Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of in- and out-group differences between Western and East-Asian facial expression recognition

Recent cross-cultural studies have questioned the cultural universality of facial expressions from a psychological viewpoint. However, the automatic facial expression recognition (FER) systems are based on the assumption that facial expressions are the same for all human beings, excluding the differences that may appear between different races and cultures. Therefore, this paper presents an analysis of culturally specific facial expression recognition focused on Western and East-Asian expressive faces using an automatic FER system based on 3 different feature extraction methods (appearance-, geometric-, and a proposed hybrid-based). Our study is focused on 4 specific facial regions (eyes-eyebrows, mouth, nose and forehead/outline) and it is powered by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) which enables the visual examination of the most relevant differences among the 6 basic expressions from each racial group. Feature extraction methods are evaluated using Support Vector Machines (SVM) and 4 standard databases. In addition, our findings are compared with a cross-cultural human study applied to 40 participants from both racial groups.
E-GOVERNMENT PROCESS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR AND THE BARRIERS AGAINST ITS IMPLEMENTATION: THE CASE STUDY IN GREECE

The study aims to gain insight into the of e-government as it has started taking place within the public sector and access the barriers that are related to its organizational structure and consequently prevent the fully incorporation and implementation of such technological efforts. In order to obtain vital and accurate information, the study adopted quantitative research methodology by using the tool of self-completion questionnaires. More precisely, this study is based on a single case study, the public administration in Greece. Moreover, the sources of data collection were relied upon primary data. Furthermore, this study revealed the organizational barriers against e-government by focusing on the major impediments as the participants captured them. Non-availability of high IT-staff, age of employees and the structure of the political regime as well as the way that the central government operates affect the structure of the public sector and are considered the most important barriers that guide to difficulties as far as e-government adoption is concerned. Indeed, Greek Public sector is facing many organizational problems and should eliminate the majority of them by undertaking radical changes and effective measures.
Local democracy and the challenges of decentralising the state: An international perspective

Abstract Decentralisation has been a major element of governance reform in developed, developing and transitional countries over the past two decades. The driving forces have differed, as have the outcomes. This paper reviews a number of issues concerned with decentralisation, drawing comparisons between the experience in Central and Eastern Europe with that in a range of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The analysis focuses in six key areas: the size of local government units and the need for an intermediate tier; structures for local democratic control; citizen participation and engagement of civil society; assignment of financial resources; central – local relations; and the impact of decentralisation on service delivery, poverty reduction and corruption. The conclusion is that decentralisation needs to be carefully designed and implemented if it is to achieve the desired outcomes.
Residential Relocation and Changes in Urban Travel: Does Neighborhood-Scale Urban Form Matter?

Abstract This article presents an empirical study of the relationship between neighborhood-scale urban form and travel behavior. It focuses on households who relocate within the Central Puget Sound region to determine if they change their travel behavior when they move from one neighborhood type to another. Regression models are used to predict change in travel behavior as a function of change in neighborhood accessibility, controlling for changes in life cycle, regional accessibility, and workplace accessibility. The study is unique in that it analyzes the travel behavior of the same households in a longitudinal manner in concert with detailed urban form measures. The findings suggest that households change travel behavior when exposed to differing urban forms. In particular, locating to areas with higher neighborhood accessibility decreases vehicle miles traveled.
High Girth Hypergraphs with Unavoidable Monochromatic or Rainbow Edges

Abstract A classical result of Erdős and Hajnal claims that for any integers k, r, g ≥ 2 there is an r-uniform hypergraph of girth at least g with chromatic number at least k. This implies that there are sparse hypergraphs such that in any coloring of their vertices with at most k − 1 colors there is a monochromatic hyperedge. When there is no restriction on the number of the colors used, one can easily avoid monochromatic hyperedges. Then, however, so-called rainbow or multicolored hyperedges might appear. Nešetřil and Rödl [19] called hypergraphs such that in any vertex-coloring there is either a monochromatic or a rainbow hyperedge, selective. They showed an existence of selective r-uniform hypergraphs of girth g for any integers r, g ≥ 2 using probabilistic and explicit constructions. In this paper, we provide a slightly di erent construction of such hypergraphs and summarize the probabilistic approaches. The main building block of the construction, a part-rainbow-forced hypergraph, is of independent interest. This is an r-uniform r-partite hypergraph with a given girth such that in any vertex-coloring that is rainbow on each part, there is a rainbow hyperedge. We give a simple construction of such a hypergraph that does not use iterative amalgamation.
Psychosocial adaptation: an evolutionary concept analysis exploring a common multidisciplinary language.

AIMS To provide the first known concept analysis of psychosocial adaptation, exploring its evolution from the concept adaptation. We also determine how psychosocial adaptation is conceptualized across nursing, health, sociobehavioural and education disciplines. BACKGROUND Psychosocial adaptation is an important conceptual term that is poorly defined in nursing and other health, sociobehavioural and education disciplines. A thorough understanding of the concept's application in nursing and across disciplines can help to clarify its meaning, facilitate a more effective common language between disciplines and inform future psychosocial adaptation research. DESIGN Rodger's evolutionary view guided this concept analysis. DATA SOURCES Peer-reviewed English and Spanish manuscripts published between 2011-2013 were retrieved from the following databases: CINAHL, Psych INFO, PubMed, Scopus and LILACS. REVIEW METHODS Eighty-nine articles related to psychosocial adaptation were included in the analysis. Findings identify key attributes, antecedents and consequences associated with the use of the concept. Findings were compared vis-a-vis reported characteristics of adaptation. RESULTS The attributes characterizing psychosocial adaptation are: change, process, continuity, interaction and influence. In psychosocial adaptation, new life conditions serve as antecedents, while consequences are good or bad outcomes. Important features of the evolution of this concept include its broad appropriation across the reviewed disciplines. The attributes of psychosocial adaptation, have some similarities to those of general adaptation. Both concepts include an aspect of change, but unlike adaptation, psychosocial adaptation has branched away from biological descriptors, such as homeostasis and tends to focus on relational characteristics, such as interaction and influences.
Fiscal Policy and the Composition of Private Consumption: Some Evidence from the U.S. and Canada

This paper develops a generalised version of the life-cycle model in which consumers’ preferences are defined over components of consumption and are affected by the level of public expenditure on goods and services. The model implies that the crowding out of private consumption could in fact be a direct demand side phenomenon caused by the way preferences respond to a change in public spending. Evidence from the U.S. and Canadian data for the period 1935-1995 confirms this theoretical conjecture as well as implying that in both countries demand for durable goods is likely to show relatively large swings which may undermine the stability of the sector and harm the supply side.
Responsiveness As Antecedent Of Satisfaction And Referrals In Financial Services Marketing: Empirical Evidence From An Emergent Economy

Financial institutions across the globe are still recovering from the meltdown of 2008 and several nations continue their struggle to stabilize national economies. However, there might be some important lessons to be learned from this debacle. Some economies, notably the emergent ones, were more resilient to this slowdown than the developed ones. In fact, the banking sector in some of these economies posted a robust growth in spite of the downturn in global banking. We report on a detailed study of a multinational bank operating in the emergent economy of India with a random national sample of over 9,000 of their customers. Our research provides valuable insights into a market driven bank’s drive for customer satisfaction and referrals and examines antecedents and consequences of such initiatives. We provide empirical evidence suggesting that responsiveness to customer enquiries and complaints might be a strong driver of customer satisfaction, irrespective of the outcome of the resolution process. Our finding that responsiveness supersedes a positive outcome in service provider-customer conflict resolution is a contribution of this research to extant literature with important strategic and managerial implications for firms.
Using Knowledge Graphs to Explain Entity Co-occurrence in Twitter

Modern Knowledge Graphs such as DBPedia contain significant information regarding Named Entities and the logical relationships which exist between them. Twitter on the other hand, contains important information on the popularity and frequency with which these entities are mentioned and discussed in combination with one another. In this paper we investigate whether these two sources of information can be used to complement and explain one another. In particular, we would like to know whether the logical relationships (a.k.a. semantic paths) which exist between pairs of known entities can help to explain the frequency with which those entities co-occur with one another in Twitter. To do this we train a ranking function over semantic paths between pairs of entities. The aim of the ranker is to identify the path that most likely explains why a particular pair of entities have appeared together in a particular tweet. We train the ranking model using a number of lexical, graph-embedding and popularity-based features over semantic paths containing a single intermediate entity and demonstrate the efficacy of the model for determining why pairs of entities occur together in tweets.
Employer Size, Wages and Unobserved Skills: Evidence from Moonlighters in the UK

In this paper we examine the labour quality explanation of the employer size–wage gap: larger firms pay higher wages because they employ more skilled workers. Most previous studies control for unobserved skills of workers by applying the fixed-effects estimator to longitudinal data, thus assuming time-invariant unobserved individual heterogeneity. We release this assumption by using a sample of moonlighters; hence, identification is achieved by differencing across two jobs held simultaneously rather than sequentially. Using the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey, we find that controlling for unobserved skills in the sample of moonlighters does not reduce the estimate of the wage gap.
The Balance‐of‐Payments Constraint and Growth Rate Differences Among African and East Asian Economies

The balance-of-payments constrained growth rate model postulates that the balance of payments position of a country is the main constraint on economic growth, because it imposes a limit on demand to which supply can adapt. This paper applies the model to a sample of African and Asian countries aiming at explaining growth rate differences among these countries by quantifying the individual and combined contributions of export growth, capital flows and changes in the terms of trade in each country’s case. The results obtained give support to the argument that, in contrast to Asian countries, the low growth rates in African countries are explained by low export expansion relative to the imports required for the processes of growth and development. This poor performance of African countries is attributed to the low magnitudes of their dynamic Harrod foreign trade multipliers, which are determined by the respective income elasticities of demand for exports and imports. It is asserted that the low dynamic Harrod foreign trade multipliers of African countries are direct products of their excessive dependency on the exportation of primary products. — Le modele de taux de croissance contraries par la balance des paiements postule que la position de la balance des paiements constitue le principal obstacle a la croissance economique d’un pays, dans la mesure ou elle impose une limite a la demande a laquelle l’offre pourrait s’adapter. Le present article applique ce modele a un echantillon de pays africains et asiatiques afin d’expliquer les differences de taux de croissance entre ces pays, en quantifiant la contribution individuelle et collective de facteurs tels que la croissane des exportations, les flux de capitaux et la variation des termes de l’echange dans chaque pays. Les resultats obtenus confortent l’argument selon lequel, contrairement a ce qui se passe dans les pays asiatiques, la modicite des taux de croissance dans les des pays africains s’explique par la faible expansion des exportations par rapport aux importations necessaires pour assurer le processus de croissance et de developpement. Cette performance mediocre des economies africaines est imputee a l’insuffisance de leur multiplicateur dynamique du commerce exterieur de Harrod, qui est determine par leurs elasticites-revenu de la demande d’exportations et d’importations. Cette insuffisance est elle-meme une consequence directe de la dependance excessive de ces pays a l’egard des exportations de produits de base.
A positron emission tomography study of the effects of treatment with valproate on brain 5-HT2A receptors in acute mania.

OBJECTIVE To examine the effects of treatment with valproate on brain 5-HT2A receptors in acute manic patients using positron emission tomography (PET) and [18F]-setoperone. METHODS Patients with DSM-IV bipolar I disorder-manic episode were recruited. Patients were drug free or drug naïve at the time of baseline PET scan. All patients were treated with valproate and one patient received lithium in addition to valproate for 3-5 weeks following which they had a post-treatment PET scan. The effect of treatment on brain 5-HT2A receptor binding was determined using statistical parametric mapping (SPM) and region of interest (ROI) analyses. Of the 12 manic patients recruited, seven patients had both baseline and post-treatment PET scans. RESULTS All seven patients improved with treatment and were in remission at the time of the second PET scan. Both SPM and ROI analyses showed that treatment with mood stabilizers had no significant effect on brain 5-HT2A receptor binding in manic patients. CONCLUSION This study suggests that changes in brain 5-HT2A receptors are not involved in the antimanic effects of mood stabilizers however, we cannot exclude the possibility of 5-HT2A receptor involvement in down-stream signaling pathways.
Transplantation of human mesenchymal stem cells promotes functional improvement and increased expression of neurotrophic factors in a rat focal cerebral ischemia model

Previous studies have suggested that intravenous transplantation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in rat ischemia models reduces ischemia‐induced brain damage. Here, we analyzed the expression of neurotrophic factors in transplanted human MSCs and host brain tissue in rat middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) ischemia model. At 1 day after transient MCAO, 3 × 106 immortalized human MSC line (B10) cells or PBS was intravenously transplanted. Behavioral tests, infarction volume, and B10 cell migration were investigated at 1, 3, 7, and 14 days after MCAO. The expression of endogenous (rat origin) and exogenous (human origin) neurotorphic factors and cytokines was evaluated by quantitative real‐time RT‐PCR and Western blot analysis. Compared with PBS controls, rats receiving MSC transplantation showed improved functional recovery and reduced brain infarction volume at 7 and 14 days after MCAO. In MSC‐transplanted brain, among many neurotrofic factors, only human insulin‐like growth factor 1 (IGF‐1) was detected in the core and ischemic border zone at 3 days after MCAO, whereas host cells expressed markedly higher neurotrophic factors (rat origin) than control rats, especially vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) at 3 days and epidermal growth factor (EGF) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) at 7 days after MCAO. Intravenously transplanted human MSCs induced functional improvement, reduced infarct volume, and neuroprotection in ischemic rats, possibly by providing IGF‐1 and inducing VEGF, EGF, and bFGF neurotrophic factors in host brain. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Synthesis of Quasi-Elliptic Bandpass Frequency-Selective Surface Using Cascaded Loop Arrays

A new quasi-elliptic bandpass frequency-selective surface (FSS) is presented by cascading a two-dimensional periodic array of double square loops (DSLs) and an array of gridded square loops (GSLs). The proposed FSS can be systematically synthesized based on microwave filter theory. The synthesized FSS can control not only the passband characteristics, but also transmission-zero frequencies at both ends of the passband, thus resulting in high selectivity and quasi-elliptic filtering response. The operating principle, detailed synthesis procedure, and implementation guidelines for this FSS are presented and discussed. As an example, a prototype of the proposed FSS is designed, fabricated, and tested. Measured results demonstrate that the proposed FSS has a simple structure, high selectivity, and stable bandpass response under a large variation of the incident angle.
Revenue Bubbles and Structural Deficits: What's a State to Do?

The 2001 recession proved alarming to state government finances. A relatively shallow national recession led to a severe downturn in state revenues that took three years to unwind. In the current economic downturn, early signs of fiscal stress are already apparent. This raises several fundamental questions: * Since 1984 the U.S. macroeconomy entered into the "Great Moderation" in which economic volatility was reduced. Has state revenue volatility relative to the business cycle increased during this period? * Has the composition of state revenues and expenditures made states more susceptible to economic downturns and less likely to rebound in recovery? * Do states have the appropriate tools to address structural deficits or are they using budgeting techniques designed to address cyclical downturns to fix structural gaps? * Do the states have appropriate early warning mechanisms to anticipate fiscal stress? In this paper we will use state specific indicators of economic conditions to examine fiscal performance and budgeting practice over the economic cycle. In particular we will examine the interaction of policy choices in the states of Illinois and Iowa to see how these choices have impacted revenue collections and revenue productivity. Illinois and Iowa have significantly different economic structures and tax structures that should help illuminate what factors affect fiscal conditions. Finally we will offer some observations on how revenue and expenditure structures may need to change if states are going to avoid (or minimize) fiscal downturns.
Mitochondrial Uncoupling Agents Trigger Ventricular Fibrillation in Isolated Rat Hearts

Sudden cardiac death resulting from ventricular fibrillation (VF) remains a major cause of mortality. The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of loss of oxidative phosphorylation and activation of the mitochondrial ATP-sensitive K+ channel and permeability transition pore in VF development during myocardial ischemia by using mitochondrial uncoupling agents (carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone and 2,4-dinitrophenol) and channel blockers (5-hydroxydecanoate and cyclosporine A) at concentrations that have been demonstrated to block the intended targets selectively. Isolated rat hearts (n = 8 per group) were perfused with 0.3 μM carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone, 100 μM 2,4-dinitrophenol, 0.2 μM cyclosporine A, 100 μM 5-hydroxydecanoate, or vehicle solution and regional ischemia induced after 10 minutes. Carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone and 2,4 dinitrophenol caused profound QT shortening and triggered VF in 100% of hearts before ischemia. During ischemia, neither cyclosporine A (88%) nor 5-hydroxydecanoate (100%) reduced VF incidence compared with control (100% VF). In separate hearts, carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone decreased tissue ATP content, and glibenclamide or glimepiride delayed the QT shortening and onset of VF triggered by carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone. In conclusion, mitochondrial uncoupling agents trigger VF, likely as a result of ATP depletion with subsequent activation of sarcolemmal ATP-sensitive K+ currents. The mechanism of VF in ischemia does not involve activation of the mitochondrial ATP-sensitive K+ channel or permeability transition pore.
The impact of the petroleum sector on the output of the Nigerian construction sector

The petroleum sector plays an important role in the Nigerian economy, as it is the single largest revenue earner of the country and one of the largest contributors to the gross domestic product (GDP). This study estimated the impact of petroleum and gas revenue on the performance of the construction sector using a polynomial distributed lag model. We extracted data on the petroleum and gas sector (PGS), the GDP and construction sector output (CNS) for this study from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Statistical Bulletin. The analysis employed econometric methodology, which includes testing for stationarity and co‐integration as well as estimating the distributed lag model. The result shows that the petroleum and gas revenue significantly affected construction output for three consecutive years starting from their year of occurrence. The study concluded that the PGS has a far‐reaching impact on the growth and development of the construction sector. It therefore recommends supporting the channelling of funds from the petroleum sector into development of constructed facilities infrastructure.
Tuning electrical conductivity of CNT-PDMS nanocomposites for flexible electronic applications

This paper presents a study into the electrical conductivity of multi-wall carbon nanotube-polydimethylsiloxane (MWNT-PDMS) nanocomposite and their dependence on the filler concentration. It is observed that the electrical conductivity of the composites can be tailored by altering the filler concentration. Accordingly, the nanocomposites with filler weight ratio ranging from 1% to 8% were prepared and tested. Finally, the significance of results presented here for flexible pressure sensors and stretchable interconnects for electronic skin applications have been discussed.