Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regulations, Institutions, and Commitment: A framework for resolving the regulatory problem

People the world over are calling for privatization and regulatory reform as the solution to the problem of poor performance by public utilities, and as the means to improved service and lower prices. In this book we argue that these expectations may not always be met because of the way a country's political and social institutions – its executive, legislative, its judicial systems, its informal norms of public behavior – interact with regulatory processes and economic conditions. By making administrative expropriation and manipulation of utilities more or less difficult in some settings than in others, a country's institutions influence the confidence of investors and the performance of privatized utilities. In particular, the analysis in this book looks at the problem of utilities regulation through the lens of the new institutional economics – with its microanalytical perspective and its view of regulation as a contracting problem – to offer insights into the performance of privatized telecommunications utilities in different political and social circumstances. The book presents the results of a comparative assessment of the impact of core political and social institutions on regulatory structures and performance in the telecommunications industry in Jamaica, the United Kingdom, Chile, Argentina, and the Philippines. We argue that the credibility and effectiveness of a regulatory framework, and so its ability to encourage private investment and support efficiency in the production and use of services, vary with a country's political and social institutions.
A Workload-Driven Approach to Dynamic Data Balancing in MongoDB

With rapid growth of demand on Big Data storage, MongoDB has been a prevalent choice to store unstructured data in recent years. MongoDB evenly distributes data across shard servers to ensure that all the shard servers hold approximately same amount of data and the data access workload will be balanced across these servers. This approach, however, can hardly guarantee the performance of data access when there are hotspots in data because it supposes all the data will be accessed in same patterns. This paper puts forward a workload-driven approach to dynamic data balancing in MongoDB. In this approach, the workload will be monitored in real time by parsing and analyzing log of MongoDB in order to find the hotspots of data. Then, the heat of hotspots will be diffused across shard servers by dynamic data migration. After migration, the workload will be rebalanced across shard servers though data are probably not even distributed, and the performance of hotspots access will be improved. The evaluation of this approach has shown its effectiveness from three aspects, including the improvement of performance, the data migration and the improvement of utilization of CPU.
What pieces of limit order book information matter in explaining order choice by patient and impatient traders?

In this paper, we extend the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between the state of the limit order book (LOB) and order choice. Our contribution is twofold: first, we propose a sequential ordered probit (SOP) model which allows studying patient and impatient traders’ choices separately; second, we consider two pieces of LOB information, the best quotes and the book beyond the best quotes. We find that both pieces of LOB information explain the degree of patience of an incoming trader and, afterwards, its order choice. Nonetheless, the best quotes concentrate most of the explanatory power of the LOB. The shape of the book beyond the best quotes is crucial in explaining the aggressiveness of patient (limit order) traders, while impatient (market order) traders base their decisions primarily on the best quotes. Patient traders’ choices depend more on the state of the LOB on the same side of the market, while impatient traders mostly look at the state of the LOB on the opposite side. The aggressiveness of both types of traders augments with the inside spread. However, patient (impatient) traders submit more (less) aggressive limit (market) orders when the depth of the own (opposite) best quote and the length of the own (opposite) side of the book increase. We also find that higher depth away from the best ask (bid) quote may signal that this quote is ‘too low (high)’, causing incoming impatient buyers (sellers) to be more aggressive and incoming patient sellers (buyers) to be more conservative.
How Do the Elderly Fare Cross-Nationally? Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study Project

This paper uses microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study How Do the Elderly in Taiwan Fare Cross-Nationally? Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study Project Peter Saunders and Timothy M. Smeeding Social Policy Research Centre, Discussion Paper, No.81 Abstract This paper uses microdata from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to estimate and compare four dimensions of the well-being of the aged in Taiwan and eight other countries - the United States, Japan, Australia, Poland, Finland, Germany, Hungary and Canada. Together, these nine countries cover a broad variety of economic experience, institutional development and cultural tradition which complicate the task of comparing them. The four dimensions studied are (relative) poverty, income distribution, relative economic status and income composition. A key focus of the analysis and a significant feature of the results is the important role which living arrangements (and, to a lesser extent, age and gender) play in determining the relative economic status of the aged in each country. This issue is explored more thoroughly in Taiwan, where the (admittedly exploratory and preliminary) analysis illustrates how shared living arrangements (and hence shared housing costs) represent an important part of the overall safety net for the elderly.
Um estudo sobre o modelo de gestão e o processo sucessório em empresas familiares

O presente estudo buscou identificar, a partir da realizacao de uma pesquisa de campo, as caracteristicas mais presentes no modelo de gestao das empresas familiares da amostra utilizada, para inferir, a partir das observacoes realizadas, sobre aquelas que pudessem explicar sua longevidade, sob a perspectiva do processo sucessorio. Para alcancar tal objetivo, executivos da mais alta hierarquia de 71 empresas do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul foram entrevistados. Os dados coletados, orientados por um roteiro de entrevistas, foram testados com a utilizacao de estatistica descritiva, apoiada pela aplicacao de teste de correlacao de Pearson. O estudo levou em consideracao o que foi observado na pesquisa de campo, contraposto as praticas de gestao empresarial consagradas pela literatura especializada. As conclusoes do estudo sugerem que as empresas de maior porte possuem modelos de gestao mais aperfeicoados e com caracteristicas proximas aquelas preconizadas pela literatura especializada. Nas empresas de menor porte, porem, tais caracteristicas destoam, em parte, das recomendadas pela mencionada literatura. Nao houve, entretanto, evidencias suficientemente fortes que permitissem a conclusao de que tais caracteristicas fossem determinantes para a continuidade das organizacoes objetos do estudo.
Resolving people-park conflicts through negotiation: reflections on the Richtersveld experience

Abstract Protected areas in developing countries play a vital role in promoting the ideal of sustainable development.But 'people-park'conflicts are commonplace,threatening the future of these areas and the long term well-being of local communities. Surprisingly, little attention has been given to applying lessons learned in conflict studies to people-parkconflicts. In contrast to traditional adversarialresponses, negotiated approaches offer considerable potential for transforming people-park conflicts into mutually beneficial relationships.Experiencesin the Richtersveldregion of South Africa demonstrate the cardinal role negotiation can play in addressing key issues underlying people-park conflicts.
Reduced Empathy Scores in Patients with Parkinson's Disease: A Non-Motor Symptom Associated with Advanced Disease Stages.

BACKGROUND Empathy describes the ability to infer and share emotional experiences of other people and is a central component of normal social functioning. Impaired empathy might be a non-motor symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD). OBJECTIVE To examine empathic abilities and their relationship to clinical and cognitive functioning in PD patients. METHODS Empathy was measured in 75 non-demented PD patients and 34 age-matched healthy controls using a German version of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Moreover, we collected demographic and clinical data and conducted a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery. RESULTS PD patients had a significant lower global empathy score than healthy controls. Furthermore, we found significant group differences for the cognitive empathy scales but not for the scales which are sensitive for affective empathy components. The empathy decrease was significantly higher in advanced Hoehn & Yahr stages. There were only sporadic significant correlations between empathy scores and cognitive variables. CONCLUSIONS PD patients show a stage dependent empathy score decrease which is driven mainly by cognitive aspects of empathy. However, emotional empathy aspects are not reduced.
Peripheral vascular disease in systemic lupus erythematosus

With increasing longevity of lupus patients, peripheral vascular disease (PVD) has become an important cause of morbidity. With no systematic study of PVD in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), this study was undertaken to define the frequency and spectrum of PVD in SLE and factors affecting such an occurrence. All medium-sized peripheral arteries of bilateral upper and lower extremities were studied in 50 SLE patients using Doppler ultrasonography. PVD was defined clinically as one or more of intermittent claudication, absent/unequal pulses, gangrene or ischemic ulcers and sub-clinically as asymptomatic patients with Doppler abnormalities, with ≥50% reduction in diameter considered hemodynamically significant. Mean (SD) age of the patients was 31.6 (10.1) years. Forty-one percent were hypertensive. Dyslipidemia was found in 62%. Fifteen (30%) had Raynaud's phenomenon. Fourteen (28%) patients had PVD, of whom three had positive markers for antiphospholipid antibody (aPL) and six were asymptomatic. Ischemic ulcers were seen in eight (16%), gangrene in three (6%), femoral artery plaques in two (4%), stenosis in four (8%) and intermittent claudication in none. Dyslipidemia was found to independently affect occurrence of PVD (OR = 5.37, [95% CI 1.05—27.5], P = 0.05). The causes of PVD overlap significantly and further studies are needed to ascertain the relative contribution of each. Lupus (2007) 16, 720—723.
Time-to-contact estimation of accelerated stimuli is based on first-order information.

The goal of this study was to test whether 1st-order information, which does not account for acceleration, is used (a) to estimate the time to contact (TTC) of an accelerated stimulus after the occlusion of a final part of its trajectory and (b) to indirectly intercept an accelerated stimulus with a thrown projectile. Both tasks require the production of an action on the basis of predictive information acquired before the arrival of the stimulus at the target and allow the experimenter to make quantitative predictions about the participants' use (or nonuse) of 1st-order information. The results show that participants do not use information about acceleration and that they commit errors that rely quantitatively on 1st-order information even when acceleration is psychophysically detectable. In the indirect interceptive task, action is planned about 200 ms before the initiation of the movement, at which time the 1st-order TTC attains a critical value.
Softmax-margin training for statistical machine translation

The training procedure is very important in statistical machine translation (SMT). It has a great influence on the final performance of a translation system. The widely used method in SMT is the minimum error rate training (MERT). It is effective to estimate the feature function weights. However, MERT does not use regularization and has been observed to over-fit. In this paper, we describe a method named softmax-margin, which is a modification of the max-margin training. This approach is simple, efficient, and easy to implement. We conduct our work using data sets from the WMT shared tasks. The results of experiment on small scale French-English translation task reach a competitive performance compared to MERT.
Education and Assessment of Pharmacists on the Use of the Drug Burden Index in Older Adults Using a Continuing Professional Development Education Method

Objective. To educate pharmacists and assess their knowledge of and ability to calculate the Drug Burden Index (DBI) using a continuing professional development (CPD) intervention. Methods. The intervention included designing education surrounding the DBI and its application in practice and assessing knowledge in the form of a CPD education article with four multiple-choice questions (MCQs). Deidentified demographic data on participants were collected. Results. Multiple-choice questions were completed by 2522 pharmacist participants: 97.9% of participants successfully completed the CPD assessment (answered three or four MCQs correctly), and 76.5% of participants achieved a perfect score (answered four MCQs correctly). The question that required calculation of the DBI for a fictional patient was answered correctly least often (81.8%). Conclusion. Pharmacist participants had good knowledge of using DBI in practice; difficulty was observed in calculating the DBI for a hypothetical patient. This CPD intervention provided a practical medium for educating and assessing pharmacists’ knowledge of the DBI.
Is China Exporting Deflation?

In the past few years, observers increasingly have pointed to China as a source of downward pressure on global prices. This paper evaluates the theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on the question of whether China's buoyant export growth has led to significant changes in the inflation performance of its trading partners. This evidence suggests that the impact of Chinese exports on global prices has been, while non-negligible, fairly modest. On a priori grounds, our theoretical analysis suggests that China's economy is still too small relative to the world economy to have much effect on global inflation - a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts that effect at about 1/3 percentage point in recent years. In terms of the empirical evidence, we identify a statistically significant effect of U.S. imports from China on U.S. import prices, but given the size of this effect and the relatively low share of imports in U.S. GDP, the ultimate impact on the U.S. consumer prices has likely been quite small. Moreover, imports from China had little apparent effect on U.S. producer prices. Finally, using a multi-country database of trade transactions, we estimate that since 1993, Chinese exports lowered annual import inflation in a large set of economies by 1/4 percentage point or less on average, similar to the prediction of our theoretical model.
Peroxisome Targeting Signal Type 1 (PTS1) Receptor Is Involved in Import of Both PTS1 and PTS2: Studies withPEX5-Defective CHO Cell Mutants

ABSTRACT To investigate the mechanisms of peroxisome assembly and the molecular basis of peroxisome assembly disorders, we isolated and characterized a peroxisome-deficient CHO cell mutant, ZP139, which was found to belong to human complementation group II, the same group as that of our earlier mutant, ZP105. These mutants had a phenotypic deficiency in the import of peroxisomal targeting signal type 1 (PTS1) proteins. Amino-terminal extension signal (PTS2)-mediated transport, including that of 3-ketoacyl coenzyme A thiolase, was also defective in ZP105 but not in ZP139. PEX5 cDNA, encoding the PTS1 receptor (PTS1R), was isolated from wild-type CHO-K1 cells. PTS1R’s deduced primary sequence comprised 595 amino acids, 7 amino acids less than the human homolog, and contained seven tetratricopeptide repeat (TPR) motifs at the C-terminal region. Chinese hamster PTS1R showed 94, 28, and 24% amino acid identity with PTS1Rs from humans, Pichia pastoris, and Saccharomyces cerevisiae, respectively. A PTS1R isoform (PTS1RL) with 632 amino acid residues was identified in CHO cells; for PTS1R, 37 amino acids were inserted between residues at positions 215 and 216 of a shorter isoform (PTS1RS). Southern blot analysis of CHO cell genomic DNA suggested that these two isoforms are derived from a single gene. Both types of PEX5 complemented impaired import of PTS1 in mutants ZP105 and ZP139. PTS2 import in ZP105 was rescued only by PTS1RL. This finding strongly suggests that PTS1RL is also involved in the transport of PTS2. Mutations inPEX5 were determined by reverse transcription-PCR: a G-to-A transition resulted in one amino acid substitution: Gly298Glu of PTS1RS (G335E of PTS1RL) in ZP105 and Gly485Glu of PTS1RS (G522E of PTS1RL) in ZP139. Both mutations were in the TPR domains (TPR1 and TPR6), suggesting the functional consequence of these domains in protein translocation. The implications of these mutations are discussed.
Influence of cardiac-surgery performance reports on referral practices and access to care. A survey of cardiovascular specialists.

BACKGROUND Reports on the comparative performance of physicians are becoming increasingly common. Little is known, however, about the credibility of these reports with target audiences or their influence on the delivery of medical services. METHODS Since 1992, Pennsylvania has published the Consumer Guide to Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery, which lists annual risk-adjusted mortality rates for all hospitals and surgeons providing such surgery in the state. In 1995, we surveyed a randomly selected sample of 50 percent of Pennsylvania cardiologists and cardiac surgeons to find out whether they were aware of the guide and, if so, to determine their views on its usefulness, limitations, and influence on providers. RESULTS Eighty-two percent of the cardiologists and all the cardiac surgeons were aware of the guide. Only 10 percent of these respondents reported that its mortality rates were "very important" in assessing the performance of a cardiothoracic surgeon. Less than 10 percent reported discussing the guide with more than 10 percent of their patients who were candidates for a coronary-artery bypass graft (CABG). Eighty-seven percent of the cardiologists reported that the guide had a minimal influence or none on their referral recommendations. For both groups, the most important limitations of the guide were the absence of indicators of quality other than mortality (cited by 78 percent), inadequate risk adjustment (79 percent), and the unreliability of data provided by hospitals and surgeons (53 percent). Fifty-nine percent of the cardiologists reported increased difficulty in finding surgeons willing to perform CABG surgery in severely ill patients who required it, and 63 percent of the cardiac surgeons reported that they were less willing to operate on such patients. CONCLUSIONS The Consumer Guide to Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery has limited credibility among cardiovascular specialists. It has little influence on referral recommendations and may introduce a barrier to care for severely ill patients. If publicly released performance reports are intended to guide the choice of providers without impeding access to medical care, a collaborative process involving physicians may enhance the credibility and usefulness of the reports.
The International Market Entry Choices of Start-Up Companies in High-Technology Industries

For a young, resource-constrained, technology-based start-up embarking on international sales, the choice of entry mode is a strategic decision of major importance. Yet within the emerging research stream of international entrepreneurship, curiously little attention has been devoted to the empirical analysis of foreign market entry forms. The authors address this important issue by analyzing the determinants of 398 export decisions taken from a U.K. survey of 246 technology-based start-ups with international activities. The findings show that the entry mode decision is necessarily a trade-off between the resources available and the support requirements of the customer. Issues of the innovativeness of the technology and the historic channel experience of the firm in its domestic market are particularly strong determinants of mode choice. The authors suggest that an organizational capability perspective on these firms’ behavior offers a better explanation of their entry decisions than either transaction cost or stage theory.
The Emergence of Second-Tier Auditors in the US: Evidence from Investor Perceptions of Financial Reporting Credibility

We examine changes in the association between auditor type (Big 4, Second-Tier, and Other non-Big 4) and perceived financial reporting credibility in the wake of events (e.g., Andersen’s failure, the implementation of SOX, creation of the PCAOB, etc.) which led to significant growth in Second-Tier client portfolios and increased scrutiny of Second-Tier audit practices. Our results reveal that financial reporting credibility of Second-Tier clients was lower than that of Big 4 clients and was indistinguishable from that of Other non-Big 4 clients pre-Andersen. However, post-Andersen, we find that financial reporting credibility of Second-Tier clients is higher than that of Other non-Big 4 clients and is indistinguishable from that of Big 4 clients. We expect that our results will be of interest to regulators, both in the United States and in the European Union, who have expressed concerns about the current state of competition in the audit market, management and boards of directors that are contemplating switching to a Second-Tier audit firm, and academics investigating quality differences among audit firm types.
Vasculogenesis — a new strategy for induction of peripheral neovascularization

SummaryBackground: New blood vessel development can be induced by supplementation with angiogenic growth factors. In some older diabetic or hypercholesterolaemic patients, however, endothelial cells are defective and cannot support angiogenesis. Methods: Endothelial progenitor cells (EPC) can help to overcome this limitation, providing a source of viable endothelial cells. Results: It has been demonstrated that EPC can improve neovascularization in ischaemic hind limb, accelerate blood flow in diabetic mice, and improve cardiac function. Conclusions: In this review, we will summarize the effects of EPC in the treatment for experimental peripheral ischaemia.ZusammenfassungGrundlagen: Die Entwicklung neuer Blutgefäße kann durch die Gabe von angiogenetischen Wachstumsfaktoren induziert werden. Bei älteren Zuckerkranken oder Hypercholesterinämie-Patienten sind die Endothelzellen geschädigt und können die Angiogenese nicht unterstützen. Methodik: Mit Hilfe der endothelialen Progenitorzellen (EPC) können funktionsfähige Endothelzellen gebildet werden. Ergebnisse: Es konnte gezeigt werden, daß die EPC zu einer Neovaskularisation in ischämischen Extremitäten führt, den Blutfluß bei diabetischen Mäusen und die Herzfunktion verbessert. Schlußfolgerungen: In diesem Review diskutieren wir die Effekte der EPC bei der Behandlung experimenteller peripherer Ischämien.