Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Washington State Merged Longitudinal Administrative Database

This paper describes a uniquely comprehensive database constructed from merged state administrative data. State Unemployment Insurance (UI) systems provide an important source of data for understanding employment effects of policy interventions but have also lack several key types of information: personal demographics, non-earnings income, and household associations. With UI data, researchers can show overall earnings or employment trends or policy impacts, but cannot distinguish whether these trends or impacts differ by race or gender, how they affect families and children, or whether total income or other measure of well-being change. This paper describes a uniquely comprehensive new administrative dataset, the Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative Database (WMLAD), created by University of Washington researchers to examine distributional and household economic effects of the Seattle $15 minimum wage ordinance, an intervention that more than doubled the federal minimum wage. WMLAD augments UI data with state administrative voter, licensing, social service, income transfer, and vital statistics records. The union set of all individuals who appear in any of these agency datasets will provide a near-census of state residents and will augment UI records with information on age, sex, race/ethnicity, public assistance receipt, and household membership. In this paper, we describe 1. ) our relationship with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services that permits this data access and allows construction of this dataset using restricted personal identifiers; 2. ) the merging and construction process, including imputing race and ethnicity and constructing quasi-households from address co-location; and 3. ) planned benchmarking and analysis work.
Listen to the Voice of the Customer -First Steps towards Stakeholder Democracy

Customers should have the same right to co-decide how the company allocates its resources as every other member of the stakeholder network. When I was neglected this vote by my favorite soft drink producer 18 years ago, I started a company in which every decision is made in a consensus democratic way. The basic idea is communication on eye-level. Although I see this as a natural thing, it seems to be an innovative business model for many established companies. Uwe Lübbermann, founder and central moderator of Premium Cola, a consensus-democratic internet collective, winner of the “50 Most Impactful Social Innovators Award” and consultant for the topic of corporate democracy.
Design and demonstration of an indoor visible light communication network with dynamic user access and resource allocation

We design and realize an indoor visible light communication (VLC) network based on the time division mechanism to mitigate inter-cell interference, which can support flexible access and resource allocation of multiple mobile users in the ultra-dense attocell layout. WiFi is adopted for the uplink feedback, including the user ID and channel state information. After receiving feedback, the central coordinator is capable of performing mobile user access, localization, handoff control and resource allocation. The data sent from the central coordinator is buffered at the distributed base stations within the attocells, and then transmitted to the scheduled user by downlink VLC. A real-time experimental platform including three attocells and two users is built up to evaluate the performance of the proposed VLC network. Furthermore, off-line measurements are conducted to find the optimal operating point of the system. Experimental results show that the bit error rate (BER) of the real-time transmission is below 6.3091 × 10−5, and the frame loss rates (FLRs) of static user and mobile user are about 0.1% and 8.2%, respectively.
Confirmation of conjugation processes during TNT metabolism by axenic plant roots

This paper examines processes in plants for the formation of fate products of TNT beyond its aminated reduction products, 2-amino-4,6-dinitrotoluene and 4-amino-2,6-dinitrotoluene. TNT metabolites were isolated and characterized in combination with temporal analyses of product profiles and 14C distribution, in microbe-free, axenic root cultures of Catharanthus roseus. Four unique TNT-derived compounds were isolated. Using evidence from 1H NMR, mass spectroscopy, HPLC, acid hydrolysis, and enzymatic hydrolysis with β-glucuronidase and β-glucosidase, they were established as conjugates formed by reactions of the amine groups of 2-amino-4,6-dinitrotoluene and 4-amino-2,6-dinitrotoluene. From the mass spectral evidence, at least a six-carbon unit from the plant intracellular millieu was involved in conjugate formation. Mass balance analysis indicated that, by 75 h after TNT amendment of the initial TNT radiolabel, extractable conjugates comprised 22%, bound residues comprised another 29%, 2-amino-4,6-dinitrot.
Risk factors for sporadic infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7.

BACKGROUND Little is known about risk factors for sporadic infection with Escherichia coli O157:H7. In response to a sharp increase in reported cases in New Jersey during July 1994, we conducted a case-control study to identify principal sources of infection and contributing practices. METHODS Standardized questionnaires were used to evaluate (1) potential exposures of case patients and matched controls and (2) knowledge, attitudes, and practices of food preparers in case and control households. Patient isolates were subtyped by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis. RESULTS Patients with E coli O157:H7 infection (N = 23; median age, 9 years; 55% female) were more likely than healthy controls to have eaten a hamburger in the week preceding illness (matched odds ratio, undefined; P < .001); 80% of the hamburgers eaten by ill persons were prepared at home. Food preparers in case households were less likely than those in control households to report washing their hands (odds ratio, 8.5; P < .005) and work surfaces (odds ratio, 10.5; P < .05) after handling raw ground beef. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis yielded 17 unique subtypes among the 23 patient isolates, indicating multiple sources of infection. CONCLUSIONS Hamburgers prepared at home are an important source of sporadic E coli O157:H7 infections. We estimate that adequate hand washing by food preparers could have prevented 34% of E coli O157:H7 infections in the study population.
On Division by Functional Iteration

In order to avoid the time delays associated with linearly convergent division based on subtraction, other iterative schemes can be used. These are based on 1) series expansion of the reciprocal, 2) multiplicative sequence, or 3) additive sequence convergent to the quotient. These latter techniques are based on finding the root of an arbitrary function at either the quotient or reciprocal value. A Newton-Raphson iteration or root finding iteration can be used.
Estimating forest canopy bulk density using six indirect methods

Canopy bulk density (CBD) is an important crown characteristic needed to predict crown fire spread, yet it is difficult to measure in the field. Presented here is a comprehensive research effort to evaluate six indirect sampling techniques for estimating CBD. As reference data, detailed crown fuel biomass measurements were taken on each tree within fixed-area plots located in five important conifers types in the western United States, using destructive sampling following a series of four sampling stages to measure the vertical and horizontal distribution of canopy biomass. The six ground-based indirect measurement techniques used these instruments: LI-COR LAI-2000, AccuPAR ceptometer, CID digital plant canopy imager, hemispherical photography, spherical densiometer, and point sampling. These techniques were compared with four aggregations of crown biomass to compute CBD: foliage only, foliage and small branchwood, foliage and all branchwood (no stems), and all canopy biomass components. Most techniques had the best performance when all canopy biomass components except stems were used. Performance dropped only slightly when the foliage and small branchwood canopy biomass aggregation (best approximates fuels available for crown fires) was employed. The LAI-2000, hemispherical photography, and CID plant canopy imager performed best. Regression equations that predict CBD from gap fraction are presented for all six techniques.
Impact of SHGs on Economic Condition of Rural Women: An Empirical Study in Mudhapada Village, Bhadrak, Odisha

The paper was attempted to study “Impact of SHGs on Economic condition of Rural Women: An Empirical Study in Mudhapada Village, Bhadrak, Odisha”. Self Help Groups are the self-governed, peercontrolled informal group of people with similar socioeconomic background, having a desire to come forward voluntarily for a mutual agreement of helping each other for productive or domestic purposes. Women in rural India lived in virtual isolation, unable to access even the most basic of services. Central and State government initiated many programme for improving standard of living of rural women, among these programme SHG is a most important weapon for economic development of rural women. With the formation of Women's Self-Help Groups, women are now achieving social and physical mobility. It is a suitable means for the women empowerment. It plays a vital role for improving economic security to the women as well as improves quality of their life by providing credit, savings, insurance, remittance and also non-financial services. The study was conducted in Mudhapada village purposively. Objectives of the study were firstly to find out the socioeconomic conditions of the respondents in the study area, secondly to find out the impact of SHGs on rural women respondents. Eight SHGs in the village were selected with the help of purposive random sampling method. Sample was covered 50 SHGs women members respondents age groups of 18-50 for the study, it was based on interview and both primary and secondary data, which are largely qualitative in nature followed by descriptive research design. The processing of data was classifying and tabulation of data.
Adapting Sequential Algorithms to the Distributed Setting

It is a well known fact that sequential algorithms which exhibit a strong "local" nature can be adapted to the distributed setting given a legal graph coloring. The running time of the distributed algorithm will then be at least the number of colors. Surprisingly, this well known idea was never formally stated as a unified framework. In this paper we aim to define a robust family of local sequential algorithms which can be easily adapted to the distributed setting. We then develop new tools to further enhance these algorithms, achieving state of the art results for fundamental problems. We define a simple class of greedy-like algorithms which we call \emph{orderless-local} algorithms. We show that given a legal $c$-coloring of the graph, every algorithm in this family can be converted into a distributed algorithm running in $O(c)$ communication rounds in the CONGEST model. We show that this family is indeed robust as both the method of conditional expectations and the unconstrained submodular maximization algorithm of Buchbinder \etal \cite{BuchbinderFNS15} can be expressed as orderless-local algorithms for \emph{local utility functions} --- Utility functions which have a strong local nature to them. We use the above algorithms as a base for new distributed approximation algorithms for the weighted variants of some fundamental problems: Max $k$-Cut, Max-DiCut, Max 2-SAT and correlation clustering. We develop algorithms which have the same approximation guarantees as their sequential counterparts, up to a constant additive $\epsilon$ factor, while achieving an $O(\log^* n)$ running time for deterministic algorithms and $O(\epsilon^{-1})$ running time for randomized ones. This improves exponentially upon the currently best known algorithms.
Efficient Data Sharing on Heterogeneous Systems

General-purpose computing on GPUs has become more accessible due to features such as shared virtual memory and demand paging. Unfortunately it comes at a price, and that is performance. Automatic memory management is convenient but suffers from many drawbacks, preventing heterogeneous systems from achieving their full potential. In this work we analyze the challenges and inefficiencies of demand paging in GPUs, in particular on collaborative computations where data migrates multiple times between host and device. We establish that demand paging on GPUs introduces significant overheads for these kind of computations, and identify the issues of false sharing and unnecessary data transfers derived from the granularity at which data is migrated. In order to alleviate these problems we propose a memory organization and dynamic migration scheme to efficiently share data between host and device at fine granularities and without software intervention. We evaluate our design with a set of collaborative heterogeneous benchmarks and find it achieves 15% lower execution times on average with cache line-sized migrations, but severely degrading performance on benchmarks that access large blocks of contiguous memory. Page-sized migrations, although inefficient, provide on average a 47% execution time reduction with our design over a baseline system implementing demand paging. Our results suggest that cache line-sized migrations are not feasible in systems using a PCI-Express interconnect. In order to understand how future interconnect technologies will impact the feasibility of fine-grained migrations, we evaluate our scheme with various link latencies. We find interconnect latencies four to five times lower than PCI-Express are sufficient to effectively share data at finer granularities.
Output feedback exponential stabilization for 1-D unstable wave equations with boundary control matched disturbance

We study the output feedback exponential stabilization of a one-dimensional unstable wave equation, where the boundary input, given by the Neumann trace at one end of the domain, is the sum of the control input and the total disturbance. The latter is composed of a nonlinear uncertain feedback term and an external bounded disturbance. Using the two boundary displacements as output signals, we design a disturbance estimator that does not use high gain. It is shown that the disturbance estimator can estimate the total disturbance in the sense that the estimation error signal is in $L^2[0,\infty)$. Using the estimated total disturbance, we design an observer whose state is exponentially convergent to the state of original system. Finally, we design an observer-based output feedback stabilizing controller. The total disturbance is approximately canceled in the feedback loop by its estimate. The closed-loop system is shown to be exponentially stable while guaranteeing that all the internal signals are uniformly bounded.
Parasites make male pipefish careless

Parasite‐mediated sexual selection is expected to favour the avoidance of matings with infected individuals. However, the extent to which the costs and benefits of discriminating against parasitized mates trade off may depend upon numerous factors. I investigated the effects of sex and infection status on choosiness in sex‐role reversed deep‐snouted pipefish (Syngnathus typhle L.) that were either artificially infected with the trematode parasite Cryptocotyle sp. or sham‐infected. Sham‐infected males were significantly more likely to associate with a sham‐infected female rather than with a Cryptocotyle‐infected female. Infected males failed to discriminate against infected potential partners. Males were choosier the larger they were relative to the females available for choice. Females were not discriminatory, regardless of their infection status. Given an inverse relation between female fecundity and parasite load, choosy unparasitized males may gain enhanced reproductive success from their choice decisions. In contrast, more heavily infected wild‐caught males gave birth to slightly fewer, but not smaller offspring than did uninfected or lightly infected males, suggesting only a low direct premium on choosy females. The detrimental effects of parasitism on male choosiness, and the lack of female discrimination against infected males likely have profound repercussions on the strength of sexual selection acting on the two sexes and on the dynamics of host–parasite interactions in this system.
Application and Stability Analysis of a Novel Digital Active EMI Filter Used in a Grid-Tied PV Microinverter Module

This paper presents a novel technique to suppress common-mode electromagnetic interference (EMI) using a digital active EMI filter (DAEF). The DAEF control technique is concurrently implemented with a digital controller of a grid-tied photovoltaic microinverter. A brief description of the microinverter architecture and its inverter circuit is illustrated. The inverter stability is investigated using the overall transfer function. Accordingly, the system compensation is designed based on the direct quadrant (DQ) reference frame control technique. Finally, the proposed digital controller is tested on a grid-connected 200-W dc-ac microinverter. The experiment results validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Compared with the conventional passive EMI filter, the proposed digital controller can achieve an equivalent or better performance in terms of EMI suppression and maintain stability within the operation bandwidth. Therefore, the embedded DAEF can significantly reduce the size, cost, and space of the overall power inverter printed circuit board without the need of a conventional passive EMI filter.
The Effects of CEO Tenure on Earnings Management: The Role of CEO Career Origin and Affiliated Relationships

Consensus about ownership concentration in Indonesian firms suggests that the agency problem in Indonesia is expected to be different from other countries. This study aims to review the impact of CEO career concerns on earnings management. The study uses the regression method with samples of CEOs of companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2014. Newly appointed CEOs have been proved to use real and accruals earnings management to increase profits in the early period of their tenures, while CEOs leaving their posts use only real earning management to increasing earnings in the final year of their tenure. CEO career origin and shareholder affiliation have not been proved to effect newly appointed CEO’s earnings-management activities. The study concludes there is a preference for CEOs to use real earnings management during their tenures and so the enforcement of regulations related to the disclosure of management career profiles is encouraged.
[Invited] Pixel aperture and offset pixel aperture techniques for 3-dimensional imaging

In this paper, the pixel aperture and offset pixel aperture techniques for 3-dimensional imaging are presented. In general, the aperture is located at the camera lens. However, in the proposed image sensor, the aperture is integrated on the CMOS image sensor chip and is formed at a metal layer of the CIS process. A pixel pattern which comprises red, blue, and white pixels with or without the pixel aperture is used for implementing the color image and extracting the depth information. In the pixel aperture technique, the focused image from the pixel aperture pixels and the defocused image from the white pixels were obtained. The depth information was obtained using two images from the pixel aperture and white pixels with different blur. In the offset pixel aperture technique, the disparity information was obtained from the left offset pixel aperture and right offset pixel aperture pixels. The CMOS image sensors with pixel aperture and offset pixel aperture techniques were fabricated using 0.11 μm CIS process and its performance was evaluated.
The value of fecal calprotectin as a marker of intestinal inflammation in patients with ulcerative colitis.

BACKGROUND/AIMS To assess intestinal inflammation, simple, inexpensive and objective tools are desirable in inflammatory bowel disease. This study aimed to evaluate fecal calprotectin as a marker of active disease in ulcerative colitis. MATERIALS AND METHODS Sixty patients with a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis and 20 controls were recruited into the study. The disease activity of ulcerative colitis was determined by modified Truelove-Witts criteria and Rachmilewitz endoscopic index. The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to measure the concentrations of fecal calprotectin. C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate and hemogram were also measured, and inflammatory markers were compared with fecal calprotectin in determining disease activity. RESULTS Fecal calprotectin concentration in the patients with active ulcerative colitis (n=30) was significantly higher than that in the inactive ulcerative colitis group (n=30) and in the controls (n=20) (95% confidence interval: 232.5 (0.75-625) vs 11.7 (0.2-625), 7.5 (0.5-512) mg/L, p<0.001). There was no significant difference between the patients with inactive ulcerative colitis and controls (p>0.05). The calprotectin concentration was greater in the patients with a more severe clinical index, higher endoscopic activity (>4), elevated C-reactive protein, leukocytosis, and extensive colitis (p<0.05). The areas under the curve of the receiver operating characteristics were 0.817, 0.809, 0.532, and 0.507 for C-reactive protein, fecal calprotectin, leukocyte count, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate, respectively. There was a significant correlation between the fecal calprotectin concentration and the endoscopic activity in ulcerative colitis (r = 0.548, p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS Fecal calprotectin is a useful marker in the diagnosis of active disease and evaluation of clinical and endoscopic activity in ulcerative colitis.
Relationships between Corporate Governance and Firm Performance: Effects on Czech Export Oriented and Financial Industries

The thesis describes effects of corporate governance on firm performance and managerial income of firms from sectors important for Czech GDP: financial sector and export-oriented manufacturing industries. Added value of the work comes mostly from the fact that it concerns Czech firms and especially that it studies the two sectors using econometric method as well as it compares them on graphs and tables. There are two main topics for hypotheses testing. Firstly, the thesis investigates effects on firm performance, measured by proxy variable return on equity, by sizes of executive boards and firms. Secondly, the effects of performance as well as companies and boards sizes on managerial income are studied. JEL Classification G34, L25, M52