Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
“Effective” Number of Parties

The qEffectiveq Number of Parties: qA Measure with Application to West Europeq Laakso, Markku;Taagepera, Rein Comparative Political Studies; Apr 1, 1979; 12, 1; Proouest pg. 3 “EFFECTIVE” NUMBER OF PARTIES A Measure with Application to West Europe MARKKU LAAKSO University of Helsinki REIN TAAGEPERA University of California, Irvine I s a large number of parties bound to destabilize a political system (Duverger, 1954) or is it not (e.g., Lijphart, 1968; Nilson, 1974)? Before this question can be answered, the number of parties must be operationally deﬁned in a way that takes into account their relative size. Such a number is also needed if one wants to detect trends toward fewer or more numerous parties over time, or the effects of a proposed change in electoral rules. This article presents ways to calculate this important political variable, calculates it for I42 post-1944 elections in 15 West European countries, and analyzes its possible effect on stability. We often talk of two-party and multiparty systems. We further dis- tinguish three~ or four—party systems in some countries, and even talk (e. g., Blondel, 1969: 535) of a two-and-a-half-party system whenthere is a third party of marginal size. Mexico could be viewed as a one-and-a- half-party system because the PR1 is so much larger than all other parties. Rather than take the number of all existing parties, including even the very smallest, one visibly has a need for a number that takes into account their relative size. We will call this number the “effective number of parties,” using the word “effectiveq somewhat in the sense pressure group literature uses it when talking about “effective access” (Truman, 195]: 506), but even more in the operational sense physicists give it when they talk about effective current (Richards et al., 1960: 594), COMPARATIVE POLITICAL STUDIES. Vol. I2 No. I. April 1979 3-27 © I979 Sage Publications. Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Sage Inc.
TANF's Impact on Low-Income Mothers Raising Children with Disabilities

Using data from the National Survey of America's Families, this study assesses the success of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) goals to increase employment, enhance family stability through marriage promotion, and reduce welfare reliance. In the period prior to TANF implementation, during implementation, and from 1 to 4 years after implementation, employment rates increased for some mother categories. Among categories of poor and near-poor mothers of children with disabilities, marriage rates did not change. Although TANF appears to have mixed results for these families, it is not leading to an overall reduction in welfare reliance among low-income women raising children with disabilities. The authors discuss recommendations and policy implications for the successful promotion of employment among mothers raising children with disabilities.
The impact of classification on psychopharmacology and biological psychiatry

Nosological classification in psychiatry, as it is currently applied, does not facilitate biological and psychopharmacological research. • Syndromal acuity has disappeared. Consequently, it is impossible to determine: (i) vi/hether a particular drug affects a particular symptom configuration; (ii) what exactly the behavioral correlate of a particular biological disturbance is. The problem of unfocused diagnoses is greatly magnified by the phenomenon called comorbidity. • The boundary between distress and disorder is illdefined. • Symptom configuration and certain nonsymptomatological variables such as duration and severity are prematurely linked, so as to conceptualize categorical entities. The validity of those constructs has not been sufficiently demonstrated. This undermines the validity of biological studies and leads to “nosologomania,” ie, an ever-growing series of undervalidated psychiatric “disorders. ” • Symptoms are grouped horizontally as if they all had the same diagnostic “valence. ” This, however, is highly unlikely. • The nosological disease model is unconditionally and uncritically accepted. Alternative models are ignored, particularly the reaction-form model, though it has substantial heuristic value, and deserves to be thoroughly scrutinized. (Research) strategies to remedy this situation are pointed out.
Dual-Spiral methodology for knowledgebase constructions

This research proposes Dual-Spiral methodology, a knowledgebase construction methodology to process the diverse and complex queries about common sense. The main idea of the methodology is that humans and machines collaborate each other to create the knowledgebase of good quality. By applying to WiseKB project, we verify how the methodology works effectively.
Towards Spatially Aware Tangible Displays for the Masses

Spatially aware tangible displays are a promising approach for extending the interaction space of conventional tabletops from the 2D surface to the 3D physical space above it. This is achieved by utilizing the position and orientation of lightweight tracked displays, which allows for a natural and intuitive way to interact with complex information spaces. Technical solutions for such systems already exist in research labs. However, they usually are expensive, complex, and difficult to maintain and thus are inappropriate for a broad audience. With our work, we want to address this issue. In a long term, we envision a low-cost tangible display system that supports both active displays (e.g., the iPad) and passive displays (e.g., paper screens and everyday objects such as a mug). In this paper, we take the initial step into this direction by presenting a proof of concept system that supports active displays. Along with the application of a consumer depth camera (Kinect), this reduces the costs by more than an order of magnitude.
Improving Feasibility of Fixed Priority Tasks Using Non-Preemptive Regions

Preemptive schedulers have been widely adopted in single processor real-time systems to avoid the blocking associated with the non-preemptive execution of lower priority tasks and achieve a high processor utilization. However, under fixed priority assignments, there are cases in which limiting preemptions can improve schedulability with respect to a fully preemptive solution. This is true even neglecting preemption overhead, as it will be shown in the paper. In previous works, limited-preemption schedulers have been mainly considered to reduce the preemption overhead, and make the estimation of worst-case execution times more predictable. In this work, we instead show how to improve the feasibility of fixed-priority task systems by executing the last portion of each task in a non-preemptive fashion. A proper dimensioning of such a region of code allows increasing the number of task sets that are schedulable with a fixed priority algorithm. Simulation experiments are also presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Estimating Prevalences of Sensitive Problems From Nonsensitive Data

Accurate and regularly updated prevalences are critical to guide both prevention and policy. However, despite their impact on public health, the prevalence of behavioral and mental health problems such as child maltreatment and intimate partner violence (IPV) are collected infrequently (e.g., once per decade or less). The purpose of this study is to test the viability of using nonsensitive, dynamic variables to estimate prevalences of sensitive behavioral problems. Several archival data sets of partner and child maltreatment are used. Data sets are randomly divided into development and cross-validation subsets. Sequential, backward, stepwise logistic regression is used to derive estimation equations, which are then tested in the cross-validation subset. The results indicate that estimated prevalences are close to the measured prevalences. Confidence intervals (95%) are approximately the same as those that pertain to measured prevalences (±1%-2%). In situations where it is either too expensive or too sensitive to assess a population regularly on a problem of interests, it appears as if policy makers and prevention planners can use regularly collected, nonsensitive data to estimate accurately the prevalence of unmeasured, sensitive outcomes.
Oppositional Effects of Serotonin Receptors 5-HT1a, 2, and 2c in the Regulation of Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis

Serotonin (5-HT) appears to play a major role in controlling adult hippocampal neurogenesis and thereby it is relevant for theories linking failing adult neurogenesis to the pathogenesis of major depression and the mechanisms of action of antidepressants. Serotonergic drugs lacked acute effects on adult neurogenesis in many studies, which suggested a surprisingly long latency phase. Here we report that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine, which has no acute effect on precursor cell proliferation, causes the well-described increase in net neurogenesis upon prolonged treatment partly by promoting the survival and maturation of new postmitotic neurons. We hypothesized that this result is the cumulative effect of several 5-HT-dependent events in the course of adult neurogenesis. Thus, we used specific agonists and antagonists to 5-HT1a, 2, and 2c receptor subtypes to analyze their impact on different developmental stages. We found that 5-HT exerts acute and opposing effects on proliferation and survival or differentiation of precursor cells by activating the diverse receptor subtypes on different stages within the neuronal lineage in vivo. This was confirmed in vitro by demonstrating that 5-HT1a receptors are involved in self-renewal of precursor cells, whereas 5-HT2 receptors effect both proliferation and promote neuronal differentiation. We propose that under acute conditions 5-HT2 effects counteract the positive proliferative effect of 5-HT1a receptor activation. However, prolonged 5-HT2c receptor activation fosters an increase in late-stage progenitor cells and early postmitotic neurons, leading to a net increase in adult neurogenesis. Our data indicate that serotonin does not show effect latency in the adult dentate gyrus. Rather, the delayed response to serotonergic drugs with respect to endpoints downstream of the immediate receptor activity is largely due to the initially antagonistic and un-balanced action of different 5-HT receptors.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Other Excremental Visions

An adult engaged in writing a book for children may well intend to present a life-affirming vision that communicates cultural values and traditions, but at the same time that adult may consciously or unconsciously induce, even seduce, the child to accept and repeat the neurotic discontents of culture and civilization. Works such as L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time or OOell's Island of the Blue Dolphins exhilarate the reader with new role models or the breakdown of stereotypes but undermine such innovations by a displaced traditional metaphysics (L'Engle) or by reneging on the break with conventions once the character is reintegrated into cultural norms (O'Dell). Children's literature is a complicated artistic, psychological, and social phenomenon, in some ways more so than adult literature because the author projects memories and libidinal releases through forms pretending innocence. Comedy and romance, still the most prevalent patterns of children's literature, are modes and genres that have generally established values and traditions even as they seemed momentarily to subvert them. Conventions such as the topos for poverty Â—"Hard by a forest dwelt a woodcutter with his wife. They were so poor that they no longer had daily bread" Â—have become such rigid figures that their social and historical ground is no longer perceived. A slight displacement as in Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory opens up new possibilities: "The whole of this family Â—the six grownups (count them) and Charlie Bucket Â— live together in a small wooden house on the edge of a great town. " ' The ground against which the figures (conventions, symbols, characterizations) are outlined is often indistinct and obscured even though it energizes the figures. The ground of children's literature should be of special interest to the interpreter because the figures often pretend to be a part of songs of innocence or nothing but fun and frolic as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl's tale, this "Hansel and Gretel" displaced into industrial or post-industrial society, is a libidinal, aggressive, and wildly indulgent fantasy with guiltless sweet assurance, for we all simply "love chocolate," even to the extent that we cover one of our favorite lax-
CLB-ECC: Certificateless Blind Signature Using ECC

Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) is a new benchmark in modern cryptography. It not only simplifies the certificate management problem of PKC, but also avoids the key escrow problem of the identity based cryptosystem (ID-PKC). In this article, we propose a certificateless blind signature protocol which is based on elliptic curve cryptography (CLB-ECC). The scheme is suitable for the wireless communication environment because of smaller parameter size. The proposed scheme is proven to be secure against attacks by two different kinds of adversaries. CLB-ECC is efficient in terms of computation compared to the other existing conventional schemes. CLB-ECC can withstand forgery attack, key only attack, and known message attack. An e-cash framework, which is based on CLB-ECC, has also been proposed. As a result, the proposed CLB-ECC scheme seems to be more effective for applying to real life applications like e-shopping, e-voting, etc., in handheld devices.
Extramedullary plasmacytoma in the presence of multiple myeloma: clinical correlates and prognostic relevance

Objective We studied the clinical and laboratory features and outcomes of multiple myeloma (MM) with extramedullary plasmocytoma (EP) disease both at diagnosis and during the course of MM. Patients and methods Forty-two patients of 467 patients with MM were retrospectively analyzed from both the 100th Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army and Shanghai Changzheng Hospitals. The clinical characteristics, laboratory parameters, responses, risk factors, and outcomes were analyzed. Results The median age was 53 years with a male/female sex ratio of 34:8. Twenty-six patients had EP disease at the time of diagnosis, and 16 patients developed EP during the course of the disease. We found that the Durie–Salmon stage, serum lactate dehydrogenase level, beta-2-microglobulin, complete blood counts, albumin, and the type of immunoglobulin (Ig) were not associated with the development of EP disease. Patients who developed EP during the course of MM had a higher ratio of plasmocytes and premature plasmocytes in the bone marrow with lower C-reactive protein level and earlier stage of International Staging System for Lung Cancer at the diagnosis of MM compared with patients who presented with EP at diagnosis. Once the patients developed EP disease, they frequently showed resistance to chemotherapy. With a median follow-up of 30 months, 19 patients were alive. Log-rank univariate analysis showed that patients with EP who had normal C-reactive protein, higher hemoglobin, lower serum lactate dehydrogenase, and stage I of International Staging System for Lung Cancer had longer survival. However, cyclooxygenase multivariate analysis failed to show statistical significance for any factor. Conclusions EP disease is the MM end-phase and is not a rare manifestation of MM with a cumulative incidence of 9% of MM. The prognosis is very poor once the diagnosis of EP disease is concurrent with MM.
Models of Thought

Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon has in the past quarter century been in the front line of the information-processing revolution; in fact, to a remarkable extent his and his colleagues' contributions have written the history of that revolution in cognitive psychology. This book brings together papers dating from the start of Simon's career to the present. Its focus is on modeling the chief components of human cognition and on testing these models experimentally.
Science-Based Business Studies at Leiden University

The Science Based Business (SBB) programme was established at Leiden University in 2001 in an effort to counter the unidirectional professionalism of students in science studies – not explicitly to meet the needs of business and industry. Nor is SBB a stand-alone Master's programme like the MS/MBA or the PSM in the USA: rather, it is designed to be an elective in all Leiden's research Master's programmes. It attracts both those students who want to stay on to study for a PhD and those who seek an occupation outside fundamental research. Especially pertinent to building capacity for innovation is the new course, ‘Orientation on Technopreneurship’, which is taught alongside the SBB programme. Because career opportunities for SBB and OOT graduates are diverse, the organizers have avoided an industry-specific focus in both cases.
Mediator Influences Telomeric Silencing and Cellular Life Span

ABSTRACT The Mediator complex is required for the regulated transcription of nearly all RNA polymerase II-dependent genes. Here we demonstrate a new role for Mediator which appears to be separate from its function as a transcriptional coactivator. Mediator associates directly with heterochromatin at telomeres and influences the exact boundary between active and inactive chromatin. Loss of the Mediator Med5 subunit or mutations in Med7 cause a depletion of the complex from regions located near subtelomeric X elements, which leads to a change in the balance between the Sir2 and Sas2 proteins. These changes in turn result in increased levels of H4K16 acetylation near telomeres and in desilencing of subtelomeric genes. Increases in H4K16 acetylation have been observed at telomeres in aging cells. In agreement with this observation, we found that the loss of MED5 leads to shortening of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast) replicative life span.
Do cladistic and morphometric data capture common patterns of morphological disparity?

The distinctly non‐random diversity of organismal form manifests itself in discrete clusters of taxa that share a common body plan. As a result, analyses of disparity require a scalable comparative framework. The difficulties of applying geometric morphometrics to disparity analyses of groups with vastly divergent body plans are overcome partly by the use of cladistic characters. Character‐based disparity analyses have become increasingly popular, but it is not clear how they are affected by character coding strategies or revisions of primary homology statements. Indeed, whether cladistic and morphometric data capture similar patterns of morphological variation remains a moot point. To address this issue, we employ both cladistic and geometric morphometric data in an exploratory study of disparity focussing on caecilian amphibians. Our results show no impact on relative intertaxon distances when different coding strategies for cladistic characters were used or when revised concepts of homology were considered. In all instances, we found no statistically significant difference between pairwise Euclidean and Procrustes distances, although the strength of the correlation among distance matrices varied. This suggests that cladistic and geometric morphometric data appear to summarize morphological variation in comparable ways. Our results support the use of cladistic data for characterizing organismal disparity.
Preschool Embedded Figures Test Performance of Young Children: Age and Gender Differences

An analysis of the literature was the basis for a set of predictions regarding the Preschool Embedded Figures Test performance of a small, cross-sectional sample of 37 3- to 5-year-old children. The test scores were modestly reliable. Predicted age-related differences in scores for boys and girls were observed, including an interaction of age with gender; however, other predictions regarding those scores were not supported. Based on a small sample, it was tentatively concluded that the evidence for continued use of the Preschool Embedded Figures Test as a measure of field independence for young children was weak.
Changes in the distribution of GAP-43 during the development of neuronal polarity

GAP-43, a neuron specific growth-associated protein, is selectively distributed to the axonal domain in developing neurons; it is absent from dendrites and their growth cones. Using immunofluorescence microscopy, we have further examined the distribution of GAP-43 during the development of hippocampal neurons in culture, in order to determine when this polarized distribution arises. Cultured hippocampal neurons initially extend several short processes which have the potential to become either axons or dendrites. At this stage, before the morphological expression of polarity, GAP-43 is concentrated in the growth cones of these processes but is distributed more or less equally among them. Polarity becomes established when one of these processes elongates to become the axon. At the earliest stage when the emerging axon can be identified, GAP-43 is preferentially concentrated in its growth cone. During the next few days, as the remaining processes take on dendritic properties, they lose their residual GAP-43 immunoreactivity. Throughout development, GAP-43 remains highly concentrated in the axonal growth cone, but the concentration of GAP-43 in the axon shaft increases, beginning near the growth cone and progressing proximally until GAP-43 is uniformly distributed along the entire axon. At all stages of development, GAP-43 is also concentrated in the region of the Golgi apparatus. These results suggest that the selective sorting of at least one membrane protein into the axon coincides with the morphological expression of polarity. These results also raise the possibility that GAP-43 may play an important role in the early phases of axonal outgrowth, by which the functional polarity of neurons is established.
Fully-parallel LUT-based (2048,1723) LDPC code decoder for FPGA

A good trade-off between performance and complexity is achieved if the min-sum algorithm with 2-bit non-uniform quantization is used to decode Low-Density Parity-Check codes. This paper proposes a method to design Variable Node Update (VNU) units based on Look-up tables suitable to design decoders for this algorithm. The method has been developed for the (2048,1723) LDPC code of the IEEE 802.3an standard and fully-parallel architectures have been implemented in a FPGA device. The results show that with the proposed method 35% area saving is achieved with respect to the use of the conventional VNU units.
Global clumping index map derived from modis BRDF products

In this study, we show for the first time a global Clumping Index (CI) map at 500 m resolution derived using the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) product from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). We found that the hotspot calculated from the MODIS BRDF product is underestimated in comparison with POLarization and Directionality of the Earth's Reflectances (POLDER) measurements very near the hotspot, so the MODIS-derived CI could be overestimated without correcting the bias. We developed an approach to correct the MODIS hotspot magnitude against synchronous co-registered POLDER-3 data. Field measured CIs by the Tracing Radiation and Architecture of Canopies instrument from 38 sites were used to evaluate the global CI map. Validation indicates that a strong correlation between MODIS-derived NDHD and CI indeed exists, and red band is better than near infrared band in effectively capturing the structural differences among cover types.