based tourism, destination attachment and ownership of property at the destination. It also examines whether visitors are obstructed from exhibiting pro-environment attitudes and behaviors by situational barriers at the destination. A questionnaire survey was employed to test the hypotheses. The main sample of 300 respondents was collected in Thailand in two main tourism regions. Results from the survey indicate that destination attachment and nature-based tourism experience positively influence visitors' pro-environment attitudes, whereas ownership of property at the destination enhances their sense of attachment to the destination. “Vacation mindset” and different social norms have a negative impact on their pro-environment attitudes, while the lack of availability of “green” infrastructure, products and information negatively impact their attitudes as well as behaviors. Based on these findings, visitors' pro-environment attitudes may be enhanced by eliciting feelings of attachment to the destination and more frequent experience of nature-based tourism, while their pro-environment behaviors may be enhanced by greater provision of environmental friendly tourism products, infrastructure and information.
Gender Segregation and Wage Difference in the Hospitality Industry

This article estimates the contribution of different types of gender segregation to the wage difference between men and women in the hospitality industry. Matched employer–employee data from a sample of hotels and restaurants in Andalusia are used to this end. The data source includes information on 181 hotels and 121 restaurants. Impacts on the wage gap are obtained for two empirical specifications. In the first, equal returns of observable variables are assumed for men and women and, in the second, returns are assumed to be different for each gender. The authors find that industrial and vertical segregation – and to a lesser extent establishment segregation – increase the wage differential. However, horizontal and category segregation help to diminish this, although the impact of the latter is not very substantial. Regarding occupational segregation, women predominate in worst-paid jobs, but their wages drop less than men's earnings. These estimations are robust to both empirical specifications.
Core competencies and the strategic management of R & D

There is an increasing concern amongst R&D managers and their immediate 'customers' and sponsors within companies to have reliable mechanisms to direct R&D simultaneously toward effective rapid innovation and accumulation of long term technological strength. This is leading R&D managers to seek analytical tools to help them identify technologies which have particular significance for competitive advantage, for multiple SBUs, and for longer term strategic positioning, and to manage them in ways which do not leave them at the mercy of business unit strategies, but situate them closer to the core of corporate strategies. This paper conducts an examination of the parallel literature on the idea of core competencies as a new paradigm in corporate strategy and shows that core competencies can be useful focusing devices for assisting in the creation of this linkage between the technological and non-technological aspects of the corporate strategy agenda. Implications are drawn out for: R&D decisions in the areas of shaping strategic research programmes; funding and organisation regimes for R&D; and measuring the effectiveness of R&D.
Long Term Effects of Fiscal and Monetary Policy in a Stock-Flow-Consistent Macro-Framework

Some fundamental issues of fiscal and monetary policy are discussed within a stock-flow-consistent macroeconomic framework for an open economy. The core of the model is the financial sector with both a capital market and a money market and correspondingly differing interest rates. Further key elements are households which maximize an inter-temporal utility function with respect to both consumption and wealth, profit maximizing firms subject to a production function with decreasing returns to scale, and government expenses funded by both taxes and public debt. Concerning monetary policy, different regimes are discussed, including monetary abstinence, quantitative easing, and monetizing public debt. Typical Keynesian policy measures such as rising wages, expansionary monetary policy, and public deficit spending are also discussed. The main focus is on long term effects of these measures, with the dynamics being only briefly sketched. Because the model is entirely solvable analytically, it may also be useful as a means of didactics.
Nonlinear ultrasound simulations using a time-explicit discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method

Histotripsy with ultrasound is an emerging noninvasive therapeutic modality that uses cavitation to precisely destroy diseased soft tissue. Accurate simulations of histotripsy are needed for treatment planning and device design. These simulations are performed in the time-domain, span hundreds of wavelengths, and must handle strong shocks and discontinuities between materials, such as the brain and the skull. The discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is an outstanding candidate for such simulations. DG methods possess the following qualities: 1) high order accuracy, 2) geometric flexibility, 3) excellent dissipation properties, and 4) excellent scalability on massively parallel machines. The objective of this work is to develop a massively parallel DG method for histotripsy simulations in the brain.
The dynamics of Greek public debt – evidence from simultaneous and structural VAR models

The goal of the present article was to investigate not only the dynamics of the Greek public debt, but also the appropriate measures required for achieving fiscal consolidation. The empirical estimation is carried out using a macroeconomic data set spanning the period 1980–2008 and both the three-stage least squares (3SLS) methodological approach on a theoretical model and the structural VAR methodology to perform forecast tests and to calibrate the future paths of the public debt variable up to 2020. The results suggest that only a restrictive fiscal policy that simultaneously increases government revenues and reduces government expenditure could permit the country to achieve debt sustainability. The results also suggest that debt sustainability can be achieved faster when tax revenue policies are intensified. The results are expected to have important implications to policymakers for designing effective macroeconomic policy in terms of achieving sustainable levels of public debt.
Contributions of hydrophobic domain interface interactions to the folding and stability of human γD‐crystallin

Human γD‐crystallin (HγD‐Crys) is a monomeric eye lens protein composed of two highly homologous β‐sheet domains. The domains interact through interdomain side chain contacts forming two structurally distinct regions, a central hydrophobic cluster and peripheral residues. The hydrophobic cluster contains Met43, Phe56, and Ile81 from the N‐terminal domain (N‐td) and Val132, Leu145, and Val170 from the C‐terminal domain (C‐td). Equilibrium unfolding/refolding of wild‐type HγD‐Crys in guanidine hydrochloride (GuHCl) was best fit to a three‐state model with transition midpoints of 2.2 and 2.8 M GuHCl. The two transitions likely corresponded to sequential unfolding/refolding of the N‐td and the C‐td. Previous kinetic experiments revealed that the C‐td refolds more rapidly than the N‐td. We constructed alanine substitutions of the hydrophobic interface residues to analyze their roles in folding and stability. After purification from E. coli, all mutant proteins adopted a native‐like structure similar to wild type. The mutants F56A, I81A, V132A, and L145A had a destabilized N‐td, causing greater population of the single folded domain intermediate. Compared to wild type, these mutants also had reduced rates for productive refolding of the N‐td but not the C‐td. These data suggest a refolding pathway where the domain interface residues of the refolded C‐td act as a nucleating center for refolding of the N‐td. Specificity of domain interface interactions is likely important for preventing incorrect associations in the high protein concentrations of the lens nucleus.
Scale and composition effects of human capital on Spanish regional migration

The aim of this article is to test the effects of human capital on Spanish internal migration, decomposed into two components: the size and the composition of the labour force. Our results indicate that those Spanish regions that experienced increases in the ratio of skilled to unskilled workers attracted less immigration in the period 1965 to 1984. Between 1985 and 2000, when employment rates turned nonsignificant in determining migration, the opposite was observed.
Environment stiffness estimation with multiple observers

When a compliant robotic manipulator interacts with the environment, forces are generated at the contact points, which are a function of environment parameters (such as stiffness, damping and friction). The resulting contact forces can cause a bouncing effect and eventually instability of the manipulator. This problem assumes a great importance when the environment is unknown or poorly structured, such as in robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS). Stability has to be guaranteed when the robot interacts with stiff environments, such as touching a bone or another surgical instrument. To accomplish that, it is necessary to develop a mechanism that estimates in real time the relevant environment parameters to make the corresponding adaptation of control laws possible. In this paper, an algorithm for online stiffness estimation for compliant robotic manipulation is presented. This online algorithm receives the system command input and measured force, generating an estimation of the system stiffness. The method does not require persistent excitation, nor position and velocity measurements. It has low computational overhead, making it suitable for online operation. Simulation and experimental results are presented, validating the approach.
The Credibility of the European Monetary System: The Role of Politics

So far the main focus in the literature devoted to currency crises has been on economic information (inflation, unemployment, trade deficits, real exchange rate overvaluation). However, the present analysis draws our attention to the role of the political factors in currency crises. By conjecturing from two types of literature (currency crises and political economy), we are able to state testable hypotheses related to the importance of political factors during currency crises episodes, which are then tested empirically. We use the cases of Denmark and France during the period 1987-1998. A two-state Markov-Switching AR(1) method with constant transition probabilities is applied in order to take into account sudden shifts in expectations that are not perfectly foreseeable and deterministic events. In our analysis, we find evidence that the self-fulfilling feature in speculations is present for Denmark and France. Furthermore, the results suggest that political factors influence the likelihood of speculative attacks, suggesting that agents do incorporate political information in their expectations.
A research on the non-coherent demodulation method of the underwater 2FSK signal

This paper presents a non-coherent demodulation method of 2FSK signal based on instantaneous frequency, which uses two median filters to smooth the instantaneous frequency sequences. And this method is proved useful to realize code synchronization. When the code rate is 1kbps, the ber is about 10−5.
Enabling TRIPs: The pharma–biotech–university patent coalition

ABSTRACT The dominant player behind the Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement, as regards patents, was a handful of American pharmaceutical transnational corporations (‘big pharma’). Given that TRIPs was exceptionally controversial, how was US big pharma uniquely enabled to command the entire trade diplomatic machinery of the US and, through that, enact global law in its favour? This paper explores one crucial factor in the enacting of TRIPs, namely the prior pursuit of domestic US patent reform, from which a highly integrated and powerful single-issue political coalition between US big pharma, the new biotechnology sector and academic life science departments was formed. This created the political context in the US in which patent issues, particularly those affecting the pharmaceuticals industry, came to be considered matters of state. But explaining both the success of this patent coalition and the subsequent success of the US-led international demands for TRIPs in turn demands appeal to analysis of the structure of the global economy and its transformation to one of neoliberal financialisation, from a watershed of 1980. The paper explores how the critical histories of each of the three sectors of the patent coalition are illuminated by analysis in the context of this structural change and the underlying connections between apparently disparate issues it reveals.
Changes in Vascular Capacity in Awake Dogs in Response to Carotid Sinus Occlusion and Administration of Catecholamines

Changes in cardiac filling pressure (central venous pressure) were measured following carotid occlusion and infusions of catecholamines in awake dogs while cardiac output was held constant. After carotid occlusion in dogs with vagi blocked, central venous pressure increased about 0.8 mm Hg (an estimated decrease in vascular capacity of 2.4 ml/kg). Carotid occlusion before vagal block or following vagal block and β-adrenergic block with propranolol caused no significant changes in central venous pressure. Phenylephrine (0.1–2.0 μg/min per kg) caused dose-dependent increases in arterial pressure, but changed central venous pressure (ca. 2.5 mm Hg) only at the highest doses. Epinephrine in doses (0.03–0.51 μg/min per kg) that caused little change in arterial pressure increased central venous pressure up to 5.3 mm Hg (an estimated decrease in vascular capacity of 12.0 ml/kg); this response was attenuated about 50% by propranolol. Isoproterenol (0.01–0.40 μg/min per kg) decreased arterial pressure and caused changes in central venous pressure similar to those seen with epinephrine. These responses were abolished by propranolol. Vascular compliance, determined from the change in central venous pressure following known changes in vascular blood volume, averaged 3.0 ± 0.6 ml/mm Hg per kg. In the conscious, resting dog, both α- and β-adrenergic receptors are involved in the reflex control of cardiac filling pressure. The β-adrenergic responses predominate.
The Impact of a Fuel Adjustment Clause on the Regulated Firm's Value and Cost of Capital

In recent years the cost of fuel to operate power plants for electric utilities has increased much faster than many utility executives and regulators have anticipated. In the presence of substantial regulatory lag in adjusting rates, stockholders have had to absorb the difference between revenues and unanticipated increases in fuel expenses. In an effort to shorten the time required for increased costs to be reflected in increased prices to consumers, many firms have been allowed to use an automatic fuel adjustment clause (FAC) to pass on increased costs to consumers as they occur. The FAC usually allows the firm to adjust the price of electricity when the price of fuel deviates from some fixed base price. Presently more than 40 of the 50 state regulatory commissions allow some type of FAC.
The SEVIRI Instrument

The SEVIRI is a 50 cm diameter aperture, line by line scanning radiometer, which provides image data in four Visible and Near InfraRed (VNIR) channels and eight InfraRed (IR) channels. The VNIR channels include the High-Resolution Visible (HRV) channel, which contains 9 broadband detection elements to scan the Earth with a 1 km sampling distance at SSP. All the other channels (including the IR channels) are designed with 3 narrow band detection elements per channel, to scan the Earth with a 3 km sampling distance. The full Earth disc image is obtained after 1250 scan line steps (south – north direction) of 9 km SSP per line step. The satellite spin of 100 rpm allows to complete (east – west direction) a full image in about 12.5 min. A flip-flop mechanism is activated to put the on-board black body in the optical path for the instrument calibration. The black body is removed after about 2 seconds from the calibration position. After that, the scan mirror moves back to its initial position. The Earth observation is resumed (after retrace during ~2 min) leading to an overall repeat cycle of maximum 15 minutes. The instrument functional architecture is based on four main assemblies: the Telescope and Scan Assembly (TSA) including the Calibration Unit and the Refocusing Mechanism, the Focal Plane & Cooler Assembly (FPCA), the Electrical Unit Assembly (EUA) consisting of the Functional Control Unit (FCU), the Detection Electronics (DE) including the Main Detection Unit (MDU), the Preamplifier Unit (PU) and the Detectors. This paper will present the instrument design including a description of the SEVIRI hardware elements together with a summary of the flight unit performances.
Power flow calculation of three-phase distribution network based on constant jacobian matrix and newton method

According to basic principle of newton method and the characteristics of distribution network, this paper presents a power flow method of constant jacobian matrix suitable for three-phase asymmetric distribution network. Based on reasonable approximation and phase transformation of node voltages and branch currents, jacobian matrix becomes constant during iterative process, which reduces the amount of computation greatly. The presented algorithm is suitable for distribution networks with multiple voltage levels, loops, PV nodes, etc, so it is universal for distribution network. Simulation results show that the algorithm has reliable convergence and stability.
Diagnosing Trends and Determinants in Public Support for Turkey's EU Membership

Despite scholarly interest in the process of Turkey's candidacy for European Union (EU) membership, what is missing in the literature is a detailed examination of Turkish public opinion on the issue. Using Turkish Election Surveys, Eurobarometer surveys and International Social Survey Programme data, we test whether economic considerations, support for democracy, attachment to national identity and religiosity affect Turkish individuals' attitudes towards Turkey's EU membership. Perceived national economic conditions and national identity have a negative impact while satisfaction with democracy is positively linked to support for EU membership. Contrary to expectations, religion exerts no significant influence over membership preferences.