Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
La rentabilidad de la educación superior en Chile. Revisión de las bases de 30 años de políticas públicas

This paper analyzes the effect of attending vocational secondary education on labor market outcomes. Using administrative data on school enrollment, labor income, and employment, we identify the type of secondary school attended, as well as the number of months of formal employment and monthly income, ten years after graduating from high school. We supplement our data with historical records about the local availability of vocational secondary education, which we use to construct instrumental variables. Our results show that compared to conventional secondary schools, vocational secondary education increases formal employment - between 0.4 and 1.6 months of employment per year depending on its type. On the other hand, we document that graduates from vocational schools have, on average, lower wages than those of individuals with conventional high school degrees. However, we find significant heterogeneity by type of vocational education. For example, our results show that industry-oriented vocational schools over perform the other alternatives, including conventional secondary education. For this type, we estimate a return of 42,100 Chilean pesos per month. In contrast, students who attended technical high schools earn 54,610 Chilean pesos less than those obtaining high school degrees from conventional high schools.Overall, our findings provide new insights on the return to vocational education in Chile. They inform policy makers about the challenges and potential benefits associated with non-conventional high schools.
Research services staff in Australian universities: an investigation of profile, nomenclature, professional alignment, role, workplace relationships, and policy implementation.

Research is recognised globally as vital to social and economic development and in progressing national interest. Universities are at the forefront of knowledge generation and it is not surprising that the work of researchers, their productivity, development and contribution to society and the economy attract a great deal of interest from governments and are the subject of a large body of research literature. In contrast, the management and administrative support of research is just now beginning to be acknowledged as an important element in the overall research endeavour, not least because the systems around research in universities have increased in complexity. Drawing on a mixed method design including a national on-line questionnaire (n = 194) and multiple interviews (n = 37), this thesis contributes a comprehensive picture of the operating landscape of research managers and administrators in centralised Research Service offices in Australian universities. It explores their profile, how they perceive and interpret their roles and responsibilities and the dynamics of their working relationships. The studied group was found to be predominantly female, typically aged in their 40s and degree qualified with a number of profile findings revealing significant differences by gender. Participant nomenclature preferences highlighted significant shortcomings in current staffing terminology. Given this, the salience of a nomenclature ladder to address both visibility and aspiration of university research support staff was explored. Findings on professional selfconcept, professional characteristics, growing specialisations and perceived stakeholder regard provided insights into the professional alignment of this occupational group. Perception of role was defined largely by the intensity and focus of interactions with students and researchers. At the time of study, sector preparations for the anticipated Research Quality Framework (RQF) provided the contextual setting in which detailed inquiry into participant involvement in policy implementation was conducted. Finally, the thesis offers a model of engagement through which the interactive dynamic between research support staff and researchers can be interpreted and understood. Through this model, identification of areas of potential mismatch and frustration from the standpoint of research support staff can be used to develop organisational strategies to foster and enrich the contribution of this group with the added potential to ultimately enhance university research performance.
"Creating Cool Stuff": Pupils' Experience of the BBC micro:bit

The recent introduction of computer science (CS) education into schools in many countries has led to a surge in interest in programming tools and approaches which make CS concepts and tasks engaging, motivating and accessible to all. There is renewed interest in supporting learning through physical computing, which has been shown to be motivational whilst offering opportunities for collaboration and creativity. Within this context the BBC recently led a collaborative venture in the UK to develop a portable and low-cost programmable device. The consortium funded and produced one million devices, enough for every 11-12 year-old in the UK. In this paper, we report on what we believe to be the first study to investigate the usability and affordances of the BBC micro:bit. We interviewed 15 teachers and 54 pupils in schools in England about their experiences with the device who were, in general, enthusiastic about the potential of the BBC micro:bit. We describe pupils' experiences in terms of usability, creativity, the tangibility of the device and their learning of programming, and analyse their experiences in the context of previously reported benefits of physical computing.
Markov Chain Modeling of Aggregations of Electric Water Heaters for Demand Response Applications

We develop a dynamic system model for a population of water boilers, which is simple enough for control purposes, but at the same time appreciates the complexity of the boilers internal dynamics and the volatility of such a load. For this purpose, a computationally involved model for a single water boiler is improved and then used to create a population. Based on these boilers a simple Markov Chain Model is created. Finally the ability of the Markov Model to predict the power consumption of other populations in an open loop control system is analyzed.
Performance Comparison of IDMA and CDMA Systems Based on Simulink

This paper presents the performance comparison of interleave division multiple access (IDMA) and code division multiple access (CDMA) systems based on Simulink. We investigate the basic principle that illustrates the similarities and differences of the two different schemes. According to these schemes, we analyze every model function and build simulation platforms for these systems. The simulation platforms can realize the performance simulation flexibly by setting the main parameters of the models conveniently. We take the chirp interference as example to test the anti-jamming performance of IDMA and CDMA. Simulation and test results show that IDMA performs better than CDMA despite its simplicity.
The crisis of America's cities

More than half a decade has passed since Gorbachev launched his "prerestroika" programme to reform the Soviet Union, but the struggle between reformers and conservatives continues to rage while the final outcome, and even the goals of the programme, remains a mystery. Whatever the outcome of this transformation, its impact will reverberate well beyond the borders of the USSR to shape US security and commercial policies into the next century. This edited volume brings together original essays by US-Soviet relations scholars and international business and security experts to explore the many complex and critical issues that the United States must confront in developing its commercial and security policies for the next decade.
L'utilisation des splines bidimensionnels pour l'estimation de lois de maintien en arrêt de travail

The aim of this paper is to propose an operational two-dimensional parametric adjustment for laws of maintenance in disability. The method suggested rests on splines in dimension 2; it is applied to a real data set, and the scale of reserving which results from it is compared with the scale of reference of the BCAC.
SCTP over MIPv 4 for Multi-homed Mobile Host

The present paper reports on the experimentation using SCTP with mobile IP where mobile IP provides the device identification and location management support while SCTP takes care of the handoff management aspect. In this, we use multihoming feature of SCTP to allow mobile device to remain connected through multiple access networks simultaneously in an overlaid network environment. This make the handover smoother, reduces handoff latency and makes seamless mobility possible. The experimental results based on ns2 simulator is used to compare the performances of using multihomed SCTP for seamless handover and MIP4 for location management with MIP used for both handover and location management. Keywords— Stream Control Transmission Protocol(SCTP), handover, transport layer, Mobile IP(MIP)
Focused Crawling : algorithm survey and new approaches with a manual analysis

The exponential growth of the Internet makes the universal search engines try to address the scalability limitations with vast amounts of hardware and network resources and by distributing the crawling process across users, queries, or even client computers. Furthermore it makes increasingly difficult to discover topic relevant information that can be used in specialized portals and on-line search. To tackle this issue the focused web crawlers are emerging. They are a kind of crawlers that dynamically browse the Internet by choosing the most promising links in order to try to maximize the relevancy of the retrieved pages and thus saving significantly bandwidth and time. In this master thesis, an algorithm survey is done to find the best alternatives in the literature. With the best options (Graphic Context, Best-First and History Path) and two new approaches (proposed in this paper) an automatic and manual analysis is performed with two different document topic classifier algorithms: SVM and String-Matching. It will be shown that any of the alternatives in the literature outperforms the Best-First algorithm and just the two new approaches do it. It is shown that using both classifiers to define what it is ’best’ in the Best-First algorithm obtains the best precision and accuracy. Moreover it is shown that the anchor text gives really valuable information than can be used to increase the precision through a learning process.
Genetic Vaccines and Therapy

Background: Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes severe bronchiolitis and is a risk factor for asthma. Since there is no commercially available vaccine against RSV, a short interfering RNA against the RSV-NS1gene (siNS1) was developed and its potential for decreasing RSV infection and infection-associated inflammation in rats was tested. Methods: Plasmids encoding siNS1 or an unrelated siRNA were complexed with a chitosan nanoparticle delivery agent and administered intranasally. Control animals received a plasmid for a non-specific siRNA. After expression of the plasmid in lung cells for 24 hours, the rats were intranasally infected with RSV. Results: Prophylaxis with siNS1 significantly reduced lung RSV titers and airway hyperreactivity to methacholine challenge compared to the control group. Lung sections from siNS1-treated rats showed a sizable reduction in goblet cell hyperplasia and in lung infiltration by inflammatory cells, both characteristics of asthma. Also, bronchoalveolar lavage samples from siNS1-treated animals had fewer eosinophils. Treatment of rats with siNS1 prior to RSV exposure was effective in reducing virus titers in the lung and in preventing the inflammation and airway hyperresponsiveness associated with the infection that has been linked to development of asthma. Conclusion: The use of siNS1 prophylaxis may be an effective method for preventing RSV bronchiolitis and potentially reducing the later development of asthma associated with severe respiratory infections. Background Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the predominant cause of severe bronchiolitis and pneumonia in infants worldwide and also results in lower respiratory tract infections in immunodeficient and elderly adults [1]. Children born prematurely or with congenital heart abnormalities are at especially high risk for life-threatening respiratory infections by viruses such as RSV. Severe lower respiratory tract infection in infants can be fatal and frequently leads to costly hospital stays. RSV bronchiolitis in infancy is also a Published: 1 February 2007 Genetic Vaccines and Therapy 2007, 5:4 doi:10.1186/1479-0556-5-4 Received: 27 July 2006 Accepted: 1 February 2007 This article is available from: http://www.gvt-journal.com/content/5/1/4 © 2007 Kong et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Sustainable Preferences and Damage Abatement:Value Judgments and Implications for Consumption Streams

This paper examines the implications of adopting alternative value judgements when evaluating future consumption streams in the context of damage abatement. The paper focusses on a form of ‘sustainable preferences’ designed to avoid either a dictatorship by present or by future generations which can arise when using a ‘standard’ social welfare function. Numerical examples are reported, based on a simple growth model, under alternative damage abatement parameters and welfare functions. The results illustrate how sustainable preferences effectively reduce the damages on future consumption by shifting consumption from the present to the future. This implies an intergenerational trade-off. An explicit policy of damage abatement under a standard social welfare function implies a similar intergenerational trade-off. However, the results suggest that damage abatement does not penalise current generations as much under sustainable preferences as it does under standard value judgements
Speaker Recognition using Gaussian Mixture Models

Gaussian Mixture models is one of the most popular statistical methods in speaker recognition. The purpose of this research is to perform experiments of speaker recognition using various feature vectors: four formants, four formants with fundamental frequency and mel cepstrum coefficients. Gaussian mixture models using mel cepstrum coefficients is baseline in speaker recognition and gives one of the best results in text independent speaker recognition. After implementing experiments of speaker recognition and comparing experimental results we can affirm that mel scale cepstral coefficients and four formants with fundamental frequency gives quite the same recognition accuracy, but creating of Gaussian mixture speaker models and recognition process continues a few times longer using mel scale cepstral coefficients, because count of calculations is few times greater in that case. Using only four formants gives the worst results of recognition accuracy. Ill. 7, bibl. 12 (in English; summaries in English, Russian and Lithuanian).
Simultaneous Grasp and Motion Planning: Humanoid Robot ARMAR-III

In this work, we present an integrated approach for planning collision-free grasping motions. Therefore, rapidly exploring random tree (RRT)-based algorithms are used to build a tree of reachable and collision-free configurations. During tree generation, both grasp hypotheses and approach movements toward them are computed. The quality of reachable grasping poses is evaluated using grasp wrench space (GWS) analysis. We present an extension to a dual-arm planner that generates bimanual grasps together with collision-free dual-arm grasping motions. The algorithms are evaluated with different setups in simulation and on the humanoid robot ARMAR-III (Figure 1).
How Will Transatlantic Policy Interactions Change with the Advent of EMU

This paper analyses US–European policy interactions under different assumptions about the policy-making regime and the nature of the fiscal environment, contrasting the standard Keynesian case with an anti-Keynesian case in which government spending cuts are expansionary. When fiscal policy is anti-Keynesian, EMU may enhance monetary and fiscal discipline in Europe and stabilize employment in the face of supply shocks, in striking contrast to popular fears. The European Central Bank (ECB) and central banks outside Europe will have little incentive to coordinate their response to such shocks. Governments (the fiscal authorities) will wish central banks to coordinate, but the latter will not share their interest. We show that fiscal coordination can be counterproductive in this setting. Governments and central banks on both sides of the Atlantic are worse off when European governments cooperate. The results for the Keynesian case are different: EMU may reduce monetary discipline, the ECB and central banks outside Europe will wish to coordinate their response to supply shocks, and the ECB will want European governments to coordinate their policies.
Inflation Expectations and Monetary Policy in Thailand

This paper examines the relationship between inflation expectations and monetary policy in Thailand. The forward-looking Taylor rule is applied to measure monetary policy actions. Inflation expectations extracted from the yield curves are used. Our results provide two key findings. First, we find econometric evidence that inflation expectations react to monetary policy actions. A tighter monetary policy can curb expected inflation not only for short-term expectations but also for long-term expectations. These results are valid for both the reducedform single-equation and the structural-form system-of-equations estimation. Second, the monetary policy stance as measured by the residuals from the forward-looking Taylor rule is able to capture the relationship between monetary policy and inflation expectations better than the outcome-based policy rule. These results may explain the weak evidence in previous studies of the relationship between inflation expectation and monetary policy.
The Cytoskeletal Adaptor Protein Band 4.1B Is Required for the Maintenance of Paranodal Axoglial Septate Junctions in Myelinated Axons

Precise targeting and maintenance of axonal domains in myelinated axons is essential for saltatory conduction. Caspr and Caspr2, which localize at paranodal and juxtaparanodal domains, contain binding sites for the cytoskeletal adaptor protein 4.1B. The exact role of 4.1B in the organization and maintenance of axonal domains is still not clear. Here, we report the generation and characterization of 4.1B-null mice. We show that loss of 4.1B in the PNS results in mislocalization of Caspr at paranodes and destabilization of paranodal axoglial septate junctions (AGSJs) as early as postnatal day 30. In the CNS, Caspr localization is progressively disrupted and ultrastructural analysis showed paranodal regions that were completely devoid of AGSJs, with axolemma separated from the myelin loops, and loops coming off the axolemma. Most importantly, our phenotypic analysis of previously generated 4.1B mutants, used in the study by Horresh et al. (2010), showed that Caspr localization was not affected in the PNS, even after 1 year; and 4.1R was neither expressed, nor enriched at the paranodes. Furthermore, ultrastructural analysis of these 4.1B mutants showed destabilization of CNS AGSJs at ∼1 year. We also discovered that the 4.1B locus is differentially expressed in the PNS and CNS, and generates multiple splice isoforms in the PNS, suggesting 4.1B may function differently in the PNS versus CNS. Together, our studies provide direct evidence that 4.1B plays a pivotal role in interactions between the paranodal AGSJs and axonal cytoskeleton, and that 4.1B is critically required for long-term maintenance of axonal domains in myelinated axons.
Dynamic Connectivity in Wireless Underground Sensor Networks

In wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs), due to the dynamic underground channel characteristics and the heterogeneous network architecture, the connectivity analysis is much more complicated than in the terrestrial wireless sensor networks and ad hoc networks, which was not addressed before, to our knowledge. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed to analyze the dynamic connectivity in WUSNs, which captures the effects of the environmental parameters such as the soil composition and the soil moisture, and the system parameters such as the operating frequency, the sensor burial depth, the sink antenna height, the density of the sensor and sink devices, the tolerable latency of the networks, and the number and the mobility of the above-ground sinks. The lower and upper bounds of the connectivity probability are derived to analytically provide principles and guidelines for the design and deployment of WUSNs in various environmental conditions.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports an Analysis of Otc Interest Rate Derivatives Transactions: Implications for Public Reporting an Analysis of Otc Interest Rate Derivatives Transactions: Implications for Public Reporting

fi ndings and is being distributed to economists and other interested readers solely to stimulate discussion and elicit comments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and are not necessarily refl ective of views at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. The authors thank Casidhe Horan and Sha Lu for invaluable contributions as research analysts and Sheila Leavitt for her research on select sections of the paper. They also thank Kathryn Chen for her work on the development of this project and her thoughtful comments, George Pullen and his team from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for their advice on data cleaning steps, and Katrina Bell for her help with data explanations and interpretations. They are grateful to members of the OTC Derivatives Supervisors Group and the following individuals for input and comments: Tramontana. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily refl ect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System. Abstract This paper examines the over-the-counter (OTC) interest rate derivatives (IRD) market in order to inform the design of post-trade price reporting. Our analysis uses a novel transaction-level data set to examine trading activity, the composition of market participants, levels of product standardization, and market-making behavior. We fi nd that trading activity in the IRD market is dispersed across a broad array of product types, currency denominations, and maturities, leading to more than 10,500 observed unique product combinations. While a select group of standard instruments trade with relative frequency and may provide timely and pertinent price information for market participants , many other IRD instruments trade infrequently and with diverse contract terms, limiting the impact on price formation from the reporting of those transactions. Nonetheless, we fi nd evidence of dealers hedging rapidly after large interest rate swap trades, suggesting that, for this product, a price-reporting regime could be designed in a manner that does not disrupt market-making activity.