Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Services Trade and Policy

Since the mid-1980s a substantial body of research has taken shape on trade in services. Much of this is inspired by the WTO and regional trade agreements. However, an increasing number of papers focus on the impacts of unilateral services sector liberalization. The literature touches on important linkages between trade and FDI in services and the general pattern of productivity growth and economic development. This paper surveys the literature on services trade, focusing on contributions that investigate the determinants of international trade and investment in services, the potential gains from greater trade, and efforts to cooperate to achieve such liberalization through trade agreements. There is increasing evidence that services liberalization is a major potential source of gains in economic performance, including productivity in manufacturing and the coordination of activities both between and within firms. The performance of service sectors, and thus services policies, may also be an important determinant of trade volumes, the distributional effects of trade, and overall patterns of economic growth and development. At the same time, services trade is also a source of increasing political unease about the impacts of globalization on labor markets, linked to worries about offshoring and the potential pressure this places on wages in high income countries.
Assessment of periodontal conditions and systemic disease in older subjects. I. Focus on osteoporosis.

BACKGROUND Osteoporosis (OPOR) is a common chronic disease, especially in older women. Patients are often unaware of the condition until they experience bone fractures. Studies have suggested that OPOR and periodontitis are associated diseases and exaggerated by cytokine activity. Panoramic radiography (PMX) allows studies of mandibular cortical index (MCI), which is potentially diagnostic for OPOR. AIMS i). To study the prevalence of self-reported history of OPOR in an older, ethnically diverse population, ii). to assess the agreement between PMX/MCI findings and self-reported OPOR, and iii). to assess the likelihood of having both a self-reported history of OPOR and a diagnosis of periodontitis. MATERIALS AND METHODS PMX and medical history were obtained from 1084 subjects aged 60-75 (mean age 67.6, SD +/- 4.7). Of the films, 90.3% were useful for analysis. PMXs were studied using MCI. The PMXs were used to grade subjects as not having periodontitis or with one of three grades of periodontitis severity. RESULTS A positive MCI was found in 38.9% of the subjects, in contrast to 8.2% self-reported OPOR. The intraclass correlation between MCI and self-reported OPOR was 0.20 (P < 0.01). The likelihood of an association between OPOR and MCI was 2.6 (95%CI: 1.6, 4.1, P < 0.001). Subjects with self-reported OPOR and a positive MCI had worse periodontal conditions (P < 0.01). The Mantel-Haentzel odds ratio for OPOR and periodontitis was 1.8 (95%CI: 1.2, 2.5, P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS The prevalence of positive MCI was high and consistent with epidemiological studies, but only partly consistent with a self-reported history of osteoporosis with a higher prevalence of positive MCI in Chinese women. Horizontal alveolar bone loss is associated with both positive self-reported OPOR and MCI.
Velopharyngeal Function during Vocalization in Infants

Objective: To determine the age at which infants achieve velopharyngeal closure during vocalization. Design: Longitudinal with repeated measures. Setting: Laboratory. Participants: Six healthy infants were studied monthly from ages 2 to 6 months while they interacted with a parent and an investigator. Main Outcome Measures: The presence or absence of velopharyngeal closure, as determined by sensing ram pressure at the anterior nares. Results: The velopharynx was open for windups, whimpers, and laughs, and it was closed for cries, screams, and raspberries, regardless of age. The frequency with which the velopharynx closed during syllable utterances increased significantly with age. Conclusions: Velopharyngeal closure for speech-like utterance increases with age, but is not complete and is still undergoing development at 6 months of age. Velopharyngeal closure during infancy may be influenced by pressure demands of the utterance; however, support for this speculation is stronger for other types of utterances than it is for speech-like utterances. The method used in this study holds promise for evaluating infants with suspected velopharyngeal impairment.
Continuous Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation during Positron Emission Tomography: A Suitable Tool for Imaging Regional Excitability of the Human Cortex

In six healthy volunteers, H(2)(15)O positron emission tomography (PET) was employed to evaluate rate-dependent functional activation of the left primary sensorimotor hand area (SM1(HAND)) during subthreshold repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). Using an eight-shaped coil, continuous trains of rTMS were delivered during nine 50-s H(2)(15)O PET scans. Nine different stimulation frequencies were used, ranging from 1 to 5 Hz. Stimulus intensity was set at 10% below active motor threshold. During three additional PET scans, an ineffective rTMS was applied via another eight-shaped coil, which was held 10 cm above the vertex. Statistical parametric mapping was employed to assess relative differences in normalized regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) across conditions. Compared with ineffective rTMS, subthreshold rTMS increased normalized rCBF in the stimulated SM1(HAND). Moreover, the increase in rCBF in the left SM1(HAND) showed a linear positive relationship with the rate of rTMS, indicating a rate-dependent functional activation of the stimulated SM1(HAND). These data demonstrate that, by varying the variables of rTMS across scans, continuous rTMS during H(2)(15)O PET provides a noninvasive tool to study the regional excitability profile of a distinct cortical area.
Predicting the home location of serial offenders: a preliminary comparison of the accuracy of human judges with a geographic profiling system.

The accuracy with which human judges, before and after 'training', could predict the likely home location of serial offenders was compared with predictions produced by a geographic profiling system known as Dragnet. All predictions were derived from ten spatial displays, one for each of ten different U.S. serial murderers, indicating five crime locations. In all conditions participants were asked to place an 'X' on each spatial display corresponding to where they thought the offender lived. In the control condition, a comparison was made between the accuracy of these predictions for 21 participants on two separate occasions a few minutes apart. In the experimental condition, between their first and second predictions the 21 participants were given two heuristics to follow--distance-decay and circle hypothesis. Results showed that participants with no previous knowledge of geographic profiling were able to use the two heuristics to improve the accuracy of their predictions. The overall accuracy of the second set of predictions for the experimental group was also not significantly different from the accuracy of predictions generated by Dragnet.
Efficient algorithms for alternating pushdown systems : application to certificate chain discovery with threshold subjects

Motivated by recent applications of pushdown systems to computer security problems, we present an efficient algorithm for the reachability problem of alternating pushdown systems. Although the algorithm is exponential, a careful analysis reveals that the exponent is usually small in typical applications. We show that the algorithm can be used to compute winning regions in pushdown games. In a second contribution, we observe that the algorithm runs in polynomial time for a certain subproblem, and show that the computation of certificate chains with threshold certificates in the SPKI/SDSI authorization framework can be reduced to this subproblem. We present a detailed complexity analysis of the algorithm and its application, and report on experimental results obtained with a prototype implementation.
GPU-based training of autoencoders for bird sound data processing

Bird sounds have been studied in recent years due to their significance in helping ornithologists, and ecologists to monitor birds activities, which reflect climate changes, biodiversity, and reserves local protection status. Within the increasingly collected large amount of bird sound data from experts and amateurs, how to handle, and employ the state-of-the-art deep learning methods to mining such large amount of data, is bringing a huge challenge, and opportunity for the research community. In this work, we propose a framework using the GPU to accelerate autoencoders training for a large amount of bird sound data. Experimental results show that the GPU can considerably speed up the training process of bird sounds when fed within different scales of data, or feature numbers, compared with CPU-based learning.
The incidence of accidents in child care centers of the local government organizations.

OBJECTIVE To study the incidence of accidents and the environment around the building of child care centers of the local government organizations under the Health Promoting Center 6. MATERIAL AND METHOD This was a descriptive study carried out among 1,871 child care centers of the local government organizations under the Health Promoting Center 6 within eight Northeastern provinces. The self administered questionnaires were handed out in the process of this study and data were collected between January 1 and February 28, 2011. RESULTS One thousand eight hundred seventy one child care centers answered the questionnaires. The ratio of children per caregiver was found to be 17:1. In 2010 the incidence of injury in children was 7.17 per 100 persons. Ratio of injury between boys and girls was 1.9:1. The places mostly reported for the accidents were outside the building, the playground instruments, and inside the classrooms. Most child care centers were located on the street side and had no fence near the water sources (pool, pond) and trees. Only 22.9% had children water closets and those with adult water closet provided no support for holding. Most (93.3%) of the toilets had water containers inside. CONCLUSION Environment around the child care center building may be the cause of many accidents. If the child care centers comply the convention instructions, children will be safe during they stay.
Electrically small unbalanced four-arm wire antenna

An electrically small antenna element is presented. It is an unbalanced antenna, consisting of four wire arms arching over a groundplane. One of the wire ends is the feed, and the other three are connected to the groundplane, via a capacitance, short, and load, respectively. The resonance frequency is tuned by varying the capacitance, which can be set fixed or used to accomplish electronic tunability with a tuning range of several octaves. The momentary bandwidth of the antenna is approximately 3%. Applications are typically antennas for very small terminals in narrowband systems, or alternatively broadband systems where electronical tuning can be implemented in the antenna. The exact shape of the wires is not critical and can be chosen to conform to mechanical design requirements.
Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace

Proponents and critics of the democratic peace have debated the extent to which covert attempts by democracies to overthrow other elected governments are consistent with or contradict democratic peace theory. The existing debate, however, fails to acknowledge that there are multiple democratic peace theories and that inter-democratic covert intervention might have different implications for different arguments. In this article, we first distill hypotheses regarding covert foreign regime change from three theories of democratic peace. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we then investigate these hypotheses in the context of U.S. covert intervention in Chile (1970–73). The evidence suggests that covert intervention is highly inconsistent with norms and checks-and-balances theories of democratic peace. The evidence is more consistent with selectorate theory, but questions remain because democratic leaders undertook interventions with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood that failure would be publicized, which would constitute exactly the type of policy failure that democratic executives supposedly avoid.
Detection of JPEG compression on bitmap image based on phase spectrum statistical features

In image forensics, JPEG compression history estimation problem consists of three stages: JPEG compression detection, color model identification and subsampling, and estimation of quantization steps. Although, it is well known the importance of the phase spectrum information of digital signals and its application in image processing, the phase spectrum has been poorly explored for image forensics. In this paper, a novel method for detecting JPEG compression using statistical moments of the phase spectrum is presented. The experimentation results show that the detection rates achieved by the proposed strategy are competitive with other methods reported in the state-of-the-art.
Compliance with International Accounting Standards in a national context: some empirical evidence from the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchanges

The contribution of this paper is to provide evidence, from a sample of 281 listed companies, about Egyptian convergence to international accounting. We construct indices to measure both disclosure and measurement/presentation convergence, and the impacts of education and training, tax, and three company characteristics on compliance. Compliance, which is low, is associated with the volume of trading in company stocks, but not with industry sector or legal status. The findings suggest weak enforcement, and a need for education and training of accountants, and the removal of adverse tax implications for companies if increased convergence is to be achieved.
Topology investigation on high speed PM generator with back wound windings

This paper highlights the armature structures in a 60 krpm high speed PM generator along with the investigations on the variations of machine electromagnetic and thermal performance caused by stator structure. By using the transient electromagnetic field researches, the leakage flux generated by the yoke back windings is studied, whilst at the same time investigating on back EMF and loss distribution. Following the electromagnetic analyses, the temperature distribution in motor is studied via the three dimensional fluid-thermal coupling analyses, and the effects caused by structure of motor back wounded windings, notch type, and core slot on machine thermal field are investigated.
Low-Cost Ka-band Switchable RHCP/LHCP Antenna Array for Mobile SATCOM Terminal

Achieving a functional antenna for mobile satellite communications terminals in Ka-band is probably one of the most challenging tasks in current antenna engineering, particularly bearing in mind they need to be low profile and “affordable. ” This quest is involving many companies in the field. Our contribution represents one of such efforts. The antenna is based on a slotted waveguide array technology to maximize efficiency and it features a number of novel solutions, going from its robust polarization switching mechanism, to the use of a thin wideband polarizer and the utilization of groove gap waveguides. This communication reports the measured data of a fully functional prototype to validate its novel contributions.
Participation in Illegitimate Activities: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

A theory of participation in illegitimate activities is developed and tested against data on variations in index crimes across states in the United States. Theorems and behavioral implications are derived using the state preference approach to behavior under uncertainty. The investigation deals directly with the interaction between offense and defense: crime and collective law enforcement. It indicates the existence of a deterrent effect of law-enforcement activity on all crimes and a strong positive correlation between income inequality and crimes against property. The empirical results also provide some tentative estimates of the effectiveness of law enforcement in reducing crime and the resulting social losses.
A Proteomic Study of SUMO-2 Target Proteins*

The SUMO family in vertebrates includes at least three distinct proteins (SUMO-1, -2, and -3) that are added as post-translational modifications to target proteins. A considerable number of SUMO-1 target proteins have been identified, but little is known about SUMO-2. A stable HeLa cell line expressing His6-tagged SUMO-2 was established and used to label and purify novel endogenous SUMO-2 target proteins. Tagged forms of SUMO-2 were functional and localized predominantly in the nucleus. His6-tagged SUMO-2 conjugates were affinity-purified from nuclear fractions and identified by mass spectrometry. Eight novel potential SUMO-2 target proteins were identified by at least two peptides. Three of these proteins, SART1, heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (RNP) M, and the U5 small nuclear RNP 200-kDa helicase, play a role in RNA metabolism. SART1 and heterogeneous nuclear RNP M were both shown to be genuine SUMO targets, confirming the validity of the approach.
An adaptive memory tuning strategy with high performance for Spark

With the rapid development of internet, people put more and more focus on data, which contains much information and are of great value. To gain better performance in data analysis, in-memory computing has been more and more popular. Spark (Zaharia et al., 2010) is a successful example of improving computing performance through in-memory computing. However, how to make full use of memory resource is still a problem for Spark. In this paper, we presented an adaptive memory tuning strategy for Spark, which enables dynamic data compression and serialisation selecting strategy to use less resource usage and obtain faster data process. We derived the strategy of selecting the optimal data compression and serialisation mathematically. It chooses proper memory tuning strategy according to resource usage and can obtain good performance in applications, which persist data frequently.
Education and Earnings Growth: Evidence from 11 European Countries

We use cohort data from 11 European countries to study whether experience profiles differ by educational attainment. Previous literature does not provide a clear answer to this question, that is important to evaluate private returns to education over the working life of individuals. We find evidence that employees with tertiary education have steeper experience profiles than employees with upper secondary or compulsory education. Hence, education provides not only an initial labour market advantage but also a permanent advantage that increases with time in the labour market. We also find that differences in earnings growth by education are lower in countries with a higher level of corporatism and higher in countries which have experienced both relatively fast labour productivity growth and a relatively low educational attainment. The educational system also seems to matter, because countries with a more stratified system of secondary education have smaller differences in earnings growth by education.
Oxidative stress, aging, and diseases

Reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS) are produced by several endogenous and exogenous processes, and their negative effects are neutralized by antioxidant defenses. Oxidative stress occurs from the imbalance between RONS production and these antioxidant defenses. Aging is a process characterized by the progressive loss of tissue and organ function. The oxidative stress theory of aging is based on the hypothesis that age-associated functional losses are due to the accumulation of RONS-induced damages. At the same time, oxidative stress is involved in several age-related conditions (ie, cardiovascular diseases [CVDs], chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic kidney disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer), including sarcopenia and frailty. Different types of oxidative stress biomarkers have been identified and may provide important information about the efficacy of the treatment, guiding the selection of the most effective drugs/dose regimens for patients and, if particularly relevant from a pathophysiological point of view, acting on a specific therapeutic target. Given the important role of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of many clinical conditions and aging, antioxidant therapy could positively affect the natural history of several diseases, but further investigation is needed to evaluate the real efficacy of these therapeutic interventions. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of literature on this complex topic of ever increasing interest.
Money and Inflation – A New Macroeconomic Analysis

Presents a review of Money and Inflation – A New Macroeconomic Analysis (Sergio Rossi (with a Foreword by Mauro Baranzini and Alvaro Cencini) Edward Elgar Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA 2001 li + 238 pp.)
Coordination control for generic linear multi-agent systems with time delay: A semi-discretization approach

This paper aims to perform the convergence analysis for a group of linear multi-agent systems with time delay and communicating over arbitrary network topology. It is proved that within the allowable delay bound, all the agents within each closed strong component reach synchronization, while all the other agents outside the closed strong components converge to the dynamic convex hull spanned by the agents in the closed strong components. The delay bound is calculated by the method of semi-discretization, which is also useful in searching for an optimal feedback control with the fastest convergence rate for a certain time delay. A simulation example is given to illustrate the validity of the obtained results.
A Spherical Hidden Markov Model for Semantics-Rich Human Mobility Modeling

We study the problem of modeling human mobility from semantic trace data, wherein each GPS record in a trace is associated with a text message that describes the user's activity. Existing methods fall short in unveiling human movement regularities for such data, because they either do not model the text data at all or suffer from text sparsity severely. We propose SHMM, a multi-modal spherical hidden Markov model for semantics-rich human mobility modeling. Under the hidden Markov assumption, SHMM models the generation process of a given trace by jointly considering the observed location, time, and text at each step of the trace. The distinguishing characteristic of SHMM is the text modeling part. We use fixed-size vector representations to encode the semantics of the text messages, and model the generation of the l2-normalized text embeddings on a unit sphere with the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. Compared with other alternatives like multi-variate Gaussian, our choice of the vMF distribution not only incurs much fewer parameters, but also better leverages the discriminative power of text embeddings in a directional metric space. The parameter inference for the vMF distribution is non-trivial since it involves functional inversion of ratios of Bessel functions. We theoretically prove, for the first time, that: 1) the classical Expectation-Maximization algorithm is able to work with vMF distributions; and 2) while closed-form solutions are hard to be obtained for the M-step, Newton's method is guaranteed to converge to the optimal solution with quadratic convergence rate. We have performed extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-life data. The results on synthetic data verify our theoretical analysis; while the results on real-life data demonstrate that SHMM learns meaningful semantics-rich mobility models, outperforms state-of-the-art mobility models for next location prediction, and incurs lower training cost.