Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Land Reform in Russia: Institutional Design and Behavioural Responses

Stephen K. Wegren. Land Reform in Russia: Institutional Design and Behavioural Responses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xix, 340 pp. Glossary. Appendices. Index. $55.00, paper.Stephen K. Wegren' s monograph provides a detailed analysis of the politics of land reform in post-communist Russia. The book will be of interest to specialists in Russian reform, to students of comparative agricultural policy and peasant studies, and to those interested in legislative processes in post-communist countries. Land Reform in Russia is clearly the fruit of countless years of careful research. The reader quickly forms the impression of an author who has seen more than a few seasons change in the Russian countryside. Surely there can be few greater challenges for a social scientist than studying land reform in a country with the largest amount of territory of any state in the world. One should acknowledge, with appreciation, that it is very labour-intensive to produce a monograph with this level of empirical detail.The monograph shows several particular strengths. Wegren provides an exhaustive account of the legislative evolution of Russian land reform, which at least until Putin's presidency proceeded in fits and starts until the final Land Code was adopted in 2002. Second, Wegren includes a detailed discussion of the legal regulation of land in Russia, painting a vivid picture of multiple layers of conditions imposed on the use of land. For the average rural resident, the end result could be described as a rather precarious set of rights. One must be careful when using the term privatization to describe Russia's land reform, because as Wegren points out, an individual's access to land may comprise some combination of family plots, shares of former collective farm land, rental arrangements, and rights of use. Privatization, therefore, is only one part of the land reform story.Third, the greatest strength of Wegren' s work is his discussion of survey research results and statistical data. In the second half of the book, the author documents the impact that reforms have had on Russian rural dwellers. The reader learns from Wegren that some citizens (predominantly male, well-educated, and well-connected) feel they have benefited from the process of change, but that many more peasants have experienced a sense of loss. Nevertheless, the odds of success are not completely stacked in favour of those who are already privileged. For instance, Wegren' s data suggests that bigger families working the land they occupy tend to accumulate more land than smaller families, because of the ability to concentrate the work of a larger number of people (pp. …
An overview of composite actuators with piezoceramic fibers

The use of piezoelectric ceramic materials for structural actuation is a fairly well developed practice that has found use in a wide variety of applications. However, just as advanced composites offer many benefits over traditional engineering materials for structural design, actuators that utilize the active properties of piezoelectric fibers can improve upon many of the limitations encountered with monolithic piezoceramic devices used to control structural dynamics. There are several types of active composites available commercially or under development at research institutes. This paper will discuss the manufacturing processes, intended applications and relative benefits of four different types of active fiber composite actuators.
Application of Adaptive Mixtures and Fractal Dimension Analysis Technique to Particle Physics

The discrimination of physics “signal” from “background” is one of the most important subjects in high energy physics analysis since this process usually governs the magnitude of measurement errors. Background suppression using kernel density estimation to estimate the parent distribution of a data sample appears to be an effective method. In this paper, Adaptive Mixtures [1] and Kernel Density Estimation with Likelihood Maximization (KDELM) are examined. In addition, the Fractal Dimension [2] of a data set is studied as a tool to find physics signals. Adaptive Mixtures are designed to accept the strengths of the kernel estimates and that of the finite mixtures while discarding the weaknesses of these methods. In the kernel estimation method, one kernel is assigned to each datum. As a result, kernel density estimates converge asymptotically under very weak conditions. Due to the large number of kernels, however, there is computational disadvantage in the case that there are many data points. On the other hand, since finite mixture methods employ small fixed numbers of kernels, these approaches have an advantage in calculation time. However, very strong assumptions must be put on the underlying densities as well as on the initial states of kernels. In the adaptive mixture, the number of kernels is driven by data. At each data point, criteria for making the decision whether a new kernel is added are tested. When these criteria are satisfied, a new kernel is added. Otherwise, the parameters of the adaptive mixture kernels are updated to accommodate the new data point. In this way, only the necessary number of kernels are introduced in the fit while the characteristic of asymptotic convergence remains without strong assumptions on the underlying distributions. KDELM uses the maximization of likelihood. The main difference between KDELM and Adaptive Mixtures is that, in KDELM, all data points are taken into account at the same time to calculate the likelihood of the kernel estimates. Only when addition of a kernel reduces the overall likelihood is the new kernel added to the kernel estimates. If the new kernel produces a worse overall likelihood, the process adding new kernels is ceased. The fractal dimension [2] D, also called capacity dimension, is defined by n( ) = −D, (1)
The Membrane-Bound Aspartyl Protease BACE1: Molecular and Functional Properties in Alzheimer’s Disease and Beyond

The β-site APP cleaving enzyme 1 (BACE1) is a transmembrane aspartyl protease involved in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathogenesis and in myelination. BACE1 initiates the generation of the pathogenic amyloid β-peptide, which makes BACE1 a major drug target for AD. BACE1 also cleaves and activates neuregulin 1, thereby contributing to postnatal myelination, in particular in the peripheral nervous system. Additional proteins are also cleaved by BACE1, but less is known about the physiological consequences of their cleavage. Recently, new phenotypes were described in BACE1-deficient mice. Although it remains unclear through which BACE1 substrates they are mediated, the phenotypes suggest a versatile role of this protease for diverse physiological processes. This review summarizes the enzymatic and cellular properties of BACE1 as well as its regulation by lipids, by transcriptional, and by translational mechanisms. The main focus will be on the recent progress in understanding BACE1 function and its implication for potential mechanism-based side effects upon therapeutic inhibition.
Mechanical Thrombectomy Using a Solitaire Stent in Acute Ischemic Stroke; Initial Experience in 40 Patients

Objective This study was conducted in order to demonstrate the initial experience of the Solitaire AB stent in mechanical intracranial thrombectomy. Methods We conducted a retrospective review of 40 consecutive patients who underwent intra-arterial Solitaire AB stent thrombectomy for treatment of acute ischemic strokes between October 2010 and November 2011. Demographic, clinical, and radiological presentations and outcomes were studied. Results Twenty six men and 14 women with a mean initial National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score of 14.1 (range, 8-26) and a mean age of 65.4 (range, 32-89) years were included in this study. Occlusion sites were as follows: internal carotid artery (n = 11), middle cerebral artery M1 (n = 22), M2 (n = 5), and basilar artery (n = 2). Successful revascularization was achieved in 36 (90%) patients. The mean NIHSS score was 11.6 (range, 1-23) at 24 hours after the procedure, and 42.5% of patients showed a modified Rankin scale score of ≤ 2 at 90 days. New occlusion by migrated emboli was observed in one (2.5%) case. Post-procedural intracerebral hemorrhage occurred in only one case (2.5%), with an all-cause mortality of two (5%). Conclusion The Solitaire AB device is a relatively safe and effective tool for use in performance of mechanical thrombectomy in patients with acute ischemic stroke.
Solving Amazons ∗

We present a method of exhaustively solving the popular combinatorial game Amazons in a parallel setting. The game has a high branching factor with high overlap, making it difficult to search in parallel. We exploit some structural properties of game positions to minimise game tree expansion, and use a parallel breadth-first search algorithm on the game tree. Throughput is maximised by allowing some minimal work duplication, avoiding a high communication overhead. We intend to use this method to solve the full 10x10 game with 4 amazons per player.
Organization of Functional Synaptic Connections between Medullary Reticulospinal Neurons and Lumbar Descending Commissural Interneurons in the Neonatal Mouse

The medullary reticular formation (MRF) of the neonatal mouse is organized so that the medial and lateral MRF activate hindlimb and trunk motoneurons (MNs) with differential predominance. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether this activation is polysynaptic and mediated by commissural interneurons with descending axons (dCINs) in the lumbar spinal cord. To this end, we tested the polysynapticity of inputs from the MRF to MNs and tested for the presence of selective inputs from medial and lateral MRF to 574 individual dCINs in the L2 segment of the neonatal mouse. Reticulospinal-mediated postsynaptic Ca2+ responses in MNs were reduced in the presence of mephenesin and after a midline lesion, suggesting the involvement of dCINs in mediating the responses. Consistent with this, stimulation of reticulospinal neurons in the medial or lateral MRF activated 51% and 57% of ipsilateral dCINs examined (255 and 352 dCINs, respectively) and 52% and 46% of contralateral dCINs examined (166 and 133 dCINs, respectively). The proportion of dCINs that responded specifically to stimulation of medial or lateral MRF was similar to the proportions of dCINs that responded to both MRF regions or to neither. The three responsive dCIN populations had largely overlapping spatial distributions. We demonstrate the existence of dCIN subpopulations sufficient to mediate responses in lumbar motoneurons from reticulospinal pathways originating from the medial and lateral MRF. Differential control of trunk and hindlimb muscles by the medullary reticulospinal system may therefore be mediated in part by identifiable dCIN populations.
Homogeneity adjustments of in situ atmospheric climate data: a review

Long-term in situ observations are widely used in a variety of climate analyses. Unfortunately, most decade- to century-scale time series of atmospheric data have been adversely impacted by inhomogeneities caused by, for example, changes in instrumentation, station moves, changes in the local environment such as urbanization, or the introduction of different observing practices like a new formula for calculating mean daily temperature or different observation times. If these inhomogeneities are not accounted for properly, the results of climate analyses using these data can be erroneous. Over the last decade, many climatologists have put a great deal of effort into developing techniques to identify inhomogeneities and adjust climatic time series to compensate for the biases produced by the inhomogeneities. It is important for users of homogeneity-adjusted data to understand how the data were adjusted and what impacts these adjustments are likely to make on their analyses. And it is important for developers of homogeneity-adjusted data sets to compare readily the different techniques most commonly used today. Therefore, this paper reviews the methods and techniques developed for homogeneity adjustments and describes many different approaches and philosophies involved in adjusting in situ climate data. © 1998 Royal Meteorological Society.
Mannequin development for pedestrian pre-Collision System evaluation

Pedestrian PCS (pre-Collision System), as a novel active pedestrian safety equipment to reduce pedestrian fatalities, was introduced by several vehicle manufactures in recent years. How to evaluate this system is still in study. This paper describes the development of a set of mannequins for pedestrian PCS evaluation. These mannequins represent relevant physical properties of human beings that are used by most common PCS sensors in vehicles for pedestrian detection. Three different mannequin sizes were generated to represent child, fit adult and obese adult of U.S. pedestrians. These sizes were generated using a K-means clustering method with crash weighted NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) data. To ensure that the mannequin provides the same radar cross section (RCS) as a pedestrian in the view of a 77GHz automotive radar, a special mannequin skin was developed. To make the mannequin move like a real human in the view of PCS cameras, mannequins were configured with 6 degrees of freedom articulation, 2 for shoulders, 2 for hips, and 2 for knees. The mannequin limbs are detachable at crash in order to protect the mannequin motion driving system. To ensure that the mannequins move like a real human, a gait planning method was adopted to generate different walking speed based on the gaiting research in medical fields. Other mannequin features are to support various test setups, low weight for test vehicle safety, and crash forgivingness. The mannequins were used in hundreds of PCS test runs at different crash angles and vehicle speeds.
How Does Social Security Claiming Respond to Incentives?

Most women receive some Social Security benefits based upon their husbands’ earnings history, but husbands’ benefit claiming is inconsistent with maximizing lifetime benefits for the couple. I show that husbands’ claiming behavior responds to the actuarial incentives from their retired worker benefits. Not responding to incentives from spouse and survivor formulas reduces wives’ lifetime benefits. Rule changes to the Social Security benefit calculation, the age difference between spouses, and the relative strength of the wife’s labor force history creates variation in incentives. Segments of the population predicted to be more responsive to incentives provides similar results to the main specification.
On the invariants of a linear group of order 336

Abstract The polynomial invariants of a certain classical linear group of order 336 arise naturally in studying error-correcting codes over GF(7). An incomplete description of these invariants was given by Maschke in 1893. With the aid of the Poincaré series for this group, found by Edge in 1947, we complete Maschke's work by giving a unique representation for the invariants in terms of 12 basic invariants. A conjecture is made concerning the relationship between the Poincaré series and the degrees of the basic invariants for any linear group. A partial answer to this conjecture, due to E. C. Dade, is given.
Expression of cellular prion protein (PrPc) in the rat central nervous system.

The localization of cellular prion protein in the central nervous system of adult rats is an important step not only for understanding its biology, but also to gain a better understanding of the propagation of pathogenic prion protein within the central nervous system in spongiform encephalopathies. Here, the expression of cellular prion protein is studied by immunocytochemistry and Western blotting techniques. The presence of the protein varied in the rostrocaudal direction: it was less abundant in the brainstem than in prosencephalon. PrPc-positive cells were especially abundant in the cerebral cortex. The immunoreaction was present in areas projecting to the intermediate band of the mediodorsal thalamic nucleus and the anteroventral nucleus of the thalamus. Some immunopositive neurons, glial cells, and fibres were located around vessels in areas where nitrergic activity is well documented. Our findings lead us again to propose a retrograde propagation of altered prion proteins in human spongiform encephalopathies such as fatal familial insomnia, followed by an alteration of the nitrergic systems. Moreover, destruction of the mediodorsal thalamic nucleus in fatal familial insomnia may unleash an alteration of prion and nitrergic physiology
Extracting Animated Meshes with Adaptive Motion Estimation

We present an approach for extracting coherently sampled animated meshes from input sequences of incoherently sampled meshes representing a continuously evolving shape. Our approach is based on multiscale adaptive motion estimation procedure followed by propagation of a template mesh through time. An adaptive signed distance volumes are used as the principal shape representation, and a Bayesian optical flow algorithm is adapted to the surface setting with a modification that diminishes the interference between unrelated surface regions. Additionally, a parametric smoothing step is employed to improve the sampling coherence of the model. The result of the proposed procedure is a single animated mesh. We apply our approach to the human motion data.
CCNY at TRECVID 2015: Localization

In this paper, we present a novel video-based object localization system, which is developed for the Localization task of TRECVID 2015. Our system is based on the R-CNN which is one of the state-of-the-art image-based object localization algorithms. In our system, in addition to the selective search method, EdgeBoxes algorithm is also applied to generate candidate region proposals. Two CNN models are adopted in this paper: AlexNet and GoogLeNet. The features of each region extracted from these two models are (cid:96) 2 normalized and concatenated. After that the linear SVM classiﬁcation model is employed. Since the R-CNN is image based algorithm and does not take temporal information into consideration, we propose a region trajectory algorithm which can keep tracking possible object regions while prune false detections. Our system ranks the ﬁrst place in the temporal measurement and the third in the spatial measurement. The result demonstrates that our system can robustly and eﬀectively localize objects in videos.
Eye detection based on multi-angle template matching

An eye detection algorithm from facial image based on multi-angle template is described in this paper. First, we get the face region using skin-color model, then we extract the edge of face region. After that, we can obtain the eye candidate regions with morphological opening and closing operations and symmetrical characteristics of the eyes. At last, we can accurately locate the position of eyes by multi-angle template matching. The experimental results show the effectiveness and the robustness of this algorithm.
An Intertemporal Version of Mundell's Two-Country Flexible Exchange Rates Model with Disequilibrium Microfoundations: Is Policy Interdependence Inevitable?

As a companion to a previous paper, monetary and fiscal policy are analyzed in (a) a small open economy and (b) a two-country world, where in addition to a fixed wage causing unemployment, countries now produce specialized products whose prices are fixed, causing excess supply. There are two periods, and perfect foresight. Markets clear in the second period. Exchange rates are flexible, and there is perfect capital mobility. Both monetary and fiscal policy raise domestic output whether the country is small or not, but do not affect foreign output or interest rates. Flexible exchange rates thus recover their "insulating" properties.
Torque maximization of a high-speed switched reluctance starter in acceleration test

This paper presents a torque maximization control strategy of a high speed switched reluctance machine and describes an indirect torque measurement based on acceleration. The SRM operates as a Starter/Generator for a more electric aircraft application with the requirement of an average torque of at least 15 Nm up to a speed of 27,000 rpm, which must be available for 15 s according to [4]. Maximum torque acceleration is intended to be used to start up the turbine to idle speed. The acceleration method was used to validate the torque-speed characteristic in the described starting mode. Both in high acceleration and high speed systems, a direct torque measurement would be a big challenge because of the delay time of the torque sensor. Therefore, the torque was measured indirectly by analyzing the acceleration according to the speed rise. In order to achieve numerically stable results, an additional inertia was provided.
SOCE and cancer: Recent progress and new perspectives

Ca2+ acts as a universal and versatile second messenger in the regulation of a myriad of biological processes, including cell proliferation, differentiation, migration and apoptosis. Store‐operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) mediated by ORAI and the stromal interaction molecule (STIM) constitutes one of the major routes of calcium entry in nonexcitable cells, in which the depletion of intracellular Ca2+ stores triggers activation of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)‐resident Ca2+ sensor protein STIM to gate and open the ORAI Ca2+ channels in the plasma membrane (PM). Accumulating evidence indicates that SOCE plays critical roles in cancer cell proliferation, metastasis and tumor neovascularization, as well as in antitumor immunity. We summarize herein the recent advances in our understanding of the function of SOCE in various types of tumor cells, vascular endothelial cells and cells of the immune system. Finally, the therapeutic potential of SOCE inhibitors in the treatment of cancer is also discussed.
Editorial Cardiac autonomic control in neurosurgery the example of trigemino-cardiac reflex

The trigemino-cardiac reflex (TCR) is defined as the sudden onset of parasympathetic dysrhythmia, sympathetic hypotension, apnoea or gastric hypermotility during stimulation of any of the sensory branches of the trigeminal nerve. In the present review, we summarize the knowledge about the TCR in relation to its two different ways of stimulation: (i) peripheral and (ii) central stimulation. We are the first to differentiate these two ways of occurrence of the TCR in our previous clinical work. From our studies, it seems that these differences are based on the varying autonomic control of the heart initiated either by peripheral or central stimulation. As despite the increasing clinical reports the physiological function of this brainstem reflex has not yet been fully explored, we give here new and important insights into this autonomic brainstem reflex. In addition, we try to give answers to the functional consequence of the different cardiac autonomic control of the TCR. By this physiological response, the adjustments of the systemic and cerebral circulations are initiated to divert blood to the brain or to increase blood flow within it. As a consequence, the striking age-related decline in the occurrence of the TCR seems to be the result of increased arterial stiffness. Our review gives therefore further insight into the potential brainstem circuit of the TCR, the most powerful autonomic reflex known in skull base surgery.