Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Different paths of change: home energy efficiency policy in britain and germany

This paper looks at long-term change with regard to domestic energy efficiency policy. More specifically, it discusses how the principal policy instruments targeting energy use in homes in the UK and Germany changed over time. The UK was the first country in the world that introduced obligations on suppliers to save energy at the customer end in 1994. Since then this policy changed rapidly and is now the principal instrument to deliver energy savings in the housing stock. Germany put in place large loans and grants schemes to finance residential energy efficiency measures. The CO 2 Building Rehabilitation Program started in 2001 and was modified frequently over the last decade. This paper aims to answer three questions: First, how did the two policy instruments change over time? Sec- ond, which long-term pressures caused such a remarkable shift and what were the key drivers of that change? Third, how does policy change in the UK compare to Germany?
Family and Childbearing in Canada: A Demographic Analysis

popular format. In Stacking the Deck the authors document social class discrimination in Ontario schooling, and present the analysis in a non-academic, easily understood way. This is the sort of book that teachers without any background in sociology or administration could read. However, I wonder if perhaps a little hasn't been lost in the process. The references are not recent, the theorizing is not strong, and the discussion of alternatives purposely vague. The evidence is supposed to make the case that students streamed to the bottom
Firm Size, Industry Mix and the Regional Transmission of Monetary Policy in Germany

Abstract This paper estimates the impact of interest rate shocks on regional output in Germany over the period from 1970 to 2000. We use a vector autoregression (VAR) model to obtain impulse responses, which reveal differences in the output responses to monetary policy shocks across ten German provinces. Next, we investigate whether these differences can be related to structural features of the regional economies, such as industry mix, firm size, bank size and openness. An additional analysis of the volatility of real GDP growth for the period 1992-2000 includes the Eastern provinces. We also present evidence on the interrelationship between firm size and industry, and compare our measure of firm size with those used in previous studies. We conclude that the differential regional effects of monetary policy are related to industrial composition, but not to firm size or bank size.
Foreign direct investment, pollution and economic growth: evidence from Malaysia

The bounds test developed by Pesaran et al. (2001) is applied to examine the existence of a long-run relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, pollution and output of Malaysia. Granger causality tests are also utilized to test for the presence of the short-run and long-run causal relationship between these variables. Both FDI inflows and pollution have short-run causal relationship on output. Output only has long-run causal relationship on FDI inflows.
Can culture help explain the physical health effects of caregiving over time among African American caregivers?

OBJECTIVES The purposes of this study were to longitudinally examine the health outcomes of 107 African American caregivers who provided care to their elderly dependent family members and to determine the role of culture in predicting health outcomes. METHODS With use of the stress and coping model of Pearlin and colleagues (1990) as a guide, the direct effects of background characteristics and stressors and the direct and mediating effects of resources (including culture) on two caregiver health outcomes (i.e., psychosocial health and physical functioning) were analyzed with hierarchical multiple regression analyses. RESULTS Similar to other studies, we found that combinations of caregiver background characteristics, stressors, and resources at wave 1 had direct effects on African American caregivers' health outcomes at wave 3. Unlike previous studies, where culture was not measured, we found that cultural beliefs and values did help to explain health outcomes for African American caregivers. Specifically, culture justifications for caregiving, baseline psychosocial health, and caregiving mastery predicted wave 3 psychosocial health. Caregiver education, number of morbidities, and physical functioning at wave 1 were associated with physical functioning at wave 3. DISCUSSION The findings from this study have implications for future studies, particularly in regard to cultural beliefs and values among African American caregivers.
Living and Learning Separately? Ethnic Segregation of School Children in Copenhagen

Documenting the level of ethnic residential and school segregation in Copenhagen shows low levels of residential segregation due to suburbanisation (opposite to the US experience), but high levels of school segregation, which for some student groups reach levels comparable to the extreme segregation typical for US cities. Thus, the evidence from Copenhagen suggests that low residential segregation does not necessarily translate into moderate school segregation: when school choice options are available (public and, in particular, private), low residential segregation is compatible with high school segregation levels. A decomposition suggests that socioeconomic differences do not seem to be the main driving-force behind school segregation.
Simplification and Decentralization of the Income Tax

This article presents a new type of welfare-improving tax reform model aimed at simultaneously achieving simplification and decentralization of the personal income tax. This model is based on the results of Pfähler and Dardanoni and Lambert and comprises two elements. The first one is the transformation of the income tax into an equal-yield flat tax. The second one is a reduction of the central taxation in proportion to posttax income in order to vacate a space that may be utilized by subcentral jurisdictions through a surcharge applied on the central tax liability. The theoretical proposal is illustrated with a microsimulation exercise on the Spanish personal income tax.
Finding posts in digital libraries of authors with garbled names

Authors with names containing characters outside the ASCII character set have often names garbled also in digital libraries. We solve this problem using professional social networks and digital libraries relations, links and metadata. To find publications we use simple analysis of connections of the author, his co-authors and affiliates and an approximate string matching algorithm for estimating whether the garbled name can be the right name or not. Experimental results are very promising based on real data in digital libraries such are IEEE Xplore, ACM DL and SpringerLink. Description and explanation of the method is contained, a case study was used for Czech and Slovak authors.
Currency Fluctuations in the Post-Bretton Woods Era

The international monetary landscape that has emerged since the felling of Bretton Woods is characterized by a hybrid exchange rate system that lies somewhere between the textbook polar cases of a gold standard and a pure float. This system has relatively flexible exchange rates between major countries, active central bank intervention in the market for the major currencies, and predominantly fixed exchange rates (relative to the dollar or to some basket of currencies) for less developed countries and newly industrializing nations. The majority of research on currency markets since the early 1970s has focused on the characteristics of flexible exchange rates under this hybrid regime. My thesis is that this research has been unsuccessful. The proportion of (monthly or quarterly) exchange rate changes that current models can explain is essentially zero. Even after-the-fact forecasts that use actual values (instead of forecasted values) of the explanatory variables cannot explain major currency movements over the post-Bretton Woods era. This result is quite surprising, since exchange rate changes would be entirely unpredictable only in very special cases of the theoretical models discussed. As the discussion below will argue, it is not a general implication of market efficiency that exchange rates follow a random walk process.1
The Potential of Tariff Policy for Climate Change Mitigation: Legal and Economic Analysis

This article addresses a potential role that tariff policy can play in encouraging countries to take part in a multilateral effort to mitigate climate change: it complements discussions on border tax adjustment which in law is limited to domestic taxation. It assesses whether increasing tariffs on products from polluting industries amounts to a violation of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and whether protectionism in this case can be differentiated from genuine environmental concerns. It argues that while lowering tariffs on environmental goods may serve as a carrot to promote dissemination of cleaner technologies, tariff deconsolidation is a legitimate stick to encourage polluting countries to move towards an international climate agreement. The article further explores this view by undertaking a partial equilibrium analysis to examine the impact of a unilateral 5% tariff increase on the most carbon-intensive imports from countries not committed to climate polices. Our results, however, suggest that plurilateral action would be more effective than countries pursuing tariff policy in isolation, with the former leading to an average 1.4% net reduction in carbon-intensive imports from a 5% increase in their tariffs.
Complete Genome Sequence of Systemically Disseminated Sequence Type 8 Staphylococcal Cassette Chromosome mec Type IVl Community-Acquired Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

ABSTRACT Staphylococcus aureus JH4899, a community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) isolate collected from a patient with systematically disseminated infection, is classified as sequence type 8 and carries the staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec type IVl (SCCmecIVl). It produces TSST-1, SEC, a newly discovered enterotoxin (SE1), and epidermal cell differentiation inhibitor A (EDIN-A). Here, we present the complete genome sequence of the chromosome and a plasmid harboring the se1 and ednA genes.
The ghost of Nora Batty: A qualitative exploration of the impact of footwear, bandaging and hosiery interventions in chronic wound care

Objective To explore the impact of footwear, bandaging and hosiery interventions in the everyday lives of women and men undergoing treatment for chronic, complex wounds in a city in England, UK. Methods This study draws on data generated in semi-structured interviews with patients exploring outcomes and impacts of undergoing treatment for leg and foot ulcers undertaken as part of a UK National Institute for Health Research funded study. Footwear, bandaging and hosiery are explored here as aspects of material culture, not only in functional terms as a treatment supporting or hindering healing but also as part of the means by which people receiving treatment for two of the most common complex, chronic wounds, leg ulcers and foot ulcers, negotiate and understand their embodied selves in everyday life. Findings Physical and social discomfort associated with interventions can lead to ambivalence about effectiveness. Not being able to dress appropriately impacts on the ability of people to feel comfortable and take part in special occasions and everyday events. In this context, the removal of bandaging or refusal to wear support hosiery which may be viewed as ‘non-compliance’ by a health professional may feel like a strategy of self-care or self-preservation from a patient perspective. Discussion The study of material culture explores how inanimate objects work and how they are worked with in carrying out social functions, regulating social relations and giving symbolic meaning to human activity. The interviews show some of the ways in which footwear, hosiery and bandaging play a role in controlling the boundaries between the private (wounded and potentially socially unacceptable smelly, leaky, embodied), self and the public presentation of self.
Efficient implementation of continuous skyline computation on a multi-core processor

The skyline operator has been proposed as a method for extracting highly-utility samples from a large database. A set of the extracted samples is called `skyline'. The theme of the MEMOCODE 2015 Design Contest is to accelerate continuous skyline computation, skyline computing for a streaming dataset, on any platform. In this paper, we present our method that achieved the best performance in the contest. We describe our data structure, algorithms, and optimization methods for the contest reference code in the multi-core processor. We have accelerated our solution in the two aspects of efficient algorithms and code optimizations. The task of the contest is to compute the skyline at each time-step for 800,000 entries with a seven-dimensional vector value and the activation time and the deactivation time. We use one commodity computer and the average runtime of our solution is 407 milliseconds.
Causality between Total Expenditures on Alcoholic Beverages and Violent Crime: Evidence from USA

This study examines the cointegration and causal relationship between alcohol expenditures and violent crime for USA for the period 1960-2007 using Johansen and Juselius (1990) cointegration test and the Granger no-causality approach developed by Toda and Yamamoto (1995). The study does not find a long-run equilibrium relationship between total expenditures on alcoholic beverages and violent crime. The results of Toda and Yamamoto approach indicate that total expenditures on alcoholic beverages do not Granger cause violent crime in the USA.
Pain Related Catastrophizing on Physical Limitation in Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients. Is Acceptance Important?

Abstract The experience of Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) includes significant suffering and life disruption. This cross-sectional study examined the associations between pain, catastrophizing, acceptance and physical limitation in 55 individuals (11 males and 44 female; Mean age = 54.37; SD = 18.346), from the Portuguese population with (RA) 2 years after the diagnosis; also explored the role of acceptance as a mediator process between pain, catastrophizing and physical limitation. Results showed positive correlation between pain and catastrophizing (r = .544; p ≤ .001), and also between pain and 2-years’ physical limitation (r = .531; p ≤ .001) Results also showed that acceptance was negatively correlated with physical limitation 2 years after the diagnosis (r = –.476; p ≤ .001). Path-analysis was performed to explore the direct effect of pain (ß = –.393; SD = .044; Z = 3.180; p ≤ .001) and catastrophizing (n.sig.) on physical limitation and also to explore the buffer effect of acceptance in this relationship (indirect effect ß = –.080). Results showed that physical limitation is not necessarily a direct product of pain and catastrophizing but acceptance was also involved. Pain and catastrophizing are associated but the influence of catastrophizing on physical limitation is promoted by low levels of acceptance. Results emphasize the relevance of acceptance as the emotional regulation process by which pain and catastrophizing influence physical functioning and establish the basic mechanism by which pain and catastrophizing operate in a contextual-based perspective. Also the study results offer a novel approach that may help behavioral health and medical providers prevent and treat these conditions.
Adaptación y validación del instrumento posiciones sobre el proceso de enfermería

OBJETIVO: estimar las propiedades psicometricas de la adaptacion del instrumento Posicoes frente o diagnostico de enfermagem para evaluar las actitudes del personal de enfermeria respecto al proceso de enfermeria. METODO: estudio metodologico con muestra no probabilistica de 973 auxiliares de enfermeria y 632 enfermeros de 35 hospitales y ambulatorios vinculados a la Secretaria del Estado de la Salud de Sao Paulo. La validez del instrumento de 20 items fue verificada mediante el analisis factorial confirmatorio que identifico un factor mas general en segundo nivel, formado por los tres factores clasicos de actitudes. La confiabilidad correspondio a 0,954 para el instrumento total. RESULTADOS: el instrumento Posicoes sobre o Processo de Enfermagem posee validez y confiabilidad adecuadas. CONCLUSIONES: se recomienda verificar en estudios futuros si los items presentan comportamiento diferencial segun la categoria profesional del respondiente y verificar el comportamiento del instrumento con estudiantes
Performance characteristics of the venous clinical severity score.

OBJECTIVE To facilitate study of the natural history and management of venous disease, a 10-component venous clinical severity (VCS) score has been proposed as an objective measure of disease severity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the validity and reliability of this instrument. METHODS VCS component scores (0 to 3) for pain, varicose veins, edema, pigmentation, inflammation, induration, stocking use, and ulcer size, duration, and number were measured in consecutive patients with chronic venous disease. Differences between observers (n = 3) and on serial evaluation by the same observer were determined. RESULTS One hundred twenty-eight limbs in 64 patients were evaluated. Mean VCS score increased from CEAP class 0 (1.7 +/- 1.8) to class 6 (14.7 +/- 3.0; R =.84; P <.0001). Scores in 68 limbs evaluated twice by the same observer differed by a mean of only 0.8 (P =.15), with a reliability coefficient of 0.6. Mean scores of 8.0 (+/- 5.1), 7.2 (+/- 5.1), and 8.0 (+/- 5.4) were obtained in 63 limbs evaluated by all three investigators (P =.02). Only the component scores for pain, inflammation, and pigmentation showed significant (P <.05) interobserver variability. Interobserver agreement on the absence of disease or presence of severe disease as defined by scores of 3 or less or 8 or more was good (kappa = 0.59 and 0.65, respectively). CONCLUSION The VCS score is a critically needed tool for evaluating changes in venous disease over time. The score is reliable and shows good correlation with CEAP clinical classification.
A Descriptive Analysis of State Government Debt‐Related Derivatives Policies

The increasing use of debt‐related derivatives over the last 10 years, combined with the recent global financial crisis' impact on these instruments, greatly affected the finances of many state and local governments in the United States. Some observers believe the negative effects could have been minimized had governments established prudent financial risk management policies governing these products. This research describes and analyzes debt‐related derivatives policies at the state level. It finds that while 30 states used debt‐related derivatives between 2005 and 2010, only 20 states have policies guiding financial derivative practices, with the policies being of varying breadth and depth.
SERVICE TYPOLOGIES: A STATE OF THE ART SURVEY

Services comprise an ever‐expanding source of employment in the world's economies and are of significant interest to both academicians and practitioners. In this study, historical perspectives from which to view service typologies are provided and four decades of service typologies are chronicled. The interest in services demonstrated by academicians is tracked over time as are the purposes for which typologies have been developed. A unified schematic representation of services is developed in which the common themes underlying service typology development are identified from both a macro and micro level. Based on this study, areas for future research are identified.
Did the price-related reforms in Ghana's cocoa sector favour farmers?

It is generally hypothesized in the innovation systems literature that institutions can create production incentives for farmers. This paper examines whether the introduction in 1984 of the Producer Price Review Committee (PPRC) in Ghana's cocoa sector has improved the transmission of world prices to farmers. We test how fast and to what extent world prices have been transmitted, and also address the stability of the prices received by cocoa farmers. For the period 1960–2011, the results were as follows: (1) the production of cocoa beans depended positively on the prices farmers received and negatively on price variance; (2) the establishment of the PPRC provided higher prices for farmers; and (3) the PPRC's use of the flexible freight on board (FOB) price-setting rule resulted in a better price transmission than the employed cost-plus-margin approach. However, under the FOB price-setting rule, producer price variance rose sharply. We conclude that, although FOB pricing mechanisms are often recommended for markets where prices are institutionally determined, stabilization policies should be factored in to protect farmers against international price fluctuations.
Gathering customer feedback online and Swedish SMEs

Purpose – This paper aims at exploring and describing the tools used by small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) to collect customer feedback online, their components and the criteria used in selecting these internet‐based tools.Design/methodology/approach – Multiple in‐depth case studies were conducted on five SMEs all of which are engaged in customer feedback collection online. The data collected by personal interviews was analysed in a cross‐case analysis. Findings: We conclude that e‐mail is the most dominant tool though supported other offline means. Components of Internet‐based customer feedback system and the criteria for assessing Internet‐based customer feedback collection tool by SMEs were also identified.Research limitation/implications – Five cases were investigated out of 60 and the study was restricted to the northern part of Sweden. Adding other methods could also have cross‐fertilised the study.Practical implications – The study reinforces the need for SMEs managers to use the Internet t.