Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chinese Exports and U.S. Import Prices

This paper develops a technique to decompose price distributions into contributions from markups and marginal cost. The estimators are then used as a laboratory to measure the relationship between increasing Chinese competition and the components of U.S. import prices. The estimates suggest that the intensification of Chinese exports in the 2000s corresponded to substantial changes in the distributions of both the markups and marginal cost of U.S. imports. The entry of a Chinese exporter in an industry corresponded to rest-of-world exporters shrinking their markup (lowering prices by up to 30 percent) and increasing their marginal cost (raising prices by up to 50 percent). The fact that marginal cost increased as competition stiffened strongly suggests that the composition of non-Chinese exports shifted toward higher-quality varieties. The estimates also imply a pattern in the acquisition of market share by Chinese exporters: They enter at relatively low cost/quality and then subsequently undertake quality improvements and markup reductions. These results provide some of the first measures of the dual nature of trade’s procompetitive effects; exporters respond to tougher competition by simultaneously adjusting both markups and quality.
The Globular Cluster System of NGC 1399 IV. Some noteworthy objects

We present 8 bright globular clusters and/or objects of less familiar nature which we found in the course of scrutinizing the globular cluster system of NGC 1399. These objects are morphologically striking, either by their sizes or by other structural properties. Some of them may be candidates for stripped dwarf galaxy nuclei, emphasizing the possible role of accretion in the NGC 1399 cluster system. They are all highly interesting targets for further deep spectroscopy or HST-imaging. Since these objects have been found within an area of only 42 arcmin**2, we expect many more still to be detected in a full census of the NGC 1399 cluster system.
Enabling LAAS airport surface movement: mitigating the anomalous ionospheric threat

The Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) can be used for both precision approach and Differentially Corrected Positioning Service (DCPS) applications. Through its support of DCPS, the LAAS Ground Facility (LGF) is required to meet the integrity requirements of all other operations that could use the LAAS VHF Data Broadcast (VDB). Our previous work [1,2,3] demonstrated that the existing DCPS integrity requirements cannot be met by CAT I LAAS without changes to both the definition of DCPS integrity [4,5] and the airborne receiver requirements [6]. One of the implications is that some future applications of LAAS that planned to use DCPS, such as airport surface movement, cannot be supported by DCPS with the CAT I LAAS architecture. However, if airport surface movement is defined as a separate operation, it could be supported by the existing LGF geometry screening that mitigates the anomalous ionospheric threat for CAT I precision approach. The only change needed would be to increase σpr_air in airborne equipment to bound the higher multipath errors in the airport surface environment. Confirming this hypothesis requires a more-intensive study of the requirements of airport surface movement and is the subject of this paper. If LGF geometry screening itself cannot support airport surface movement, the results in this paper include additional aircraft geometry screening proposed in [2] to lower the Maximum Acceptable Error (MAE) to a usable level while maintaining useful availability.
Exploring Student Perceptions of Involvement in Professional Recreation Organizations

Abstract This study examines the professional organizational involvement and perceptions of undergraduate students. An important educational objective for any profession is to encourage student professional involvement and development. A common manifestation of this objective in the park and recreation field is involvement in organizations such as the National Recreation and Park Association and its state association affiliates. Little information, however, is available on students' interest in and perceptions of such professional involvement. This study investigated student familiarity with and interest in recreation professional organizations in one southwestern state in the United States. Further, student perception of benefits and deterrents to involvement in professional organizations were explored. Results indicate recreation student's interest and familiarity differ by class level and emphasis area. Students also perceive multiple benefits and deterrents to professional involvement. Suggestions to foster further development in professional organizations by students are presented. Research questions are also raised concerning the changing role of academic institutions and professional organizations in promoting professional involvement.
Integrating and Querying P2P Deductive Databases

The paper proposes a logic framework for modeling the interaction among deductive databases and computing consistent answers to logic queries in a P2P environment. As usual, data are exchanged among peers by using logical rules, called mapping rules. The novelty of our approach is that only data not violating integrity constraints are exchanged. The (declarative) semantics of a P2P system is defined in terms of weak models. Under this semantics only facts not making the local databases inconsistent can be imported, and the preferred weak models are the consistent scenarios in which peers import maximal sets of facts not violating integrity constraints. A characterization of the preferred weak model semantics, allowing to model a P2P system with a prioritized logic program, is provided. The proposed framework is then extended in order to also take into account P2P system in which each peer may be locally inconsistent, i.e. its data does not satisfy some of its constraints. Finally, the complexity of P2P logic queries is investigated
Optimal design of protein docking potentials: Efficiency and limitations

Protein–protein docking is a challenging computational problem in functional genomics, particularly when one or both proteins undergo conformational change(s) upon binding. The major challenge is to define scoring function soft enough to tolerate these changes and specific enough to distinguish between near‐native and “misdocked” conformations. Using a linear programming technique, we derived protein docking potentials (PDPs) that comply with this requirement. We considered a set of 63 nonredundant complexes to this aim, and generated 400,000 putative docked complexes (decoys) based on shape complementarity criterion for each complex. The PDPs were required to yield for the native (correctly docked) structure a potential energy lower than those of all the nonnative (misdocked) structures. The energy constraints applied to all complexes led to ca. 25 million inequalities, the simultaneous solution of which yielded an optimal set of PDPs that discriminated the correctly docked (up to 4.0 Å root‐mean‐square deviation from known complex structure) structure among the 85 top‐ranking (0.02%) decoys in 59/63 examined bound–bound cases. The high performance of the potentials was further verified in jackknife tests and by ranking putative docked conformation submitted to CAPRI. In addition to their utility in identifying correctly folded complexes, the PDPs reveal biologically meaningful features that distinguish docking potentials from folding potentials. Proteins 2006. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Your Flaws Are My Pain: Linking Empathy To Vicarious Embarrassment

People vicariously experience embarrassment when observing others' public pratfalls or etiquette violations. In two consecutive studies we investigated the subjective experience and the neural correlates of vicarious embarrassment for others in a broad range of situations. We demonstrated, first, that vicarious embarrassment was experienced regardless of whether the observed protagonist acted accidentally or intentionally and was aware or unaware that he/she was in an embarrassing situation. Second, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we showed that the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula, two cortical structures typically involved in vicarious feelings of others' pain, are also strongly implicated in experiencing the ‘social pain’ for others' flaws and pratfalls. This holds true even for situations that engage protagonists not aware of their current predicament. Importantly, the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy. The present findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes. “When we are living with people who have a delicate sense of propriety, we are in misery on their account when anything unbecoming is committed. So I always feel for and with Charlotte when a person is tipping his chair. She cannot endure it. ” [Elective Affinities, J. W. Goethe].
Integrated left- and right-handed passive structures for millimeter wave applications

This paper presents the design of different on-chip left- and right-handed transmission lines for millimeter application and based on lumped components, such as inductors and capacitors. Further, the utilization of the developed models in a Wilkinson combiner structures is investigated. An easy and straightforward procedure has also been presented to ease the inductor and capacitor value selection. All the structures are designed and realized on IHP 0.25 μm SiGe BiCMOS process. The results, extracted from the measurements, show a good agreement with the simulation. Moreover it verifies the utilization feasibility of this design technique in realization of the on-chip passive structures, such as combiners and matching networks, with minimum size and low loss. The achieved results show good matching and less than 1 dB insertion loss with more than 10 times active chip size reduction, for λ/4 line and Wilkinson combiner, by using this technique.
Integrated in silico Analyses of Regulatory and Metabolic Networks of Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 Reveal Relationships between Gene Centrality and Essentiality

Cyanobacteria dynamically relay environmental inputs to intracellular adaptations through a coordinated adjustment of photosynthetic efficiency and carbon processing rates. The output of such adaptations is reflected through changes in transcriptional patterns and metabolic flux distributions that ultimately define growth strategy. To address interrelationships between metabolism and regulation, we performed integrative analyses of metabolic and gene co-expression networks in a model cyanobacterium, Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002. Centrality analyses using the gene co-expression network identified a set of key genes, which were defined here as “topologically important. ” Parallel in silico gene knock-out simulations, using the genome-scale metabolic network, classified what we termed as “functionally important” genes, deletion of which affected growth or metabolism. A strong positive correlation was observed between topologically and functionally important genes. Functionally important genes exhibited variable levels of topological centrality; however, the majority of topologically central genes were found to be functionally essential for growth. Subsequent functional enrichment analysis revealed that both functionally and topologically important genes in Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002 are predominantly associated with translation and energy metabolism, two cellular processes critical for growth. This research demonstrates how synergistic network-level analyses can be used for reconciliation of metabolic and gene expression data to uncover fundamental biological principles.
Lateral Control Law Design for Helicopter Using Radial Basis Function Neural Network

As fixed-parameter control can not satisfy control requirements when helicopter is aviating in large scale flight envelop, this paper proposes a new control law design to adjust parameters on-line. Firstly a parameter-mapping approach is developed to design flight control parameters at certain flight conditions according to the desired system performance. Then parameters obtained at given conditions are used to train Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN). Thus RBFNN can generalize the given flight conditions information and output appropriate control parameters which will meet control requirements for any current flight condition within the given flight envelop. Simulation results indicate this control law design is feasible and effective.
Improve spectrum efficiency based on variable-power AMC and ARQ for OFDM systems

To improve spectrum efficiency (SE), the adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) and automatic repeat request (ARQ) scheme have been combined for OFDM systems. In this paper, we add variable power subject to power constraint in each AMC mode. We use KKT optimization algorithm to get the optimal transmit power and AMC mode boundaries. The numerical results show that the average SE is increased by about 0.3 bits/sec/Hz for OFDM systems with Nakagami fading with parameter m=2 when SNR is around 15dB and the retransmission is once.
An Annotated Corpus Management Tool: ChaKi

Large scale annotated corpora are very important not only inlinguistic research but also in practical natural language processingtasks since a number of practical tools such as Part-of-speech (POS) taggers and syntactic parsers are now corpus-based or machine learning-based systems which require some amount of accurately annotated corpora. This article presents an annotated corpus management tool that provides various functions that include flexible search, statistic calculation, and error correction for linguistically annotated corpora. The target of annotation covers POS tags, base phrase chunks and syntactic dependency structures. This tool aims at helping development of consistent construction of lexicon and annotated corpora to be used by researchers both in linguists and language processing communities.
The 2011 annual verification report of the operational sandstorm numerical models of the National Meteorological Center

By utilizing the forecast products of the operational sandstorm numerical model (the Asia Sandstorm Numerical Forecasting Model of the Centre for Atmosphere Watch and Services of CMA(China Meteorological Administration), namely CUACE-Dust system, and the sandstorm numerical forecasting system of the National Meteorological Center, called NMC/CMA model) of National Meteorological Center, routine surface and upper air observations, the forecasting result of the two above models of the main sandstorm weather events in China in 2011 is verified. The result shows: the general forecasting occurring range and the intensity of the all previous sandstorm events of the CUACE-Dust system is basically close to the reality, especially in South Sinkiang. The forecasting result of the CUACE-Dust system is relatively unstable in the case of the weaker sandstorm events, the false alarm and miss ratio is much higher. The whole forecasting occurring range and the intensity of the all previous sandstorm events of the NMC/CMA model is with deviation according to the reality, the miss ratio is much higher in South Sinkiang, Northwest China, Inner Mongolia and North China. The overall forecasting effects of the surface wind field of the two models are good and close to the observation realities.
Assisted and automatic navigation in black oil reservoir models based on probabilistic roadmaps

Three-dimensional visualization is a valuable technique in the oil industry. One of its important applications is for inspecting black oil reservoir models, allowing engineers to design and analyze different model configurations, focusing on maximum production and minimum cost. These models are huge structures, with complex well arrangements, that require fly-through navigation for accurate analysis. The common approach of direct camera control is difficult for inexperienced users and results in inappropriate camera motions and collisions with the environment, which can easily lead to user distraction. Moreover, investments are being made on immersive caves, and environment collisions in this case are very uncomfortable. It becomes necessary to provide an assisted navigation, in which the user guides the camera more easily, without restricting the environment exploration. Also, it is interesting to provide a fully automatic navigation mode, in which the user selects a target and the system computes a smooth, collision-free path throughout the environment.In this paper, we present a specific solution for navigation in models used in numerical simulations of black oil reservoirs. Our approach is based on probabilistic roadmaps. A global roadmap of the environment is pre-computed using a randomized motion-planning algorithm. At runtime, graph searching is performed using the A* algorithm to compute collision-free paths. We propose a new roadmap-construction algorithm based on a hierarchical environment-sampling strategy, along with a topology-based coverage estimate. For multi-layered reservoir models, we present a new heuristic function for the A* algorithm that greatly increases graph searching performance. We also present new approaches to use the pre-computed roadmap for providing both assisted and automatic navigation at runtime.
Narrow Escape to a structured target and application to viral entry in the nucleus

In cellular biology, reaching a target before being degraded or trapped is ubiquitous. An interesting example is given by the virus journey inside the cell cytoplasm: in order to replicate, most viruses have to reach the nucleus before being trapped or degraded. We present here a general approach to estimate the probability and the conditional mean first passage time for such a viral particle to attain safely the nucleus, covered with many (around two thousands) small absorbing pores. Due to this large number of small holes, which defines the limiting scale, any Brownian simulations are very unstable. Our new asymptotic formulas precisely account for this phenomena and allow to quantify the cytoplasmic stage of viral infection. We confirm our analysis with Brownian simulations.
An optimization-oriented approach to the adaptive control of Markov chains

We consider the control of a dynamic system modeled as a Markov chain. The transition probability matrix of the Markov chain depends on the control u and also on an unknown parameter α. The unknown parameter belongs to a given finite set A. The long run average cost depends on the control policy and the unknown parameter. Thus a direct approach to the optimization of the performance is not feasible. A common procedure calls for an on-line estimation of the unknown parameter and the minimization of the cost functional using the estimate in lieu of the true parameter. It is well-known that this "certainty equivalence" (CE) solution may fail to yield the optimal performance. This motivates the presentation of a new optimiza tion-oriented approach to adaptive control. We consider a composite functional which simultaneously take care of theestimation and control needs. The global minimum of this composite functional coincides with the minimum of the original cost functional. Thus its joint minimization with respect to control and parameter estimates would yield the optimal control policy This joint minimization is not feasible, but it suggests an algorithm that asymptotically achieves the desired goal. Due to space constraints we omit a review of the literature as well as the proofs of our claims. They will be presented elsewhere.
Navigating Through U.S.-China Policy: An Investigation of China National Off-Shore Oil Corporation's Proposed Acquisition of Unocal Corporation and How Domestic Politics Plays a Role in Balancing U.S. Trade Policy with National Security Policy

When Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation, Ltd. ( CNOOC) at tempted to buy American-owned Unocal Corporation, it unleashed a “perfect st orm” in Washington. Members of Congress immediately called upon President Bush to invoke his Exon-Florio authority to prevent the transaction. After the president claime d action would be premature, Congress quickly coalesced to block the deal. The Chinese expressed surprise at the political backlash and ultimately CNOOC was forced to withdraw its bid. The purpose of this study is to explain the fervor that arose over C NOOC’s proposed acquisition of Unocal. The study builds upon the theoretical ap proach of new institutionalism which emerged in response to the shortcomings of theories that diminished the importance of political values and collective choice i n foreign policy making. Since institutionalism emphasizes the significance of history and assumes the infusion of societal values over time, the study applies historica l research methodology to the case study. Sources of data include the U.S. Constitution, statut e , judicial opinions, congressional hearings and reports, White House papers, administrat ive rules, and published biographies. Secondary sources include the media, journals, and thi nk-tank
Where to look next and what to look for

The authors (1996) introduced the use of multidimensional receptive field histograms for probabilistic object recognition. In this paper we reverse the object recognition problem by asking the question "where should we look? ", when we want to verify the presence of an object, to track an object or to actively explore a scene. This paper describes the statistical framework from which we obtain a network of salient points for an object. This network of salient points may be used for fixation control in the context of active object recognition.
Bichromatic Reverse Nearest Neighbors in mobile peer-to-peer networks

The increasing use of mobile communications has raised many issues of decision support and resource allocation. A crucial problem is how to solve queries of Reverse Nearest Neighbor (RNN). An RNN query returns all objects that consider the query object as their nearest neighbor. Existing methods mostly rely on a centralized base station. However, mobile P2P systems offer many benefits, including self-organization, fault-tolerance and load-balancing. In this study, we propose two P2P algorithms focusing on bichromatic RNN queries, in which mobile query objects and static objects of interest are of two different categories, based on a boundary polygon around the mobile query object. The Exhaustive Search Algorithm makes use of all information from the peers to aim at high accuracy rate while the Optimized Search Algorithm reduces the number of queried peers. The algorithms are evaluated in MiXiM simulation framework with a real dataset. The results show the practical feasibility of the P2P approach in solving bichromatic RNN queries for mobile networks.