Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gender differences in household resource allocations

Using household survey data from the United States, Brazil, and Ghana, the authors examine the relationship between paternal education and child height, an indicator of health and nutritional status. In all three countries, the education of the mother has a bigger effect on her daughter's height; paternal education, in contrast, has a bigger impact on the son's height. There are apparently, differences in the allocation of household resources depending on the gender of the child and these differences vary with the gender of the parent. In Ghana, relative to other women, the education of a woman who is better educated than her husband has a bigger impact on the height of her daughter than her son. In Brazil, women's nonlabor income has a positive impact on the health of her daughter but not her son's health. If relative education of parents and nonlabor income are indicators of power in a household bargaining game, then these results suggest that gender differences in resource allocations reflect both technological differences in child rearing and differences in the preferences of parents.
Biomonitoring and Biomarkers: Exposure Assessment Will Never Be the Same

Using modern analytical technology, it is now possible to measure almost any chemical present in our bodies. The future role of classical exposure assessment will perhaps be marginalized because biomonitoring programs can directly measure the concentration of chemicals that are present in biologic matrices. Although the concentration of chemicals in the environment will continue to be measured and related to exposure parameters, the prioritization of the national environmental agenda will be dictated by biomonitoring. Recent biomonitoring studies have examined the levels of > 200 chemicals. Biomonitoring data, by themselves, are not informative in helping consumers understand their individual health risk. A major challenge facing those who conduct biomonitoring programs is how to best communicate the information to the public. In this article, we review benefits and challenges, along with select results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2005 National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. We recommend that these data be carefully interpreted, with the goal of establishing baseline exposure information, rather than creating surrogates for conclusions about human health risk.
Local bifurcations ink-symmetric dynamical systems

A map is called a (reversing) k-symmetry of the dynamical system represented by the map if k is the smallest positive integer for which U is a (reversing) symmetry of the kth iterate of L. We study generic local bifurcations of fixed points that are invariant under the action of a compact Lie group that is a reversing k-symmetry group of the map L, on the basis of a normal form approach. We derive normal forms relating the local bifurcations of k-symmetric maps to local steady-state bifurcations of symmetric flows of vector fields. Alternatively, we also discuss the derivation of normal forms entirely within the framework of Taylor expansions of maps. We illustrate our results with some examples.
A Theory of the Production and Allocation of Effort

The purpose of this paper is to analyze systematically the production of effort and its allocation among different market and non-market sectors. I believe that this analysis can explain much of the variation in earnings that is not explained by human capital. The first section introduces the material. The next section develops the basic theoretical analysis of the production and allocation of effort by a free person. Section III applies this analysis to the value placed on time a1 located to the non-market sector, the effect of hours worked on fatigue and earnings, life cycle variations-in earnings and hours worked, investment in health, and the effect of marriage on the earnings and health of men and women. Section IV considers worker effort from the view point of firms, and shows how various characteristics of firms determine the wage rates offered and the effort supplied by their workers. Section V analyzes the production and allocation of effort by slaves, and derives "expropriation rates'' and other implications about the treatment of slaves .
Predicting Trustworthiness Behavior to Enhance Security in On-line Assessment

Over the last decade, information security has been considered a key issue in e-Learning design. Although security requirements can be met with advanced technological approaches and these solutions offer feasible methods in many e-Learning scenarios, on-line assessment activities usually show specific issues that cannot be solved with technology alone. In addition, security vulnerabilities in on-line assessment impede the development of an overall model devoted to manage secure on-line assessment. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to enhance technological security solutions with trustworthiness. To this end, we endow previous trustworthiness models with prediction features by composing trustworthiness modeling and assessment, normalization methods, history sequences, and neural network-based approaches. In order to validate our approach, we present a peer-to-peer on-line assessment model carried out in a real online course.
Competing agendas : an ecological analysis of jointly constructed task systems in physical education and sport education

This thesis addresses how teachers and pupils jointly constructed a physical education classroom ecology in one case study school. Taking into account the persuasive influences facing young people in contemporary society, this research addresses the complexity of young people's agendas in physical education from a socio-cultural perspective. Situating this study in a physical education class meant that I needed to explore, not only how young people's agendas influenced the classroom ecology, but also how the classroom structure influenced the agendas the young people pursued and how these were manifested during the lesson. This study is concerned primarily with describing and explaining a case of pupil engagement in physical education and to generate at a substantive level (Glaser and Strauss, 1978) theory which can make sense of the events in the one case study school. The aim is to provide some insights into why things happened the way they did and attempt to explain these happenings. The data presented in this study endorse to some extent the values claimed for the implementation of Sport Education. However, the implementation of Sport Education did not lead to all its' advocates claim for it and, although its implementation highlighted that it is possible to modify some of the agendas young people pursue during physical education lessons, I became particularly interested in the circumstances where sport education failed to hold the many benefits it purports to. Having presented these key findings, this thesis concludes with a discussion of the implications for those working with and for young people, and for the design and implementation of policies and practice in relation to physical education. Although I outline the implications of the issues emerging from this study for future practice which, at the very least, we need to consider, this study has made particularly clear the complexities of introducing change in schools.
Androgen Receptor Regulates Transcription of the ZEB1 Transcription Factor

The zinc finger E-box binding protein 1 (ZEB1) transcription factor belongs to a two-member family of zinc-finger homeodomain proteins involved in physiological and pathological events mostly relating to cell migration and epithelial to mesenchymal transitions (EMTs). ZEB1 (also known as δEF1, zfhx1a, TCF8, and Zfhep) plays a key role in regulating such diverse processes as T-cell development, skeletal patterning, reproduction, and cancer cell metastasis. However, the factors that regulate its expression and consequently the signaling pathways in which ZEB1 participates are poorly defined. Because it is induced by estrogen and progesterone and is high in prostate cancer, we investigated whether tcf8, which encodes ZEB1, is regulated by androgen. Data herein demonstrate that tcf8 is induced by dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in the human PC-3/AR prostate cancer cell line and that this induction is mediated by two androgen response elements (AREs). These results demonstrate that ZEB1 is an intermediary in androgen signaling pathways.
Co-Evolution of Friendship and Publishing in Online Blogging Social Networks

In the past decade, blogging web sites have become more sophisticated and influential than ever. Much of this sophistication and influence follows from their network organization. Blogging social networks (BSNs) allow individual bloggers to form contact lists, subscribe to other blogs, comment on blog posts, declare interests, and participate in collective blogs. Thus, a BSN is a bimodal venue, where users can engage in publishing (post) as well as in social (make friends) activities. In this paper, we study the co-evolution of both activities. We observed a significant positive correlation between blogging and socializing. In addition, we identified a number of user archetypes that correspond to "mainly bloggers," "mainly socializers," etc. We analyzed a BSN at the level of individual posts and changes in contact lists and at the level of trajectories in the friendship-publishing space. Both approaches produced consistent results: the majority of BSN users are passive readers; publishing is the dominant active behavior in a BSN; and social activities complement blogging, rather than compete with it.
Graduating in Canada: Profile, Labour Market Outcomes and Student Debt of the Class of 2005. Culture, Tourism and the Centre for Education Statistics. Research Paper. Catalogue no. 81-595-M No. 074.

The National Graduates Survey (NGS) examines the labour market experiences of graduates from Canadian public universities, CEGEPs [Colleges d'enseignement general et professionnel], community colleges and trade/vocational programs. The survey's primary objective is to obtain information on the labour market experiences of graduates entering the labour market, focusing on employment, occupations and the relationship between jobs and education. The NGS interviews graduates two and five years after graduation. To date, six graduating classes have been surveyed: 1982, 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000 and 2005. This report presents the first results of the 2007 National Graduates Survey (Class of 2005). It looks at graduates who completed the requirements or graduated from a college or university bachelor, master or doctoral program in 2005. Data for graduates of trade/vocational programs are not presented in this report. The first section describes the characteristics of graduates from college, bachelor, master and doctorate level programs. The second section focuses on experiences after graduation including pursuing further education and labour market activities. Section three presents information on the financing of postsecondary education, its relation to education level and labour market outcomes. The final section focuses on co-operative education and international studies and their relationship with labour market outcomes and student debt.
Improving the intelligibility of dysarthric speech towards enhancing the effectiveness of speech therapy

Dysarthria is a neuro-motor disorder in which the muscles used for speech production and articulation are severely affected. Dysarthric patients are characterized by slow or slurred speech that is difficult to understand. This work aims at enhancing the intelligibility of dysarthric speech towards developing an effective speech therapy tool. In this therapy tool, enhanced speech is used for providing auditory feedback with a delay to instill confidence in the patients, so that they can improve their speech intelligibility gradually through relearning. Feature level transformation techniques based on linear predictive coding (LPC) coefficient mapping and frequency warping of LPC poles are experimented in this work. Speech utterances from Nemours dataset with mild and moderate dysarthria are used to study the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The quality of the transformed speech is evaluated using subjective and objective measures. A significant improvement in the intelligibility of speech was observed. Our method henceforth could be used to enhance the effectiveness of speech therapy, by encouraging the dysarthric patients talk more, thus helping in their fast rehabilitation.
Low-Power Circuits for a 2.5-V, 10.7-to-86-Gb/s Serial Transmitter in 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS

Low-power building blocks for a serial transmitter operating up to 86 Gb/s are designed and implemented in a 130-nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with 150-GHz fT SiGe HBT. Power reduction is achieved by employing a low-voltage 2.5-V BiCMOS logic family, and by trading off bias current for inductive peaking. A serial transmitter test chip is fabricated in a 130-nm, 150-GHz fT SiGe BiCMOS technology. Operation is verified up to 86 Gb/s at room temperature (92Gb/s and 71Gb/s at 0degC and 100degC, respectively). As compared to recent state-of-the-art CMOS results, this work shows that by adding a SiGe HBT to a CMOS process one can achieve double the data rate with half the power dissipation
PACE Corpus: a multilingual corpus of Polarity-annotated textual data from the domains Automotive and CEllphone

In this paper, we describe a publicly available multilingual evaluation corpus for phrase-level Sentiment Analysis that can be used to evaluate real world applications in an industrial context. This corpus contains data from English and German Internet forums (1000 posts each) focusing on the automotive domain. The major topic of the corpus is connecting and using cellphones to/in cars. The presented corpus contains different types of annotations: objects (e.g. my car, my new cellphone), features (e.g. address book, sound quality) and phrase-level polarities (e.g. the best possible automobile, big problem). Each of the posts has been annotated by at least four different annotators ― these annotations are retained in their original form. The reliability of the annotations is evaluated by inter-annotator agreement scores. Besides the corpus data and format, we provide comprehensive corpus statistics. This corpus is one of the first lexical resources focusing on real world applications that analyze the voice of the customer which is crucial for various industrial use cases.
On the Optimal Solutions to AND/OR Series-Parallel Graphs

ABSTRACT. This paper is concerned with efficient ways to find optimal solutions to AND/OR graphs. Although the general methods are still at large, we have found an efficient way to obtain optimal solutions to AND/OR series-parallel graphs. This is achieved by reducing an AND/OR series-parallel graph to an AND/OR tree. Once a graph is reduced to a tree, all the known exact and heuristic methods of tree searching can be applied.
Modeling Denomination Structures

Previous work on the denomination structure of currency treats as exogenous the distribution of transactions and the denominations held by people. Here, by way of a matching model, both are endogenous. In the model, trades in pairwise meetings alternate in time with the opportunity to freely choose a portfolio of denominations and there is a trade-off between the benefits of small-denomination money for transacting and the costliness of carrying a large quantity of small-denomination money. For a given denomination structure, a monetary steady state is shown to exist. The model implies that too small denominations are abandoned. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.
Final Project Submission-Using the Access Log to Improve the Front Page

Front pages for sites such as www.cs. utexas.edu function as portals, whose goal is to allow visiting users easy access to all of the information stored on the site. Traditionally, these front pages are carefully designed by hand with two main objectives in mind: first, that important information in the site should be easily accessed by navigating the provided links, and second, that the site should have a clean design and not be overwhelmingly complicated. Unfortunately, as the amount of information on a web site increases, these two goals come into conflict. There are too many pages for the front page to link to all of them without becoming cluttered, and a front page with a simple design must by necessity leave out direct links to some of the information on the site. Currently, front pages are made by hand in an ad-hoc manner. Consequently, sometimes there are direct links on the front page to content that is rarely accessed, and sometimes there is frequently accessed content that is not directly linked. Superfluous links waste the time of the user, who is presented with a front page that has additional clutter without additional utility. Popular content that is not directly linked also wastes the user’s time, because he must navigate a hierarchical maze to find the desired content. It also increases strain on the server, because the server must load pages other than the one the user really wants as the user browses for his desired content. In order to increase the utility of the front page and to partially automate its generation, we propose to add a new section to the front page of a website, the dynamic box. This section contains dynamic content that is updated every two hours or so. The links in the dynamic box are chosen based on the access logs, and reflect the current interests of other visitors to the site. Thus the dynamic box represents the “pulse of the community” and presents a site visitor with a list of links that he will likely be interested in based only on the knowledge that he has loaded the front page for the website. The idea here is that the dynamic box pushes content on visitors, who may then access content that they might not otherwise have realized existed.
The Role of SMEs in Modern Economy

The worldwide experience proves the special role and the importance of small and medium enterprises within the national economies. After the ascension of the last three decades, it is thought that the small and medium enterprises will be in the next period the main vector of the economic progress, both in the developed countries and the ones in transition. On the one hand, the attributes of small and medium enterprises situates this type of organization in the foreground of economic development. On the other hand, the coordinates defining the new configuration of the world economy are favourable to the expansion of the small and medium sector
THE LOCAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE FU-ORIONIS-LIKE OBJECTS AR 6A AND 6B

We present new 12CO J = 3–2 and HCN J = 3–2 molecular line maps of the region surrounding the young star AR 6 using the 15 m James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). AR 6 was previously found to be a double source with both components exhibiting several characteristics of FU Orionis (FUor) eruptive variable stars. The aims of this investigation were to determine if the AR 6 sources are associated with molecular outflows and if a significant reservoir of natal molecular gas and dust exists around the stars. These observations form a part of a large-scale study of the outflow and circumstellar environment characteristics of FUors and FUor-like objects to place constrains on the age and evolutionary state of sources exhibiting FUor-like tendencies. Our data indicate that AR 6, like FUor itself, does not possess a CO outflow and likewise, does not show evidence for large amounts of molecular gas in its circumstellar environment. In fact, AR 6 seems to lie in a local minimum of HCN emission. This is also found in 850 μm dust emission seen in JCMT archival data. We conclude that from the near-infrared to the sub-millimeter, AR 6 is similar to FUor in several respects. We interpret the lack of significant dust and molecular gas in the circumstellar environment of AR 6, together with the large near-infrared (NIR) thermal excess, as evidence that the sources have exhausted their natal envelopes, that they have at least small hot circumstellar disks, and that they are more evolved than Class I protostars. This, in itself, suggests that, since FUor eruptions have also been observed in stars with large dust mass envelopes (e.g., V346 Nor) and with CO outflows (e.g., L1551 IRS5), FUor events probably occur at many different stages in the early, formative phase of a star's life, and lends support to the idea that FUor outbursts are repetitive like their shorter-lived relatives occurring in EXor eruptive variables. Finally, we study the stellar environment around AR 6 using Two Micron All Sky Survey, Spitzer Infrared Array Camera, and Chandra ACIS images and show that, being part of the “Spokes” young stellar cluster, AR 6 is unlike many FUors which are typically located in more sparsely populated regions.
Approaching human listener accuracy with modern speaker verification

Being able to recognize people from their voice is a natural ability that we take for granted. Recent advances have shown signiﬁcant improvement in automatic speaker recognition performance. Besides being able to process large amount of data in a fraction of time required by human, automatic systems are now able to deal with diverse channel effects. The goal of this paper is to examine how state-of-the-art automatic system performs in comparison with human listeners, and to investigate the strategy for human-assisted form of automatic speaker recognition, which is useful in forensic investigation. We set up an experimental protocol using data from the NIST SRE 2008 core set. A total of 36 listeners have participated in the listening experiments from three sites, namely Australia, Finland and Singapore. State-of-the-art automatic system achieved 20% error rate, whereas fusion of human listeners achieved 22%.
When Business and Education Collide : Private schools as hybrid organizations in the educational field

This thesis turns to the contested educational field to explore how hybrid schools and its principals deal with conflicting institutional demands. In the context of venture capital firm operated schools, two contrasting logics with conflicting demands become prominent: market logic demands concerning shareholder value and educational logic demands regarding educational activities. A case study was conducted on schools owned by a venture capital firm and our findings suggest two different levels of demands (‘Fundamental’ and ‘Additional’) which evokes different organizational responses. While strict compliance is apparent on the fundamental level, partially due to the specificity of the demands, resource dependency and high supervision of organizational conformity, there is room for agency, compromises and defiance at the additional level. To ensure constituencies about its commitment to their fundamental demands the hybrid schools use a strategy of avoidance to conceal and disguise its dual compliance. Further, they customize their information and rhetoric to suit the constituencies’ embraced logic and by that manage to claim their right to operate in the contested field. Finally, at the managerial level the principals’ role resemble the role of a gatekeeper, determining which demands other organizational members should focus on and what remains at their own desk.