Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Liquidity Trap and Optimal Monetary Policy Revisited

This paper investigates history dependent easing known as a conventional wis- dom of optimal monetary policy in a liquidity trap. We show that, in an economy where the rate of inflation exhibits intrinsic persistence, monetary tightening is earlier as inflation becomes more persistent. This property is referred as early tightening and in the case of a higher degree of inflation persistence, a central bank implements front-loaded tightening so that it terminates the zero interest rate policy even before the natural rate of interest turns positive. As a prominent feature in a liquidity trap, a forward guidance of smoothing the change in inflation rates contributes to an early termination of the zero interest rate policy.
Identifying the Potential Influences on Income Inequality Changes in Korea - Income Factor Source Analysis

This study attempts to measure what effects the direction and size of contributions of a number of different income sources at the household level has on the changes in inequality indexes in Korea between 1988 and 2002. Based on the Urban Household Income and Expenditure Survey (UHIES) from the National Statistics Office (NSO), it is found that the household head wage income has a decreasing effect on inequality, whereas the wage income from spouses and other members of households seem to increase the level of inequality at the household level, where the magnitude of such an effect on market income inequality is far smaller than that of the household head wage income. However, due to the inherent limitations of UHIES, generalizing the empirical findings to all types of households becomes questionable. The analytical tool used in this study is based on Shorrocks' natural decomposition method (1982, 1983) and Lerman and Yitzhaki's (1985) Gini decomposition method.
Simultaneously ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ graphene oxide into low-polar solvents through a designed interface

Dispersing graphene oxide (GO) in low-polar solvents can realize a perfect self-assembly with functional molecules and application in removal of organic impurities that only dissolve in low-polar solvents. The surface chemistry of GO plays an important role in its dispersity in these solvents. The direct transfer of hydrophilic GO into low-polar solvents, however, has remained an experimental challenge. In this study, we design an interface to transfer GO by simultaneously ‘pushing and pulling’ the nanosheets into low-polar solvents. Our approach is outstanding due to the ability to obtain monolayers of chemically reduced GO (CRGO) with designed surface properties in the organic phase. Using the transferred GO or CRGO dispersions, we have fabricated GO/fullerene nanocomposites and assessed the ability of CRGOs for dye adsorption. We hope our work can provide a universal approach for the phase transfer of other nanomaterials.
Social Welfare Functions for the Future

sidered infinite with growing population and production has resulted in increasing concern over the time path of consumption during the limited period in which man can sustain such compound excesses. In answering the interrelated problems of the optimum growth path of consumption and the optimum period over which to con sume the earth's resources, one must attempt to construct a social welfare function which extends
Virtual Reality for Traumatic Brain Injury

In this perspective, we discuss the potential of virtual reality (VR) in the assessment and rehabilitation of traumatic brain injury, a silent epidemic of extremely high burden and no pharmacological therapy available. VR, endorsed by the mobile and gaming industries, is now available in more usable and cheaper tools allowing its therapeutic engagement both at the bedside and during the daily life at chronic stages after injury with terrific potential for a longitudinal disease modifying effect.
Empowering children and young people's participation in South Australia

In late 2013, approximately 1,000 children and young people - from the ages of 3 to 18 years - were engaged as valued citizens in three South Australian communities: Campbelltown, Gawler and Onkaparinga. They undertook an 'asset audit' of the 'child friendliness' of their communities, exploring information within their education settings for two terms. This was then analysed by educators, in partnership with community steering groups, so that local decision-making on community projects included children and student's views. The collaborative process included the proposals for action that were developed by the local steering groups being checked and validated by the children and young people to ensure that the action taken truly reflected their opinions.
Network of GRAS Transcription Factors Involved in the Control of Arbuscule Development in Lotus japonicus1[OPEN]

A network of transcription factors regulates arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis in Lotus. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, in symbiosis with plants, facilitate acquisition of nutrients from the soil to their host. After penetration, intracellular hyphae form fine-branched structures in cortical cells termed arbuscules, representing the major site where bidirectional nutrient exchange takes place between the host plant and fungus. Transcriptional mechanisms underlying this cellular reprogramming are still poorly understood. GRAS proteins are an important family of transcriptional regulators in plants, named after the first three members: GIBBERELLIC ACID-INSENSITIVE, REPRESSOR of GAI, and SCARECROW. Here, we show that among 45 transcription factors up-regulated in mycorrhizal roots of the legume Lotus japonicus, expression of a unique GRAS protein particularly increases in arbuscule-containing cells under low phosphate conditions and displays a phylogenetic pattern characteristic of symbiotic genes. Allelic rad1 mutants display a strongly reduced number of arbuscules, which undergo accelerated degeneration. In further studies, two RAD1-interacting proteins were identified. One of them is the closest homolog of Medicago truncatula, REDUCED ARBUSCULAR MYCORRHIZATION1 (RAM1), which was reported to regulate a glycerol-3-phosphate acyl transferase that promotes cutin biosynthesis to enhance hyphopodia formation. As in M. truncatula, the L. japonicus ram1 mutant lines show compromised AM colonization and stunted arbuscules. Our findings provide, to our knowledge, new insight into the transcriptional program underlying the host’s response to AM colonization and propose a function of GRAS transcription factors including RAD1 and RAM1 during arbuscule development.
Optimizing Computer-Assisted Transcription Quality with Iterative User Interfaces

Computer-assisted transcription promises high-quality speech transcription at reduced costs. This is achieved by limiting human effort to transcribing parts for which automatic transcription quality is insufficient. Our goal is to improve the human transcription quality via appropriate user interface design. We focus on iterative interfaces that allow humans to solve tasks based on an initially given suggestion, in this case an automatic transcription. We conduct a user study that reveals considerable quality gains for three variations of iterative interfaces over a non-iterative from-scratch transcription interface. Our iterative interfaces included post-editing, confidence-enhanced post-editing, and a novel retyping interface. All three yielded similar quality on average, but we found that the proposed retyping interface was less sensitive to the difficulty of the segment, and superior when the automatic transcription of the segment contained relatively many errors. An analysis using mixed-effects models allows us to quantify these and other factors and draw conclusions over which interface design should be chosen in which circumstance.
Control and Personalization:Younger versus Older Users' Experience of Notifications

With the increasing ubiquity of mobile technology, users are more connected than ever. Notifications facilitate prompt connections to friends, family and work, but also distract us from what we're doing. We investigated how older and younger users thought about, interacted with, and personalized their notifications. We took a qualitative approach, conducting semi-structured interviews primed through a notification categorization activity. We interviewed 20 participants with equal numbers of younger (19-30 years old) and older (48-74) adults. We extend and refine previous qualitative work and show that while enjoyment plays a minor role in the experience of notifications, urgency, directness and social closeness are far more important factors, though context remains a nuanced issue. We found that older users especially desired a sense of control over their notifications that was difficult to achieve with current technology. Lastly, we provide information about what “categories” of notifications users perceive and expand how that can be used in new personalization systems. These results lead us to advocate a number of fundamental changes to how notifications are personalized.
Solid lipid nanoparticles release DNA upon endosomal acidification in human embryonic kidney cells

Nanotechnology can produce materials with unique features compared to their bulk counterparts, which can be useful for medical applications (i.e. nanomedicine). Among the therapeutic agents used in nanomedicine, small molecules or biomacromolecules, such as proteins or genetic materials, can be designed for disease diagnostics and treatment. To transport these biomacromolecules to the target cells, nanomedicine requires nanocarriers. Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) are among the promising nanocarriers available, because they can be made from biocompatible materials and present high stability (over one year). In addition, upon the binding genetic material, SLNs form SLNplexes. However, little is yet known about how cells process these SLNplexes—in particular, how internalization and endosome acidification affects the transfection mediated by SLNplexes. Therefore, we aim to investigate how these processes affect SLNplex transfection in HEK293T cells. We find that the SLNplex is mainly internalized by clathrin-mediated endocytosis, which is a fast and reliable pathway to transfection, leading to approximately 60% transfection efficiency. Interestingly, upon acidification (below pH 5.0), the SLN seems to release its DNA content, which can be an essential step for SLNplex transfection. The underlying mechanisms described in this work may help improve SLNplex formulations and transfection efficiency. Moreover, these advances can improve the field of nanomedical research and bring new ways to cure diseases.
A Comparison of the Nzi, Horse Pal® and Bite-Lite® H-traps and selected baits for the collection of adult Tabanidae in Florida and North Carolina

ABSTRACT: Despite the veterinary and medical importance of horse flies, deer flies, and yellow flies, only a few trap types have been evaluated to monitor adult population dynamics. Currently, three trap types are being utilized (H-trap, Horse Pal® (HP), and Nzi trap), but no head-to-head comparisons have been reported. Thus, we conducted comparative trapping studies in Florida and North Carolina. At two study sites in Florida, the efficacy of all three trap types was compared, but only the H-trap and HP were compared in North Carolina. Although trap type was significant at all sites, the trap type which caught the most specimens was not the same. In Florida at the Lower Suwannee Wildlife Refuge (LSWR) site, the H-trap caught the most specimens (2,006), followed in decreasing order by Nzi (938) and HP (541). At the Cedar Ridge Ranch site, the Nzi caught significantly more specimens (1,439) than the H-trap (215) and HP (161), which were not significantly different from each other. In North Carolina, the H-trap caught approximately twice as many specimens as the HP (1,458 vs 720). These trap comparison studies were followed up by a study on the efficacy of various bait combinations: (No Bait (NB), dry ice only (DI), Trap Tech Lure (TTL) only, and DI + TTL), which was conducted only at the two Florida sites with H-traps. At both sites, bait combinations significantly affected trap collections. One pattern (DI +TTL > DI > TTL > NB) was recorded at the LSWR, while at the Cedar River Ranch the pattern was DI > DI +TTL > TTL > NB. Our data showed that trap type and bait combination significantly influence overall adult tabanid abundance as well as individual species composition.
MEnet: A Metric Expression Network for Salient Object Segmentation

Recent CNN-based saliency models have achieved excellent performance on public datasets, but most are sensitive to distortions from noise or compression. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end generic salient object segmentation model called Metric Expression Network (MEnet) to overcome this drawback. We construct a topological metric space where the implicit metric is determined by a deep network. In this latent space, we can group pixels within an observed image semantically into two regions, based on whether they are in a salient region or a non-salient region in the image. We carry out all feature extractions at the pixel level, which makes the output boundaries of the salient object finely-grained. Experimental results show that the proposed metric can generate robust salient maps that allow for object segmentation. By testing the method on several public benchmarks, we show that the performance of MEnet achieves excellent results. We also demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous CNN-based methods on distorted images.
Evaluation of Biochar as a Soil Amendment for Alleviating the Harmful Effect of Salinity on Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp

THE EXPERIMENT was conducted to investigate the effects of application of rice straw waste-derived biochar on the growth and some metabolic activities of salt-stressed cowpea (Vigna unguiculata L.). Moreover, biochar as a soil amendment was evaluated with the additional rate of chemical fertilizers (NPK) under salinity stress in agro-ecosystem. The results indicate that salinity (200mM NaCl) caused a significant reduction in all measured growth parameters of cowpea seedlings compared with control. Salinity stress caused reduction in germination percentage by 54% and 14% and 17% in the lengths of shoot and root, respectively as well as leaf area (22% reduction), compared with the control. Furthermore, the activities of antioxidant enzymes (peroxidase, catalase and superoxide dismutase), malondialdehyde (MDA), ascorbic acid content and osmolytes (total soluble proteins, carbohydrates and amino acids) were increased under salinity stress. The results showed that application of rice straw-derived biochar increased the germination percentage and all the studied growth criteria under salinity stress. In addition, rice straw-derived biochar increased the photosynthetic activity and photosynthetic pigments (Chl. a, Chl. b and carotenoids) and decreased the biosynthesis of MDA and ascorbic acid. The results demonstrate that the highest values of the measured growth parameters and physiological processes of cowpea seedlings were recorded at 75% NPK combined with biochar treatment. In conclusion, application of rice straw-derived biochar reduced the additional rate of chemical fertilizer by 25%.
Association of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 expression in ovarian cancer and chemotherapy sensitivity

The expression of high mobility group box 1 (HMGB1), breast cancer susceptibility gene 1 (BRCA1) and P62 in ovarian cancer was investigated to explore its association with chemotherapy sensitivity in ovarian cancer patients. Tumor tissues and para-carcinoma normal tissues of 60 ovarian cancer patients hospitalized in Department of Surgery in Dongying Hospital from June, 2012 to June, 2015 were collected. Reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) was used to detect the mRNA expression levels of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 in tumor and para-carcinoma normal tissues. Moreover, immunohistochemistry was used to detect the protein expression of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 in tumor tissues and para-carcinoma normal tissues. The cancer tissue specimens were divided into the chemotherapy resistance group and sensitivity group through the in vitro resin droplet experiment to analyze the association of the expression of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 in epithelial ovarian cancer with chemotherapy resistance of patients. The RT-qPCR results showed that the expression of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 in ovarian cancer tissues at the mRNA level was significantly higher than that in para-carcinoma normal tissues. Immunohistochemical results showed that the positive expression levels of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 in ovarian carcinoma tissue were 61.67% (37/60), 76.33% (47/60) and 71.67% (43/60), respectively, while the positive expression levels of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 in para-carcinoma normal tissues were 13.33% (8/60), 8.33% (5/60) and 11.67% (7/60), respectively, and the differences were statistically significant (P<0.05). In vitro resin droplet experiment revealed that 38 out of 60 ovarian cancer patients were drug resistant and 22 patients were sensitive to the therapy. The analysis of the association with chemotherapy sensitivity revealed that the positive expression of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 was associated with the drug resistance of ovarian cancer patients. The positive expression of HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 was associated with chemotherapy sensitivity of ovarian cancer patients. Therefore, HMGB1, BRCA1 and P62 may be molecular markers for the prediction of chemotherapy sensitivity of ovarian cancer patients.
Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the Punitive Upsurge

The sudden growth and glorification of the penal state in the United States after the mid-1970s (and in Western Europe two decades later) is not a response to the evolution of crime, but a reaction to-and a diversion from-the social insecurity produced by the fragmentation of wage labor and the destabilization of ethnoracial hierarchies following the discarding of the Fordist-Keynesian compact. It partakes of a new government of poverty wedding restrictive "workfare" and expansive "prisonfare," which ensnares the precarious fractions of the postindustrial proletariat in a carceral-assistential net designed to steer them towards deregulated employment or to contain them in their dispossessed neighborhoods and in the booming prisons that have become their satellites. This policy of penalization of urban marginality guided by moral behaviorism partakes of a broader reengineering and remasculinizing of the state that has rendered obsolete the traditional scholarly and policy division between welfare and crime. It must be grasped, not under the narrow rubric of repression, but under the generative category of production, as it has spawned new state agencies, social types, knowledges and experts. It makes the study of incarceration an essential chapter in the sociology of the state and social stratification in the era of triumphant neoliberalism.
A Distributional and Orthographic Aggregation Model for English Derivational Morphology

Modeling derivational morphology to generate words with particular semantics is useful in many text generation tasks, such as machine translation or abstractive question answering. In this work, we tackle the task of derived word generation. That is, we attempt to generate the word “runner” for “someone who runs. ” We identify two key problems in generating derived words from root words and transformations. We contribute a novel aggregation model of derived word generation that learns derivational transformations both as orthographic functions using sequence-to-sequence models and as functions in distributional word embedding space. The model then learns to choose between the hypothesis of each system. We also present two ways of incorporating corpus information into derived word generation.
Haemodynamic and heart rate reflex responses to propofol in the rabbit. Comparison with althesin.

Propofol was administered to eight rabbits by constant i.v. infusion at 0.2, 0.4 and 0.6 mg kg-1 min-1 to produce light sedation. The lowest dose was compared with an infusion of Althesin 0.1 mg kg-1 min-1. The rabbits had been previously implanted with aortic and vena caval perivascular balloon cuffs to examine the baroreceptor-heart rate reflex and an aortic thermistor catheter for cardiac output (CO) measurements. A silastic catheter was placed in the pericardial sac so that the cardiac nerves could be blocked with local anaesthetic. Mean arterial pressure (MAP) was well maintained with all anaesthetic infusions. At the lower doses of propofol, CO increased by 20% (P less than 0.01) with a corresponding decrease in total peripheral resistance (TPR). However, CO and TPR were not changed significantly by Althesin. Both anaesthetics induced a similar tachycardia. Cardiac nerve blockade did not abolish the different CO and TPR responses observed for the two agents. A dose-related reduction in the range and gain of the baroreceptor-heart rate reflex was observed with propofol (P less than 0.05). The pattern of alteration of the reflex curve, however, differed between the two anaesthetics and the vagal efferent component was more resistant to blockade with propofol. The relative preservation of baroreceptor reflex responses, and the reduction in TPR by a reduction of resting constrictor tone, suggest propofol may have significant clinical advantages when used as a sedative infusion.
Virtual reality and human spatial cognition

Virtual Reality is a means of presenting multi-sensory information to an individual via a computer monitor or a head mounted device. These computer generated, threedimensional environments allow for pseudo real-time interaction and immerse the user in a synthetic space, resulting in a feeling of ‘presence’. The many uses of virtual reality are discussed, including the more recent application to psychology. Development of user friendly software packages has allowed psychologists to design virtual environments for the purpose of assessment and training, as well as to further explore psychological theories. The highly visual nature of VR allows this medium to specifically examine spatial cognition in humans. Both clinical patients and nonclinical participants were examined using a number of VR environments to assess various aspects of spatial cognition. Firstly VR was used to determine whether visuospatial deficits are present in patients with Parkinson’s disease or closed head injury. The results suggest that VR can be used to assess visuospatial deficit in clinical samples. The remaining studies examined human performance in environments based upon animal maze experiments. Cue preference in multiple choice tasks was investigated and results support the suggestion that distal cues are more important than proximal ones. The final study questioned whether spatial skills learnt in a computer environment could be successfully transferred to the real world and found that this was indeed the case. All of the findings promote the use of virtual reality in a psychological setting, drawing upon the advantages that VR technology has to offer in the experimental field. Dedicated to Susan Stirk, Jamie and Gizmo the mog