Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Political Economy of Groundwater Exploitation: The Israeli Case

IntroductionAs the reliance on aquifers rises and the intensiveness of their exploitation increases, theneed to manage them sustainably becomes increasingly apparent (Shah et al., 2000). While the determination of sustainable development of aquifers raises a host of verycomplex issues (Llamas & Custudio, 2003), the general outline of the steps and measuresthat would lead to more sustainable use patterns of aquifers are largely well known(Haddad et al., 2001a; Garrido & Livingston, 2003). Still, in many, and perhaps most,cases these measures are not used, and aquifers are exploited in an unsustainable manner,even when very wide deﬁnitions of sustainability are used (Lundquist, 1998; Shah et al.,2000). This has been the case in Israel (Gvirtzman, 2002). The question that needs to beasked, therefore, is why have the best measures advanced not been used? There are several possible answers to this question. The ﬁrst is ignorance. This can taketwo forms. It can stem from a lack of knowledge or from the inability to communicate theneed to take certain steps to decision-makers. A second possible answer is the lack ofcapacity. That is, the inability to take the necessary actions, despite the awareness of theneed for them. In the case of Israel, none of these applies, as the aquifers have been wellstudied, and the dangers have been elaborated upon in numerous reports (Menahem,2001). Moreover, Israel is often noted as a country with exceptionally high capacities interms of water management (e.g. Postel, 1997). This suggests that a third possible answerisattherootofthechoiceofunsustainablepolicies—thepoliticalandeconomicincentivesfaced by decision-makers lead them to choose an unsustainable set of policies. Thepurpose of this paper is to examine this third possible answer. That is, institutionalstructures established within the political arena generate incentives that lead tounsustainable practices.The next section outlines the political economy of aquifer exploitation. Essentially, itsuggests that the power of users, particularly farmers, combined with the invisibility ofaquifersandalack ofcountering interest groupslead toan excessive allotmentofpropertyrights over groundwater, and hence to excessive abstractions. As decision-makers prefer0790-0627 Print/1360-0648 Online/05/030413-11
China's rural poverty line and the determinants of rural poverty

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to yield more plausible rural poverty lines for China and then assess the determinants of rural poverty using these newly revised rural poverty lines. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper it is argued that the Chinese official poverty line substantially misestimates the actual rural poverty situations. The poverty lines are derived with Ravallion's method with a rural household survey data of China's two provinces, Hubei, and Inner Mongolia. Poverty determinants using the derived as well as the other rural poverty lines are compared. Findings - The results indicate that the poverty lines derived from a pan-country level food bundle cannot fully reflect the regional poverty situation. Merely adjusting rural poverty lines at the country-level consumer price index without fully considering changes in the structure of food consumption and food prices with respect to different regions may also lead to wrong poverty estimates. The comparisons between the model regression results using the newly derived poverty lines with the alternative rural poverty lines suggest that the current literature uses the World Bank or the Chinese official rural poverty lines to assess how the rural poverty determinants might yield implausible policy implications. Practical implications - China needs to adjust the rural poverty lines with full consideration to the structure of food consumption and food prices with respect to different regions. Originality/value - It is indicated that the Chinese official poverty line substantially misestimates the actual rural poverty situations in China and this in turn affects the associated policy implications.
Energy-efficient resource allocation in multiuser decode-and-forward relay networks

High energy consumption in networks is a key concern for the future wireless networks and hence, it has attracted increasing attention recently. In this work, we investigate joint source and relay transmit power allocation algorithm in a simple multiuser decode-and-forward (DF) relay network composed of multiple source, a relay and multiple destination, and focus on energy efficiency (EE) maximization which works as the critical performance evaluation metric for future communication systems. By taking into account the static power consumption, we first formulate EE maximization as a non-convex optimization problem. Then, we transform this non-convex problem into a convex optimization problem by utilizing successive convex approximation (SCA) and exploiting the properties of non-linear fractional programming approach. Consequently, an energy-efficient iterative power allocation algorithm is proposed to improve the EE and finally reach to a globally optimal solution. Through simulation results, the tradeoff between EE and the spectral efficiency (SE) is presented.
Replication Checkpoint Kinase Cds1 Regulates Recombinational Repair Protein Rad60

ABSTRACT Genome integrity is protected by Cds1 (Chk2), a checkpoint kinase that stabilizes arrested replication forks. How Cds1 accomplishes this task is unknown. We report that Cds1 interacts with Rad60, a protein required for recombinational repair in fission yeast. Cds1 activation triggers Rad60 phosphorylation and nuclear delocalization. A Rad60 mutant that inhibits regulation by Cds1 renders cells specifically sensitive to replication fork arrest. Genetic and biochemical studies indicate that Rad60 functions codependently with Smc5 and Smc6, subunits of an SMC (structural maintenance of chromosomes) complex required for recombinational repair. These studies indicate that regulation of Rad60 is an important part of the replication checkpoint response controlled by Cds1. We propose that control of Rad60 regulates recombination events at stalled forks.
Devolvement of HR practices in transitional economies: Evidence from China

China's progressive integration into the global economy has strengthened its position as a ‘magnet’ for foreign direct investment. The inevitably increased competition in the Chinese economy has led firms to adopt more market-oriented approaches to human resource management (HRM). Based on a survey of 618 managers in state-owned enterprises, domestic/private- and foreign-invested firms operating in the Jiangsu Province of China, this study investigates the extent to which HR practices have been strategically devolved to line managers, and the relationship between this devolvement and the performance of firms in China. Overall, there was little evidence of devolvement to line managers. We found no evidence of a relationship between the degree of devolvement and firm performance, although the provision of formal training to line/middle managers was predictive of performance.
Applying the technology acceptance model to the introduction of mobile healthcare information systems

This study presents an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) for exploring the factors that affect users’ intention to employ mobile healthcare information systems. This study aims at exploring the utilisation of mobile phones in healthcare environments and investigating the expectations and intentions regarding the implementation of mobile healthcare information systems in Jordan. Therefore, a questionnaire was designed using a Likert-scale method. The questionnaire was distributed through convenience sampling. The proposed model was empirically tested using data collected from a survey of 25 questions. Through this survey, 450 questionnaires were distributed and 366 ones were returned, or about (81.3%) were valid for analysis. The partial least squares (PLS) structural equation analysis (Ringle et al., 2005) was used to evaluate the causal model. The researchers find that the perceived ease of use has the most significant influence on the respondents’ behavioural intention to use mobile healthcare information systems. This study provides quantified indicators about mobile healthcare information systems and suggests a model that might help in understanding mobile healthcare information systems environment in Jordan.
Bequests, Credit Rationing and in situ Values in the Faustmann–Pressler–Ohlin Forestry Model

The problem of determining the optimal time to stop the "pure aging process" has a 150-year history in forestry. The success of the rotation model lies in the fact that it is taken to be theoretically sound, empirically testable and has clear practical relevance. Nonetheless, empirical findings show that timber supply depends on variables missing from the original formulation. Previous research has addressed the problem by abandoning the pure aging description of forests. This study demonstrates that the optimal aging process becomes forest-owner specific under imperfect land and capital markets and if the owner has in situ preferences. Copyright 1998 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.
Economic Development and Farmland Protection: An Assessment of Rewarded Land Conversion Quotas Trading in Zhejiang, China

Facing a substantial loss of farmland in the reform era, the Chinese central government established a highly centralized land management system in 1998 to guarantee its capacity to meet the domestic food needs. In order to maintain high-speed economic growth, local governments in China made great efforts to circumvent the stringent constraint on land use by launching various innovative land management schemes, among which Zhejiang’s rewarded land conversion quotas (RLCQ) trading scheme, a program similar to the transfer of development rights (TDR) in Western countries, has attracted a lot of policy and scholarly attention. In this research, we first provide an overview of China’s farmland protection policy and the RLCQ trading scheme in Zhejiang. Then, using the system GMM estimator for economic growth models and a panel dataset of 69 local jurisdictions in Zhejiang Province covering the period of 1989-2008, we assess the impacts of RLCQ trading on local economic growth. The empirical results corroborate our hypotheses that participation in land quota trading in general led to faster local economic growth, and that the trading had a stronger and more lasting impact on the economic growth of the quota buyers than on that of the sellers. The analysis suggests that in order to balance the competing goals of economic development and farmland protection, market-based land management tools have a good potential for further development in China and other countries confronting similar challenges.
Screening for pulmonary tuberculosis: an acceptable intervention for antenatal care clients and providers?

SETTING Five purposively sampled health facilities in Kasungu District, Malawi. OBJECTIVES To explore 1) the acceptability of introducing pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) screening into antenatal care (ANC) clinics amongst ANC clients and ANC service providers; and 2) the acceptability of tuberculosis (TB) treatment during and after pregnancy among women registered for TB treatment. METHODS Fourteen focus group discussions and 40 in-depth interviews with ANC clients (15), ANC service providers (10) and women registered for TB treatment (15). RESULTS Most clients found the introduction of PTB screening into ANC clinics acceptable. Some expressed concern at submitting a second sputum specimen, citing transportation/distance as the main obstacle. Other concerns were stigma and fear relating to the human immunodeficiency virus and the acquired immune-deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) and taking TB treatment during pregnancy and breast-feeding. All ANC service providers supported the idea, but were concerned about increased workload. CONCLUSION PTB screening in the ANC setting would be an acceptable intervention and could serve to increase PTB case notification in Malawi. However, alternative diagnostic strategies need to be explored. The negative associations with HIV/AIDS and some of the misconceptions surrounding TB treatment need to be addressed to avoid PTB screening becoming a potential barrier to seeking ANC. The main challenge will be whether over-stretched staff will be able to cope with this additional service.
Classification of Indonesian news articles based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation

A massive number of news articles leads to the potential problem in automatic classification task. The discussions on classification of English news articles have been widely studied. However, it is in contrast to automatic classification of Indonesian news articles. The classification method that has been implemented is limited to conventional methods, such as Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machine. Both methods is rigid in classify a document into one topic. Therefore, we implement one of Topic Modeling methods which represent a document as a distribution of topics and a topic is represented by a set of words. The method is Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The experimental study based on 10-fold cross validation strategy is conducted by employing several parameter includes number of topics (5, 10, and 15) and both LDA's hyperparameters (0.001, 0.01, and 0.1). The result shows that the best overall accuracy is about 70% for classifying documents of Indonesian news articles into 5 classes, i.e. economic, tourism, criminal, sport, and politics.
Personal development to improve management performance: a plain manager’s guide

Presents answers to the question: how does the development of self‐knowledge of managers contribute to organizational success in commercial terms? The question originated from a discussion by a group of management developers about the relationships between personal development and effective management. Looks at the contribution of self‐knowledge in terms of motives, values, personal resources, self‐esteem and internal constraints (including compulsive or “driven” behaviour). Concludes that an increasing rate of change within organizations increases the need for the development of self‐knowledge by managers.
Retroviral Constitutive Transport Element Evolved from Cellular TAP(NXF1)-Binding Sequences

ABSTRACT The constitutive transport element (CTE) of type D retroviruses serves as a signal of nuclear export of unspliced viral RNAs. The human TAP(NXF1) protein, a cellular mRNA export factor, directly binds to CTE and mediates nuclear export of CTE-containing RNAs. Here, we use genomic SELEX (systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment) to show that the human genome encodes a family of high-affinity TAP ligands. These TAP-binding elements (TBE) are 15-bp minisatellite repeats that are homologous to the core TAP-binding sites in CTE. The repeats are positioned similarly in the RNA secondary structures of CTE and TBE. Like CTE, TBE is an active nuclear export signal. CTE elements of different species share sequence similarities to TBE in the regions that are neutral for CTE function. This conservation points to a possible common ancestry of the two elements, and in fact, TBE has properties expected from a primordial CTE. Additionally, a molecular fossil of a TBE-like minisatellite is found in the genome of a modern retroelement. These findings constitute direct evidence of an evolutionary link between TBE-related minisatellites and CTE.
Optimal Money Burning: Theory and Application to Corporate Dividends

We explore signaling behavior in settings with a discriminating signal and several costly nondiscriminating ( money burning ) activities. In settings where informed parties have many options for burning money, existing theory provides no basis for selecting one nondiscriminating activity over another. When senders have private information about the costs of these activities, each sender's indifference is resolved, the taxation of a nondiscriminating signal is Pareto improving, and the use of the taxed activity becomes more widespread as the tax rate rises. We apply this analysis to the theory of dividend signaling. The central testable implication of the model is verified empirically.
Do T cells care about the mitogen‐activated protein kinase signalling pathways?

Mitogen‐activated protein (MAP) kinases, which include the extracellular response kinases, p38 and c‐Jun amino terminal kinases (JNK), play a significant role in mediating signals triggered by cytokines, growth factors and environmental stress. The JNK and p38 MAP kinases have been involved in growth, differentiation and cell death in different cell types. In the present paper, we describe how the JNK and p38 MAP kinase signalling pathways are regulated and their role during thymocyte development and the activation and differentiation of T cells in the peripheral immune system. The results from these studies demonstrate that the JNK and p38 MAP kinase signalling pathways regulate different aspects of T‐cell mediated immune responses.
Comparison of spatial and temporal averaging on ultrafast imaging in presence of quantization errors

In compound plane wave imaging (CPWI), multiple plane waves are used to insonify the imaging region with different steering angles. The compounding operation is effectively a spatial averaging filter that reduces the speckles of the image and increases the image contrast and its lateral resolution. Although spatial averaging often improves CPWI image quality, quantization errors which dependent on sampling frequency and element spacing (pitch), introduced during beam steering reduce this improvement. In this study, the effect of spatial and temporal averaging on speckle noise reduction, contrast resolution and spatial resolution in ultrafast ultrasound imaging is evaluated. The overall results from the simulations shows that the maximum effect of quantization errors on speckle noise is 0.18 dB, on the image contrast is 0.27 dB, on axial resolution is 2.38% and finally on lateral resolution is 1.44%. On the other hand, plane wave imaging (PWI) employing temporal averaging technique which is not bound with quantization errors relatively produces high contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and speckle signal to noise ratio (SSNR) at 40 MHz for both centre frequency compared to CPWI.
Stromal features are predictive of disease mortality in oral cancer patients

Worldwide, approximately 405 000 cases of oral cancer (OSCC) are diagnosed each year, with a rising incidence in many countries. Despite advances in surgery and radiotherapy, which remain the standard treatment options, the mortality rate has remained largely unchanged for decades, with a 5‐year survival rate of around 50%. OSCC is a heterogeneous disease, staged currently using the TNM classification, supplemented with pathological information from the primary tumour and loco‐regional lymph nodes. Although patients with advanced disease show reduced survival, there is no single pathological or molecular feature that identifies aggressive, early‐stage tumours. We retrospectively analysed 282 OSCC patients for disease mortality, related to clinical, pathological, and molecular features based on our previous functional studies [EGFR, αvβ6 integrin, smooth muscle actin (SMA), p53, p16, EP4]. We found that the strongest independent risk factor of early OSCC death was a feature of stroma rather than tumour cells. After adjusting for all factors, high stromal SMA expression, indicating myofibroblast transdifferentiation, produced the highest hazard ratio (3.06, 95% CI 1.65–5.66) and likelihood ratio (3.6; detection rate: false positive rate) of any feature examined, and was strongly associated with mortality, regardless of disease stage. Functional assays showed that OSCC cells can modulate myofibroblast transdifferentiation through αvβ6‐dependent TGF‐β1 activation and that myofibroblasts promote OSCC invasion. Finally, we developed a prognostic model using Cox regression with backward elimination; only SMA expression, metastasis, cohesion, and age were significant. This model was independently validated on a patient subset (detection rate 70%; false positive rate 20%; ROC analysis 77%, p < 0.001). Our study highlights the limited prognostic value of TNM staging and suggests that an SMA‐positive, myofibroblastic stroma is the strongest predictor of OSCC mortality. Whether used independently or as part of a prognostic model, SMA identifies a significant group of patients with aggressive tumours, regardless of disease stage. Copyright © 2011 Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
p22phox C242T gene polymorphism and overt diabetic nephropathy: a meta-analysis of 1,452 participants

Background/Aims The p22phox C242T gene polymorphism (rs4673) may be linked to an increased susceptibility for overt diabetic nephropathy (ODN), but the study results are still inconclusive. Methods To explore the relationship between p22phox C242T gene polymorphism and ODN, the current meta-analysis of 707 ODN patients and 745 controls from five individual studies was conducted. The pooled odds ratio (OR) and its corresponding 95% confidence interval (CI) were evaluated by either a random or fixed effect model. Results In our meta-analysis, a significant relationship between the p22phox C242T gene polymorphism and ODN was found under allelic (OR, 2.760; 95% CI, 1.400 to 5.450; p = 0.004), recessive (OR, 5.080; 95% CI, 1.020 to 25.430; p = 0.05), dominant (OR, 1.700; 95% CI, 1.167 to 2.477; p = 0.006), homozygous (OR, 3.900; 95% CI, 1.022 to 14.889; p = 0.046), heterozygous (OR, 1.523; 95% CI, 1.167 to 1.986; p = 0.002), and additive genetic models (OR, 2.019; 95% CI, 1.232 to 3.309; p = 0.005). Conclusions A positive correlation between p22phox C242T gene polymorphism and ODN risk was found. The T allele carriers of p22phox C242T gene polymorphism might be predisposed to ODN.
Statistical performance analysis of track initiation techniques

This paper analyzes the statistical performance of track initiation methods. It evaluates, by considering a track initiation as a problem of signal detection, the track detection probabilities and false track probabilities of four popular approaches: the rule-based method, the logic-based method, the Hough transform, and the modified Hough transform techniques. The first two methods detect the existence of tracks in a sequential fashion, and the fast two are image processing techniques that initiate tracks using a batch of frames. The analytical expressions for the track detection probability and false track probability of the four methods are derived to predict their capabilities in capturing new tracks and in rejecting false tracks due to false alarms and clutter background. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to confirm the analysis. It is observed that when the false track probability is held fixed, the logic-based and the modified Hough transform techniques have good detection performances.