Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Persistent Power of Behavioral Change: Long-Run Impacts of Temporary Savings Subsidies for the Poor

I use a field experiment in rural Kenya to study how temporary incentives to save impact long-run economic outcomes. Study participants randomly selected to receive large temporary interest rates on an individual bank account had significantly more income and assets 2.5–3.5 years after the interest rates expired. These changes are much larger than the short-run impacts on experimental bank account use and almost entirely driven by growth in entrepreneurship. In contrast, interest rates on joint accounts and modest cash payments did not significantly impact long-run economic outcomes. (JEL C93, D13, D14, D90, G21, I32, O12)
The Effects of Plasma Homocysteine in PCOS Women: A Review

Homocysteine is an intermediate substance formed during the breakdown of the amino acid methionine and may undergo remethylation to methionine or trans-sulfuration to cystathionine or cysteine. The metabolism occurs via two pathways: remethylation to methionine, which requires folate and vitamin B12; and transsulfuration to cystathionine, which requires pyridoxal-5’-phosphate. The disturbances in the metabolic pathways lead to the accumulation of Hcy, either by insufficient transsulfuration (through CBS mutations or vitamin B6 deficiency) or by a blockage of remethylation. In the latter case, folate or vitamin B12 deficiency may be involved, as well as MTHFR. High levels of Hcy induce sustained injury of arterial endothelial cells, proliferation of arterial smooth muscle cells and enhance activity of key participants in vascular inflammation, atherogenesis, and vulnerability of the established atherosclerotic plaque. Hyperhomocysteinemia has become the topic of interest in recent years. It has been highly associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disorders, such as, atherosclerosis, thromboembolism and dyslipidemia. Women with PCOS show constellation of metabolic syndromes. Obesity, hyperandrogenemia and type 2 diabetes mellitus is the hallmark of PCOS which later becomes the risk factors for cardiovascular disease. Various studies had revealed the presence of increased Hcy level in PCOS women which may or may not be associated with other biochemical parameters. Intense treatment for PCOS can influence homocysteine levels.
Comparison of allocation rules for paid placement advertising in search engines

Web sites such as Internet search engines, web portals, and comparison shopping services, aim to provide information or recommendations to users who might be searching for information or trying to make a purchase decision. Paid placement advertising has established itself as an important revenue resource for such information-oriented web sites, which often deliberately bias their recommendations (or sequence of results) in return for a fee from providers who wish to get preferential placement on the results page. This article examines the paid-placement ranking strategies of the two dominant firms in this industry, and compares their revenues under different scenarios via computational simulation. We find that ranking paid placement links by the product of willingness to pay and relevance is better, in most cases, than ranking by willingness to pay alone, which performs best only when the correlation between the provider's relevance and willingness to pay is large. We also analyze the impact of the competition for placement slots on placement revenues under these mechanisms.
Cognitive Foundations of Textual Coherence

Previous studies on textual coherence have been mainly focused on cohesion or cohesive ties interweaved in formal and semantic networks. Scanty attention has been paid to the underlying cognitive workings for textual coherence in terms of information structures. In order to explore the cognitive foundations underlying textual coherence, the present study presents a contrastive analysis of this relationship between 30 linguistic texts and their real world reference, within the current theoretical frameworks of textual information structure. Based on a detailed comparison analysis of information structures between 30 Chinese compositions and the original organization of their real world source, this paper tries to surface the implied cognitive basis for textual coherence. The subjects in this study were 40 Chinese college students. They were required to describe in detail a picture which was new to them in their native language. 30 texts among the 40 written compositions were chosen as coherent essays by 2 linguists for the present study. The picture and the 30 texts were parsed into comparable information units according to the currently acknowledged information structure theories in textual analysis, especially the poetic parsing method in textual information analysis advocated by Chafe and Gee. Through contrastive analyses in terms of information combinations and organizations between the picture and its 30 linguistic texts and among the texts themselves, the paper points out that textual coherence is not determined solely by cohesive ties or cohesion, it is also determined by adhesion, i.e. whether or not the text adheres to the commonly shared cognitive patterns underlying the acceptability of information organizations of linguistic texts. At the macro-structure level of textual information structure, the study shows that the coherence of a text derives from the realization of a certain cognitive mode out of a repertoire of possible shared cognitive patterns in text production. At the micro-structure level, the paper describes the specific cognitive workings for the textuality of a piece of writing. The paper also points out that some so-called cohesive ties may not really function as they are believed, and that some repetitions in the data of this research may not play the role of cohesion. The paper concludes that textual coherence has its cognitive foundations. Whether or not the underlying cognition produces a coherent text may not be determined by cohesion. The coherence of a text is mainly determined by its adhesion to normally shared cognitive patterns which underlie the acceptability of the text. By emphasizing adhesion instead of cohesion, this paper has some pedagogical implications for writing in instructional settings. Language teachers should not only teach the students the linguistic devices which are useful for textual coherence, but also inform them of the normal cognitive patterns or established thinking modes in textual constructions.
Improving land surface models with FLUXNET data

Abstract. There is a growing consensus that land surface models (LSMs) that simulate terrestrial biosphere exchanges of matter and energy must be better constrained with data to quantify and address their uncertainties. FLUXNET, an international network of sites that measure the land surface exchanges of carbon, water and energy using the eddy covariance technique, is a prime source of data for model improvement. Here we outline a multi-stage process for "fusing" (i.e. linking) LSMs with FLUXNET data to generate better models with quantifiable uncertainty. First, we describe FLUXNET data availability, and its random and systematic biases. We then introduce methods for assessing LSM model runs against FLUXNET observations in temporal and spatial domains. These assessments are a prelude to more formal model-data fusion (MDF). MDF links model to data, based on error weightings. In theory, MDF produces optimal analyses of the modelled system, but there are practical problems. We first discuss how to set model errors and initial conditions. In both cases incorrect assumptions will affect the outcome of the MDF. We then review the problem of equifinality, whereby multiple combinations of parameters can produce similar model output. Fusing multiple independent and orthogonal data provides a means to limit equifinality. We then show how parameter probability density functions (PDFs) from MDF can be used to interpret model validity, and to propagate errors into model outputs. Posterior parameter distributions are a useful way to assess the success of MDF, combined with a determination of whether model residuals are Gaussian. If the MDF scheme provides evidence for temporal variation in parameters, then that is indicative of a critical missing dynamic process. A comparison of parameter PDFs generated with the same model from multiple FLUXNET sites can provide insights into the concept and validity of plant functional types (PFT) – we would expect similar parameter estimates among sites sharing a single PFT. We conclude by identifying five major model-data fusion challenges for the FLUXNET and LSM communities: (1) to determine appropriate use of current data and to explore the information gained in using longer time series; (2) to avoid confounding effects of missing process representation on parameter estimation; (3) to assimilate more data types, including those from earth observation; (4) to fully quantify uncertainties arising from data bias, model structure, and initial conditions problems; and (5) to carefully test current model concepts (e.g. PFTs) and guide development of new concepts.
Night shift preparation, performance, and perception: are there differences between emergency medicine nurses, residents, and faculty?

Objective Determine differences between faculty, residents, and nurses regarding night shift preparation, performance, recovery, and perception of emotional and physical health effects. Methods Survey study performed at an urban university medical center emergency department with an accredited residency program in emergency medicine. Results Forty-seven faculty, 37 residents, and 90 nurses completed the survey. There was no difference in use of physical sleep aids between groups, except nurses utilized blackout curtains more (69%) than residents (60%) and faculty (45%). Bedroom temperature preference was similar. The routine use of pharmacologic sleep aids differed: nurses and residents (both 38%) compared to faculty (13%). Residents routinely used melatonin more (79%) than did faculty (33%) and nurses (38%). Faculty preferred not to eat (45%), whereas residents (24%) preferred a full meal. The majority (>72%) in all groups drank coffee before their night shift and reported feeling tired despite their routine, with 4:00 a.m. as median nadir. Faculty reported a higher rate (41%) of falling asleep while driving compared to residents (14%) and nurses (32%), but the accident rate (3% to 6%) did not differ significantly. All had similar opinions regarding night shift-associated health effects. However, faculty reported lower level of satisfaction working night shifts, whereas nurses agreed less than the other groups regarding increased risk of drug and alcohol dependence. Conclusion Faculty, residents, and nurses shared many characteristics. Faculty tended to not use pharmacologic sleep aids, not eat before their shift, fall asleep at a higher rate while driving home, and enjoy night shift work less.
Towards Flexible Automatic Generation of User-Interfaces via UML and XMI

Automatic generation of user-interfaces is a key-technology enabling designers to cope with the increasing diversity of computing devices that are becoming ubiquitous and reaching a growing number of users. Although model based generation of UIs failed to reach commercial adoption, the technology is widespread today on the Web through device independent rendering of markup. This paper presents a new approach to this problem that provides automatic generation of multiple user interfaces from UML-based high-level specifications. From a minimal set of UML extensions that promote high-level modeling of UI specifics, we demonstrate how we can automatically generate intent-based UI descriptions capable of being rendered in multiple devices. Moreover, our approach takes advantage of the XMI tools interchange format, thus promoting tool independence and taking advantage of XML technologies, like XSL transformation. We also envision how this approach could be transposed into the forthcoming W3C XForms standard, thus enabling a more ambitious approach for flexible automatic generation of UIs.
Hib Vaccines: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives

Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) causes many severe diseases, including epiglottitis, pneumonia, sepsis, and meningitis. In developed countries, the annual incidence of meningitis caused by bacteria is approximately 5–10 cases per population of 100,000. The Hib conjugate vaccine is considered protective and safe. Adjuvants, molecules that can enhance and/or regulate the fundamental immunogenicity of an antigen, comprise a wide range of diverse compounds. While earlier developments of adjuvants created effective products, there is still a need to create new generations, rationally designed based on recent discoveries in immunology, mainly in innate immunity. Many factors may play a role in the immunogenicity of Hib conjugate vaccines, such as the polysaccharides and proteins carrier used in vaccine construction, as well as the method of conjugation. A Hib conjugate vaccine has been constructed via chemical synthesis of a Hib saccharide antigen. Two models of carbohydrate-protein conjugate have been established, the single ended model (terminal amination-single method) and cross-linked lattice matrix (dual amination method). Increased knowledge in the fields of immunology, molecular biology, glycobiology, glycoimmunology, and the biology of infectious microorganisms has led to a dramatic increase in vaccine efficacy.
The advantage of the extremes: tree seedlings at intermediate abundance in a tropical forest have the highest richness of above‐ground enemies and suffer the most damage

Tropical forest tree diversity has been hypothesized to be maintained via the attraction of density responsive and species‐specific enemies. Tests of this hypothesis usually assume a linear relationship between enemy pressure (amount of damage and enemy richness) and seedling or tree density. However, enemy pressure is likely to change nonlinearly with local seedling abundance and community scale tree abundance if enemies are characterized by nonlinear functional responses. We examined the abiotic and biotic factors associated with richness of above‐ground enemies and foliar damage found in tree seedlings in a tropical forest in Puerto Rico. Rather than identify specific enemies targeting these seedlings, we used damage morphotypes, a paleo‐ecological method, to derive a proxy for enemy species richness. We found that the relationships between local and (conspecific seedling density) community scale (conspecific basal area of adult trees) abundance and both richness of above‐ground enemies and foliar damage were hump‐shaped. Seedlings of tree species existing at intermediate levels of abundance, at both local and community scales, suffered more damage and experienced pressure from a greater diversity of enemies than those existing at high or low densities. We hypothesized that greater damage at intermediate abundance level could arise from a rich mixture of generalist and specialist enemies targeting seedlings of intermediate abundance tree species. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that generalist enemies were more diverse on species at rare or intermediate abundance relative to common tree species. However, specialist enemies showed no significant trend across tree species abundance at either the local or community scales. Synthesis. Our results suggest that interspecific variation in tree species abundance leads to differences in the magnitude and type of damage tropical tree seedlings suffer. This variation leads to a nonlinear, hump‐shaped relationship between species abundance and enemy damage, highlighting fruitful directions for further development of species coexistence theory.
On indirect method of exponential estimation for neural network model with discretely distributed delays

The purpose of this research is to develop a method of calculation of exponential decay rate for a neural network model based on differential equations with discretely distributed delays. The method results in a quasipolynomial inequality allowing us to investigate the qualitative behavior of the model depending on parameters. In such way we showed inverse dependency in changes of exponential decay rate and time delay. An example of a two-neuron network with four delays is given and numerical simulations are performed to illustrate the obtained results.
The impact of taxing working memory on negative and positive memories

Background: Earlier studies have shown that horizontal eye movement (EM) during retrieval of a negative memory reduces its vividness and emotionality. This may be due to both tasks competing for working memory (WM) resources. This study examined whether playing the computer game “Tetris” also blurs memory. Method: Participants recalled negative and positive memories in three conditions: recall only, recall with concurrent EM, and recall with playing Tetris. Before and after these conditions, vividness, emotionality, and physiological startle responses during recall were measured. Results: A reaction time task showed that EM and Tetris draw on WM, compared to no dual-task. Compared to recall only, EM and Tetris both decreased reported emotionality and startle responses. Conclusions: The effects of EM and Tetris did not differ, even though the tasks differed in the degree of taxing WM. This suggests that taxing WM and its effects on emotional memories may not be linearly related. Potential clinical implications are discussed. For the abstract or full text in other languages, please see Supplementary files under Reading Tools online
Role of rumen fungi in fiber degradation.

Anaerobic fungi inhabit the rumen and actively degrade plant cell walls. Rumen fungi produce high levels of cellulases and hemicellulases and are particularly proficient in producing xylanases. These enzymes are regulated by substrate (especially soluble sugars) available to the organisms. Fungi degrade unlignified (i.e., no histochemical reaction for phenolics) plant walls totally, indicating that enzymes are able to hydrolyze or solubilize the entire plant wall. These organisms are better able to colonize and degrade the lignin-containing tissues than are bacteria; phenolics are solubilized but not metabolized from the plant wall by fungi. Anaerobic fungi are unique among rumen microorganisms in that they penetrate the cuticle. Residues after incubation with fungi are physically weaker than those incubated with whole rumen fluid or with rumen bacteria, suggesting that fungi could alter the fibrous residue for easier mastication by the animal. Data indicate that cocultures of anaerobic fungi with methanogenic bacteria stimulate cellulose degradation; other data suggest that fungi are inhibited by certain rumen microorganisms. The interaction of rumen fungi with other organisms in relation to fiber degradation in the rumen requires additional study. Rumen fungi have the potential to degrade the more recalcitrant plant walls in forages, but this potential is not always reached in the rumen.
Modified particle swarm optimized MIMO FLC for complex industrial process

This paper presents a modified particle swarm optimization (MPSO) algorithm to design an optimal multi input multi out (MIMO) fuzzy logic controller for a cement mill process. The membership function, rule base and the scaling factor of the multi input multi output FLC is tuned for optimal control performance using MPSO by minimizing the Integral absolute error for minimum and maximum operating setpoints. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed MPSO optimized MIMO FLC work effectively under varying hardness and setpoints. The material hardness is considered upto 1.7 to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm over other control algorithms.
A domain-agnostic approach for opinion prediction on speech

We explore a domain-agnostic approach for analyzing speech with the goal of opinion prediction. We represent the speech signal by mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and apply long short-term memory neural networks to automatically learn temporal regularities in speech. In contrast to previous work, our approach does not require complex feature engineering and works without textual transcripts. As a consequence, it can easily be applied on various speech analysis tasks for different languages and the results show that it can nevertheless be competitive to the state-of-the-art in opinion prediction. In a detailed error analysis for opinion mining we find that our approach performs well in identifying speaker-specific characteristics, but should be combined with additional information if subtle differences in the linguistic content need to be identified.
Shape optimization approaches to free‐surface problems

Three different reformulations of a free‐surface problem as shape optimization problems are considered. These give rise to three different cost functionals that apparently have not been exploited in literature. The shape derivatives of the cost functionals are explicitly determined. The gradient information is combined with the boundary variation method in a preconditioned steepest descent algorithm to solve the shape optimization problems. Numerical results that compare the performance of the proposed cost functionals are presented. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Inhaled epoprostenol therapy for pulmonary hypertension: Improves oxygenation index more consistently in neonates than in older children

The purpose of this study was to determine the efficacy of inhaled epoprostenol for treatment of acute pulmonary hypertension (PH) in pediatric patients and to formulate a plan for a prospective, randomized study of pulmonary vasodilator therapy in this population. Inhaled epoprostenol is an effective treatment for pediatric PH. A retrospective chart review was conducted of all pediatric patients who received inhaled epoprostenol at a tertiary care hospital between October 2005 and August 2007. The study population was restricted to all patients under 18 years of age who received inhaled epoprostenol for greater than 1 hour and had available data for oxygenation index (OI) calculation. Arterial blood gas values and ventilator settings were collected immediately prior to epoprostenol initiation, and during epoprostenol therapy (as close to 12 hours after initiation as possible). Echocardiograms were reviewed during two time frames: Within 48 hours prior to therapy initiation and within 96 hours after initiation. Of the 20 patients in the study population, 13 were neonates, and the mean OI for these patients improved during epoprostenol administration (mean OI before and during therapy was 25.6±16.3 and 14.5±13.6, respectively, P=0.02). Mean OI for the seven patients greater than 30 days of age was not significantly different during treatment (mean OI before and during therapy was 29.6±15.0 and 25.6±17.8, P=0.56). Improvement in echocardiographic findings (evidence of decreased right-sided pressures or improved right ventricular function) was demonstrated in 20% of all patients. Inhaled epoprostenol is an effective therapy for the treatment of selected pediatric patients with acute PH. Neonates may benefit more consistently from this therapy than older infants and children. A randomized controlled trial is needed to discern the optimal role for inhaled prostanoids in the treatment of acute PH in childhood.