Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A wake-up call: Contagion through alertness

We provide a novel contagion mechanism based on an alertness effect. Observing an adverse event is a wake-up call that induces investors to acquire costly information about the potential exposure to that event. Even if the exposure to the adverse event turns out to be absent, information acquisition in itself can trigger fragility. Our mechanism is applicable to soverign debt crises, bank runs, currency attacks, political regime change, and other coordination problems. The contagion-through-alertness mechanism offers an explanation for the 1997 Asian currency crisis where financial fragility spread to countries with seemingly unrelated fundamentals and limited interconnectedness.
Simulation of Position Error Signal Degradation Due to Operational Vibration for Hard Disk Drives in a Storage Server Box

A method for simulating position error signal (PES) degradation due to operational vibration of hard disk drives in a storage server box is presented. The drive model used was based on the component mode synthesis method; the model of the operational vibration of the box based on the frequency transfer function method was newly added. The results of simulations and experiments using a network attached storage box with six SCSI drives showed close agreement. Moreover, component analysis of the computed PES degradation indicated that the rocking vibration of the disk/spindle assembly was the dominant cause of the PES degradation.
Inequality in Pay: A Study of Wage Disparity in the NFL

Using a sample that spans 10 seasons from 1994-95 to 2003-2004, we study the wage differential across different racial groups in the NFL. Controlling for player and team characteristics, individual performance attributes, and player positions, fixed-effect regressions on log of salary reveal a positive and significant pay premium for non-white athletes. However, sub-period estimation suggests that this premium was strongest for the earlier sample, and is not significant for recent years. Individual positional regressions suggest that traditional white skill positions have a significant premium for white athletes, while tradition non-white skill positions have no premium. This premium persists controlling for experience and quality of the athlete.
On Heuristics for Solving Winner Determination Problem in Combinatorial Auctions

The winner determination problem (WDP) in combinatorial auctions is the problem of, given a finite set of combinatorial bids B, finding a feasible subset B′ of B with a maximum revenue. WDP is known to be equivalent to the maximum weight set packing problem, and hard to approximate by polynomial time algorithms. This paper proposes three heuristic bid ordering schemes for solving WDP; the first two schemes take into account the number of goods shared by conflicting bids, and the third one is based on a recursive application of such local heuristic functions. We conducted several experiments to evaluate the goodness of the proposed schemes. The result of experiments implies that the first two schemes are particularly effective to improve the performance of the resulting heuristic search procedures. More concretely, they are scalable compared with the conventional linear programming (LP) relaxation based schemes, and could quickly provide an optimum solution under optimization schemes such as the branch-and-bound method. In addition, they exhibit a good anytime performance competitive to the LP-based schemes, although it is sensitive to configurable parameters controlling the strength of contributions of bid conflicts to the resultant bid ordering schemes.
Redefining political-administrative relationships in South Africa

This article is an overview of shifting political—administrative relationships in South Africa, with particular reference to growing politicization (partisan control of the bureaucracy). Studies of politicization of public services are important because political involvement in management has often led to negative effects on service delivery. The article sets out a theoretical framework for political—administrative relationships, examining the growing politicization of public services, the impact of New Public Management (NPM) and political—administrative relationships in developing countries. It then looks at political—administrative relationships in South Africa, including the apartheid history, the development of a new framework in the democratic South Africa and politicization in the staffing of the public service. It examines three functional areas — the decentralization of powers, contract appointments and performance management — and discusses the implications of this changing framework for service delivery. The methodology consisted of interviews with a number of senior government officials, including three current directors-general and a former Minister for the Public Service and Administration, an analysis of government legislation, Public Service Commission (PSC) data including surveys, unpublished data of the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA), policy papers of the African National Congress (ANC) and an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study of political involvement in bureaucracies. The article concludes that growing politicization of the public service has contributed to poor service delivery, and that the South African government needs to place greater emphasis on merit as the basis for appointments and promotions. Points for practitioners This article is useful for professionals working in public management and administration because it looks at the following debates and issues, which have practical implications: frameworks for understanding political—administrative relationships in the public service; the impact of the politicization of staff in the public service; and how merit-based appointment can improve government effectiveness. The article also offers lessons to developing countries wishing to create more professional public services.
Improving uptake of HIV testing in patients with a confirmed STI

Up to 70% of GU clinic attendees with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) and undiagnosed HIV, remain HIV undiagnosed after their visit. STIs have been shown to facilitate HIV transmission. Therefore, patients with an STI should test for HIV. Our objective was to compare the uptake of HIV testing in GU clinic attendees with an STI (study group) with those receiving a negative GU screen (control group). This re-audit was performed after introduction of the following clinic changes: nurse-performed asymptomatic GU screening; 'opt-out' HIV testing policy; discontinuing routine pre-HIV test counselling; access to HIV results by post. The uptake of HIV testing overall, and in the study and control groups respectively was 53% (n = 573), 41% (n = 285) and 65%, showing significant improvement compared to the first audit in 1999 (18%, 14% and 33% respectively) (P < 0.01). The clinic interventions increased HIV testing rates which were in keeping with National Sexual Health strategy targets.
Whither Europeanization? Concept Stretching and Substantive Change

This paper discusses the concept of Europeanization in the light of recent research on the impact of the European Union politics and policy. Conceptual analysis is preliminary to empirical analysis. Accordingly, I examine the risk of "concept stretching", discuss extension and intension of Europeanization, and propose a taxonomy to "unpack" the concept and organize empirical research. The explanation of Europeanization is based on mechanisms and variables that need further exploration, but some preliminary results are presented here. Further research should concentrate on the policy level (and its interaction with macro-structures) and seek cross-fertilization with theoretical policy analysis and international relations, thus avoiding the risk of intellectual segregation.
The Role of Functional Form in Estimating Elasticities of Housing Expenditures

where U, denotes a disturbance term having standard properties and where the f, (j" = 0, Y,P) are constant across i. While there have been discussions in the literature regarding such matters as: (1) methods of measuring Hi, Y, and Pi [5; 10; 11]; (2) problems of aggregation and the relative merits of micro and metro data [12; 17; 19; 20] (3) simultaneous equations bias and the neglect of the supply side [18; 23] and (4) the specification errors created by omitting the price term and other variables [7; 15; 16; 24], virtually all estimates have been constructed from a variant of this model. The log-linear specification is convenient because it allows the income and price elasticities of housing expenditure (Pr, and P,) to be estimated by a direct application of ordinary least squares (OLS). However, as will be argued momentarily, equation (1) may have a questionable basis in theory for two reasons. First, measures of transport costs are frequently excluded as regressors in housing expenditure functions even though such measures are theoretically relevant variables. ' Second, and this point will be stressed in the discussion to follow, income and price elasticities are likely to vary across observation units. As a result, existing estimates of these elasticities must be interpreted as complicated weighted averages of their underlying and observation specific counterparts. Both of these problems are of potential importance because accurate estimates of these income and price elasticities of expenditure are useful not only in developing housing policy but also in studying issues involving suburbanization and property taxation.
New MPEG-7 Scalable Color Descriptor Based on Polar Coordinates for Multispectral Earth Observation Image Analysis

Continuously expanding high-resolution and very high resolution multispectral image collections, provided by remote sensing satellites, require specific methods and techniques for data analysis and understanding. Even though there are several patch-based approaches for image classification and indexing, none of them are integrated within a standard. Having the goal to develop an MPEG-7 compliant descriptor for patch-based multispectral earth observation image classification and indexing, we propose a new feature extraction method able to extract maximum information from all the available spectral bands that Sentinel 2, the last generation of remote sensing satellites, provides. Using the polar coordinate transformation of the reflectance values, we obtain illumination invariant features, which can be used along with the scalable color descriptor present in MPEG-7 standard. Also, our method proves to enhance land cover classification of the areas affected by clouds and their shadows and provide similar classification results compared with the homogeneous texture descriptor (HTD), spectral histogram (SH), concatenated HTD with SH features, spectral indices (SIs), and bag-of-words-based descriptors, such as bag-of-SIs and bag-of-spectral-values on cloud-free areas.
Neighborhood house price indexes in Chicago: a Fourier repeat sales approach

House price indexes are estimated for 851 census tracts in the City of Chicago using a Fourier repeat sales estimator. Locally weighted regression allows price indexes to be estimated for submarkets with small numbers of sales. Annual appreciation rates are higher between 1990 and 1996 in neighborhoods close to the city center with large minority populations, high concentrations of poverty, and many vacant homes in 1990. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.
The Scod Model: Analyzing Durations with a Semiparametric Copula Approach

This paper applies a new methodology for modeling order durations of ultra-high-frequency data using copulas. While the class of common Autoregressive Conditional Duration models are characterized by strict parameterizations and high computational burden, the semiparametric copula approach proposed here offers more flexibility in modeling the dynamic duration process by separating the marginal distributions of waiting times from their temporal dependence structure. Comparing both frameworks as to their density forecast abilities, the Semiparametric Copula Duration model clearly shows a better performance.
Tax Incentives and Demand for Mortgage Debt: Evidence from the Finnish 1993 Tax Reform

Abstract The 1993 Finnish tax reform reduced the incentives to use mortgage financing in home acquisition for high-income households. Before the reform, mortgage interest was deductible according to a progressive schedule which meant that the benefit from the deduction was the greater the higher was the taxpayer 's marginal income tax rate. After the reform, the deduction is made according to a flat schedule and the benefit no longer depends on taxpayer 's marginal income tax rate. This setting can be seen as a natural experiment, where one can distinguish multiple treatment groups and a control group. This paper uses household level repeated cross-section data from before and after the reform to study whether Finnish households responded to these changes in incentives to borrow. The results, based on difference-in-differences estimates, show that high income households with high marginal tax rates responded to the reform by clearly reducing their mortgage borrowing compared to the control group which was unaffected by the reform.
Foreign Capital and Skilled-Unskilled Wage Inequality in a Developing Economy with Non-Traded Goods

The existing theoretical literature does not take into consideration the existence of non-traded goods and the nature of capital mobility between the traded and the non-traded sectors in analyzing the consequences of liberalized investment policies on the relative wage inequality in the developing countries. The present paper purports to fill in this gap using two four-sector general equilibrium models reasonable for a developing economy. We have found that inflows of foreign capital usually improve the wage inequality when the low-skill sector is capital-intensive. But, the relative wage gap may widen if the high-skill sector is capital-intensive. When the non-traded sector produces a non-traded final commodity wage inequality worsens if the low-skill sector is capital-intensive and employs only a very small proportion of the unskilled workforce and if the primary export sector is unskilled labour-intensive. Appropriate policy recommendations for improving the wage inequality have also been made.
Moral Orientation and Relationships in School and Adolescent Pro- and Antisocial Behaviors

This multilevel study examined the relationships between moral climate factors and prosocial as well as antisocial behaviors inside and outside the school (school misconduct, delinquent behavior, and vandalism). The moral climate factors were punishment- and victim-based moral orientation, relationships among students, and teacher–student relationships. The analyses of data from 670 students in 69 classes showed that the classroom-level variables only had a significant impact on misconduct at school of students aged 12 to 20. For the other outcome variables, the student-level variables (student and teacher–student relationships, but especially students’ moral orientation) were significant. A novel finding was that a positive teacher–student relationship not only proved to be related to less misconduct inside the school but also to less delinquent behavior and vandalism outside the school. This indicates that the teacher is an important socializing agent for adolescent behavior in general.
Sexual self‐schema and depressive symptoms after prostate cancer

The years following prostate cancer treatment are characterized by changes in sexual functioning and risk for depressive symptoms. Sexual self‐schema (SSS) is a cognitive generalization about sexual aspects of the self that are associated with sexual behavior, affect, and the processing of sexually relevant information. This study tested if men's SSS moderates the impact of sexual morbidity on depressive symptoms.
Detection of gradual scene changes for parsing of video data

The automatic video parser, a necessary tool for the development and maintenance of a video library, must accurately detect video scene changes so that the resulting video clips can be indexed in some fashion and stored in a video database. With the current existing algorithms, abrupt scene changes are detected fairly well; however, gradual scene changes, including fade-ins, fade-outs, and dissolves, are often missed. In this paper, we propose a new gradual scene change detection algorithm. In particular, we focus on fade- ins, fade-outs, and dissolves. The proposed algorithm is based on the chromatic video edit model. The video edit model indicates that, for sequences without motion, the second partial derivative with respect to time is zero during fade- ins, fade-outs, and dissolves. However, it is also zero for static scenes. Thus, the proposed algorithm computes the first (to disregard static scenes) and second partial derivatives, and if the norm of the second derivative is 'small' relative to the norm of the first derivative, the algorithm declares a gradual scene change. The efficacy of our algorithm is demonstrated using a number of video clips and some performance comparisons are made with other existing approaches.
Natural Tocopherols in a Dietary Supplement of Lutein Affect Tissue Distribution of Tocopherols in Young Rats

The effects of graded levels of Flora GLO (FG), a dietary supplement containing lutein derived from marigold flowers, on tissue concentrations of lutein and α- and γ-tocopherol were determined. Six groups of male weanling Fischer 344 rats (15/group) were fed ad libitum modified AIN-93G diets containing 0%, 0.30%, 0.60%, 1.20%, 2.40%, or 4.80% FG for eight weeks. FG provided 0%, 0.015%, 0.030%, 0.060%, 0.120%, or 0.240% lutein; corresponding levels of tocopherols were ~0%, 0.006%, 0.012%, 0.023%, 0.046%, and 0.092%, respectively. Maximal uptakes of lutein in plasma, spleen, and liver were observed with 4.8% FG. Lutein was not detectable in brain, heart, lung, testes, and kidney. Concentrations of αtocopherol in the plasma (μg/mg triglycerides) were reduced in all rats fed FG (p < 0.05). αTocopherol increased nonlinearly in lung, heart, and spleen with increased FG level. αTocopherol in liver increased with increased dietary FG; αtocopherol in kidney, testes, and brain did not increase. At each dietary level of FG, the spleen had a higher percentage of γtocopherol, and testes and brain had a lower percentage of γtocopherol than all other tissues. For all tissues, the concentrations of αtocopherol were always higher than those of γtocopherol. Tocopherols added to the dietary supplement for functional purposes appeared to have a significant effect on tissue levels of tocopherols. Therefore, changes in α and γtocopherol levels in tissues of rats fed FG cannot be attributed solely to effects of lutein.
Differences among Watershed Sub-Populations in Willingness to Pay for Water Quality Improvements: The Impact of TMDL Development

The Opequon watershed is located in northern Virginia (VA) and the eastern panhandle of West Virginia (WV). In both states, Opequon Creek is classified as impaired based on violations of bacteria, benthic and biologic standards. Both VA and WV are using Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) plans to improve water quality within Opequon Creek. However, these TMDL plans are at different stages with VA being completed and WV still in progress. As part of the TMDL process in VA, this research is based on a contingent valuation survey which was developed to measure the expected monetary benefits of TMDL implementation throughout the Opequon watershed. On the basis of log-likelihood tests of grouped tobit models to explain willingness-to-pay (WTP) for watershed clean-up, VA, WV, and VA riparian landowner respondents were found to consist of different populations. Riparian landowners had the highest median annual WTP at $64, VA respondents the next highest ($49), and WV the lowest ($32). These medians were found to be statistically different from each other. When valuing out-of-state clean-up, however, VA and WV respondents were found to be similar populations with a one-time median WTP of $28. Results show that the TMDL process did impact VA respondent WTP for in-state clean-up.
Next generation hardware development: The role of technology intelligence to reduce uncertainty in Agile new Product Development

Companies are adapting their traditional development processes, aiming for project-specific designs that are referred to as “Agile Product Development” - flexible, adaptive and accelerated processes. Implementing these principles supports developers to react to challenges such as shortened innovation cycles. Still, agile product development is an endeavor with many uncertainties. Agile methods aim at reducing these uncertainties through a balancing of predictive work (e.g. information gathering, forecasting, planning) and adaptive work (e.g. prototyping, trial-and-error, validated learning). However, companies often fail at successfully conducting predictive work in order to avoid uncertainties in the product development process. Methods for forecasting and information generation have to date not been described in the context of agile new product development. The authors explore if and how the concept of technology intelligence - a widely used method of information generation - can be used for agile new product development. Based on the identified shortcomings of current technology intelligence, the authors draft an adjusted concept for agile technology intelligence. Underlying premises and suitable methods are presented and discussed as a first step towards a comprehensive methodology.
Education and income attraction: an online dating field experiment

ABSTRACT Prior studies have found a robust correlation in the education of dating and married couples. However, there is little evidence to suggest that such correlations are causal, that is, for the sake of relationship public goods such as the pleasures of the enlightened conversations that only a common high level of education might support. Being empirical studies, they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income, height or health, which are correlated with education, from driving results. We contribute to this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 388 artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in China. We then counted thousands of ‘visits’ – clicks on abbreviated profiles, which included education and income information, from search engine results. We found that men’s visits to female profiles were unaffected by the profile’s assigned education level, while women’s visits to male profiles increase with the profile’s education. However, that increase was not increasing on the women’s own level of education, though their visits to the higher income male profiles was increasing on their own education. Our findings suggest that the relationship public goods that stem from a common level of high education are not at the forefront of either men’s or women’s minds before their first dates, when one might expect such goods to play a critical role in the decision to develop the relationship further.