Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
There and back again: convergence towards the competition state plan

The competition state thesis was first penned nearly 20 years ago against a backdrop of Thatcherism transitioning to Blairism. It describes a scenario in which advanced welfare states, stripped of resources and legitimacy, are disempowered to such an extent that they are replaced by the competition state. It is posited that no longer is the state primarily concerned with decommodifying citizens. Marked by lower social spending, lower tax, a reliance on active labour market programmes and governance through flexible networks consisting of state and non-state actors, institutions and organisations, the competition state is fundamentally geared towards ensuring the conditions for a successful global market economy. Previous work argued that empirical analysis of the competition state suggested that the competition state took more than one form but that it was a very real phenomenon. This paper seeks to query whether such conclusions can be maintained when a longitudinal approach is taken. Evidence would suggest yet again that there is no single approach to social policy; however, it would appear that, for all the diversity that exists within the political economy of welfare states, the impact of the competition state is always present.
Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth

This paper explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed. I document that a key feature of the growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than application of better technology to existing sources, and suggest that the end of that era could come soon. The economic dislocations that historically followed temporary oil supply disruptions are reviewed, and the possible implications of that experience for what the transition era could look like are explored.
Développement financier, croissance économique et productivité globale des facteurs en Afrique Sub‐saharienne**

Resume: L’article analyse empiriquement les liens developpement financier (DF)-croissance economique, et developpement financier-productivite globale des facteurs (PGF) en Afrique Sub-saharienne. L’etude est basee sur une approche VAR: tests de cointegration de Johansen et modeles a correction d’erreurs. L’echantillon comprend 22 pays et porte sur la periode 1960–2002. Les resultats suggerent que le DF et la croissance, et le DF et la PGF sont cointegres, dans plusieurs pays. De plus, dans plusieurs cas, la relation entre le DF et la croissance est caracterisee par une causalite bidirectionnelle au sens de Granger, alors que la relation entre le DF et la PGF est caracterisee par une causalite unidirectionnelle allant du DF vers la PGF. Il apparait, a quelques exceptions pres, que le developpement financier stimule la croissance dans les pays ou cette croissance est soutenue par le progres technique. L’implication de nos resultats est que toute mesure qui stimule le developpement financier, va stimuler la croissance economique a travers l’acceleration du progres technique. Abstract: The paper empirically analyzes the financial development (FD)-growth nexus, and the financial development-total factor productivity (TFP) link in sub-Saharan Africa. The study is based on a VAR approach: Johansen cointegration tests and error correction models. The sample includes 22 countries over the period from 1960 to 2002. Results suggest that FD and economic growth and, FD and TFP are cointegrated for many countries. Moreover, in many cases, the relationship between FD and growth is characterized by bidirectional causality in the Granger sense, whereas the relation between FD and TFP is characterized by a unidirectional causality running from FD to TFP. With few exceptions, it appears that financial development spurs economic growth in countries where that growth is supported by technological progress. The implication of the findings is that any reform that causes betterment in the financial sector will foster economic growth through a sharp increase in technological progress.
The Swedish Election 1998: A Protest Vote and the Birth of a New Political Landscape?

The 1998 Swedish general election was a protest election primarily against the Social Democratic Party. The party was hit by a debate on deceit when the unpopular financial restructuring policy was implemented. Disappointed social democratic voters from the 1994 election flocked to the Left Party. Others did not vote at all. The electoral turnout dropped to 81.4 percent; the lowest level in a parliamentary election since the election of 1958. A turnout of 81.4 percent is not particularly low from an international perspective, but it has received a great deal of attention in the political debate. Certain signs do indicate that there has been a general devaluation of voting as a means of exercising political influence among large groups of voters. Other forms of influence are perceived as being more meaningful. A sense of meaninglessness, of individual and institutional powerlessness, also seems to be spreading to social groups that have traditionally had a fundamental trust in the political system.
EMC compliance testing of BBC World Service HF transmitter sites

The aim of this work is to seek a modelling and measurement methodology to assess compliance of BBC World Service HF transmitter sites with ICNIRP safety guidelines relating to near zone incident field levels and the SAR and current densities they induce in the body, and to determine the most restrictive quantities. A typical HF curtain array is modelled over a Sommerfeld ground, and near zone cross-polar vertical fields are shown to be as significant as their horizontal co-polar counterparts, even without confounding support structures being considered. Results for ‘Virtual Family’ phantom models exposed to plane wave fields are described and compared with HPA data. A hybrid computational technique to illuminate phantoms with realistic near zone antenna fields is discussed, together with a corroborative field measurement strategy, focussing towards development of a general evaluation paradigm for all HF installations.
Integration of Global Knowledge Networks

This article surveys the literature and develops a framework for research into the integration of distributed knowledge work (DKW). Knowledge work is considered to be “distributed” whenever key decisions for execution of the project cut across organizational boundaries, as occurs under outsourcing, offshoring, or open‐source arrangements. The growth of such arrangements in recent years is well documented. Nonetheless, research into maintaining the coherence of a DKW project from initiation to customer delivery, often referred to as supply chain integration, project or systems integration, or simply “integration,” is relatively new. We first review the relevant literature from operations, service, and information management, organizational theory, and engineering design, focusing on the key decisions identified by this literature in relation to the contracting, organization, work, and information infrastructure design of a knowledge work project. We then attempt to open the “black box” of integration by inductively organizing these key decisions. Finally, we contrast this approach with prior research frameworks and identify key topics for future study.
A Bag of Useful Tricks for Practical Neural Machine Translation: Embedding Layer Initialization and Large Batch Size

In this paper, we describe the team UT-IIS’s system and results for the WAT 2017 translation tasks. We further investigated several tricks including a novel technique for initializing embedding layers using only the parallel corpus, which increased the BLEU score by 1.28, found a practical large batch size of 256, and gained insights regarding hyperparameter settings. Ultimately, our system obtained a better result than the state-of-the-art system of WAT 2016. Our code is available on https://github.com/nem6ishi/wat17.
A novel diffracted tubes technology based on the method of ray tracing

It is well known that the method of ray tracing tubes could be used to predict the propagation of radiowave in complex environment. Moreover, it is an important technology used to explore the characteristics of indoor radiowave propagation. But the traditional methods could not compute the path vector correspond to diffraction ray tube when ray which ray tube intersect with the obstacle such as furniture. In this paper, a novel diffracted tubes technology has been put forword, which can effectively overcome the shortcoming of traditional method and the diffracted tube path vector expression has been calculated. According to the novel method, none of the diffraction tubes which is contributed to the receiver is given up. As the result, the prediction efficiency can be improved.
Identification of Merkel Cells by an Antibody to Villin

Merkel cells represent a population of epithelial cells in the skin and oral mucosa. Although Merkel cells are reliably distinguishable from other epithelial cells at the ultrastructural level, these cells are usually not discernible by standard light microscopy and need special techniques for their identification. Villin is an actin-crosslinking protein that is associated with the actin filament cores of brush border microvilli. In this study we show that an antibody against villin is an excellent marker of Merkel cells and their microvilli even at the light microscopic level. The surrounding keratinocytes and subepithelial connective tissue cells do not show any significant affinity for the antibody against villin. Confocal laser micrographs reconstructed from serial images 0.5 μm thick of Merkel cells that were immunostained with villin clearly reveal the three-dimensional morphology of Merkel cells and their microvilli. The presence of villin in Merkel cell microvilli lends support to the idea that these cells might have a mechanoreceptor function.
Conflict, inflation and money

Conflict is endemic in the capitalist system and concerns all aspects of economic life : the techniques of production to be used, the length and intensity of the working day, and the distribution of income. Naturally, these are all interconnected and what happens in one sphere influences what happens in the rest, and all in some way affect the behaviour of wages and prices. So much is obvious, but, in view of the complexity of the inflationary process, the present article focuses on just one particular area, namely how conflict over the distribution of income affects the general level of prices in advanced capitalist economies. A formal model is constructed in which the following factors are combined in a coherent fashion : taxes, the terms of trade, expectations and money. In writing this article I have drawn on a wide variety of past writing on the subject of inflation, although usually without explicit acknowledgement. Amongst the works which influenced me most were: Marx's writing on the reserve army of labour, Keynes' How to Pay for the War, Maynard's Economic Development and the Price Level, Phillips' famous article on unemploy ment and wages, Wilkinson's contribution to Do Trade Unions Cause Inflation? and, finally, monetarist writing on expectations.
Phosmet induces up‐regulation of surface levels of the cellular prion protein

CHRONIC (2 day) exposure of human neuroblastoma cells to the organophosphate pesticide phosmet induced a marked concentration-dependent increase in the levels of PrP present on the cell surface as assessed by biotin labelling and immunoprecipitation. Levels of both phospholipase C (PIPLC)-releasable and non-releasable forms of PrP were increased on the plasma membrane. These increases appear to be due to post-transcriptional mechanisms, since PrP mRNA levels as assessed by Northern blotting were unaffected by phosmet treatment. These data raise the possibility that phosmet exposure could increase the susceptibility to the prion agent by altering the levels of accessible PrP.
A Methodological Study to Develop a Standard Operational Protocol for Nurses on Central Line Catheter Care of Patients in Selected Intensive Care Units

Aim: This study aims to develop a standard operational protocol (SOP) for central line catheter care for nurses. Materials and Methods: A preliminary draft of protocol based on extensive review of the literature was developed. The current practices of the nurses regarding central line catheter care were observed. Focus group discussions (FGD) were conducted with the nurses to identify the problems encountered by them during care of central line. Four rounds of Delphi were conducted to validate the protocol. The protocol was found to be feasible in terms of understanding, clarity and easy implementation after conducting a pilot study. An observation checklist was developed from the final draft of the protocol. The nurses were taught regarding the central line catheter care as per the protocol. 30 nurses were observed during central line catheter care by the researcher. After implementation of the protocol, feedback of the nurses was taken by conducting FGDs. Results: Content validity index of each item in the protocol was acceptable. The overall Cronbach's alpha value of the checklist was 0.75. It was concluded that the checklist is reliable and each item has a contribution in the checklist. Conclusion: This protocol addresses interventions to enable staff to provide proper care of the central line catheter to prevent CLABSI.
Reconfigurable, conditional pre-charge SRAM: Lowering read power by leveraging data statistics

This paper presents a data-dependent SRAM paired with statistical methods to leverage data correlation for the purpose of low power read operations. A 10T bit-cell, a prediction-based conditional pre-charge circuit, and a compact column circuit implemented in a 16kbit 28nm SRAM test chip demonstrate power savings up to 69% for applications spanning signal processing, video coding and computer vision as compared to similar memories with naive prediction.
The Business Firm as a Political Actor

The state governance system seems to be incapable to address sufficiently global public goods problems or to regulate global business so that the public interest is served. At the same time, international governmental organizations are unable to fill the governance gap while nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) criticize the behavior of business firms along their supply chains. Therefore, business firms are confronted with increasing social and environmental demands and are requested to take responsibility for issues of public concern. As a response, some business firms engage with corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects and directly contribute to the production of public goods. These developments challenge the received theory of the firm and its strict separation of public and private domains. Corporations become political actors. In this introductory essay, the guest editors first elaborate on the concept of politics and describe the challenges that lead to the new political role of global business firms and, second, will introduce the articles in this special issue and briefly comment on their contribution.
Adaptive peak power tracking for back-to-back wind energy conversion system

Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) has been widely studied since it is closely related to the efficiency of wind harvesting. Generally, there are two major approaches to realize MPPT. One is to reach the optimal power point by perturbing and observing the extracted wind power; the other is to reach the optimal power output by tracing the turbine power curve. Each approach has its pros and cons and their features are complementary to each other. This paper demonstrates a new peak power tracking algorithm which keeps the merits of these two types and avoid their drawbacks. The proposed algorithm is applied to the generator-side of the power converter to ensure that the wind turbine is running at peak power output.
Wideband impedance characterization and modeling of power electronic capacitors under high bias voltage variation

Passive components, in particular capacitors, are widely used in power electronics, especially in EMC filters. Their impedance variation with respect to operating conditions (frequency, temperature, operating voltage) is very significant and shouldn't be neglected. In this paper, we aim to characterize the influence of bias voltage variations on capacitor parameters (C and ESR) over a wide frequency range. The characterization is performed for DC bias voltage range up to 1 kilo Volt. This first step enables to define how to include these operating conditions in the development of “high-frequency electric model” of capacitors, which consider the bias voltage dependence of each electric parameter. To do this, a test bench based on vector network analyzer and two current probes is used.
Strategy and the Crystal Cycle

In industries characterized by very large capital investment and fast-moving technological dynamics, cyclical behavior emerges as the setting in which firms have to strategize. The barriers to entry in such settings are extremely high, but they can be breached—as shown in the Flat Panel Display industry, which has seen successive entries by Japanese, then Korean, then Taiwanese firms over the course of the past decade. In its short history, this industry has already exhibited four cycles (the "crystal cycle") and a fifth downturn is now looming. However, the striking feature of the industry is that firms have successfully entered only during industry downturns, engaging in counter-cyclical investment; not a single firm has entered during an upturn. This provides the starting point for a strategic analysis of this fast-growing industry, conducted through a dynamic framework that complements the "competitive forces" framework introduced in a static setting by Porter over two decades ago. It is critical to draw on both dynamic and static frameworks to fully comprehend the strategic options open to firms.
Cyber maturity in the Asia-Pacific region 2015

Provides a depth of information and analysis that builds a deeper understanding of regional countries’ whole of nation approach to cyber policy, crime, and security issues, and identifies potential opportunities for engagement. Summary The second edition of the International Cyber Policy Centre’s annual Cyber Maturity in the Asia Pacific is the culmination of 12 months research and analysis delving into the cyber maturity of 20 countries within our region. It is a usable, quick-reference resource for those in government, business, academia, and the wider cyber community who are looking to make considered, evidence-based cyber policy judgements in the Asia-Pacific. It provides a depth of information and analysis that builds a deeper understanding of regional countries’ whole of nation approach to cyber policy, crime, and security issues, and identifies potential opportunities for engagement. This years’ maturity metric contains five new countries and integrates a stand-alone assessment category on cybercrime enforcement. This new cybercrime category joins continuing assessments of whole-of-government policy and legislative structures, military organisation, international engagement and CERT team maturity in addition to business and digital economic strength and levels of cyber social awareness. This information is distilled into an accessible format, using metrics to provide a snapshot by which government, business, and the public alike can garner an understanding of the cyber profile of regional actors.
Economic Integration and Convergence Processes in the EU Cohesion Countries

This article compares the economic performance of the EU cohesion countries-Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland - from 1960 to the present, in order to identify the processes that have promoted or inhibited real convergence prospects at various points in time. The likely impacts of EMU in strengthening or weakening these processes are then analysed. Amongst the factors studied are labour-market performance, macroeconomic stability and the efficacy of microeconomic policy-making. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
Characterization of methanogenic and prokaryotic assemblages based on mcrA and 16S rRNA gene diversity in sediments of the Kazan mud volcano (Mediterranean Sea)

The diversity of the methyl‐coenzyme reductase A (mcrA) and 16S rRNA genes was investigated in gas hydrate containing sediment from the Kazan mud volcano, eastern Mediterranean Sea. mcrA was detected only at 15 and 20 cm below seafloor (cmbsf) from a 40‐cm long push core, while based on chemical profiles of methane, sulfate, and sulfide, possible anaerobic oxidation of methane (AOM) depth was inferred at 12–15 cmbsf. The phylogenetic relationships of the obtained mcrA, archaeal and bacterial 16S rRNA genes, showed that all the found sequences were found in both depths and at similar relative abundances. mcrA diversity was low. All sequences were related to the Methanosarcinales, with the most dominant (77.2%) sequences falling in group mcrA‐e. The 16S rRNA‐based archaeal diversity also revealed low diversity and clear dominance (72.8% of all archaeal phylotypes) of the Methanosarcinales and, in particular, ANME‐2c. Bacteria showed higher diversity but 83.2% of the retrieved phylotypes from both sediment layers belonged to the δ‐Proteobacteria. These phylotypes fell in the SEEP‐SRB1 putative AOM group. In addition, the rest of the less abundant phylotypes were related to yet‐uncultivated representatives of the Actinobacteria, Spirochaetales, and candidate divisions OP11 and WS3 from gas hydrate‐bearing habitats. These phylotype patterns indicate that AOM is occurring in the 15 and 20 cmbsf sediment layers.
Toward integrated analysis of human impacts on forest biodiversity: lessons from Latin America.

Although sustainable forest management (SFM) has been widely adopted as a policy and management goal, high rates of forest loss and degradation are still occurring in many areas. Human activities such as logging, livestock husbandry, crop cultivation, infrastructural development, and use of fire are causing widespread loss of biodiversity, restricting progress toward SFM. In such situations, there is an urgent need for tools that can provide an integrated assessment of human impacts on forest biodiversity and that can support decision making related to forest use. This paper summarizes the experience gained by an international collaborative research effort spanning more than a decade, focusing on the tropical montane forests of Mexico and the temperate rain forests of southern South America, both of which are global conservation priorities. The lessons learned from this research are identified, specifically in relation to developing an integrated modeling framework for achieving SFM. Experience has highlighted a number of challenges that need to be overcome in such areas, including the lack of information regarding ecological processes and species characteristics and a lack of forest inventory data, which hinders model parameterization. Quantitative models are poorly developed for some ecological phenomena, such as edge effects and genetic diversity, limiting model integration. Establishment of participatory approaches to forest management is difficult, as a supportive institutional and policy environment is often lacking. However, experience to date suggests that the modeling toolkit approach suggested by Sturvetant et al. (2008) could be of value in such areas. Suggestions are made regarding desirable elements of such a toolkit to support participatory-research approaches in domains characterized by high uncertainty, including Bayesian Belief Networks, spatial multi-criteria analysis, and scenario planning.