Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cyclical Bias in Government Spending: Evidence from the OECD

This paper studies the role of business cycles in the phenomenon of increasing government spending/GDP ratios in the OECD countries. Using a panel data set covering the 1975-1995 period, the main finding is that the prolonged rise in this ratio is linked to a cyclical bias; the spending/GDP ratio increased during recessions and stayed approximately constant during expansions. Also analyzed are the cyclical changes in the composition of government spending (goods and services, transfers and subsidies, and capital expenditure), in tax revenues, and a possible link between the cyclical bias and an index of government weakness.
The ends of a continuum: genetic and temperature‐dependent sex determination in reptiles

Two prevailing paradigms explain the diversity of sex‐determining modes in reptiles. Many researchers, particularly those who study reptiles, consider genetic and environmental sex‐determining mechanisms to be fundamentally different, and that one can be demonstrated experimentally to the exclusion of the other. Other researchers, principally those who take a broader taxonomic perspective, argue that no clear boundaries exist between them. Indeed, we argue that genetic and environmental sex determination in reptiles should be seen as a continuum of states represented by species whose sex is determined primarily by genotype, species where genetic and environmental mechanisms coexist and interact in lesser or greater measure to bring about sex phenotypes, and species where sex is determined primarily by environment. To do otherwise limits the scope of investigations into the transition between the two and reduces opportunities to use studies of reptiles to advance understanding of vertebrate sex determination generally. BioEssays 26:639–645, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Low-Power Scan Operation in Test Compression Environment

This paper presents a new and comprehensive low-power test scheme compatible with a test compression environment. The key contribution of this paper is a flexible test-application framework that achieves significant reductions in switching activity during all phases of scan test: loading, capture, and unloading. In particular, we introduce a new on-chip continuous-flow decompressor. Its synergistic use with a power-aware scan controller allows a significant reduction of toggling rates when feeding scan chains with decompressed test patterns. While the proposed solution requires minimal modifications of the existing design for test logic, experiments indicate that its use results in a low switching activity which reduces power consumption to or below a level of a functional mode. It resolves problems related to power dissipation, voltage drop, and increased temperature. Our approach integrates seamlessly with test logic synthesis flow, and it does not compromise compression ratios. It fits well into various design paradigms, including modular design flow where blocks come with individual decompressors and compactors.
Precision Weighting—An Effective Automatic Indexing Method

A great many automatic indexing methods have been implemented and evaluated over the last few years, and automatic procedures comparable in effectiveness to conventional manual ones are now easy to generate. Two drawbacks of the available automatic indexing methods are the absence of reliable linguistic inputs during the indexing process and the lack of formal, analytical proofs concerning the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The precision weighting procedure described in the present study uses relevance criteria to weight the terms occurring in user queries as a function of the balance between relevant and nonrelevant documents in which these terms occur; this approximates a semantic know-how of term importance. Formal mathematical proofs are given under well-defined conditions of the effectiveness of the method.
Economics, Entitlements and Social Issues: Voter Choice in the 1996 Presidential Election

Theory: Contemporary theories of presidential election outcomes, especially the economic voting and spatial issue voting models, are used to examine voter choice in the 1996 presidential election. Hypotheses: First, we look at the effects of voter perceptions of the national economy onvoter support for Clinton. Second we look at the effects of candidate and voter positions on ideology and on a number of issues. Last, we examine whether respondents' views on other issues - social issues such as abortion as well as issues revolving around entitlements and taxation that were emphasized by the campaigns - played significant roles in this election. Methods: Multinomial probit analysis of the 1996 National Election Studies data; simulations based on counterfactual scenarios based on different macroeconomic conditions and different issue platforms of candidates. Results: The effects of economic perceptions are much greater than the effects of voter issue positions on the election outcome. Some social issues, namely abortion, did play a role in determining the election outcome. The presence of a third centrist candidate limited the ability of other candidates to improve their vote shares by moving in the issue space.
Risk-stratified patients with resectable soft tissue sarcoma benefit from epirubicin-based adjuvant chemotherapy

As adjuvant chemotherapy (AC) for soft tissue sarcomas is controversial, we performed a retrospective analysis of patients seen at Washington University in St. Louis to evaluate whether it benefited our patient population. Patients were risk‐assessed using the Memorial Sloan Kettering Predictive Nomogram (MSKPN). We defined high‐risk patients by a MSKPN 4‐year postoperative probability of sarcoma‐specific death of ≥0.3 and investigated if they benefited from AC. Retrospective review was performed on patients seen between 15 February 1996 and 6 February 2010. A propensity score method in the logistic regression framework was used to model the likelihood of receiving AC. To make causal inference on the effect of AC on survival outcomes, a propensity score inverse probability of treatment weighting approach was applied to survival analysis. Overall, 135 high‐grade patients were assessed, 33 were treated with Ifosfamide/Epirubicin (I/Epi) and 102 were non AC patients. The stratified MSKPN risk was not significantly associated with any survival endpoint in the whole cohort, but trended for overall survival (OS) when evaluated against non AC patients. After adjustment for MSKPN risk and other variables, patients not receiving chemotherapy had significantly worse OS, recurrent free survival, and disease‐specific survival (DSS) with adjusted hazard ratios of 4.18 (95% CI: 2.22–7.90), 8.96 (95% CI: 3.85–20.83), and 5.42 (95% CI: 2.09–14.06), respectively. In retrospective analyses, risk‐stratified patients with soft tissue sarcoma benefited from I/Epi‐based AC. Randomized I/Epi versus I/Doxorubicin clinical trials may determine the optimal adjuvant treatment.
Comparison of fast permanent magnet flux estimation methods for railway traction application PMSMs

Two fast online Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) flux estimation methods, reactive power feedback and extended Kalman filter based methods, are analyzed and compared from machine real torque optimization point of view. The analysis has been carried out, firstly, in simulation and afterwards, it has experimentally been validated on a 120kW SPMSM railway traction prototype.
Stronger authentication for password credential Internet Services

Most Web and other on-line service providers (“Internet Services”) only support legacy ID (or email) and password (ID/PW) credential authentication. However, there are numerous vulnerabilities concerning ID/PW credentials. Scholars and the industry have proposed several improved security solutions, such as MFA, however most of the Internet Services have refused to adopt these solutions. Mobile phones are much more sensitive to these vulnerabilities (so this paper focuses on mobile phones). Many users take advantage of password managers, to keep track of all their Internet Service profiles. However, the Internet Service profiles found in password managers, are normally kept on the PC or mobile phone's disk, in an encrypted form. Our first contribution is a design guideline, whereby the Internet Service profiles never need to touch the client's disk. Most users would benefit, if they had the ability to use MFA, to login to a legacy Internet Service, which only supports ID/PW credential authentication. Our second contribution is a design guideline, whereby users can choose, for each legacy ID/PW Internet Service, which specific MFA they wish to use. We have also presenting conceptual design guidelines, showing that both of our contributions are minor changes to existing password managers, which can be implemented easily with low overhead.
Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopic Imaging and Multivariate Regression for Prediction of Proteoglycan Content of Articular Cartilage

Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopic imaging has been earlier applied for the spatial estimation of the collagen and the proteoglycan (PG) contents of articular cartilage (AC). However, earlier studies have been limited to the use of univariate analysis techniques. Current analysis methods lack the needed specificity for collagen and PGs. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the suitability of partial least squares regression (PLSR) and principal component regression (PCR) methods for the analysis of the PG content of AC. Multivariate regression models were compared with earlier used univariate methods and tested with a sample material consisting of healthy and enzymatically degraded steer AC. Chondroitinase ABC enzyme was used to increase the variation in PG content levels as compared to intact AC. Digital densitometric measurements of Safranin O –stained sections provided the reference for PG content. The results showed that multivariate regression models predict PG content of AC significantly better than earlier used absorbance spectrum (i.e. the area of carbohydrate region with or without amide I normalization) or second derivative spectrum univariate parameters. Increased molecular specificity favours the use of multivariate regression models, but they require more knowledge of chemometric analysis and extended laboratory resources for gathering reference data for establishing the models. When true molecular specificity is required, the multivariate models should be used.
Financial decision-making abilities and financial exploitation in older African Americans: Preliminary validity evidence for the Lichtenberg Financial Decision Rating Scale (LFDRS)

ABSTRACT This study examines preliminary evidence for the Lichtenberg Financial Decision Rating Scale (LFDRS), a new person-centered approach to assessing capacity to make financial decisions, and its relationship to self-reported cases of financial exploitation in 69 older African Americans. More than one third of individuals reporting financial exploitation also had questionable decisional abilities. Overall, decisional ability score and current decision total were significantly associated with cognitive screening test and financial ability scores, demonstrating good criterion validity. Study findings suggest that impaired decisional abilities may render older adults more vulnerable to financial exploitation, and that the LFDRS is a valid tool.
Energy-Efficient Train Operation in Urban Rail Transit Using Real-Time Traffic Information

Energy-efficient train operation represents an important issue for daily operational urban rail transit. Most energy-efficient train operation strategies are normally planned according to a timetable, which is designed by offline traffic information. In this paper, a new energy-efficient train operation model based on real-time traffic information is proposed from the geometric and topographic points of view through a nonlinear programming method, leading to an energy-efficient driving strategy with real-time interstation running time monitored by the automatic train supervision system. The novelty of this work lies not only in the establishment of a new model for energy-efficient train operation but also in the utilization of combining analytical and numerical methods for deriving energy-efficient train operation strategies. More specifically, the energy-efficient operation model is built based on trajectory analysis when the energy-efficient optimal controls are applied, from which an energy-efficient reference trajectory is obtained under the running time and distance constraints, in which the nonlinear programming method is utilized. In contrast to most existing methods, the proposed model turns out to be a small-scale problem, and the difficulties of solving partial differential equations or the process of predetermining and reiteratively calculating some key factors as traditionally involved are avoided. Thus, it is more feasible to implement the strategy and easier to make real-time adjustment if needed. The comparative analysis and the simulation verification with the actual operating data confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. With the proposed method, some delayed trains are able to maintain punctuality at the next station and sometimes even reducing energy consumption.
SUPPORT ALGORITHMS FOR X-RAY MICRO-CT CONEBEAM IMAGING

Small animal imaging has become an important tool in the biomedical sciences since it permits researchers to noninvasively screen animal models for mutations or pathologies as well as to monitor disease progression and response to therapy. The modality considered here is x-ray micro-CT which is useful for obtaining highresolution volumetric anatomic images of the internal structure of an animal. In particular, we emphasize the MicroCAT which is a circular orbit conebeam system that originally was developed for mouse work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory [1, 2, 3] but has since then been transferred to industry for commercialization. Reconstructions are computed by means of the Feldkamp algorithm [4]. Here we present two support algorithms called XFOV and FOA which briefly can be summarized as follows. In order to image an animal that is taller than what a given symmetric detector array configuration supports, the XFOV algorithm is used to essentially double the field of view [5]. The detector array is mechanically offset to appear as one half of a detector array that is twice as wide. To compensate for the missing projection data, we apply an interpolation and weighting scheme during reconstruction. Applied on its own, the weighting scheme can be used for fast animal screening since it allows an image volume to be reconstructed in about half the time it takes to compute a regular full reconstruction. The XFOV idea applies to circular orbit conebeam algorithms in general including iterative ones. Only the voxels located inside the axial cylinder inscribed by the image volume need be considered during reconstruction [6]. However, the FOA algorithm [7], which is a data-driven preprocessing scheme, makes it possible to identify an even smaller, but still convex subset of voxels that include all those relevant to the object under study. By concentrating on this subset of voxels during reconstruction, the computational demands of the otherwise time consuming backprojection step of the Feldkamp algorithm can be greatly reduced without sacrificing the image quality. Presented here in connection with x-ray imaging, the FOA idea is general by nature and applies not only to other circular conebeam algorithms including iterative ones but also to other types of projection image reconstruction problems. We provide experimental results based on the Shepp-Logan 3D head phantom as well as mouse data from a MicroCAT scanner. More results will be presented at the meeting.
Cooperative positioning and radar sensor fusion for relative localization of vehicles

Future advanced driver assistance systems require an accurate and up-to-date picture of the surrounding environment for applications such as forward collision assistants or adaptive cruise control. Today, the relative position of other objects with respect to the ego-vehicle is obtained with on-board ranging sensors, such as radar. By adding communication capabilities to future vehicles, cooperative approaches can offer a complementary source of relative position information. This paper proposes a fusion framework in which cooperative positioning information is fused with on-board radar sensor data. The measurement runs recorded on a highway and a rural road, demonstrate that the fusion of both information sources outperforms the positioning estimation using solely the radar sensor. An assessment of the current standard for vehicular communication in real world driving environments shows that a cooperative approach is able to extend the perception range of radar sensors in non-Line-of-Sight situations.
New influenza A (H1N1/09) in three renal transplant patients

The pandemic new influenza A (H1N1/09) virus may be especially threatening for immunosuppressed renal transplant patients as they are at increased risk for complications, prolonged infection and mortality. This is the first case report of renal transplant patients with PCR-confirmed H1N1 respiratory tract infection. They showed a surprisingly mild clinical course despite respiratory fungal or viral co-infections in two cases. Treatment with oseltamivir in standard dosage was immediately started after diagnosis and proved to be rapidly beneficial with respect to clinical outcome and virus shedding without deteriorating renal transplant function.
Adaptation to climate change: trade‐offs among responses to multiple stressors in an intertidal crustacean

Trade‐offs may influence both physiological and evolutionary responses to co‐occurring stressors, but their effects on both plastic and adaptive responses to climate change are poorly understood. To test for genetic and physiological trade‐offs incurred in tolerating multiple stressors, we hybridized two populations of the intertidal copepod Tigriopus californicus that were divergent for both heat and salinity tolerance. Starting in the F2 generation, we selected for increased tolerance of heat, low salinity, and high salinity in replicate lines. After five generations of selection, heat‐selected lines had greater heat tolerance but lower fecundity, indicating an energetic cost to tolerance. Lines selected for increased salinity tolerance did not show evidence of adaptation to their respective environments; however, hypo‐osmotic selection lines showed substantial loss of tolerance to hyperosmotic stress. Neither of the salinity selection regimes resulted in diminished heat tolerance at ambient salinity; however, simultaneous exposure to heat and hypo‐osmotic stress led to decreased heat tolerance, implying a physiological trade‐off in tolerance to the two stressors. When we quantified the transcriptomic response to heat and salinity stress via RNA sequencing, we observed little overlap in the stress responses, suggesting the observed synergistic effects of heat and salinity stress were driven by competing energetic demands, rather than shared stress response pathways.
Mining a News Archive for a Comparable Corpus

The emergence of the World Wide Web has provided new and important opportunities to easily access and combine data and information from several different sources and thereby enabling the construction of new resources for researchers everywhere. In this paper we describe recent work that we have done in order to construct a comparable corpus consisting of Amharic and English news texts. In doing so, we utilised a number of available software and data sources that were (mainly) found on the Internet. The Amharic and English news texts were collected from Walta Information Center, a private news agency located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that makes daily news in Amharic and English available through their web page http://www.waltainfo. com. Although the center provides Ethiopian news in both Amharic and English, only a small portion of the articles in the archive refer to the same event. Thus a major part of the work consisted of identifying the relevant comparable news items in the archive and aligning them with their respective corresponding version. The work is motivated by the fact that Amharic is a language for which very few computational linguistic tools or corpora (such as part-of-speech taggers, parsers or tree-banks) exist. A solution to this problem (which is shared by a number of so called ”low density languages”) is through the transfer of linguistic knowledge, tools and techniques from languages for which linguistic resources are more developed and more readily available. There has recently been a number of research projects with this focus (see e.g. [14], [6], [11], [3] and [2]). It is our hope that the availability of even a small parallel Amharic English corpus can provide a starting point for such transfer as well as provide a useful basis for a number of other higher level natural language processing activities for Amharic. In order to align the Amharic and English news articles, we used the Levenshtein Distance algorithm to find fuzzy matches for the words in the title of articles that were published on the same date and that occured in the same place. The performance of the matching algorithm was evaluated and experimental results for news items from the Gregorian year 2001 are presented. Depending on
An example of passive micromixer design, simulation and optimization

The paper presents the designing process of the passive micromixer. Design parameters of microfluidic channel's geometry are optimized based on flow simulation results. CAD software Solid Works and application Flo Xpress are used for designing and simulation. Aim of presented student's work is not connected to any actual research activities. However part of MSc Thesis shows outcome of student's ability that is accomplished at Biomedical department. This is one of outcomes of BioEMIS TEMPUS project, and therefore the future work on this topic regarding practical implementation is not given here.
The face‐specific N170 component reflects late stages in the structural encoding of faces

To investigate which stages in the structural encoding of faces are reflected by the face-specific N170 component, ERPs (event-related brain potentials) were recorded in response to different types of face and non-face stimuli. The N170 was strongly attenuated for cheek and back views of faces relative to front and profile views, demonstrating that it is not merely triggered by head detection. Attenuated and delayed N170 components were elicited for faces lacking internal features as well as for faces without external features, suggesting that it is not exclusively sensitive to salient internal features. It is suggested that the N170 is linked to late stages of structural encoding, where representations of global face configurations are generated in order to be utilised by subsequent face recognition processes.