Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How to quantify household electricity end-use consumption

Information about total electricity consumption is available for most households. However, the electricity consumption related to different end uses, e.g. space heating, water heating, lighting and services from household appliances are usually not metered. Metering data are very costly to achieve, and in this paper we study two methods for end-use estimation, which can be applied on household data for appliance holdings, demographic and economic variables. The first method is the engineering model which has been used to calculate the so far only documented Norwegian end-use results applied on data from a Norwegian energy survey. The second method is an econometric conditional demand model applied on data from the same survey. We compare the numerical results from the two models and give some recommendations regarding choice of end-use approach and what questions to implement in household surveys designed to disaggregate electricity consumption.
Down-regulation of microRNA-205 promotes gastric cancer cell proliferation.

OBJECTIVE Increasing evidence indicates that MicroRNAs, a class of small RNA molecules, play crucial roles in tumorigenesis, through affecting cell proliferation, apoptosis and metastasis. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of miR-205 on gastric cancer cell proliferation. MATERIALS AND METHODS The expression of miR-205 was examined in the gastric cancer tissues and cell lines. BrdU incorporation assay was used to measure the cell proliferation. Western blot was performed to determine the protein expression. RESULTS miR-205 is significantly down-regulated in gastric cancer tissues, compared with adjacent normal tissues. Besides, miR-205 expression is associated with clinical and pathological characteristics of patients. In vitro studies further found that inhibition of miR-205 significantly promoted gastric cancer cell proliferation via cell-cycle progression. Further analyses indicated that miR-205 was able to repress oncoprotein Yin Yang 1 expression, through targeting its 3'-untranlated region. CONCLUSIONS Our data suggest that down-regulation of miR-205 may represent an important mechanism for the development of gastric cancer.
Planning and Controlling UK Public Expenditure on a Resource Basis

The UK Government has, from 2003/04, completed the transition from planning and controlling public expenditure in cash to the full implementation of resource budgeting. Accounting had already switched to the resource basis, with effect from 2001/02. The 2002 Spending Review was the first biennial review of future spending levels and priorities to be conducted entirely on a resource basis. This article clarifies what was involved in this transition, paying attention to how it made the 2002 Spending Review different from its predecessors. Changes in both the fiscal framework and the accounting and budgeting systems have been designed to improve decision making at departmental level, and to improve information flows to Parliament and the public.
Anonymizing Personal Text Messages Posted in Online Social Networks and Detecting Disclosures of Personal Information

While online social networking is a popular way for people to share information, it carries the risk of unintentionally disclosing personal information. One way to reduce this risk is to anonymize personal information in messages before they are posted. Furthermore, if personal information is somehow disclosed, the person who disclosed it should be identifiable. Several methods developed for anonymizing personal information in natural language text simply remove sensitive phrases, making the anonymized text message unnatural. Other methods change the message by using synonymization or structural alteration to create fingerprints for detecting disclosure, but they do not support the creation of a sufficient number of fingerprints for friends of an online social network user. We have developed a system for anonymizing personal information in text messages that generalizes sensitive phrases. It also creates a sufficient number of fingerprints of a message by using synonyms so that, if personal information is revealed online, the person who revealed it can be identified. A distribution metric is used to ensure that the degree of anonymization is appropriate for each group of friends. A threshold is used to improve the naturalness of the fingerprinted messages so that they do not catch the attention of attackers. Evaluation using about 55,000 personal tweets in English demonstrated that our system creates sufficiently natural fingerprinted messages for friends and groups of friends. The practicality of the system was demonstrated by creating a web application for controlling messages posted on Facebook. key words: fingerprint, anonymized text message, disclosure detection, online social network
Is There an Economic Rent for Island Hotels?

This paper examines whether there is an ‘insular rent’ for Spanish hotels. The authors look at whether the hotels located in the Balearic and Canary Islands establish higher prices once quality has been controlled. They use quantile regression because it has informational advantages, given that independent variable effects are not constant along the hotel price distribution. The main result is that, once quality is taken into account, it seems there is a positive rent for island hotels. However, this rent is highly related to a hotel brand name effect. It seems that the hotel brand name reduces consumer information asymmetry problems by signalling higher quality standards or reducing the variance in the quality of a hotel given its ex ante known characteristics.
Evolving Federations and Regional Public Deficits: Testing the Bailout Hypothesis in the Spanish Case

High debt autonomy and low tax autonomy often characterize evolving federations, making the bailout hypothesis very attractive in resolving subcentral government deficits. However, meeting both conditions is not enough to conclude that bailout expectations are the main reason for a potential deficit. There are many other factors affecting expectations and the real behavior of the agents involved: central government, subcentral governments, and the financial markets. Empirical research is the only means by which to determine the relevance of the bailout problem in each situation. To demonstrate this argument, the author describes an exhaustive analysis of the Spanish case. The main conclusion is that deficit seems to be better understood by a more traditional model of fiscal choices than by bailout expectations.
The Politics of Global Production: Apple, Foxconn and China's New Working Class

Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter - the Taiwanese‐owned Foxconn - the power dynamics of the buyer‐driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the high‐pressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power.
Governance through Development: Poverty Reduction Strategies, International Law and the Disciplining of Third World States

1. Introduction 2. PRSPs in Postcolonial International Law and Global Governance 3. PRSPs and the Crisis of Legitimacy in the International Order 4. Ownership as Conditionality: PRSPs and the Evolution of Conditional Financing 5. Reforming the Nation State: PRSPs and Rehabilitated Adjustment 6. Redesigning the Political Project: Discipline and Legitimation through Participatory Policymaking 7. Consolidation and Conclusion: PRSPs, Transnational Governance and Globalized Legal Regimes
QARMA-Beta-t-EGARCH versus ARMA-GARCH: an application to S&P 500

ABSTRACT Statistical performance and out-of-sample forecast precision of ARMA-GARCH and QARMA-Beta-t-EGARCH are compared. We study daily returns on the Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) index and a random sample of 50 stocks from the S&P 500 for period May 2006 to July 2010. Competing models are estimated for periods before and during the US financial crisis of 2008. Out-of-sample point and density forecasts are performed for periods during and after the US financial crisis. The results provide evidence of the superior in-sample statistical and out-of-sample predictive performance of QARMA-Beta-t-EGARCH.
Preoperative psychological preparation for children undergoing ENT operations: a comparison of two methods

A psychological preparation programme was developed for outpatient surgery in children. The purpose of this study was to determine if the programme could increase retrieval of information and reduce anxiety prior to ENT surgery. After ethical committee approval, 160 children and their parents were included. Eighty children (group 1) received conventional verbal information from an ENT nurse, and another 80 children (group 2) received specific information, including role‐play, from a nurse anaesthetist at a preadmission visit. Children’s and parents’ experience of premedication, operation theatre (OR), i.v. ‐needle insertion and induction of anaesthesia were evaluated from a self‐rating questionnaire. The questionnaire included ratings for anxiety and satisfaction with information and care. The results indicate a clear improvement of the preoperative acquisition of knowledge in all age groups. When it comes to alleviation of fear, a positive effect of the preparation programme was noticed, especially among the younger children (< 5 years), while preoperative anxiety overall was a significantly smaller problem among the older children. The effects of the programme were also related to previous experience of anaesthesia and most beneficial among young children with such experience. Overall, the most negative procedure reported by the children was the i.m. injection for premedication (a routine which was abandoned as a result of the study), followed by the insertion of the i.v. ‐needle. The parents experienced watching their child fall asleep during induction of anaesthesia as most negative, followed by the insertion of the i.v. ‐needle. Parents also reported more satisfaction and less anxiety after having received specific information and preparation preoperatively. It was concluded that this preoperative preparation programme is useful in all age groups with regard to information, while alleviation of anxiety and fear was seen mainly among the younger children with previous experience of anaesthesia.
Achieving System-Optimal Splitting Rates in a Freeway Network Using a Reverse Stackelberg Approach

Abstract A game-theoretical method is proposed to achieve a system-optimal distribution of traffic over a freeway network. In particular, the road authority is represented by a leader player and each follower player embodies a group of drivers with the same value of time that plan to travel between a given origin and destination. In the proposed reverse Stackelberg approach, the leader presents a function to each follower that maps a vector of splitting rates over possibles routes to a monetary incentive. The follower then decides upon a splitting rate and the associated monetary incentive that yield the minimum weighted measure of travel time and monetary fees. In this manner, the road authority can compose an optimal leader function under which the followers will behave as desired, i.e., to achieve the system-optimal splitting rates.
Inner-City Disease and the Public Health of the Suburbs: The Sociogeographic Dispersion of Point-Source Infection

The political abandonment of impoverished inner-city minority populations has caused the virtual physical implosion of many US urban neighborhoods, ranging from the New York City's South Bronx to Los Angeles' South Central. Resulting extreme levels of social disintegration and community disruption, in turn, have greatly intensified a nexus of interrelated pathological behaviors and conditions leading to more rapid spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), production of multiple-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, and rising rates of many other contagious diseases which recent evolutionary theory suggests may become increasingly virulent. The standard model of the geographic spread of disease, when coupled with long-standing observations on the patterns of contact between central cities and their suburbs, suggests that the economically segregated outlying suburban townships, local suburban minority enclaves, and the collapsing inner-city neighborhoods in fact constitute a single, linked, geographically extended disease ecosystem. We find that even at the earliest stages of a contagious epidemic originating from an inner city epicenter, the rate of suburban infection will be directly proportional to the number of those already infected within the city, as modulated by the spatial ‘commuting field’ between city and suburb. Extension of this view to the patchwork system of suburban minority enclaves embedded within more affluent townships suggests that the political abandonment of minority populations in any context will significantly increase rates of serious disease within affluent suburban communities.
Entrepreneurship: Getting Nonnormality Right

Decision problems in environments with iid shocks are typically modeled as involving payoffs that follow a martingale process. The paper formalizes entrepreneurial skills as the ability to design optimal investment strategies for problems, in which payoffs do not follow a martingale. It develops a new model of states of nature, such that Gaussian states (finite variances and finite expectations) are as likely as non-Gaussian states (infinite variances and infinite expectations). To determine a true state, an "entrepreneur" performs a nonstandard Bayesian inference with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Her competitor uses a standard Bayesian inference and 96% of the time concludes that a true state is Gaussian even when, in reality, it is non-Gaussian. By properly applying strategies optimal for non-Gaussian states, and strategies optimal for Gaussian states, the "entrepreneur" finds and benefits from profit opportunities that are missed by her competitor.
Purification of different amphiphilic forms of a microvillus aminopeptidase from pig small intestine using immunoadsorbent chromatography.

1 A detergent-solubilized pig intestinal microvillus aminopeptidase (microsomal aminopeptidase, EC 3.4.11.2) was purified approximately 150 times with a yield of about 20% by a rapid and simple immunoadsorbent technique. The purified enzyme was shown to be homogeneous by crossed immunoelectrophoresis and by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in dodecyl sulphate. Furthermore it was essentially free from other known peptidases and disaccharidases. 2 By charge-shift crossed immunoelectrophoresis it was demonstrated that the hydrophilic form was continuously generated both during a more time-consuming purification procedure and during storage. The development of a rapid purification procedure allowed the preparation of an amphiphilic form free from the hydrophilic one, which could be stabilized by 0.5 mM HgCl2. 3 Intestinal aminopeptidase isolated from a pig having the pancreatic duct ligated three days before sacrifice migrated in polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in dodecyl sulphate as a single polypeptide chain with a molecular weight of 162000. In contrast, the enzyme from a pig with intact pancreatic duct when purified even in the presence of Kunitz trypsin inhibitor consisted of three polypeptide chains (molecular weights 162000, 123000 and 61000). Trypsin treatment in vitro converted the large polypeptide chain into the two smaller ones. It is suggested that the membrane-bound enzyme after biosynthesis is modified by trypsin and/or chymotrypsin. 4 The conversion of the amphiphilic form to the hydrophilic one and the hydrolysis of the large polypeptide chain into the two smaller ones represented different reactions.
Epidemiology of an outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the U.K. using restriction fragment length polymorphism.

1. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is a growing health care problem. When a series of cases occur, it is essential to know if patients with multidrug-resistant disease represent one or a number of separate outbreaks. 2. The epidemiology of an outbreak of isoniazid- and streptomycin-resistant tuberculosis in Blackburn was studied by restriction fragment length polymorphism using a probe for the IS6110 DNA sequence. 3. Mycobacterium tuberculosis from four cases of isoniazid- and streptomycin-resistant disease had an identical restriction fragment length polymorphism pattern. This pattern was not shared by drug-sensitive isolates of M. tuberculosis obtained from Blackburn (n = 8) or London (n = 13) or a M. tuberculosis isolate from a fifth Blackburn case which was resistant to isoniazid alone. 4. This methodology confirmed that all four cases of isoniazid- and streptomycin-resistant disease were part of a single epidemiologically related outbreak of drug-resistant disease. This study demonstrates how the epidemiology of an outbreak of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in the U.K. can be confirmed by restriction fragment length polymorphism.
Faculty productivity : facts, fictions, and issues

1. Rethinking Faculty Work: Challenges and Possibilities William G. Tierney 2. Higher Education's Changing Environment: Faculty Productivity and the Reward STrucutre Danile T. Layzell 3. Faculty Productivity and academic Culture William G. Tierney 4. The Highly Productive Faculty Member: Confronting the Mythologies of Faculty Work James S. Fairweather 5. Documenting Diversity: The Professional Portfolio and Faculty Rewards Robert M. Diamond and Bronwyn E. Adams 6. Faculty Salary Structures in Research Universities: Implications for Productivity James C. Hearn 7. Talking Tenure: Opening up the Conversation Yvonna S. Lincoln
On the measurement of nicotine dependence in adolescence: comparisons of the mFTQ and a DSM-IV-based scale.

OBJECTIVE To compare nicotine-dependent smokers identified by the modified Fagerström Tolerance Questionnaire (mFTQ) and a scale based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM-IV), in a multiethnic adolescent sample. METHODS A school survey was conducted on 6th- to 10th-grade students (N=15,007) in a large urban public school system. RESULTS The two scales formed two distinct factors. The concordance between the two classifications of nicotine dependence was low. The DSM identified a much larger number of nicotine-dependent smokers than the mFTQ, mostly because smokers met dependence criteria at much lower levels of cigarettes consumed, especially when they were depressed. Rates of dependence were higher among whites than minority-group members, especially African Americans. Control for level of cigarette consumption attenuated or eliminated ethnic differences. CONCLUSIONS This investigation provides some understanding of youths defined as dependent by each scale but cannot by itself indicate which scale better measures dependence. Differences in dependence rates among ethnic groups are accounted for mostly by quantity of cigarettes smoked.
Cervical Preparation Before Dilation and Evacuation Using Adjunctive Misoprostol or Mifepristone Compared With Overnight Osmotic Dilators Alone: A Randomized Controlled Trial

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate operative time after adjunctive misoprostol or mifepristone compared with overnight osmotic dilators alone for cervical preparation before dilation and evacuation at 16–23 6/7 weeks of gestation. METHODS: This double-blind, three-arm, multicenter, randomized trial compared overnight osmotic dilators alone, dilators plus 400 micrograms buccal misoprostol 3 hours preoperatively, and dilators plus 200 mg oral mifepristone during dilator placement for dilation and evacuation. Our primary outcome was dilation and evacuation operative time within two cohorts: 16–18 6/7 weeks of gestation (N=150) and 19–23 6/7 weeks of gestation (N=150). Three hundred women were required for 80% power to detect a 2-minute difference in operative time. Secondary outcomes included initial cervical dilation, side effects, physician satisfaction by Likert scale, and complications. RESULTS: Between February 2013 and February 2014 we randomized 300 women evenly across treatment arms. Group demographics were similar. We found no difference in operative time in either gestational cohort (early cohort [minutes]: 5.11±3.0 dilators alone, 4.99±3.3 misoprostol, 4.33±2.0 mifepristone, P=.34; late cohort [minutes]: 7.50±3.7 dilators alone, 7.62±5.4 misoprostol, 6.74±3.2 mifepristone, P=.53). In the early cohort, initial dilation was greater with misoprostol than dilators alone (2.4 compared with 2.0 cm, P=.007). Patients given misoprostol had significantly more pain, fever, and chills. In the late cohort, dilation and evacuation procedures were less difficult after mifepristone (4.1%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.0–9.6) than misoprostol (18.8%, 95% CI 7.7–29.8) or dilators alone (18.8%, 95% CI 7.7–29.8; P=.04). We had inadequate power to infer differences in complications: dilators alone (10%, 95% CI 4.2–16.0) compared with misoprostol (2%, 95% CI 0–4.7) compared with mifepristone (2%, 95% CI 0–4.8). CONCLUSION: Despite no difference in operative time, adjunctive mifepristone facilitates later dilation and evacuation compared with osmotic dilators alone and is better tolerated than misoprostol. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov, www.clinicaltrials. gov, NCT01751087. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: I
Identification of miRNA-Mediated Core Gene Module for Glioma Patient Prediction by Integrating High-Throughput miRNA, mRNA Expression and Pathway Structure

The prognosis of glioma patients is usually poor, especially in patients with glioblastoma (World Health Organization (WHO) grade IV). The regulatory functions of microRNA (miRNA) on genes have important implications in glioma cell survival. However, there are not many studies that have investigated glioma survival by integrating miRNAs and genes while also considering pathway structure. In this study, we performed sample-matched miRNA and mRNA expression profilings to systematically analyze glioma patient survival. During this analytical process, we developed pathway-based random walk to identify a glioma core miRNA-gene module, simultaneously considering pathway structure information and multi-level involvement of miRNAs and genes. The core miRNA-gene module we identified was comprised of four apparent sub-modules; all four sub-modules displayed a significant correlation with patient survival in the testing set (P-values≤0.001). Notably, one sub-module that consisted of 6 miRNAs and 26 genes also correlated with survival time in the high-grade subgroup (WHO grade III and IV), P-value = 0.0062. Furthermore, the 26-gene expression signature from this sub-module had robust predictive power in four independent, publicly available glioma datasets. Our findings suggested that the expression signatures, which were identified by integration of miRNA and gene level, were closely associated with overall survival among the glioma patients with various grades.