Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Aggregate Investment Expenditures on Traded and Nontraded Goods

It is a well-established empirical regularity in the macroeconomic literature that the relative price of nontraded goods (expressed in terms of traded goods) correlates positively with income and exhibits large differences across space and time. This paper shows that, despite the large differences in the relative price, aggregate investment expenditure shares on traded and nontraded goods are remarkably similar in rich and poor countries. Furthermore, the two expenditure shares have remained close to constant over time, with the average nontraded expenditure share varying between 0.54-0.60 over the 1960-2002 period. Empirical results of this paper offer a new restriction for the two-sector growth model. We show that, with the restriction imposed on the model, only around 25 percent of the differences in PPP adjusted investment rates between rich and poor countries can be attributed to differences in relative productivity between traded and nontraded sectors, i.e., the Balassa-Samuelson effect.
Fine Pathogen Discrimination within the APL1 Gene Family Protects Anopheles gambiae against Human and Rodent Malaria Species

Genetically controlled resistance of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes to Plasmodium falciparum is a common trait in the natural population, and a cluster of natural resistance loci were mapped to the Plasmodium-Resistance Island (PRI) of the A. gambiae genome. The APL1 family of leucine-rich repeat (LRR) proteins was highlighted by candidate gene studies in the PRI, and is comprised of paralogs APL1A, APL1B and APL1C that share ≥50% amino acid identity. Here, we present a functional analysis of the joint response of APL1 family members during mosquito infection with human and rodent Plasmodium species. Only paralog APL1A protected A. gambiae against infection with the human malaria parasite P. falciparum from both the field population and in vitro culture. In contrast, only paralog APL1C protected against the rodent malaria parasites P. berghei and P. yoelii. We show that anti-P. falciparum protection is mediated by the Imd/Rel2 pathway, while protection against P. berghei infection was shown to require Toll/Rel1 signaling. Further, only the short Rel2-S isoform and not the long Rel2-F isoform of Rel2 confers protection against P. falciparum. Protection correlates with the transcriptional regulation of APL1A by Rel2-S but not Rel2-F, suggesting that the Rel2-S anti-parasite phenotype results at least in part from its transcriptional control over APL1A. These results indicate that distinct members of the APL1 gene family display a mutually exclusive protective effect against different classes of Plasmodium parasites. It appears that a gene-for-pathogen-class system orients the appropriate host defenses against distinct categories of similar pathogens. It is known that insect innate immune pathways can distinguish between grossly different microbes such as Gram-positive bacteria, Gram-negative bacteria, or fungi, but the function of the APL1 paralogs reveals that mosquito innate immunity possesses a more fine-grained capacity to distinguish between classes of closely related eukaryotic pathogens than has been previously recognized.
Chlamydia trachomatis and Genital Mycoplasmas: Pathogens with an Impact on Human Reproductive Health

The most prevalent, curable sexually important diseases are those caused by Chlamydia trachomatis (C. trachomatis) and genital mycoplasmas. An important characteristic of these infections is their ability to cause long-term sequels in upper genital tract, thus potentially affecting the reproductive health in both sexes. Pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), tubal factor infertility (TFI), and ectopic pregnancy (EP) are well documented complications of C. trachomatis infection in women. The role of genital mycoplasmas in development of PID, TFI, and EP requires further evaluation, but growing evidence supports a significant role for these in the pathogenesis of chorioamnionitis, premature membrane rupture, and preterm labor in pregnant woman. Both C. trachomatis and genital mycoplasmas can affect the quality of sperm and possibly influence the fertility of men. For the purpose of this paper, basic, epidemiologic, clinical, therapeutic, and public health issue of these infections were reviewed and discussed, focusing on their impact on human reproductive health.
Urban area extraction using variogram texture analysis and OTSU threshold segmentation in TerraSAR-X SAR image

This paper presents a new method for unsupervised urban area extraction from SAR imagery. The image segmentation method combines variogram texture feature extraction with OTSU threshold segmentation method, to obtain the result as good as traditional classical algorithm and have much higher computational efficiency. TerraSAR-X image is used to validate the proposed method, and experimental results show that the proposed segmentation approach can obtain accurate urban area delineation. Keywords-Urban, variogram, OTSU,TerraSAR-X
Malware Development on Mobile Environments

Mobile devices are nowadays adopted almost in every corner of the world. Being them crucial elements of people lives, in direct contact with their owners for the entire day and gathering sensitive information, they unwillingly attract cyber-criminals. The mobile malware phenomenon is currently a serious threat in this context. In this paper, we evaluate the rationale behind the development of a trojan horse: considering the Android platform, we describe the implementation and functional choices we have made by developing a mobile malware called Android Total Control.
A Rare Chromosome 3 Imbalance and Its Clinical Implications

The duplication of chromosome 3q is a rare disorder with varying chromosomal breakpoints and consequently symptoms. Even rarer is the unbalanced outcome from a parental inv(3) resulting in duplicated 3q and a deletion of 3p. Molecular karyotyping should aid in precisely determining the length and breakpoints of the 3q+/3p− so as to better understand a child's future development and needs. We report a case of an infant male with a 57.5 Mb duplication from 3q23-qter. This patient also has an accompanying 1.7 Mb deletion of 3p26.3. The duplicated segment in this patient encompasses the known critical region of 3q26.3-q27, which is implicated in the previously reported 3q dup syndrome; however, the accompanying 3p26.3 deletion is smaller than the previously reported cases. The clinical phenotype of this patient relates to previously reported cases of 3q+ that may suggest that the accompanying 1.7 Mb heterozygous deletion is not clinically relevant. Taken together, our data has refined the location and extent of the chromosome 3 imbalance, which will aid in better understanding the molecular underpinning of the 3q syndrome.
Concise Review: Dissecting a Discrepancy in the Literature: Do Mesenchymal Stem Cells Support or Suppress Tumor Growth?

The discovery that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are recruited into tumors has led to a great deal of interest over the past decade in the function of MSCs in tumors. To address this, investigators have used a variety of tumor models in which MSCs are added exogenously to determine their impact on tumor development. Interestingly, many studies have reported contradicting results, with some investigators finding that MSCs promote tumor growth and others reporting that MSCs inhibit tumor growth. Many mechanisms have been reported to account for these observations, such as chemokine signaling, modulation of apoptosis, vascular support, and immune modulation. In this review, we analyzed the differences in the methodology of the studies reported and found that the timing of MSC introduction into tumors may be a critical element. Understanding the conditions in which MSCs enhance tumor growth and metastasis is crucial, both to safely develop MSCs as a therapeutic tool and to advance our understanding of the role of tumor stroma in carcinogenesis. STEM CELLS 2011;29:11–19
AllAboard: Visual Exploration of Cellphone Mobility Data to Optimise Public Transport

The deep penetration of mobile phones offers cities the ability to opportunistically monitor citizens' mobility and use data-driven insights to better plan and manage services. With large scale data on mobility patterns, operators can move away from the costly, mostly survey based, transportation planning processes, to a more data-centric view, that places the instrumented user at the center of development. In this framework, using mobile phone data to perform transit analysis and optimization represents a new frontier with significant societal impact, especially in developing countries. In this paper we present AllAboard, an intelligent tool that analyses cellphone data to help city authorities in visually exploring urban mobility and optimizing public transport. This is performed within a self contained tool, as opposed to the current solutions which rely on a combination of several distinct tools for analysis, reporting, optimisation and planning. An interactive user interface allows transit operators to visually explore the travel demand in both space and time, correlate it with the transit network, and evaluate the quality of service that a transit network provides to the citizens at very fine grain. Operators can visually test scenarios for transit network improvements, and compare the expected impact on the travellers' experience. The system has been tested using real telecommunication data for the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and evaluated from a data mining, optimisation and user prospective.
Response monitoring, repetitive behaviour and anterior cingulate abnormalities in autism spectrum disorders (ASD)

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by inflexible and repetitive behaviour. Response monitoring involves evaluating the consequences of behaviour and making adjustments to optimize outcomes. Deficiencies in this function, and abnormalities in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) on which it relies, have been reported as contributing factors to autistic disorders. We investigated whether ACC structure and function during response monitoring were associated with repetitive behaviour in ASD. We compared ACC activation to correct and erroneous antisaccades using rapid presentation event-related functional MRI in 14 control and ten ASD participants. Because response monitoring is the product of coordinated activity in ACC networks, we also examined the microstructural integrity of the white matter (WM) underlying this brain region using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) measures of fractional anisotropy (FA) in 12 control and 12 adult ASD participants. ACC activation and FA were examined in relation to Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised ratings of restricted and repetitive behaviour. Relative to controls, ASD participants: (i) made more antisaccade errors and responded more quickly on correct trials; (ii) showed reduced discrimination between error and correct responses in rostral ACC (rACC), which was primarily due to (iii) abnormally increased activation on correct trials and (iv) showed reduced FA in WM underlying ACC. Finally, in ASD (v) increased activation on correct trials and reduced FA in rACC WM were related to higher ratings of repetitive behaviour. These findings demonstrate functional and structural abnormalities of the ACC in ASD that may contribute to repetitive behaviour. rACC activity following errors is thought to reflect affective appraisal of the error. Thus, the hyperactive rACC response to correct trials can be interpreted as a misleading affective signal that something is awry, which may trigger repetitive attempts at correction. Another possible consequence of reduced affective discrimination between error and correct responses is that it might interfere with the reinforcement of responses that optimize outcomes. Furthermore, dysconnection of the ACC, as suggested by reduced FA, to regions involved in behavioural control might impair on-line modulations of response speed to optimize performance (i.e. speed-accuracy trade-off) and increase error likelihood. These findings suggest that in ASD, structural and functional abnormalities of the ACC compromise response monitoring and thereby contribute to behaviour that is rigid and repetitive rather than flexible and responsive to contingencies. Illuminating the mechanisms and clinical significance of abnormal response monitoring in ASD represents a fruitful avenue for further research.
Managing the Social Trajectory: A Practice Perspective on Project Management

This paper responds to recent calls to extend the theoretical perspectives taken on the important organizational activity of managing projects, based on a deeper understanding of the reality of their day-to-day social practice. Drawing on theoretical constructs from sociologist Strauss, we conceptualize projects as a “social trajectory,” whose progress is determined by ongoing interaction between parties with different “world views” seeking to promote their interpretations and interests within a network of organizational power relations. This theoretical framework is used to interpret an 18-month participant-observer ethnographic study of an IT-enabled business change project, seeing the management of the project in terms of intense social interaction seeking alignment between multiple perspectives and interests. From the rich data from the case study, we demonstrate the relationship between the effectiveness of this “alignment-seeking” and the perceived progress of the project trajectory, and develop a model of projects as social trajectories where the trajectory progress is linked to the key characteristics of the “alignment-seeking” process. This model extends current project management theory and points to a different way of thinking about project management, emphasizing management interventions not typically part of mainstream project management methods.
Solving Heterogeneous Estimating Equations with Gradient Forests

Forest-based methods are being used in an increasing variety of statistical tasks, including causal inference, survival analysis, and quantile regression. Extending forest-based methods to these new statistical settings requires specifying tree-growing algorithms that are targeted to the task at hand, and the ad-hoc design of such algorithms can require considerable effort. In this paper, we develop a unified framework for the design of fast tree-growing procedures for tasks that can be characterized by heterogeneous estimating equations. The resulting gradient forest consists of trees grown by recursively applying a pre-processing step where we label each observation with gradient-based pseudo-outcomes, followed by a regression step that runs a standard CART regression split on these pseudo-outcomes. We apply our framework to two important statistical problems, non-parametric quantile regression and heterogeneous treatment effect estimation via instrumental variables, and we show that the resulting procedures considerably outperform baseline forests whose splitting rules do not take into account the statistical question at hand. Finally, we prove the consistency of gradient forests, and establish a central limit theorem. Our method will be available as an R-package, gradientForest, which draws from the ranger package for random forests.
Melt layer statistic of two firn cores recently drilled at Dye3 and South Dome in the dry snow zone of Southern Greenland

In the last couple of years remote sensing data have shown large areas of wet snow in the Southern part of the Greenland ice sheet. These melt features are attributed to the overall warming trend. Persistent warming implies changes in the firn layer as well. Even in areas of the dry snow zone one can observe sporadically a few ice lenses within the firn column indicating refrozen meltwater from warm events in the past. In our contribution we want to close the gap between investigations of firn cores drilled in the 70's and the observational record of remote sensing data over the last decade in South Greenland. The focus lies on firn of the dry snow zone which is sensitive against changes in a warming atmosphere and cold enough to prevent a longway percolation path of meltwater to several firn layers. To this end we had drilled two 45m-long firn cores at the former drilling sites of DYE3 (65°11'N, 43°49'W) and South Dome (SD) (63°32'N, 44°34'W) during a aircraft-supported field campaign 2012. The retrieved 3inch-firn core segments of 1m length are measured by a X-ray-scanning routine with the means of the core-scale AWI-ICE-CT. The 2d-density fields are calculated and allow to distinguish between refreezing meltwater and compacted firn. The depth-scales are converted to time-scales by using DEP (dielectric profiling) and (in case of DYE3) discrete sampled d18O measurements. Number density of melt layers and relative amount of melt show an synchronized behavior with an general increase over the last 30 years. Local maxima are observed in both sites at around 6-9m and 25m at DYE3 and 5-8m, 22m and 40m at SD.
Enabling exact delay synthesis

Given (i) a Boolean function, (ii) a set of arrival times at the inputs, and (iii) a gate library with associated delay values, the exact delay synthesis problem asks for a circuit implementation which minimizes the arrival time at the output(s). The exact delay synthesis problem, with given input arrival times, relates to computing the communication complexity of a Boolean function, which is an intractable problem. Input arrival times are variable and can take any value, thereby making the exact delay synthesis search space infinite. This paper presents theory and algorithms for exact delay synthesis. We introduce the theory of equioptimizable arrival times, which allows us to partition all arrival time patterns into a finite set of equivalence classes. Thanks to this new theory, we create for the first time exact delay circuit databases covering all Boolean functions up to 5 variables and all possible arrival time patterns. We describe further arrival time compression techniques which enable the creation of larger databases. We propose an enhanced delay synthesis flow capable of dealing with large circuits, combining exact delay logic rewriting and Boolean optimization techniques, attaining unprecedented results. We improve 9/10 of the best known results in the EPFL arithmetic delay synthesis competition, outperforming previous best results up to 3x. Embedded in a commercial EDA flow for ASICs, our exact delay synthesis techniques reduce the total negative slack by 12.17%, after physical implementation, at negligible area and runtime costs.
Novel artifact detection for motion compensated deinterlacing

Motion adaptive deinterlacing has been used widely in various kinds of commercial products, but the picture quality in motion areas still has much room for improvement. Motion compensated deinterlacing solves this problem by interpolation along the motion trajectory and thus is becoming the main trend of the next generation of deinterlacing algorithms. However, it suffers visible artifacts caused by incorrect motion vectors. To improve such imperfect pictures, this paper presents a motion compensation algorithm with more accurate motion estimation and more efficient artifact detection for digital television displays. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can produce high-quality pictures with less flicker and imperceptible artifacts than a number of other techniques.
An efficient reduction technique for degree-constrained subgraph and bidirected network flow problems

Efficient algorithms are given for the bidirected network flow problem and the degree-constrained subgraph problem. Four versions of each are solved, depending on whether edge capacities/multiplicities are one or arbitrary, and whether maximum value/maximum cardinality or minimum cost/maximum weight is the objective. A version of the shortest path problem is also efficiently solved. The algorithms use a reduction technique that solves one problem instance by reducing to a number of problems.
Discrimination against people with HIVinfection and AIDS

between the community and prison.2 There has been considerable pressure to ensure that the delivery of methadone detoxification to opiate users presenting to prison is adequate, and guidelines have been drawn up, with the cooperation of key people involved in drug treatment services, to promote this. Opiate users should be given sufficient methadone during drug withdrawal to reduce the likelihood of them injecting and using contaminated equipment. Ross and colleagues insist that the existing seven day withdrawal regimen is unethical. Colleagues and I run an inpatient unit where we provide a 10 day withdrawal regimen for all our opiate dependent patients, and we can see no grounds for arguing that reducing this to seven days is unethical or fails to replicate the physiological rates of withdrawal.3 4 In my view such withdrawal regimens should be spread evenly throughout the prison system. According to the most recent report of the director of health care for prisoners, a survey of prison treatment establishments found that only a fifth of respondents were providing methadone detoxification for opiate withdrawal. All prison medical officers should provide approved treatments for drug withdrawal; more individualised treatment approaches can evolve in the wake of the widespread provision of a basic minimum of treatment. '
Arterial elastance and heart-arterial coupling in aortic regurgitation are determined by aortic leak severity.

BACKGROUND In aortic valve regurgitation (AR), aortic leak severity modulates left ventricle (LV) arterial system interaction. The aim of this study was to assess (1) how arterial elastance (E(a)), calculated as the ratio of LV end-systolic pressure and stroke volume, relates to arterial properties and leak severity and (2) the validity of E(a)/E(max) (with E(max) the slope of the end-systolic pressure-volume relation) as a heart-arterial coupling parameter in AR. METHODS AND RESULTS Our work is based on human data obtained from a study on vascular adaptation in chronic AR. These data allowed us to assess the parameters of a computer model of heart-arterial interaction. In particular, total peripheral resistance (R) and aortic leak severity--expressed as leak resistance (R(L,ao))--were quantified for different patient subgroups (group I/IIa/IIb: E(max) = 2.15/0.62/0.47 mm Hg/mL; E(a) = 1.24/0.66/0.90 mm Hg/mL; R = 1.9/0.6/0.85 mm Hg.s/mL, R(L,ao) = 0.35/0.05/0.20 mm Hg.s/mL). A parameter study demonstrated that R(L,ao) was the main determinant of E(a). With all other parameters constant, valve repair would increase E(a) to 2.81, 1.08, and 1.54 mm Hg/mL in groups I, IIa, and IIb, respectively. For a given E(a)/E(max), LV pump efficiency (estimated as the ratio of stroke work and LV systolic pressure-volume area) was lower than the theoretical predicted value, except for the simulations with intact aortic valve. CONCLUSIONS In AR, E(a) is determined by aortic leak severity rather than by arterial system properties. Using E(a)/E(max) as a coupling parameter in general or as a mechanico-energetic regulatory parameter in particular is questionable.