Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Proxy means test index for targeting social programs : two methodologies and empirical evidence

Frecuentemente los beneficiarios de los programas sociales del Estado son identificados por medio de indicadores aproximados de los recursos (proxy means test), los cuales tratan de medir el bienestar de los inviduos del hogar. Uno de los más empleados es el predictor de una regresión del ingreso (o mejor del consumo) sobre características relevantes. Éste tiene la desventaja de necesitar mediciones adecuadas del consumo o ingreso, las cuales son costosas de obtener. Otro enfoque consiste en usar análisis de componentes principales cualitativas. Este artículo muestra que hay una estrecha relación entre los dos indicadores, lo cual permite concluir que, en ausencia de información confiable del ingreso o consumo, el uso del análisis de componentes principales cualitativos es apropiado para construir el indicador de recursos.Palabras clave: componentes principales, indicadores aproximados de los recursos, regresión.
Contextualized perceptions of movement as a source of expanded insight: People with multiple sclerosis' experience with physiotherapy

The hospitals' outpatient clinics for people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) are important in the health care. Research regarding physiotherapy in such clinics is limited. The purpose was to investigate how PwMS perceive movement during single sessions of physiotherapy in a hospital's outpatient clinic, and what do these experiences mean for the patient's insight into their movement disturbances? Qualitative research interviews were performed with a purposive sample of 12 PwMS and supplemented with seven videotaped sessions. Content analysis was performed. The results indicate that contextualized perceptions of movement appear to be an essential source for PwMS to gain expanded insight with regard to their individual movement disturbances regardless of their ambulatory status. The contextualization implies that perceptions of movement are integrated with the physiotherapist's explanations regarding optimizing gait and balance or other activities of daily life. Perceptions of improvement in body part movement and/or functional activities are vital to enhancing their understanding of their individual movement disorders, and they may provide expanded insight regarding future possibilities and limitations involving everyday tasks. The implementation of movements, which transforms the perceived improvement into self-assisted exercises, appeared to be meaningful. Contextualized perceptions of improvements in movement may strengthen the person's sense of ownership and sense of agency and thus promote autonomy and self-encouragement. The findings underpin the importance of contextualized perceptions of movement based on exploration of potential for change, as an integrated part of information and communication in the health care for PwMS. Further investigations are necessary to deepen our knowledge.
When Will You Have a New Mobile Phone? An Empirical Answer From Big Data

When and why people change their mobile phones are important issues in mobile communications industry, because it will impact greatly on the marketing strategy and revenue estimation for both mobile operators and manufactures. It is a promising way to take use of big data to analyze and predict the phone changing event. In this paper, based on mobile user big data, first through statistical analysis, we find that three important probability distributions, i.e., power-law, log-normal, and geometric distribution, play an important role in the user behaviors. Second, the relationships between eight selected attributes and phone changing are built, for example, young people have greater intention to change their phones if they are using the phones belonging to the low occupancy phones or feature phones. Third, we verified the performance of four prediction models on phone changing event under three scenarios. Information gain ratio was used to implement attribute selection and then sampling method, cost-sensitive together with standard classifiers were used to solve imbalanced phone changing event. Experiment results show our proposed enhanced backpropagation neural network in the undersampling scenario can attain better prediction performance.
Promoting the quality of hospital service for children with developmental delays

Quality of hospital services is the spotlight that the public are concerned with. This research established an objective and quality index of physical therapies to systematically analyse and propose an innovation strategy for hospital services. This research was to launch the critical index and to investigate the relationship and relative weight of its importance. Analytic network process and Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory were adopted. The result showed experts from different groups universally identified the ‘function-oriented therapeutic goal’ as most important. The result indicates that hospitals enforce ‘regular satisfaction survey of the patients’, continuously monitor ‘index of patient safety’, which is ‘function-oriented therapeutic goal’ to promote quality of physical therapies in children with developmental delays.
Recognition of semiconductor defect patterns using spectral clustering

Diverse defect patterns shown on the wafer map usually contain important information for quality engineers to find their root causes of abnormalities. Today, even with highly automated and precisely monitored facilities used in a near dust- free clean room and operated with well-trained process engineers, the occurrence of spatial defects still cannot be avoided. This research presents a spatial defect diagnosis system and attempts to solve two challenging problems for semiconductor manufacturing: (1) to estimate the number of defect clusters in advance, and (2) to separate both convex and non-convex defect clusters at the same time. In this paper, a spatial filter is used to denoise the noisy wafer bin map (WBM) and to extract meaningful defect clusters. To isolate various types of defect patterns, a hybrid scheme combining entropy fuzzy c means (EFCM) with spectral clustering is applied to the denoised output. The proposed approach is validated with an empirical wafer bin maps obtained in a DRAM company in Taiwan. Experimental results show that four kinds of mixed- type defect patterns are successfully extracted and classified.
The CD3‐gamma and CD3‐delta subunits of the T cell antigen receptor can be expressed within distinct functional TCR/CD3 complexes.

The T cell receptor for antigen (TCR) consists of two glycoproteins containing variable regions (TCR‐alpha/beta or TCR‐gamma/delta) which are expressed on the cell surface in association with at least four invariant proteins (CD3‐gamma, ‐delta, ‐epsilon and ‐zeta). CD3‐gamma and CD3‐delta chains are highly homologous, especially in the cytoplasmic domain. The similarity observed in their genomic organization and their proximity in the chromosome indicate that both genes arose from duplication of a single gene. Here, we provide several lines of evidence which indicate that in human and murine T cells which expressed both the CD3‐gamma and CD3‐delta chains on their surface, the TCR/CD3 complex consisted of a mixture of alpha beta gamma epsilon zeta and alpha beta delta epsilon zeta complexes rather than a single alpha beta gamma delta epsilon zeta complex. First, a CD3‐gamma specific antibody failed to co‐immunoprecipitate CD3‐delta and conversely, several CD3‐delta specific antibodies did not coprecipitate CD3‐gamma. Secondly, analysis of a panel of human and murine T cell lines demonstrated that CD3‐gamma and CD3‐delta were expressed at highly variable ratios on their surface. This suggested that these chains were not expressed as a single complex. Thirdly, CD3‐gamma and CD3‐delta competed for binding to CD3‐epsilon in transfected COS cells, suggesting that CD3‐gamma and CD3‐delta formed mutually exclusive complexes. The existence of these two forms of TCR/CD3 complexes could have important implications in the understanding of T cell receptor function and its role in T cell development.
Event-based control and scheduling codesign of networked embedded control systems

For networked embedded control systems (NECSs) besides control performance an efficient usage of computation and communication resources is crucial. This paper presents a novel event-based codesign concept for NECSs. The codesign concept involves a joint design of a control law, a scheduler, and an event generator. The control law serves for improving control performance, the scheduler and the event generator for an efficient usage of the limited resources. The codesign problem is formulated as a linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem which can be solved efficiently. The developed theory is evaluated through a simulation for networked embedded control of a set of inverted pendulums. Noteworthy, the codesign concept is generally applicable to discrete-time switched linear systems.
Rational Expectations and Macroeconomic Forecasts

The article presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a collection of time series of quarterly multiperiod forecasts for six variables including real GNP growth, inflation, and unemployment. The analysis covers responses by 79 frequent participants in economic outlook surveys conducted regularly since 1968. It shows much greater incidence of apparently systematic errors for inflation than for the other variables. Also, the tests are more favorable to composite group forecasts than to most of the individual forecast sets.
Public Decisions as Public Goods

It is now orthodox in economics to explain the desirability of government by pointing to the existence of public goods and the difficulties which the private market would have in dealing with them. ' It is the theme of this article that the operations of the government itself raise a new and extremely difficult public-goods problem. Consider a federal judge who is making a decision on some case. The decision is a direct generation of externalities by him-the externalities falling on the participants in the case. In addition to these rather restricted externalities, he is participating in the production of a public good: law enforcement. If he should, for example, decide to bring in a decision which is not in accord with the law, he not only changes the situation in this particular case, but he also, in a sense, changes the law for the future. This latter phenol tenon is most important in those cases in which judges are actually making law; their decisions generate a pure public good (or public bad). Note, however, the judge himself has almost no private incentive to reach the "right" decision. Suppose that he reaches a decision which leads to an increase in the crime rate; the rise in the crime rate might have a significant effect on the country as a whole, but the likelihood that this particular judge or his immediate family would be victims is very low compared with the damage inflicted on others. The same principle would apply if the judge extended the definition of some crime to include acts which had previously not been regarded as within the statute. Once again, it would be extremely unlikely that he himself would suffer any damage from the act; hence, he has created a public good (or bad) without significant private gain (or loss). He cannot be removed front office, nor can his salary be reduced. In practice it is also impossible to even deny him pay raises which are given to other members of the judiciary. It is true that in some cases the judge's decision will not be final;
Geotourism and Geoparks as Gateways to Socio-cultural Sustainability in Qeshm Rural Areas, Iran

Cultural sustainability is the concept for the recovery and protection of cultural identities. It is linked to previous traditional practices through celebrating local and regional histories and passing down cultural values to future generations. Nowaday, geoparks as an innovation for the protection of natural and geological heritage play an important role in cultural sustainability in rural areas. Moreover, a geopark stimulates local socio-economic and socio-cultural development by attracting an increasing numbers of visitors. The aim of this paper is to assess innovative strategies of geoparks for socio-cultural sustainability. To this end, electronic questionnaires were sent to all geoparks around the world (64) registered by UNESCO and just 25 questionnaire responses were received (20 in Europe and three in Asia (Malaysia, Japan and Iran), one in Australia, and one in South America (Brazil)). Additionally, the interview method was used to consider the role played by the creation of Qeshm geopark in reducing the negative cultural impacts of tourism in rural areas. Based on the results of the descriptive analysis, geopark activities promote cultural components in their territory.
Low Molecular Weight Dextran Sulfate Binds to Human Myoblasts and Improves their Survival after Transplantation in Mice

Myoblast transplantation represents a promising therapeutic strategy in the treatment of several genetic muscular disorders including Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Nevertheless, such an approach is impaired by the rapid death, limited migration, and rejection of transplanted myoblasts by the host. Low molecular weight dextran sulfate (DXS), a sulfated polysaccharide, has been reported to act as a cytoprotectant for various cell types. Therefore, we investigated whether DXS could act as a “myoblast protectant” either in vitro or in vivo after transplantation in immunodeficient mice. In vitro, DXS bound human myoblasts in a dose dependent manner and significantly inhibited staurosporine-mediated apoptosis and necrosis. DXS pretreatment also protected human myoblasts from natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity. When human myoblasts engineered to express the renilla luciferase transgene were transplanted in immunodeficient mice, bioluminescence imaging analysis revealed that the proportion of surviving myoblasts 1 and 3 days after transplantation was two times higher when cells were preincubated with DXS compared to control (77.9 ± 10.1% vs. 39.4 ± 4.9%, p = 0.0009 and 38.1 ± 8.5% vs. 15.1 ± 3.4%, p = 0.01, respectively). Taken together, we provide evidence that DXS acts as a myoblast protectant in vitro and is able in vivo to prevent the early death of transplanted myoblasts.
Responsible business decisions: an over-arching framework

Contemporary businesses face increasing pressures on formulating, implementing and monitoring their strategic policies. Their long-term success in attaining these strongly relies on developing a proactive two-way, or even multi-way, stakeholder dialogue to become aware of the moral aspects of decisions. Openness and transparency should help to provide stakeholders with information on how and why particular courses of action have been adopted. In order to be effective and efficient, responsible business decision-making requires the willpower and commitment by management to implement, monitor and evaluate the ethical action which ought to be based on the organisation's evolving values and priorities. Although inclusive relationships may be accomplished in several ways, the normative interpretation of stakeholder theory is the most appropriate methodology to enable moral judgement to be made. An over-arching framework is presented to assess, review and re-balance the different techniques for any business to achieve its intended outcomes through the triple bottom line. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Validation of Reduced‐Scale Reactions for the Quantifiler™ Human DNA Kit

Abstract: Accurate quantification of DNA samples is an important step in obtaining accurate and reproducible short tandem repeat (STR) profiles. Quantitative real‐time‐PCR has improved the speed and accuracy of DNA quantification over earlier methods, albeit at significantly greater cost per reaction. Here, the performance of reduced volume (10 μL) DNA quantification assays using the Quantifiler™ Human DNA Quantification Kit was evaluated using commercial standards and single source biological stains (e.g., venous blood, saliva, and semen). In addition, casework‐type samples including those subjected to environmental contaminants containing PCR inhibitors and samples having undergone extensive DNA degradation were also quantified. The concentration of DNA in various forensic samples ranged from 0 to 2.9 ng/μL depending on sample source and/or environmental insult. Compared to full‐scale reactions, reduced volume assays displayed equivalent to improved amplification efficiency and sample‐to‐sample reproducibility (±0.01–0.17 CT FAM). Furthermore, the use of data from reduced‐scale Quantifiler™ reactions facilitated the accurate determination of the amount of sample DNA extract needed to generate quality STR profiles. The use of 10 μL‐scale Quantifiler™ reaction volumes has the practical benefit of increasing the effective number of reactions per kit by 250%; thereby reducing the cost per assay by 60% while consuming less sample. This is particularly advantageous in cases of consumptive testing.
Comparative Effects of Chronic Exposure to Ethanol and Calcium Channel Antagonists on Calcium Channel Antagonist Receptors in Cultured Neural (PC12) Cells

Abstract: Treatment with 200 mM ethanol for 6 days increased binding of the Ca2+ channel antagonist, (+)‐[3H]PN 200‐110, to intact PC12 cells in culture. Enhancement of binding by ethanol was due to an increase in binding site number without appreciable change in binding affinity. Long‐term exposure to Ca2+ channel antagonist drugs (nifedipine, verapamil, or diltiazem), which, like ethanol, acutely inhibit Ca2+ flux, failed to alter (+)‐[3H]PN 200‐110 binding to PC12 membranes. Cotreatment of ethanol‐containing cultures with the Ca2+ channel agonist, Bay K 8644, did not attenuate the response to ethanol; instead, chronic exposure to Bay K 8644 alone increased (+)‐[3H]PN 200‐110 binding. These results suggest that chronic exposure to ethanol increases Ca2+ channel antagonist receptor density in living neural cells, but that acute inhibition of Ca2+ flux by ethanol is unlikely to trigger this response.
Diaphragm Recruitment Increases during a Bout of Targeted Inspiratory Muscle Training.

PURPOSE The extent to which the diaphragm is targeted during a bout of inspiratory muscle training (IMT) is unknown. The purpose of this study was to characterize the relative activation patterns of the diaphragm and extradiaphragmatic inspiratory muscles during a bout of IMT and to determine whether diaphragmatic recruitment can be increased by giving subjects specific diaphragmatic breathing instructions (IMTdi). METHODS Ten healthy men were instrumented with surface EMG electrodes on the sternocleidomastoid (EMGscm), scalenes (EMGsca), parasternal intercostals (EMGpic), and seventh intercostal space (EMG7ic). A multipair esophageal electrode catheter measured crural diaphragmatic EMG (EMGdi) and transdiaphragmatic pressure (Pdi). Trial 1 of IMT involved 25 dynamic inspiratory maneuvers at 40% of maximal inspiratory mouth pressure using a variable flow resistive loading device where subjects were free to choose their own inspiratory muscle recruitment strategy. Trial 2 involved the same procedures, but subjects were given specific instructions to actively recruit their diaphragm. Cervical magnetic stimulation of the phrenic nerves verified the absence of diaphragmatic fatigue before commencing the second trial. RESULTS Compared with IMT, IMTdi resulted in a significant increase in EMGdi (56 ± 12 vs 73 ± 10%max, P = 0.002) and Pdi swings (39 ± 14 vs 64 ± 17 cm H2O, P < 0.0001) and a decrease in EMGsca (52 ± 21 vs 36 ± 22%max, P = 0.04). There was no difference in EMG7ic (26 ± 19 vs 33 ± 21%max, P = 0.36), EMGpic (31 ± 24 vs 25 ± 15%max, P = 0.22), and EMGscm (58 ± 21 vs 45 ± 24%max, P = 0.08) when comparing IMT versus IMTdi, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Simple diaphragmatic breathing instructions can significantly increase the recruitment of the diaphragm during IMT compared with a bout of IMT where individuals are free to choose their own inspiratory muscle recruitment strategy.
Drugs and lipid metabolism

I propose to give a review of the effect of drugs on lipid metabolism which will be extensive rather than intensive. Several excellent reviews are available that discuss the drugs which are most effective for lowering plasma lipid levels in the six main types of human hyperlipoproteinaemia (Lees & Wilson, 1971 ; British Medical Journal, I 972 ; Levy, Fredrickson, Shulman, Bilheimer, Breslow, Stone, Lux, Sloan, Krauss & Herbert, 1972). But there are other drugs, not thought of as lipidlowering agents, that can decrease or increase one or more of the plasma lipids. I shall try to review these, and also some facets of lipid metabolism, other than plasma concentrations, as affected by drugs. I shall restrict myself to drugs that are available and used in clinical medicine. If I were to include drugs that have been used to influence lipid metabolism in experimental animals or the new lipid-lowering drugs that are still at the stage of clinical trials and not yet approved, the list would be at least twice as long.
Research on the Influencing Effect between CHVA and CPI in China Based on VAR Models

The cointegration test, granger causality test, VAR model, impulse response function and other econometric methods are used in this paper to analyze the influencing effect between commercial housing vacancy rate and CPI and its delay impact. The results show that there is a long-term equilibrium relationship between commercial housing vacancy rate and CPI in China. There are at least one cointegration relationship between CHVR and CPI. The past values of the CPI appear to contain information which is useful for forecasting changes in the CHVR. CPI has a significant effect on CHVR and CPI rising drives CHVR.
Vulnerability, capacity and resilience: Perspectives for climate and development policy

In the decades since the terms 'vulnerability', 'capacity' and 'resilience' became popular in both the disaster and development literatures, through natural and social science discourses, the terms have been applied to many development- and disaster-related policies and have been the subject of much debate and interpretation amongst various schools of thought. An illustrative review of the use of these terms is given followed by a critique of the main discourses, especially regarding the development and disaster policy advantages and disadvantages. Recommendations are given at different scales for closing some of the gaps identified, especially regarding the policy usefulness of certain theoretical approaches. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Accounting System Reform in Japanese Local Governments

The New Public Management (NPM), of which the change from cash accounting to accrual accounting is considered an important tool, has been in fashion in many developed countries. Japanese governments, however, have preserved control of expenditures on a cash basis, though recently financial management reforms in local government have begun to adopt NPM ideas. Using a contingency framework which views the reform of accounting sub-systems (management accounting, financial accounting and auditing) as stimulated by a combination of internal and external pressures, this paper explores why Japanese local governments managed to survive without accrual accounting and the prospects for further reform in the future. It is suggested that system change itself can be accomplished by internal pressures, in the form of mandated policies, alone but that sustained external pressures by citizens are required in order to achieve the intended outcomes of accounting reform.