Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distributional Welfare Implications of an Irrigation Water Subsidy

The distributional welfare implications of a subsidy for irrigation water for California rice producers are analyzed. A more general equilibrium approach than that used in previous studies is taken in order to determine the effects of subsidy on consumers, subsidized producers, and unsubsidized producers. The two important policy conclusions of the results are that unsubsidized producers bear part of the cost of a subsidy through lower prices, and that consumers (taxpayers) may gain by sponsoring increased production through a selective subsidy.
Herbal leaf classification using images in natural background

Leaf identification normally use images that taken in the laboratory with sophisticated equipment and a white background. Leaf segmentation in natural environment have different approaches and accuracy levels. So that, the level of complexity increases. It is no wonder that only few of studies used leaf identification with natural background. By taking into account on this problem, this research tries to identify leaf based on the images taken in its natural environment. Image retrieval does not consider the light intensity and does not captured on the white background. Therefore, this research proposes image enhancement algorithm and segmentation algorithm as follows: 1) Changing the image into LAB image, then conducting BLOB analysis to separate the leaves from their environment; 2) Convert the image to RGB image and after that, clustering the color using K-Means; 3) From the results, select object with the highest amount of pixels. Then, the object features are identified, based on the characteristics of the shape and texture. Leaf shape and texture features, produce high accuracy only when both are applied at the same time. Accuracy is low if only one feature applied, whether only shape feature, or texture feature. In this research, the morphological features were used for shape feature extraction. Local binary pattern was used for texture features extraction. Then the identification of accuracy was obtained by using Multilayer Perceptron algorithm (MLP). The contribution of this study is using proposed image enhancement and segmentation algorithm, so that the features of the image can be extracted based on shape and texture descriptors. The identification accuracy in this study reached 96.07%.
Transformation of the cerebellum into more ventral brainstem fates causes cerebellar agenesis in the absence of Ptf1a function

Significance The contribution of cell fate misspecification to human brain disorders is poorly understood. The cerebellum, a major center of motor and sensory coordination, is frequently malformed in humans. During development it arises from dorsal hindbrain, but a long-standing question has been how the cerebellum is established along the dorsal–ventral axis of the neural tube. Here we identified the gene encoding pancreatic transcription factor PTF1A, which is inactivated in patients with cerebellar agenesis, as the first gene regulating the ventral limit of the cerebellum. We describe transformation of cerebellar neurons into more ventral extracerebellar fates as a novel mechanism of cerebellar agenesis. Our data provide some of the strongest evidence reported to date for a critical role of cell fate misspecification in a human brain developmental phenotype. Model organism studies have demonstrated that cell fate specification decisions play an important role in normal brain development. Their role in human neurodevelopmental disorders, however, is poorly understood, with very few examples described. The cerebellum is an excellent system to study mechanisms of cell fate specification. Although signals from the isthmic organizer are known to specify cerebellar territory along the anterior–posterior axis of the neural tube, the mechanisms establishing the cerebellar anlage along the dorsal–ventral axis are unknown. Here we show that the gene encoding pancreatic transcription factor PTF1A, which is inactivated in human patients with cerebellar agenesis, is required to segregate the cerebellum from more ventral extracerebellar fates. Using genetic fate mapping in mice, we show that in the absence of Ptf1a, cells originating in the cerebellar ventricular zone initiate a more ventral brainstem expression program, including LIM homeobox transcription factor 1 beta and T-cell leukemia homeobox 3. Misspecified cells exit the cerebellar anlage and contribute to the adjacent brainstem or die, leading to cerebellar agenesis in Ptf1a mutants. Our data identify Ptf1a as the first gene involved in the segregation of the cerebellum from the more ventral brainstem. Further, we propose that cerebellar agenesis represents a new, dorsal-to-ventral, cell fate misspecification phenotype in humans.
Does an EMILY's List Endorsement Predict Electoral Success, or Does EMILY Pick the Winners?

Abstract Women's political action committees (PACs)—those committees founded by women to raise money for women candidates—have been and will likely continue to be an important part of American electoral politics. In this article, we investigate the impact of EMILY's List, because it is the standard bearer of women's PACs and is commonly cited as crucial to women's electoral success. Empirical studies of EMILY's List impact to date have largely assumed causal inference by using traditional linear models. We use a propensity score–matching model to leverage on causality and find that an EMILY endorsement helps some candidates and hurts others. Our findings set the stage for further and more nuanced investigations of when, where, and how EMILY's List can enhance the likelihood of electoral success for women.
Modeling the Risk Premium on Eurodollar Bonds

In 1998 the outstanding value of the Eurobond market was estimated to be $2,648.3 billion, making it one of the largest capital markets of the world. Despite its size, this market has not attracted the attention from academics that it deserves. One reason for its relative neglect is likely the unavailability of a suitable database of Eurobond returns and related information. Using a newly constructed Eurobond database, the authors present evidence of the systematic relationship between macroeconomic and financial sources of risk and the Eurobond U.S. dollar bond market between 1992 and 1997. A small set of macroeconomic and financial variables, more frequently used to model the equity risk premium, can help explain the risk premium. The model can be used to form portfolios of Eurobonds that are insulated from these sources of systematic risk.
The impact of maths support tutorials on mathematics confidence and academic performance in a cohort of HE Animal Science students

Students embarking on a bioscience degree course, such as Animal Science, often do not have sufficient experience in mathematics. However, mathematics forms an essential and integral part of any bioscience degree and is essential to enhance employability. This paper presents the findings of a project looking at the effect of mathematics tutorials on a cohort of first year animal science and management students. The results of a questionnaire, focus group discussions and academic performance analysis indicate that small group tutorials enhance students’ confidence in maths and improve students’ academic performance. Furthermore, student feedback on the tutorial programme provides a deeper insight into student experiences and the value students assign to the tutorials.
Persistence of Shocks on Seasonal Processes

The paper addresses the issue of measuring the persistence of shocks on seasonally integrated processes observed at quarterly intervals. We show that the amplitude of the limiting cycle described by the cumulated impulse response function provides a parametric measure of persistence and that Cochrane's normalized variance ratio can correspondingly be extended as a non-parametric counterpart. For illustrative purposes the latter is applied to the Italian GDP and to the output of the agricultural sector. Copyright 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Integrating corporate social responsibility (CSR) into ISO management systems – in search of a feasible CSR management system framework

Following the growing interest in corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Committee on Consumer Policy (ISO/COPOLCO) opened the discussion about the feasibility of CSR management system standard. In this paper, we investigate the underlying issues that shape the development of CSR standard. Based on our case study research, we provide a framework for organisations to establish, manage, improve and document a CSR management system. This framework is based on process and systems thinking and analogous to ISO 9001:2000 adding significantly to existing definitive management frameworks. Finally, we outline areas for further research and indicate substantial managerial implications.
Persistent infection with chicken anaemia virus and some effects of highly virulent infectious bursal disease virus infection on its persistency.

Chicken anaemia virus (CAV) infectivity and the effect of highly virulent infectious bursal disease virus (hv IBDV) infection on CAV's infectivity were examined in chickens inoculated with CAV or inoculated dually with CAV and hv IBDV. Five chickens inoculated dually with hv IBDV at 35 days old and then with CAV at 40 days old exhibited no clinical signs of disease, but showed atrophic bursae of Fabricius when necropsied 4 weeks later. Upon examining the chickens at 7 days postinoculation (dpi) with CAV, it was found that hv IBDV infection had inhibited production of virus neutralising (VN) antibody to CAV, and that it was possible to recover CAV from plasma of these chickens. Although VN antibody to CAV appeared after 14 dpi, CAV was recovered from blood cells (BC s) at high titres ranging from 10(2.5)to 10(5.5)TCID(50)/0.1 ml, 7 to 28 dpi in IBDV -induced immunosuppressed chickens. In addition, CAV was sporadically recovered, using rectal swabs, from the dually inoculated chickens at low titers, ranging from 10(1.0)to 10(2. 0)TCID(50)/0.1 ml). In contrast, although CAV was recovered from BC s in most of the chickens inoculated with CAV alone, the titers were lower (10(1.0)to 10(2.5)TCID(50)/0.1 ml). No CAV was detected from the rectal swabs of these chickens. The results of virus recovery were confirmed by polymerase chain reaction. This study first examined the persistency of CAV in BC s and the effective enhancement of primary CAV infection as a result of immunosuppression caused by hv IBDV infection.
The economics of the business firm : seven critical commentaries

Preface First Commentary. The firm in theory: its definition and existence Second Commentary. Agency and non-agency explanations of the firm's organization Third Commentary. Enterprise control, wealth, and economic development Fourth Commentary. Profit maximization and rational behavior Fifth Commentary. The use and abuse of accounting profit data Sixth Commentary. Management compensation and tournament theory Seventh commentary. The intensity and dimensionality of competition References.
A comparative study on phonological feature detection from continuous speech with respect to variable corpus size

In this paper, place and manner of articulation based phonological features have been successfully identified with high accuracy using very minimal amount of training data. In detection-based, bottom-up speech recognition approach, the phonological feature based acoustic-phonetic speech attributes are considered as a key component. After identifying the features, they are merged together to get the phonemes. So this type of feature detection using low corpus size shows a path with which continuous speech can be recognized using inadequate data repository also. To execute the experiment, both the language, Bengali and English have been considered. The sentences were trained using deep neural network. Training procedure is carried out for Bengali using three different corpus sizes with a number of 100, 200, and 500 sentences. The average frame level accuracies were obtained as 87.88%, 88.43% and 88.96% respectively for CDAC speech corpus. Whereas using the same training procedure for TIMIT corpus, the accuracies were 87.97%, 88.84%, and 89.39% respectively. So the average frame level accuracy is almost same irrespective of number of training data. This ensures, in case of small speech corpora, phonological feature based speech attributes can be detected with the bottom-up approach.
Effect of Sodium Fluoride on Cancellous Bone Defect Healing in Rats

Problem statement: The purpose of this study was to histopathology and biomechanics evaluate the effect of sodium fluoride on cancellous bone defect healing in rat model. Approach: The experiment was conducted on 40 male adult SD rats which were divided into four groups of control and experiments. After induction of general anesthesia, a hole in size of 2×3 mm in diameter and depth was made using a dental bit in the inner aspect of the between condyles of right femor. In all groups, defect was left untreated. Control group was given distilled water and the other three groups were exposed to fluoridated water at different concentrations (8, 30 and 60 mg F-/L). After 45 days all rats were sacrificed and the histopathological and biomechanical penetration tests of the distal femoral bone were performed. Results: In control group, defect seemed to be filled with adipous tissue and sparse hematogenic cells and in spite of a poor osteogenic activity and some osteoblasts could already be seen. In experiment groups, many osteoblasts groupings and young bone trabeculas increased in number and bone trabeculas more organized. Histopathologically findings show that 30 mg F-/L sodium fluoride in drinking water has been better effect than other groups. The mean load for fracturing in control group was 173.01±23.05 and in experiment groups 8, 30 and 60mg were 177.31±33.71, 181.90±36.81 and 168.51±54.35. Differences observed in biomechanically findings were significant between 30mg group and other groups (p<0.05). Conclusion: The results of this study show that fluoride level at 30 mg F-/L in drinking water increases compressive strength of cancellous bone defect in healing process and could stimulate osteogenesis in femoral cancellous bone defect in rats.
Luiss Lab on European Economics LLEE Working Document no.15 The role of trade openness and institutional quality in the productivity performance of Central and Eastern European Accession Countries

We estimate the effect of trade openness and institutional quality on productivity in transition economies. Our approach builds on recent economic literature dealing with the so-called “deep” determinants of economic growth (Frankel and Romer, 1999, Hall and Jones, 1999, Alcalà and Ciccone, 2001). This work, however, is an attempt to provide a slight departure from existing contributions as to the geographical dimension and the econometric approach. First, we focus on the first group of 10 economies in transition in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic and Slovenia), eight of which have recently entered the European Union. Second, while applied studies normally have a crosssectional dimension, we employ a panel data set which covers the period from the break down of Soviet Union to today. The empirical results seem to confirm the relevance of both the degree of trade openness and the progress in the institutional reforms to explain the productivity performance in Central and Eastern European countries, over the past decade.
Asbestos and lung cancer: An analysis of the epidemiological evidence on the asbestos—smoking interaction

Three simple models for the asbestos—smoking interaction on human lung cancer production are considered. In the first model the excess incidence of lung cancer independently due to asbestos and to smoking adds together when both agents are present (additive model). In the second the addition of each one of the two agents produces an effect (increase in lung cancer incidence) which is proportional to the effect of the other (multiplicative model). In the third, asbestos can only increase lung cancer incidence in the presence of smoking. As previously found by other investigators, the additive model appears the least plausible in the light of the data from two published epidemiological studies. A discrimination between the other two models is attempted through a detailed analysis of the five published epidemiological studies today available which provide information on occupational asbestos exposure, smoking habits and lung cancer risk. Although the data do not allow a definitive discrimination, the multiplicative model appears to be more plausible, being also consistent with a multistage carcinogenic mechanism and with evidence from animal (rat) experiments. It is relevant both for biology and for public health that in this model asbestos and smoking are regarded as independently capable of producing lung cancer in humans and that they act synergistically when exposure to both occurs.
Playback detection using machine learning with spectrogram features approach

This paper presents 2D image processing approach to playback detection in automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems using spectrograms as speech signal representation. Three feature extraction and classification methods: histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) with support vector machines (SVM), HAAR wavelets with AdaBoost classifier and deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) were compared on different data partitions in respect of speakers or playback devices: for instance with different speakers in training and test subsets. The playback detection systems were trained and tested on two speech datasets S1 and S2 manufactured independently by two different institutions. The test error for both datasets oscillates about the level of 1% for HOG+SVM and even below it for CNN in bigger S1 base. In cross validation scenario in which one base was used for training and second base for the test the results were very poor what suggests that the information relevant for playback detection appeared in each base in different way.
Are Capital Markets Inefficient on a Macro Level?

Samuelson’s dictum (1998) states that capital markets are “macro inefficient”. If this conjecture is true, returns should be partially predictable across different asset classes. We test for the predictability of returns on an asset class level by exploiting the advantageous features of the parametric portfolio policy approach proposed by Brandt, Santa-Clara and Valkanov (2009). We apply the parametric portfolio policy framework in a multi asset investment universe and perform a number of robustness checks such as varying the degree of risk aversion, conducting out-of-sample analyses and including transaction costs. Our results demonstrate that the parametric portfolio policy approach generates positive excess returns after costs in an out-of-sample setting by parameterizing the asset weights as a function of the assets’ value and momentum characteristics. The optimal strategy is a combination of value and momentum investing and depends on the risk aversion of investors. Risk-averse investors benefit from focusing on value investing, while our results advise risk-seeking investors to favor momentum investing. Overall, our analysis indicates that capital markets are inefficient on a macro level.
Bending and Folding Effect Study of Flexible Fully Printed and Late-Stage Codified Octagonal Chipless RFID Tags

In this paper, octagonal chipless RFID tags are introduced and herein, the design development, the applied fabrication, and the experimental verification are presented. The designed tags, which are based on frequency-selective surfaces, are produced by screen printing on low-cost flexible materials including plastic and paper. A novel codification technique specifically conceived to complement the high yield manufacturing processes is proposed. Through an extensive measurement campaign, the octagonal chipless RFID tag functionality is proved. The experimental results include the morphological characterization, ID code verification, and a complete study of the bending and folding effects on the tag. Focusing on this, a working bent tag with a curvature radius down to 16 mm is reviewed. Additional characteristics like the polarization independence and extended read ranges are also corroborated.
Rapid Ground Car Detection on Aerial Infrared Images

With extensive applications of unmanned aircraft vehicle and infrared imagery's particular characteristic, ground car detections using infrared aerial images have been gradually applied to intelligent video surveillance. However, the aerial infrared images are always low-resolution and fuzzy, ground car detection is subjected to pose variations, view changes as well as surrounding radiations, this inevitably poses many challenges to detection task. In this paper, we present a novel approach toward ground car detection on infrared images via an end to end regressive neural network, other than background segmentation or foreground extraction. The main works of our research can be divided into three parts: (1) A unique aerial moving platform is built to collect a large amount of infrared images. It is achieved by assembling the DJI M-100 UAV and the FLTR TAU2 infrared sensor; (2) An aerial infrared car data set is unprecedentedly constructed. It is can be used for the following researches in this field; (3) A ground car detection model is trained. It can work in the moving and stationary cars in some severe environments. We test it on some low-resolution infrared images in a typical urban complicated environment and compare it with a state-of-the-art method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach instantly detects cars while keeping a low leak and false alarm ratio.