Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Currency Substitution and the Demand for Money in Five European Union Countries

The high degree of economic integration has led to an increased degree of currency substitution in the EU countries, which could bring instability in national money demand functions while an EU-wide money demand function could be more stable. Currency substitution usually takes the form of cross border deposits (CBD), which are not included in the traditional monetary aggregates. Thus, extended monetary aggregates that include the relevant CBDs are defined in this study. In order to investigate the implications of currency substitution for the stability of the demand functions, the traditional and extended monetary aggregates for five EU countries are defined in addition to EU-wide monetary aggregates. The estimated EU-wide demand for extended money appears to be stable suggesting that there is scope for monetary policy at the European level. However, the stability of the area-wide aggregate has been impaired when the relevant CBDs are not included.
ENCOURAGING SUB-NATIONAL GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY IN HUNGARY

Hungary's counties and municipalities face difficult challenges. Participation in cost-cutting structural reforms initiated by the central government means cutbacks to administrative overheads and tough decisions in public services. At the same time, there are also challenges in modernising local infrastructures and in making full use of the EU funds for development projects. This paper first looks at how meeting these challenges can be helped by better budgeting, in particular regarding the transparency and oversight of accounts. Financing arrangements are also examined and this reveals a general problem of complexity. Assessment of spending responsibilities suggests room for improving the roles of counties and regions and a need for cutbacks in central-government influence on service provision and public-sector wages at the local level. Promouvoir l'efficience des administrations infranationales en Hongrie Les departements et les communes de la Hongrie se trouvent confrontes a une serie de problemes. Leur participation aux reformes structurelles lancees par l’administration centrale les oblige a trancher dans les depenses administratives et a prendre des decisions delicates en ce qui concerne les services publics. Dans le meme temps, il faut mener une action permanente de modernisation des infrastructures locales et tirer pleinement parti des financements de l’UE pour les projets de developpement. On verra tout d’abord comment une meilleure budgetisation, surtout pour ce qui est de la transparence et du controle des comptes, faciliterait cette action. On examinera egalement les modalites de financement, qui posent un probleme general, celui d’une trop grande complexite. Une evaluation des competences en matiere de depenses montre qu’il serait possible de mieux definir les missions des comtes et des regions et que l’administration centrale devrait exercer moins d’influence sur la prestation des services et sur les remunerations dans le secteur public.
Epithelial apoptosis

Apoptosis is an essential part of the normal cellular phenotype repertoire. In the absence of appropriate survival factors, apoptosis is activated through specific signalling cassettes. Epithelia form distinctive three‐dimensional cohesive structures that depend on adhesive interactions in order for these tissues to carry out their specialised roles, such as secretion and reproduction. The cellular programme that triggers apoptosis in epithelial cells has not yet been shown to differ from that in other cell types, yet the unique characteristics of epithelia endow them with specific determinants for survival. In particular, cell‐matrix and cell‐cell interactions are required to prevent entry of epithelial cells into apoptosis, and soluble factors that have profound effects on epithelia, such as steroid hormones or hepatocyte growth factor, also influence their survival. The regenerative capacity of certain epithelia is controlled by intrinsic expression of survival genes within stem cell populations, and may regulate the susceptibility of different epithelial tissues to undergo carcinogenesis.
Identification of naturally processed viral nonapeptides allows their quantification in infected cells and suggests an allele-specific T cell epitope forecast

Virus-specific cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) recognize virus-derived peptides presented by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules on virus-infected cells. Such peptides have been isolated from infected cells and were compared to synthetic peptides. We found previously the Kd- or Db-restricted natural influenza nucleoprotein peptides to coelute on reversed phase high performance liquid chromatography columns with certain peptidic by-products present in synthetic peptide preparations. Here we show by extensive biochemical and immunological comparison that the natural peptides in all respects behave as the surmised synthetic nonapeptides, and thus, must be identical to them. The absolute amounts of these natural peptides contained in infected cells could be determined to be between 220 and 540 copies by comparing with defined amounts of pure synthetic nonapeptides. The comparison of the natural Kd-restricted peptide with published synthetic peptides known to contain other Kd-restricted CTL epitopes suggested a new MHC allele-specific T cell epitope forecast method, based on the defined length of nine amino acid residues and on critical amino acid residues at the second and the last position.
Robust subthreshold 7T-SRAM cell for low-power applications

In this paper, a novel 7T-SRAM cell for ultra-low power applications is proposed. The proposed SRAM cell is fully functional at subthreshold voltages down to VDDmin=200mV. In this technique, separate read/write bitlines and wordlines are used that makes read and write operation independent. The 7T-SRAM cell proposed in this paper, improves static read noise margin, write margin, and write time by 2.2X, 27%, and 6% in comparison to the standard 6T-SRAM cell. The 7T-SRAM cell proposed in this paper, improves write margin of the conventional 7T-SRAM cell, as well. The proposed 7T-SRAM cell is designed in 65nm CMOS technology.
Action spectrum of keratitis produced by ultraviolet radiation.

A KNOWLEDGE of the distribution of wavelengths and energies involved in the production of keratitis by ultraviolet radiation has theoretic and practical importance. Such information is fundamental to an understanding of the harmful photobiologic processes in the cornea and is prerequisite to the determination of exposure hazards and protective devices. The present report attempts to show quantitatively what bands of the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum are responsible for the production of keratitis and what relation the keratitis band has to the erythema band, to the characteristic absorption bands of some proteins and to the absorption of several types of common glass. A curve relating wavelength to the quantity of energy just necessary to produce keratitis represents the action spectrum for keratitis, whereas a curve relating wavelength to the absorption of the corneal epithelium represents the absorption spectrum of the corneal epithelium. It is one aim of this study to
GROWTH CHARACTERISTICS OF POLIOVIRUS IN HELA CELLS: NUCLEIC ACID METABOLISM

The RNA and DNA contents of the nucleus and cytoplasm of the HeLa cell were determined. The rates of incorporation of P32 into the various nucleic acid fractions were established for the ordinary HeLa cell maintained under a set of standard conditions. The changes in the rates of incorporation of P32 and in the amounts of RNA and DNA which occurred subsequent to infection with poliovirus were followed throughout the infectious cycle. These changes were correlated with the intracellular appearance of the newly formed virus. A net synthesis of RNA occurred in the cytoplasmic component of the cell. The increase was detectable 2 hours before the first appearance of demonstrable virus and reached a maximum (2.5 times normal) at 6 hours. Viral increase was not maximal before the 7th hour after infection.
Automatic Event and Relation Detection with Seeds of Varying Complexity

In this paper, we present an approach for automatically detecting events in natural language texts by learning patterns that signal the mentioning of such events. We construe the relevant event types as relations and start with a set of seeds consisting of representative event instances that happen to be known and also to be mentioned frequently in easily available training data. Methods have been developed for the automatic identification of event extents and event triggers. We have learned patterns for a particular domain, i.e., prize award events. Currently we are systematically investigating the criteria for selecting the most effective patterns for the detection of events in sentences and paragraphs. Although the systematic investigation is still under way, we can already report on first very promising results of the method for learning of patterns and for using these patterns in event detection.
Colonoscopic Findings in Patients With Incidental Colonic Focal FDG Uptake.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of FDG-avid and non-FDG-avid lesions detected at colonoscopy in patients presenting with incidental focal colonic FDG uptake at PET/CT. MATERIALS AND METHODS Among 9073 patients who underwent PET/CT over a 4-year period, 82 patients without a history of colonic disease had focal colonic FDG uptake and underwent colonoscopy. In consensus, a radiologist and a nuclear physician read images from these PET/CT examinations. They recorded the location of focal FDG uptake in the colon and associated CT abnormalities and measured maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax) and metabolic volume (MV). Readings were performed twice--first without and second with knowledge of lesion location at colonoscopy. The final diagnosis was based on colonoscopic findings and histopathologic results categorized into benign, premalignant, or malignant. RESULTS One hundred seven foci of colonic FDG uptake at PET/CT and 150 lesions at colonoscopy were detected. Among 107 foci of FDG uptake, 65 (61%) corresponded to a lesion at colonoscopy (true-positive findings), and 42 (39%) did not (false-positive findings). Among 150 lesions found at colonoscopy, 85 (57%) were not FDG avid (false-negative findings). The MV of true-positive findings was lower than that of false-positive findings (4.0 ± 0.4 cm(3) vs 6.2 ± 0.7 cm(3); p = 0.006), but SUVmax did not differ (7.4 ± 0.5 vs 7.7 ± 0.5; p = 0.649). Considering the histopathologic categories of the lesions and the false-positive findings, there was no difference in SUVmax (p = 0.103), but MV was lower in premalignant lesions than in false-positive findings (p = 0.005). CONCLUSION Focal colonic FDG uptake may indicate the presence of a benign, pre-malignant, or malignant lesion. Subsequent colonoscopy should not be restricted to the colonic site of FDG uptake.
COACHES: An assistance multi-robot system in public areas

In this paper, we present a robust system of self- directed autonomous robots evolving in a complex and public spaces and interacting with people. This system integrates highlevel skills of environment modeling using knowledge-based modeling and reasoning and scene understanding with robust image and video analysis, distributed autonomous decision- making using Markov decision process and Petri-Net planning, short-term interacting with humans and robust and safe navigation in overcrowding spaces. This system has been deployed in a variety of public environments such as a shopping mall, a center of congress and in a lab to assist people and visitors. The results are very satisfying showing the effectiveness of the system and going beyond just a simple proof of concepts.
A Bayesian Approach to Image Recognition Based on Separable Lattice Hidden Markov Models

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to image recognition based on separable lattice hidden Markov models (SL-HMMs). The geometric variations of the object to be recognized, e.g., size, location, and rotation, are an essential problem in image recognition. SL-HMMs, which have been proposed to reduce the effect of geometric variations, can perform elastic matching both horizontally and vertically. This makes it possible to model not only invariances to the size and location of the object but also nonlinear warping in both dimensions. The maximum likelihood (ML) method has been used in training SL-HMMs. However, in some image recognition tasks, it is difficult to acquire sufficient training data, and the ML method suffers from the over-fitting problem when there is insufficient training data. This study aims to accurately estimate SL-HMMs using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) and variational Bayesian (VB) methods. The MAP and VB methods can utilize prior distributions representing useful prior information, and the VB method is expected to obtain high generalization ability by marginalization of model parameters. Furthermore, to overcome the local maximum problem in the MAP and VB methods, the deterministic annealing expectation maximization algorithm is applied for training SL-HMMs. Face recognition experiments performed on the XM2VTS database indicated that the proposed method offers significantly improved image recognition performance. Additionally, comparative experiment results showed that the proposed method was more robust to geometric variations than convolutional neural networks. key words: image recognition, hidden Markov models, separable lattice hidden Markov models, Bayesian approach, deterministic annealing
Investigating the phonological similarity effect: implications for short-term memory models

The current thesis examined the effect that phonological similarity has on shortterm memory (STM) performance. Across nine experiments, the predictions that two classes of STM models (non-linguistic and psycholinguistic) generate for the effect that phonological similarity has on the recall of item information and memory for an item’s position in a list were tested. In the current thesis, phonological similarity was operationally defined in a number of different ways. For instance, lists of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and nonwords, rhymed (shared _VC component), shared the initial consonant and vowel (CV_ component) or shared the two consonants (C_C component). Performance across these conditions was compared to when the stimulus lists were either phonemically dissimilar (i.e., used as a baseline measure of performance) or phonemically similar (i.e., each stimulus in each list had at least two phonemes in common with at least one other stimulus in the same list). Regardless of whether the experimental stimuli were words or nonwords, when performance was measured using the item recall criterion (scored as correct if a participant recalled an item that was presented in a list, regardless of position), an item recall advantage was observed for rhyming lists of stimuli. Non-linguistic STM models suggest that an item recall advantage should be observed whenever the size of the ‘secondary memory search set’ can be limited to a smaller number of items (e.g., all items that rhyme). In contrast, psycholinguistic models of STM assume that this item recall advantage derives from sub-syllabic structures that aid the recall of item information. In terms of the effect that phonemic similarity has on order memory, the findings from the current thesis are inconsistent with the predictions generated from nonlinguistic models of STM that are based on the distinctiveness assumption – the idea that as similarity increases order memory should decrease. Rather the findings are consistent with psycholinguistic models of STM that assume that the effect that phonemic similarity has on order memory is a consequence of linguistic constraints, such as sonority, that operate at the sub-syllabic as compared to lexical level. Based on the current research findings, modifications to existing STM models have been proposed.
PARTICIPATION OF WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION

After a brief historical review, the author describes the legal, cultural and economic elements that brought women into US higher education in such big numbers. She also discusses the professional situation of women after graduation and reviews major problems awaiting a solution Mrs. Nancy Tapper is executive vice‐president of the Centre for Social Redesign, Oakland, California. Trained as a mathematician she is a former professor and college president
Capital social y desarrollo territorial en la ciudad de México: una reflexión a partir de los presupuestos participativos

Las profundas transformaciones ocurridas a partir de los procesos de democratizacion en America Latina durante las ultimas decadas demandan nuevas respuestas por parte de los gobiernos para poder hacer frente a la perdida de confianza que ha provocado en la ciudadania el abandono del Estado de bienestar, la adopcion de politicas neo-liberales y los limites de la democracia representativa. En este marco, los gobiernos se han abierto a la participacion de los ciudadanos para que juntos y mediante mecanismos de participacion y concertacion, den solucion a los problemas que se presentan en sus territorios. Para analizar este cambio en la forma de gobernar denominado en la literatura especializada como gobernanza, este articulo analiza la institucionalizacion del presupuesto participativo en la Ciudad de Mexico como una accion de gobierno que busca promover la participacion ciudadana para generar capital social desde las colonias pues a traves de los organos de representacion ciudadana, los ciudadanos se organizan para presentar proyectos especificos que tienen como finalidad el mejoramiento de sus espacios.
Corneal topography and elasticity in normal and keratoconic eyes. A methodological study concerning the pathogenesis of keratoconus.

One eye of 27 patients with keratoconus and 37 normals were examined by photokeratoscopy and topographic pachometry to obtain informations about the corneal shape and thickness profile. The progressive alteration of corneal topography in keratoconus may be based on elastic deformation. Through a distention, predominantly of the central area, increasing large differences between central and peripheral thickness appear. Simultaneously the area of the corneal surface increases into a more elliptical corneal shape. In keratoconus relative to normals, the study demonstrates, an alteration of, as well as a correlation between, the corneal shape and thickness profile in accordance with the elastic hypothesis. Based on corneal topography determination, intraocular pressure measurements and a derived elastic theory the corneal tissue mass (M), tissue strength (Young's Modulus in steady state Y(s) , and the ocular rigidity (E) were determined. Y(s) and E was found to be significantly decreased, whereas M seems to be equal in keratoconus compared with normals. Histologically cornea consists of an amorphous matrix in which the collagen fibers are embedded. E seems to reflect the immediate elastic response of the collagen fibers (Y(i], which, however, may be relaxed in steady state. Y(s) seems to reflect the elastic response of the matrix, which consists of matrix compression and sliding of collagen fibers. Thus the biomechanical alteration of cornea in keratoconus may be introduced by increased sliding fo collagen fibers due to reduced attachment to Bowman's layer and altered synthesis of the matrix substance.
p38 Mitogen-activated Protein Kinase Mediates Bid Cleavage, Mitochondrial Dysfunction, and Caspase-3 Activation during Apoptosis Induced by Singlet Oxygen but Not by Hydrogen Peroxide*

p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase is activated and involved in cleavage of caspase-3 during apoptosis induced by a number of stimuli. However, the signaling events triggered by p38 that result in caspase-3 activation are still unknown. In human leukemia cells, two reactive oxygen species, singlet oxygen and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), selectively stimulated the phosphorylation of p38. Preincubation of cells with SB203580, a specific inhibitor of p38, dose dependently inhibited DNA fragmentation induced by singlet oxygen but not by H2O2. Protection from apoptosis by SB203580 correlated with inhibition of caspase-3, and several events that are associated with caspase-3 activation, including Bid cleavage, decrease in mitochondrial transmembrane potential and release of cytochrome c from mitochondria, whereas caspase-8 cleavage was not affected by this inhibitor. In contrast, blockade of caspase-8 with Ile-Glu-Thr-Asp-fluoromethyl ketone is sufficient to prevent formation of DNA fragments and to inhibit all the above signaling events, with exception of p38 phosphorylation, in both singlet oxygen- and H2O2-treated cells. These data suggest that caspase-3 activation is regulated through redundant signaling pathways that involve p38 and caspase-8 acting upstream of Bid during singlet oxygen-induced apoptosis, whereas the activation of caspase-3 by H2O2 is only governed by a caspase-8-mediated apoptotic pathway.
The Heart of the University

This article examines the library’s status on the American college campus and how its image has recorded shifting ideals and values in education and society. Academic libraries evolved from single rooms in the 1700s to freestanding libraries in the 1800s. Post–Civil War changes in higher education spurred the development of large, prominent libraries, centrally located and intended to symbolize the “heart of the university. ” After World War II, new government and academic policies influenced dramatically rising enrollments and broadened curricula, which, combined with a cultural shift to modernist architecture, produced a new type of library building that emphasized function over monumentality.
Lattice Reduction-Based MIMO Iterative Receiver Using Randomized Sampling

For iterative detection and decoding (IDD) in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, although the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detector is desirable in terms of performance, it is difficult to be employed due to its prohibitively high complexity as an exhaustive search is used. In this paper, a lattice reduction (LR)-based MIMO detection method is studied to achieve near MAP performance with reasonably low complexity for IDD. The a priori information (API), which is available from a soft-input soft-output (SISO) decoder, is taken into account to generate a list with a randomized successive interference cancellation (SIC) method. More specifically, a joint Gaussian distribution is used to convert the API into the LR domain and a modified sampling distribution, which was originally adopted for near optimal LR-based detection in non-IDD MIMO systems, is derived for random sampling to build a list of candidate vectors of high a posteriori probability (APP) with low complexity. It is shown that the IDD receiver with the proposed method outperforms those with the conventional LR-based methods, where no API is taken into account to build a list. Furthermore, the trade-off between performance and complexity is exploited with varying list length.
Intralaboratory reproducibility in cervical cytology. Results of the application of a 100-slide set.

In order to evaluate the agreement and accuracy of cervical (vaginal) cytologic diagnoses, 16 cytologists from a large laboratory in Florence, Italy, with experience ranging from 2 to 25 years, independently examined a set of 100 slides. A common reporting form based on a seven-category classification system was used. Concordance was calculated for each pairwise comparison between the 16 cytologists and between each cytologist and the target diagnosis. The values of the kappa statistic for the whole laboratory were . 49 for the multiple raters comparison and . 59 for the target diagnosis comparison, showing a relatively good degree of agreement.