Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DEFINING A MULTIDIMENSIONAL INDEX OF DECENT WORK FOR MÉXICO

De acuerdo con las leyes mexicanas y las regulaciones de la OIT se construyo un indice multidimensional de trabajo decente usando la metodologia de Alkire y Foster aplicada a paneles de la Encuesta de Ocupacion y Empleo (ENOE). Es un indice multidimensional que toma en cuenta ocho dimensiones, una monetaria y siete no monetarias, que son ingreso laboral, horas trabajadas, seguridad social, cuidados familiares, trabajo suficiente, proteccion a los derechos laborales, respeto a los derechos laborales y estabilidad en el empleo. De esta manera se logro clasificara los trabajosen cuatro tipos: decente, no decente, MEL (vulnerable por Minimos Estandares Laborales) y vulnerable por salario.
Developing and Testing a Framework for Alternate Ownership, Tenure and Governance Strategies for the Proposed Detroit-Windsor River Crossing - Phase II Report

This research presents an analytic framework that can explore the merits and demerits associated with public and/or private ownership of a transportation infrastructure, where potentials for cost recovery through revenues generated appear to be high, even though the project may be fraught with risks at the other end. The framework also explores various forms of joint ownership associated with the public and private enterprise. Ownership, Tenure & Governance (OTG) are three terms that incorporate the role of each entity in a strategy, where a number of OTG strategies are considered to encourage joint entity participation. The strategies vary in the degree of participation by the public and the private entity. The analytic framework is developed based upon the principles of investment decision under uncertainty. The primary objectives of the research are as follows: 1) Develop a methodology to integrate uncertainty and risk in the transportation infrastructure investment decision making process; 2) Identify different strategies ranging from public to private to various forms of joint OTG scenarios; 3) Develop an analytic framework that can be used to test different OTG scenarios; and, 4) Demonstrate the methodology with a real world case study.
Innovation by Teams in Shanghai, China: Cooperative Goals for Group Confidence and Persistence

Organizations increasingly ask teams to stimulate innovation but research is needed to identify the conditions when teams have the confidence and persistence to innovate successfully. Using the concepts of cooperation, competition, group potency and initiative, this study proposes that relationships where team members believe that their goals are cooperative in that one person's goal attainment helps others reach their goals lay the foundation for innovation. Specifically, cooperative goals convince team members that they have the group potency to complete a range of tasks and the initiative to persist to overcome obstacles and innovate. In contrast, competitive, negatively related goals and independent, unrelated goals are hypothesized to undermine confidence, persistence and innovation. Group members from 101 teams from various organizations in Shanghai, China, completed a survey with measures of cooperative, competitive and independent goals, group potency, and initiative; their project leader completed the measure of innovation. Structural equation analysis supports the theoretical framework that cooperative goals help group members develop the confidence of group potency and the initiative to persist to accomplish tasks and innovate. These results suggest that cooperative goals and group potency and initiative are important conditions that help teams innovate for organizations and thereby specify conditions that can help groups realize their potential to achieve innovation for organizations.
Returns to fertilizer use: does it pay enough? Some new evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

The low level of modern inputs adoption by African farmers is considered to be a major impediment to food security and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa. The government of Burkina Faso, following the example of a number of other countries in the region, launched a subsidy program in 2008 to encourage farmers’ uptake of chemical fertilizers and foster cereal production. This article explores the importance of fertilizer profitability in explaining the relative, apparent low use of chemical fertilizers by farmers in Burkina Faso. Using largescale plot data, we estimate maize yield response to nitrogen to be 19 kg/ha on average and to vary with soil characteristics. Profitability, which we measure through the calculation of a marginal value cost ratio, is estimated at 1.4 on those plots which received fertilizers, with significant variations across regions. For those plots on which fertilizers were not applied, we predict that fertilizers should have been profitable in most cases under the current level of subsidized fertilizer prices. These findings suggest that the low uptake of chemical fertilizers might have been driven by factors other than profitability, including insufficient supply of subsidized fertilizers to farmers in need. Our results also call for increasing the availability of credit to farmers in order to encourage adoption of chemical fertilizers. Finally, our results also show that not taking into account the endogeneity of nitrogen use in the yield equation may produce biased estimates of the maize yield response to nitrogen.
Are CEOs and CFOs Rewarded for Disclosure Quality

ABSTRACT: This study provides evidence regarding the importance that boards of directors place on effective communication with the investor community by examining whether CEO and CFO compensation are related to the quality of the firm's financial disclosures. Using an index derived from analyst forecast characteristics and management forecast accuracy to measure disclosure quality, we find changes in the annual bonus for both the CEO and CFO to be positively associated with changes in disclosure quality. We also find that the relation is stronger for high-growth firms, firms that have stronger governance structures, and for executives with lower equity incentives. Overall, our findings provide insight into the importance that boards place on effective communication with investors as a responsibility of the CEO and CFO and, therefore, provide them with contractual incentives to address the moral hazard problem associated with voluntary disclosures. JEL Classifications: M41.
Shared Service Models in Australian Local Government: the fragmentation of the New England Strategic Alliance 5 years on

Abstract In 2004, the New England Strategic Alliance of Councils (NESAC) was formed in a successful effort by its member municipalities to avoid forced amalgamation by the NSW government in its (then) program of compulsory council consolidation. The Armidale-Dumaresq, Guyra, Uralla and Walcha Councils, as well as the New England Weeds County Council, formed a ‘strategic alliance’ under the auspices of NESAC. Over the past 5 years this alliance of councils has developed a model of shared service provision. However, in early 2009, the Walcha Shire Council dramatically announced that it would leave NESAC. This momentous decision raises several interesting questions and may have broader lessons for shared service provision in Australian local government. This paper thus seeks to augment the existing embryonic literature on shared services in Australian local government by analysing the withdrawal of the Walcha Shire Council from NESAC through interviews with the general managers and mayors of the participating organisations.
How Prepared are State and Local Workers for Retirement?

A widespread perception is that state-local government workers receive high pension benefits which, combined with Social Security, provide more than adequate retirement income. This study uses the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and actuarial reports to test this hypothesis. The major finding from the HRS analysis is that most households with state-local employment end up with replacement rates that, while on average higher than those in the private sector, are well below the 80 percent needed to maintain pre-retirement living standards. Even those households with a long-service state-local worker – those who spend more than half of their careers in public employment – have a median replacement rate, including Social Security, of only 72 percent. And this group accounts for less than 30 percent of state-local households. The remaining 70 percent of households with a short- or medium-tenure state-local worker have replacement rates of 48 percent and 57 percent, respectively. Adding income from financial assets still leaves most state-local households short of the target.
A comparison of diffusion models of the term structure

A number of different continuous time approaches that have been developed to model the term structure of interest rates are examined. These techniques span the interest rate literature over the last 20 years or so, and are the most commonly used among both academics and practitioners. We view this paper as a reference for the different term structure models, aiming to bring together the three most commonly used approaches, emphasizing their differences, analysing their respective advantages and disadvantages, and with explicit representations where they exist for prices of discount bonds.
Online visual robot tracking and identification using deep LSTM networks

Collaborative robots working on a common task are necessary for many applications. One of the challenges for achieving collaboration in a team of robots is mutual tracking and identification. We present a novel pipeline for online vision-based detection, tracking and identification of robots with a known and identical appearance. Our method runs in realtime on the limited hardware of the observer robot. Unlike previous works addressing robot tracking and identification, we use a data-driven approach based on recurrent neural networks to learn relations between sequential inputs and outputs. We formulate the data association problem as multiple classification problems. A deep LSTM network was trained on a simulated dataset and fine-tuned on small set of real data. Experiments on two challenging datasets, one synthetic and one real, which include long-term occlusions, show promising results.
Drug resistance in acute viral infections: Rhinovirus as a case study

The emergence and spread of drug resistant virus variants reflects both within-host and between-host processes. We develop an epidemiological model that can be used to address the spread of resistance at the population level, and a virus dynamics model that can be used to study the dynamics of virus over the time course of an individual’s infection. The dynamics depend in an important way on the competition between drug sensitive and drug resistant virus strains. A key observation is that the strength of competition between strains is strongly modulated by the degree of cross-immunity that infection with one strain confers against infection with the other. At the within-host level, we see that an efficient immune response can reduce the likelihood of the emergence of resistant virus. Consequently, resistance poses more of a problem for chronic infections in which there is significant immune impairment than for acute infections. These findings are discussed in the setting of rhinovirus infections, which are an important cause of infection in humans and for which novel antiviral drugs are being developed.
ATP modulates intracellular Ca2+ and firing rate through a P2Y1 purinoceptor in cane toad pacemaker cells

The effect of extracellular ATP (10–100 μm) on intracellular Ca2+ concentration ([Ca2+]i) and firing rate has been studied in single pacemaker cells isolated from the sinus venosus of cane toads. In spontaneously firing cells, ATP initially increased peak [Ca2+]i by 43 ± 5 %, increased diastolic [Ca2+]i by 20 + 3 % and increased the firing rate by 58 ± 8 %. These early effects were followed by a late phase in which both the peak [Ca2+]i and the firing rate declined. Adenosine, and UTP (respectively, P1‐ and P2Y2,4,6‐selective agonists) caused no significant change in [Ca2+]i or firing rate, while αβ‐methylene ATP (a P2X1,3 agonist) caused a small increase in firing rate but no changes in [Ca2+]i. In contrast the P2Y1‐selective agonist 2‐MesADP (1 μm) mimicked the biphasic effects of ATP and these effects were inhibited by the purinoceptor antagonists suramin and PPADS and by the P2Y1‐selective antagonist MRS 2179. Immunohistochemistry established that P2Y1 purinoceptors were present on the cell surface. Western blotting analysis demonstrated that the P2Y1 antibody recognised a 57 kDa protein. After sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ release was prevented with caffeine or ryanodine, ATP no longer had any effect on [Ca2+]i or firing rate. Furthermore, the SR Ca2+ store content was decreased during the late phase of 2‐MesADP application. The effect of ATP was coupled to phospholipase C (PLC) activity because the PLC inhibitor U‐73122 eliminated the effects of ATP. Our study shows that in toad pacemaker cells, the biphasic effects of ATP on pacemaker activity are mainly through P2Y1 purinoceptors, which are able to modulate Ca2+ release from the SR Ca2+ store.
Cellodextrin Transport in Yeast for Improved Biofuel Production

Improving Yeast for Biofuel Production The biofuels industry uses the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to produce ethanol from sugars derived from cornstarch or sugar cane. Plant cell walls are an attractive sugar source; however, yeast does not grow efficiently on cellulose–derived sugars (cellodextrins). Galazka et al. (p. 84, published online 9 September) now show that a model cellolytic fungus Neurospora crassa relies on a cellodextrin transport system to facilitate growth on cellulose. Yeast reconstituted with this transport system grew efficiently on cellodextrins, which could potentially improve the efficiency of cellulosic biofuel production. Reconstitution of a fungal transport system allows yeast to grow on sugars derived from cellulose. Fungal degradation of plant biomass may provide insights for improving cellulosic biofuel production. We show that the model cellulolytic fungus Neurospora crassa relies on a high-affinity cellodextrin transport system for rapid growth on cellulose. Reconstitution of the N. crassa cellodextrin transport system in Saccharomyces cerevisiae promotes efficient growth of this yeast on cellodextrins. In simultaneous saccharification and fermentation experiments, the engineered yeast strains more rapidly convert cellulose to ethanol when compared with yeast lacking this system.
Global and local congestion optimization in technology mapping

In this era of deep submicrometer technologies, interconnects are becoming increasingly important as their effects strongly impact the integrated circuit (IC) functionality and performance. Moreover, logic block size is no longer determined exclusively by total cell area and is often limited by wiring area. However, synthesis optimization objectives are focused on minimizing the number and size of library cells. Methodologies that incorporate congestion within the logic synthesis objective function have been proposed in the past. Nevertheless, we will demonstrate that predicting the true congestion prior to layout is not possible, and the effectiveness of any congestion minimization approach can only be evaluated after routing is completed within the fixed die size. In this paper, we propose a practical, complete methodology which first performs congestion-aware technology mapping using a global weighting factor for the technology-dependent synthesis cost function and then applies incremental localized unmapping and remapping on layout congested areas. This complete approach addresses the problem that one global factor is not suited for all layout regions of the design, which might have very different routing demands. Most importantly, through the application of this methodology to industrial examples, we will show that any attempt at a purely top-down single-pass congestion-aware technology mapping is merely wishful thinking.
HIV-related pulmonary arterial hypertension: clinical presentation and management

Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a progressive albeit rare long-term complication of HIV infection, which has gained importance following the improved survival of HIV-infected patients with the use of HAART. The clinical and pathological findings in PAH associated with HIV infection (HIV–PAH) share many features with the idiopathic form of the disease. HIV–PAH is associated with a particularly poor prognosis and decreased survival compared with HIV-infected patients without this complication, and patients with HIV–PAH tend to die from the effects of PAH rather than as a result of their HIV infection. Prompt diagnosis and effective treatment of PAH in HIV-infected patients is therefore essential. There are currently only limited data regarding the efficacy of PAH therapies in HIV–PAH. Treatment with epoprostenol has been reported to provide benefit in some cases, but is associated with a range of problems linked to the need for continuous intravenous infusion. The dual endothelin receptor antagonist bosentan has proved to be effective in HIV–PAH without affecting the control of HIV infection, and has the benefit of oral administration. Other PAH therapies including prostacyclin analogs, phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors and selective endothelin receptor antagonists have yet to be trialed in this setting. Taking into account currently available data and clinical experience, a treatment algorithm for HIV–PAH based on that defined in treatment guidelines for other forms of PAH is suggested.
Innovation, Technological Conditions and New Firm Survival

High neo-natal mortality is one of the most salient ‘facts’ about firm performance in the industrial organization literature. We model firm survival and examine the relative influence of firm, industry and macroeconomic factors on survival for new vis-a-vis incumbent firms. In particular, we focus on how the intensity of innovation in each industry affects firm survival. Our results imply that while new firms, compared with incumbent firms, thrive in risky and innovative industries, they are also more susceptible to business cycle effects such as changes in the rate of growth of aggregate demand, interest rates and the availability of equity finance. JEL Classification: L11, F13, 034
A data mining approach to developing the profiles of hotel customers

To stay competitive, hotels need to develop a viable customer retention strategy. Since a key to the successful development of such a strategy rests with customer relationship management, hotels should identify the most profitable ways to build and maintain a loyal customer relationship. In an effort to help hotels understand their customers’ preferences and the ways to interact with the customers, we propose data mining techniques. Based on a case study of luxury hotels in South Korea, this paper demonstrates the usefulness and practicality of the proposed data mining techniques.
Antimerger Policy under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act: A Reexamination of the Market Power Hypothesis

Enforcement powers granted under the 1978 Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act were intended to enhance the antitrust agencies' ability to select truly anticompetitive mergers for prosecution. For example, the HSR Act imposes automatic delays on proposed mergers, so that the agencies have time to consider the mergers' competitive effects before they are completed. Also, it provides the agencies with the legal right to compel industry participants to reveal merger-related information during precomplaint investigations. Earlier studies by Eckbo (1983) and Stillman (1983) show that the HSR Act addressed a genuine problem: they conclude that the challenged horizontal mergers in their samples, which cover the 1963-78 period, were not anticompetitive. In this paper we test the proposition that the HSR Act has in fact produced a significant improvement in the agencies' case selection record. We reject this proposition and conclude instead that he merger cases in our sample that were filed after 1978 were mounted against mergers that apparently would not have harmed competition.
An Application of Linear Mixed Effects Model to Assess the Agreement Between Two Methods With Replicated Observations

We study the problem of assessing the agreement between two methods with any number of replicated observations using linear mixed effects (LME) model with Kronecker product covariance structure in a doubly multivariate set-up. This method can also be used in the case of unbalanced designs when number of replications on each patient is unequal, as well as when the number of replications on each patient by respective methods is unequal. The model is implemented using the MIXED procedure of SAS. We demonstrate our proposed method with three real datasets.
The Weakness of Postcommunist Civil Society

Civil society continues to thrive as an object of study in postcommunist Europe, as in most other regions of the world. Much of the literature on postcommunist civil society, however, stresses its relative weakness, whether compared to other regions or to the high expectations of 1989–91. This emphasis on weakness is especially notable given that, only a decade ago, so many observers expected postcommunist civil society to be unusually strong and vibrant. Indeed, although specialists on Latin America and Southern Europe were also beginning to take the concept seriously in the 1980s, most scholars agree that the rapid revival of civil society as a major object of study resulted largely from developments surrounding the collapse of communism. The weakness of postcommunist civil society leads to a host of important questions. Yet is it actually correct to assert that postcommunist civil society is particularly weak? It seems clear that, when compared to the idealistic hopes of 1989–91, the current political, economic, and social realities have fallen short. When compared to other regions, however, the conclusion that postcommunist civil society is distinctively weak needs further substantiation. Such evidence is provided by the World Values Survey, which shows that in a wider crossregional perspective—compared against both older democracies and postauthoritarian countries—postcommunist countries do have relatively lower levels of organizational membership. This finding suggests that, even though there is some variation among the countries of postcommunist Europe, on the whole they still appear to form a coherent group. These empirical findings may affect the prospects for democracy and Marc Morje Howard is assistant professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. This article draws on his forthcoming book, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002).