Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transportation Product, Transportation Function and Cost Functions

Although major advances have been made in the estimation of transportation cost functions in terms of functional specification and microeconomic properties, available studies present inconsistencies with observed industry behavior, and have been criticized as a reliable basis for policy design. In this paper the concept of transportation cost function is restated on the basis of an improved (multi-) output definition. The transportation function is identified as that component of the production function that relates output to characteristics of vehicles, terminals and rights-of-way. Using this framework, cost functions are derived for two simple transportation systems, which illustrates the ambiguity of the aggregate output definition and shows the importance of spatial complementarity in transportation activities. Eventual contradiction between economic wisdom and firms' behavior are shown to be explainable under the multioutput perspective. The implications of output misspecification on the estimation of transportation cost functions are discussed.
Visual Impact of Zernike and Seidel Forms of Monochromatic Aberrations

Purpose. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of different aberrations modes (e.g., coma, astigmatism, spherical aberration [SA]) and different aberration basis functions (Zernike or Seidel) on visual acuity (VA). Methods. Computational optics was used to generate retinal images degraded by either the Zernike or Seidel forms of second through fourth-order aberrations for an eye with a 5-mm pupil diameter. High contrast, photopic VA was measured using method of constant stimuli for letters displayed on a computer-controlled, linearized, quasimonochromatic (&lgr; = 556 nm) display. Results. Minimum angle of resolution (MAR) varied linearly with the magnitude (root mean square error) of all modes of aberration. The impact of individual Zernike lower- and higher-order aberrations (HOAs) varied significantly with mode, e.g., arc minutes of MAR per micrometer of root mean square slopes varied from 7 (spherical defocus) to 0.5 (quadrafoil). Seidel forms of these aberrations always had a smaller visual impact. Notably, Seidel SA had 1/17th the impact of Zernike SA with the same wavefront variance, and about 1/4th the impact of Zernike SA with matching levels of r4 wavefront error. With lower-order components removed, HOAs near the center of the Zernike pyramid do not have a large visual impact. Conclusions. The majority of the visual impact of high levels of fourth-order Zernike aberrations can be attributed to the second-order terms within these polynomials. Therefore, the impact of SA can be minimized by balancing it with a defocus term that flattens the central wavefront (paraxial focus) or maximizes the area of the pupil with a flat wavefront. Over this wide range of aberration types and levels, image quality metrics based on the Point Spread Function (PSF) and Optical Transfer Function (OTF) can predict VA as reliably as VA measures can predict retests of VA, and, thus, such metrics may become valuable predictors of both VA and, via optimization, refractions.
Stock market integration in Mexico and Argentina: are short- and long-term considerations different?

This article aims to study the issue of short- and long-term stock market integration in two of Latin America's biggest emerging economies – Mexico and Argentina – with the US stock market using multivariate cointegration tools. Our study covers a period of two decades and shows strong evidence of Argentina and Mexico's short-term financial dependence on the US market. However, our results show no long-term linkages between the markets studied, indicating that Mexican and Argentinean stock markets are governed more by their fundamentals in the long term.
Positioning and Competitiveness of Producers of Balsamic Vinegar of Modena

Abstract The balsamic vinegar of Modena (BVM) is one of the most popular among the emerging Italian food products worldwide. This industry is characterised by a strong heterogeneity of the operators and by a relevant growth of sales and export. This paper first describes the main features of the market environment and the factors allowing all the BVM producers to gain a competitive advantage and their ability to compete. Second, a perceptual competitiveness map of BVM industry describing the competitive environment and highlighting the competitive factors managed by the enterprises are drawn using discriminant analysis. Cluster analysis is also applied to group the operators according to their position in the marketplace and to their competitive features. The study is useful to identify new opportunities for company differentiation and potential market niches or market segments with a lower level of competition. The analysis highlights that there is a low level of differentiation amongst the competitive arena, and the opportunities for differentiation appears linked to the following main drivers: an increased perceived level of quality, the introduction of an innovative products, the management of the price level and the identification of new attractive markets.
The relationship between energy consumption, CO2 emissions and economic growth in Tanzania

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the dynamic relationship that exists between energy consumption, environmental pollution and per capita economic growth in Tanzania. The energy consumption is represented by electricity usage in kilowatt hours (kWh) per capita, while environmental pollution is represented by carbon emission per metric tons and economic growth by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Design/methodology/approach This investigation is made based on the Environmental Kuznets Curve using time series annual data from 1975 to 2013 by applying the more robust causality technique of Toda and Yamamoto non-Causality test (1995), Impulse response and Variance Decomposition, Augumented and Dickey–Fueller test and Philips and Perron Test of unit root tests. Findings Economic growth rate (LGDP) and energy consumption per capita (LENGY), both being unidirectional, cause environmental pollution through carbon emission (LCO2) in Tanzania. Interestingly, after using impulse response, a significant and positive economic growth (GDP per capita) was found due to shocks from electricity per capita (energy consumption) and carbon emission (LCO2) with time. The Variance Decomposition suggested that the percentage of the variations due to shocks or innovations of economic growth (LGDP) and energy consumption (LENGY) to carbon emission is very high and significant, accounting to 46 and 41 per cent, respectively, in 10 years to come. Research limitations/implications The study recommends that, in the future, the relationship be examined using super-exogeneity causality tests that takes into consideration the changes in policy or regime in contrast to Toda and Yamamoto. Furthermore, the addition of other variables such as fixed capital formation and labor force, which were not considered in this study, may result in strong correlation. Practical implications The results imply that the government of Tanzania can adopt environment conservation and energy saving policies without affecting its economic growth. As a matter of fact, to put a stop to persistent environmental pollution in Tanzania, the energy saving policy should be put in place rather quickly. It is imperative that the government implements policies and strategies that ensure continuous economic growth without forsaking the environment. Originality/value Despite the increase in carbon emissions, energy consumption and economic growth in Tanzania since 2000, to date, no previous work has been done to investigate their multivariate relationship. This is the first study that uses the Toda and Yamamoto non-Causality test, Impulse Response and Variance Decomposition Analysis to investigate a trivariate relationship of the variables mentioned above.
Does Economic Diversity Enhance Regional Disaster Resilience?

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Little research examines the effect of diversity on regional economic resilience to natural disasters. We examine whether economic diversity benefits regional economies in typical circumstances and in recovery after a natural disaster, using the case of the 1993 U.S. Midwest flood. By matching counties in the nine states affected by the flood to control counties, we isolate the influence of diversity on employment and income in normal circumstances and after a substantial shock. We found economic diversity to have mixed associations with employment and income in typical circumstances. On average, economically diverse counties tended to experience faster employment gains but slower growth in per capita income than less diverse areas. The effect of economic diversity upon resilience following a natural disaster was unambiguous. Economic diversity aided counties in weathering the downturn following the flood and sped their return to long-term patterns of employment and income growth. Takeaway for practice: In promoting policies to enhance economic diversity, planners in communities located in areas prone to natural disasters should consider both the goal of disaster resilience and the potential tradeoffs between different aspects of economic performance. Research support: None.
Testing the 'home market eect' in a multi-country world: A theory-based approach

We propose a theory-based approach to testing the presence of the 'home market effect' in a multi-country world. Our framework extends Krugman's (1980, Am. Econ. Rev. 70(5), 950-959) model, in which the appeal of a country as a production site depends on both the relative size of its domestic market ('attraction') and its relative proximity to foreign markets ('accessibility'). We show that the extended model predicts a home market effect only after the actual production and trade data have been corrected for the impact of countries' differential access to world markets. This can be achieved through a simple theory-based linear filter. We propose a series of non-parametric sign- and rank-tests that are closely related to those used in factor proportions theory. When applied to a cross-section of OECD and non-OECD countries, the filtered data performs better than the raw one and our results strongly support the presence of home market effects.
Nucleosomal arrays self‐assemble into supramolecular globular structures lacking 30‐nm fibers

The existence of a 30‐nm fiber as a basic folding unit for DNA packaging has remained a topic of active discussion. Here, we characterize the supramolecular structures formed by reversible Mg2+‐dependent self‐association of linear 12‐mer nucleosomal arrays using microscopy and physicochemical approaches. These reconstituted chromatin structures, which we call “oligomers”, are globular throughout all stages of cooperative assembly and range in size from ~50 nm to a maximum diameter of ~1,000 nm. The nucleosomal arrays were packaged within the oligomers as interdigitated 10‐nm fibers, rather than folded 30‐nm structures. Linker DNA was freely accessible to micrococcal nuclease, although the oligomers remained partially intact after linker DNA digestion. The organization of chromosomal fibers in human nuclei in situ was stabilized by 1 mM MgCl2, but became disrupted in the absence of MgCl2, conditions that also dissociated the oligomers in vitro. These results indicate that a 10‐nm array of nucleosomes has the intrinsic ability to self‐assemble into large chromatin globules stabilized by nucleosome–nucleosome interactions, and suggest that the oligomers are a good in vitro model for investigating the structure and organization of interphase chromosomes.
Evidence on the Contribution of Trade Reform Towards International Income Equalization

This paper provides some historical evidence on the impact of trade reform on income disparities between the liberalizing countries. The convergence test developed here involves joint estimation of augmented Dickey-Fuller type equations using seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) techniques. Monte Carlo simulations are used to calculate the critical values which are in turn used to determine the significance of convergence. We find that countries which embarked on extensive trade liberalization programs exhibited significant income convergence with one another while countries that did not liberalize trade showed no evidence of convergence.
Corporate Social Disclosure Practices of Top Software Firms in India

This study examines the corporate social disclosure practices of the top 16 software firms in India. The 2003–2004 annual reports were analysed using content analysis to examine the attributes reported relating to human resource, community development activities, products and services activities and environmental activities. The human resources category was the most frequently reported followed by community development activities and the environmental activities was the least reported. Most of the information was qualitative and was disclosed in the ‘other’ sections of the annual report. Some firms had separate sections for each category while many others disclosed their social practices in the introductory pages of the annual report. The results indicate that firms had different motives/reasons for reporting the different attributes. The shortage of skilled labour in the software sector seems to have shaped the corporate social disclosure (CSD) practices in the human resources category. Firms seem to engage in community development activities without expecting changes to their economic performance and the CSD of community activities seem to be shaped by the expectations of the society. The nature of global competition in the software sector seems to have shaped the CSD practices in the product and services contribution category.
End-to-end keywords spotting based on connectionist temporal classification for Mandarin

Traditional hybrid DNN-HMM based ASR system for keywords spotting which models HMM states are not flexible to optimize for a specific language. In this paper, we construct an end-to-end acoustic model based ASR for keywords spotting in Mandarin. This model is constructed by LSTM-RNN and trained with objective measure of connectionist temporal classification. The input of the network is feature sequences, and the output the probabilities of the initials and finals of Mandarin syllables. Compared with hybrid based ASR systems, the end-to-end system achieves a significant improvement of 6.32% on ATWV relatively. The best result of our system is ATWV 0.8310 on RASC863 data set. The proposed CTC based method applies to KWS in a specific language.
Examining social facilitation in vigilance: a hit and a miss

Abstract Vigilance is the ability of an observer to maintain attention for extended periods of time; however, performance tends to decline with time on watch, a pattern referred to as the vigilance decrement. Previous research has focused on factors that attenuate the decrement; however, one factor rarely studied is the effect of social facilitation. The purpose for the present investigation was to determine how different types of social presence affected the performance, workload and stress of vigilance. It was hypothesised that the presence of a supervisory figure would increase overall performance, but may occur at the cost of increased workload and stress. Results indicated that the per cent of false alarm and response times decreased in the presence of a supervisory figure. Using social facilitation in vigilance tasks may thus have positive, as well as, negative effects depending on the dependent measure of interest and the role of the observer. Practitioner Summary: Social facilitation has rarely been examined in the context of vigilance, even though it may improve performance. Vigilance task performance was examined under social presence. The results of the present study indicated that false alarms and response times decreased in the social presence of a supervisory figure, thus improving performance.
How an IoT-enabled “smart refrigerator” can play a clandestine role in perpetuating cyber-crime

The need to interconnect devices over the Internet has led to the development of smart devices, home automation and the Internet of Things (IoT), which at the time of writing this paper is still an emerging phenomenon. As a result of IoT explosion, home appliances are able to be fully connected and controlled through an Intelligent Digital Network (IDN). Nevertheless, futuristic refrigerators will be able to connect to the Internet, which in turn will be able to accept a number of applications. While this brings effectiveness and convenience of connecting household appliances to the Internet, the threat level that is posed by interconnecting these appliances is high because a number of vulnerabilities exist that have potential to be exploited. In this paper, the authors show how a “smart refrigerator” can be used as an instrument that is able to propagate digital crimes like identity theft, spamming, privacy, data loss and so forth through creation of IoT bot. IoT bot is a robot network that can target connected multimedia centres. As a result, the authors have proposed a Smart Refrigerator Crime Propagation (SRCP) Model that shows how vulnerabilities are able to be exploited. Additionally, the authors have identified possible countermeasures as a route that can help to protect sensitive and critical information in an IoT-based environment. The proposed approaches/countermeasures have digital forensic capabilities that are able to filter periodic communication to and from the refrigerator in a forensic readiness approach. It is the authors' opinion that if the approaches are adhered to fully they may help to proactively prevent propagation of IoT-based digital crimes using connected home appliances.
Embedding-Based Feature Extraction Methods for Chinese Sentiment Classification

Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, seeks to figure out points of view from documents. Sentiment classification is a specific task of sentiment analysis that divides documents into positive and negative sentiment polarities according to the attitudes expressed. Feature extraction is a significant part of sentiment classification. Traditional feature extraction methods mine statistical information in documents but neglect semantic relationships between words, while some embedding methods successfully capture semantics but have difficulty in distinguishing sentiment polarities. In this paper, we propose three different sentiment specific models that take advantages of the statistical information in a document as well as the semantic relationships between words. Our models shed more light on the different roles of words in documents, assigning them different weights. Experimental results on three Chinese datasets illustrate that, in general, our models are superior to other models and provide state-of-the-art performance. Our models are efficient and have high stability.
Lack of Effect of Short-Term Depletion of Plasma Complement C3 on the Survival of Syngeneic Dopaminergic Neurons following Grafting into the Intact Rat Striatum

Metabolically compromised cells may be subject to complement-mediated cytotoxicity. The aim of this study was to clarify to what extent plasma complement C3 might contribute to the low survival (5–20%) of grafted dopaminergic neurons. The survival of intrastriatal cell suspension grafts of syngeneic dopaminergic, tyrosine hydroxylase (TH)-containing neurons was compared in rats subjected to short-term IV treatment with 1) cobra venom factor (CVF), or 2) placebo treatment. Depletion of plasma complement C3 by CVF was confirmed by crossed immunoelectrophoresis. With 159 ± 37 (mean ± SEM) TH-immunoreactive and 154 ± 40 TH mRNA-expressing neurons in the CVF-treated rats (n = 9), and 117 ± 34 TH-immunoreactive and 160 ± 49 TH mRNA-expressing neurons in placebo rats (n = 6), the CVF treatment did not increase the survival of the grafted dopaminergic neurons. Similarly, CVF had no apparent effect on the astroglial, microglial, or oligodendroglial cell response within and around the graft. The data indicate that depletion of plasma complement C3 at the time of grafting has no effect on the long-term survival of syngeneic ventral mesencephalic dopaminergic neuronal grafts.
Human resources management in multinational companies in Africa: a systematic literature review

This study provides a systematic review of literature on the analytical perspectives and empirical research on human resource policy and practice in multinational companies (MNCs) in Africa. There is a need to ‘take stock’ of research publications on HRM in MNCs in Africa both intellectually and practically. The review identifies modes of analysis and thematic approaches in HRM literature on MNCs in Africa. The results provide support for particular clusters of research literature. These pertain to interests and motivations of MNCs, comparative political economy and institutional theory, labour market and HRM modes of analysis, cultural paradigms of indigenous management thought and clusters of HRM practice research. Areas for further research are identified.
Detection of African swine fever virus DNA in blood samples stored on FTA cards from asymptomatic pigs in Mbeya region, Tanzania.

The aim of the study was to assess whether blood samples collected onto FTA(®) cards could be used in combination with real-time PCR for the detection of African swine fever virus (ASFV) DNA in samples from resource-poor settings under the assumption that asymptomatically (sub-clinically) infected pigs may be present. Blood samples were collected from clinically healthy pigs from Mbeya Region, Tanzania. The blood samples were stored on FTA(®) cards and analysed by real-time PCR assays in duplicate; three pigs had high levels of viral DNA (Ct values of 27-29), and three pigs had a low level of viral DNA (Ct 36-45). Four pigs were positive in one of the duplicate samples only, but clear products of the expected size were obtained when the reactions were analysed by gel electrophoresis. For comparison, blood samples from pigs experimentally infected with either a pathogenic (OURT T88/1) or a non-pathogenic (OURT T88/3) isolate of ASFV were collected, stored on FTA(®) cards and analysed in the same way. The blood from pigs infected with the OURT T88/1 isolate showed high levels of viral DNA (Ct 22-33), whereas infection with non-pathogenic OURT T88/3 isolate resulted in only low levels of viral DNA (Ct 39) in samples collected at 10-14 days after inoculation.
Dynamic On-Line Updating Solution for CURE Cubes

CURE is an efficient ROLAP algorithm both on construction time and utility of storage. A new updating method for cubes generated by CURE, dynamic on-line updating solution (DOLUS) is presented here in which dynamic means updating cubes incrementally and on-line guarantees concurrent of updating and query answering except the period of incremental construction in memory. DOLUS takes advantage of original CURE and brings in new writing strategies. After being updated by DOLUS, cubes appear a little different from the original CURE ones, as trivial tuples and common aggregate tuples become less and normal tuples become more. However, the query answering time is at least the same or less. Those are the result of performance tradeoff between query-optimize and storage-optimize.
Emergent Macrophytes Act Selectively on Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria and Archaea

ABSTRACT Ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and archaea (AOA) were quantified in the sediments and roots of dominant macrophytes in eight neutral to alkaline coastal wetlands. The AOA dominated in most samples, but the bacterial-to-archaeal amoA gene ratios increased with increasing ammonium levels and pH in the sediments. For all plant species, the ratios increased on the root surface relative to the adjacent bulk sediment. This suggests that root surfaces in these environments provide conditions favoring enrichment of AOB.