Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investment Shocks and the Business Cycle: The View from a Policy-Oriented DSGE model

We analyze the role of investment shocks in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy that we has been previously used to address a wide range of policy and research questions. We highlight a number of issues that affect our assessment of the importance of such shocks and compare our results to previous work. We find a central role for investment shocks of the “intertemporal IS-curve” type; investment-specific technology shocks are important in our model for matching secular trends, but play a less significant role over the business cycle. Our intertemporal IS-curve shocks are highly correlated with observable financial market data, suggesting the importance of shocks affecting risk premia and extensions of our model to more explicit consideration of financial markets. Moreover, financial market information seem to Granger-cause these exogenous processes, potentially suggesting a role for anticipated or “news” shocks. JEL classification: C51; E32; E52; O41.
Developmental perspectives on phonological typology and sound change

The relationship between first language acquisition and phonologization lies at the crossroads of developmental psychology and historical phonology—disciplines not often considered in the same breath when addressing the nature of sound patterns and change. Despite these traditional boundaries I believe that this combined research program can make significant contributions to a more nuanced understanding of why sound systems look the way they do and change in particular directions. The present chapter deals with the relationship between the earliest stages of language acquisition and the shape of phonological systems and phonological processes including sound change. The term “developmental” encompasses both the dynamic nature of the cognitive mechanisms underlying infants’ and very young children’s emerging organization of their acoustic-phonetic environment as well as the nature of the linguistic environment itself. Of particular significance here is the potential contribution of developmental processes (infant speech perception and caregiver speech production) to the phonologization of acoustic variance in the input. The scope of these developmental contributions is not limited to the infant and her abilities but also characteristics of the unique register used by caregivers when interacting with infants. This research program asks two questions:
Towards effective group recommendations for microblogging users

In this paper we propose a group recommendation model that infers the group preferences based on the actions of its members. Such recommendations can be useful when individuals are working together in areas that require relevant up-to-date news information to support decisions. To test our model, we used Twitter, a microblogging service, as a platform to recommend links to news articles. To evaluate our model, we compared the group satisfaction with different strategies of group recommendation. Results show that our model obtained an average group rating of 3.58 out of 5 over the recommendations given to the group. This represents an improvement of approximately 25% over the best performing strategy we tested. We also analyzed the impact of different actions on Twitter and of a time decay parameter on group satisfaction
Medicating Children: The Enduring Controversy over ADHD and Pediatric Stimulant Pharmacotherapy

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) holds the distinction of being both the most extensively studied pediatric mental disorder and one of the most controversial. This is partly due to the fact that it is also the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder among minors. On average, one in every ten to 15 children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with the disorder and one in every 20 to 25 uses a stimulant medication—often Ritalin, Adderall, or Concerta—as treatment. The biggest increase in youth diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed a stimulant drug occurred during the 1990s, when the prevalence of physician visits for stimulant pharmacotherapy increased five-fold. This unprecedented increase in U.S. children using psychotropic medication triggered an intense public debate.
Inventory Management of Remanufacturable Products

We address the procurement of new components for recyclable products in the context of Kodak's single-use camera. The objective is to find an ordering policy that minimizes the total expected procurement, inventory holding, and lost sales cost. Distinguishing characteristics of the system are the uncertainty and unobservability associated with return flows of used cameras. We model the system as a closed queueing network, develop a heuristic procedure for adaptive estimation and control, and illustrate our methods with disguised data from Kodak. Using this framework, we investigate the effects of various system characteristics such as informational structure, procurement delay, demand rate, and length of the product's life cycle.
WSNs Self-Calibration Approach for Smart City Applications Leveraging Incremental Machine Learning Techniques

The diffusion of the Internet of Things paradigm, in the last few years, has led to the need of deploying and managing large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), composed by a multitude of geographically distributed sensors, like the ones needed for Smart City applications. The traditional way to manage WSNs is not suitable for this type of applications, because manually managing and monitoring every single sensor would be too expensive, time consuming and error prone. Moreover, unattended sensors may suffer of several issues that progressively make their measures unreliable and consequently useless. For this reason, several automatically techniques have been studied and implemented for the detection and correction of measurements from sensors which are affected by errors caused by aging and/or drift. These methods are grouped under the name of self-calibration techniques. This paper presents a distributed system, which combines an incremental machine learning technique with a non-linear Kalman Filter estimator, which allows to automatically re-calibrate sensors leveraging the correlation with measurements made by neighbor sensors. After the description of the used model and the system implementation details, the paper describes also the proof-of-concept prototype that has been built for testing the proposed solution.
Audit, accountability, and government

This book explains, from a public law perspective, the constitutional purpose and significance of audit, a topic which has been largely neglected, and casts light on important aspects of accountability in the British system of government. The book suggests that audit, as an accountability mechanism, has been underplayed to date and that greater significance should be attributed to its role in delivering both democratic accountability and, within government, managerial accountability. The focus of the book is central government audit in Britain, but the constitutional role of audit at a local level and at a European Union level is also considered. The book begins by explaining, in a non -technical way, the basic concepts of accounting and audit, and sets audit in its historical context. The different types of audit and the institutional framework within which audit is conducted are then analysed. Any shortcomings in each area are identified and suggestions for change are explored. The constitutional significance of the changes to the role of audit that are currently taking place are analysed, as are the effects of developments, such as the creation of agencies, contracting-out, and more recently, resource accounting and budgeting and devolution, on the constitutional role of audit. The fundamental principles, both institutional and substantive, of public sector audit are identified and new tasks that audit could fulfil at central government level are proposed.
Putting the trolley in order: Experimental philosophy and the loop case

In recent years, a number of philosophers have conducted empirical studies that survey people's intuitions about various subject matters in philosophy. Some have found that intuitions vary accordingly to seemingly irrelevant facts: facts about who is considering the hypothetical case, the presence or absence of certain kinds of content, or the context in which the hypothetical case is being considered. Our research applies this experimental philosophical methodology to Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Loop Case, which she used to call into question the validity of the intuitively plausible Doctrine of Double Effect. We found that intuitions about the Loop Case vary according to the context in which the case is considered. We contend that this undermines the supposed evidential status of intuitions about the Loop Case. We conclude by considering the implications of our findings for philosophers who rely on the Loop Case to make philosophical arguments and for philosophers who use intuitions in general.
Low-Mass and Metal-Poor Gamma-Ray Burst Host Galaxies

Abstract Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are cosmologically distributed, very energetic and very transient sources detected in the γ-ray domain. The identification of their x-ray and optical afterglows allowed so far the redshift measurement of 150 events, from z = 0.01 to z = 6.29. For about half of them, we have some knowledge of the properties of the parent galaxy. At high redshift (z > 2), absorption lines in the afterglow spectra give information on the cold interstellar medium in the host. At low redshift (z < 1.0) multi-band optical-NIR photometry and integrated spectroscopy reveal the GRB host general properties. A redshift evolution of metallicity is not noticeable in the whole sample. The typical value is a few times lower than solar. The mean host stellar mass is similar to that of the Large Magellanic Cloud, but the mean star formation rate is five times higher. GRBs are discovered with γ-ray, not optical or NIR, instruments. Their hosts do not suffer from the same selection biases of typical galaxy surveys. Therefore, they might represent a fair sample of the most common galaxies that existed in the past history of the universe, and can be used to better understand galaxy formation and evolution.
Fibroblast growth factor signalling controls successive cell behaviours during mesoderm layer formation in Drosophila

Fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-dependent epithelial-mesenchymal transitions and cell migration contribute to the establishment of germ layers in vertebrates and other animals, but a comprehensive demonstration of the cellular activities that FGF controls to mediate these events has not been provided for any system. The establishment of the Drosophila mesoderm layer from an epithelial primordium involves a transition to a mesenchymal state and the dispersal of cells away from the site of internalisation in a FGF-dependent fashion. We show here that FGF plays multiple roles at successive stages of mesoderm morphogenesis in Drosophila. It is first required for the mesoderm primordium to lose its epithelial polarity. An intimate, FGF-dependent contact is established and maintained between the germ layers through mesoderm cell protrusions. These protrusions extend deep into the underlying ectoderm epithelium and are associated with high levels of E-cadherin at the germ layer interface. Finally, FGF directs distinct hitherto unrecognised and partially redundant protrusive behaviours during later mesoderm spreading. Cells first move radially towards the ectoderm, and then switch to a dorsally directed movement across its surface. We show that both movements are important for layer formation and present evidence suggesting that they are controlled by genetically distinct mechanisms.
SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION: A COMPARISON OF EAST ASIA AND EUROPE

Inspired by the observed contrasting patterns of geographical distribution of the electric machinery industry in East Asia and Europe, this paper conducts an empirical clarification of the difference in spatial relationships in industry sizes among countries within a region by use of spatial econometric techniques. The results indicate that, while the size of the electric machinery industry in a country is positively correlated with that of neighboring countries in East Asia, there is no significant spatial correlation in Europe. Such a difference in spatial interdependence has important implications for economic development in those regions.
Parallel rational world based privacy preservation mechanism for group privacy

With the rapid development of social network and information technology, people enjoy the happy and convenient life the modern world brings. On the other hand, people suffer risk caused by privacy leakage. How to protect peoples' privacy in such an information society is a still a challenge and hot issue. It is difficult to find an excellent best of both worlds solution to protect people's sensitive information while providing people the convenient and appropriate services. Aiming at this issue, the group sensitive information is the focus of research in this paper. Parallel rational world based privacy preservation mechanism is proposed to make confuse with the true sensitive value or trend. Analysis and simulation demonstrate that the group privacy preservation mechanism is effective.
Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Blast Crisis Arises from Progenitors

Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) progresses through three distinct clinical stages: chronic phase, accelerated phase, and blast crisis. The progression to accelerated phase and blast crisis is driven by activation of oncogenes, inactivation of tumor suppressor genes, and/or amplification of the BCR‐ABL fusion gene, which causes the chronic phase of the disease. The cell of origin of blast crisis is a subject of speculation. Here, I develop a simple mathematical model of CML blast crisis to investigate whether blasts arise from leukemic stem cells or more differentiated leukemic cells. I use data of patients treated with imatinib and previous agents to estimate the effects of therapy on the rate of progression. Imatinib reduces the progression rate 10‐fold as compared with previous (ineffective) therapies. If blasts were produced by leukemic stem cells, there would be no difference in the rate of progression between patients treated with imatinib and previous therapies, because imatinib seems to be incapable of depleting leukemic stem cells. Imatinib does, however, deplete leukemic progenitors. Therefore, CML blasts are likely to arise from leukemic progenitors.
Social Pensions , Migration and the Anticipation E ¤ ect

In this paper we examine intra-household decisions surrounding the relationship between migration of working-age adults and the provision of aged pension. The empirical analysis exploits the structure of the social pension program in South Africa, where for most black households age-eligibility is su¢ cient to ensure pension receipt. We allow for the possibility of an anticipation e¤ect, where as some members of the household approach the of cial age of eligibility for pension receipt, households adjust their behaviour with migration of working-age adults becoming more likely. The estimation methodology allows the data to endogenously determine the ages at which the pension anticipation e¤ect takes e¤ect and any subsequent ages at which the e¤ect changes. The empirical results suggest that households with pension recipients are more likely to send migrants in search of work. Households do not seem to wait for the members to become actually eligible to receive social pension. Furthermore, this forward-looking behaviour appears to become stronger as we move closer to the o¢ cial age of pension eligibility. It appears that the program has created economic opportunity, in allowing working-age adults to migrate in pursuit of better employment possibilities. JEL Classi cation: O15, I38, C25, C15
Boys, Girls and Communication: Their Views, Confidence and Why These Skills Matter.

The National Literacy Trust will consider requests to use extracts or data from this publication provided that you: • acknowledge that the content is the work of the National Literacy Trust and provide appropriate references in any publications or accompanying publicity. • anonymise all data to protect the identity of any individual or organisation. • state that any views expressed are yours and not necessarily those of National Literacy Trust. Acknowledgements We would like to thank the pupils and staff at the following schools without whom this study would not have been possible (in alphabetical order): Thanks also go to Wendy Lee, Professional Director, from The Communication Trust for her invaluable advice about speaking and listening issues. We would also like to thank The Communication Trust for their financial contribution that made this survey possible. It was commissioned as part of the Hello campaign; national year of communication. This is the first large-scale survey of young people's views on communication skills in the UK. The purpose of this survey was threefold. Since a search of the published literature had highlighted real gaps in knowledge, we wanted answers to the following questions: What do young people think about communication skills? Are they confident in their skills and how important do they think these skills are at school, in the workplace or in wider society? This report explores these issues by gender. from 47 schools participated in our online survey. 46 were schools from England, one was from Wales. There was an almost equal gender split in the sample, with 51.5% of boys (N = 3,511) and 48.5% of girls (N = 3,309) participating in this survey. • More girls than boys believed that having good communication skills means being good at talking and being good at listening. By contrast, significantly more boys than girls believed that it means being good at ICT (Information Communication Technology). • 5 in 10 boys compared with 4 in 10 girls strongly agreed that good communication skills boost their confidence in social situations. 3 in 10 boys compared with 2 in 10 girls also strongly agreed that good communication skills are often taken for granted and that there is the danger that they are not taken seriously if they do not express their views clearly. • More boys than girls were also concerned that they would be seen as not very intelligent if they cannot communicate …
Optimized algorithm for Gaussian second order derivative filters in fast Hessian detector

When, constructing the scale space of fast Hessian detector in SURF, using integral image and box filters to approximate the Gaussian second order derivative filters is the most pivotal step. The common algorithm for this is firstly calculating the pixels' sums in each sub-rectangle region of a mask, then multiplying the coefficients and adding them together. This way may cause some repeatable calculations, so the fast Hessian detector's speed is influenced. In order to make the filter process much faster, an optimized algorithm for Gaussian second order derivative filters was proposed. Firstly, the multiplication operators was all replaced by additions. Then, use variants instead of repeatable steps. At last, complexity of the whole convolution process was decreased. Verified by the experimental results, fast Hessian detector based on the optimized filter algorithm was much faster than that on the common method.
Efficacy of Risperidone Augmentation with Ondansetron in the Treatment of Negative and Depressive Symptoms in Schizophrenia: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Background: Given the potential role of the 5-hydroxytryptamine-3 receptor in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, this study was performed to determine whether ondansetron plus risperidone could reduce the negative and depressive symptoms in patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia. Methods: In a double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized trial (IRCT registration # 201112125280N7), in 2012–2013 in Mashhad, Iran, 38 patients with treatment-resistant schizophrenia received risperidone either combined with a fixed dose (4–8 mg/d) of ondansetron (n=18) or with a placebo (n=20) for 12 weeks. The patients were evaluated using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), Wechsler’s Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R), and Hamilton’s Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) at baseline and 12 weeks later. Changes in the inventories were used to evaluate the efficacy of the treatment. The t test, Chi-square test, and SPSS (version 16) were used to analyze the data. The statistical significance was set atP<0.05. Results: Ondansetron plus risperidone was associated with a significantly larger improvement in the PANSS overall scale and subscales for negative symptoms and cognition than was risperidone plus placebo (P<0.001). The WAIS-R scale results indicated significant differences between the 2 groups before and after administrating the medicine and the placebo. The administration of ondansetron significantly improved visual memory based on the subtests of the WAIS (P<0.05). Ondansetron had no positive effects on depressive symptoms (effect size=0.13). Conclusion: This study confirmed that ondansetron, as an adjunct treatment, reduces negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia and can be used as a potential adjunctive strategy particularly for negative symptoms and cognitive impairments. Trial Registration Number: IRCT201112125280N7
Lensing Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Clusters

Full-sky microwave surveys like the upcoming Planck satellite mission will detect of order 10^4 galaxy clusters through their thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. I investigate the properties of the gravitationally lensing subsample of these clusters. The main results are: (1) The combined sample comprises >~70% of the complete sample. (2) It is confined to redshifts 0.2+-0.1, and to masses (5+-3) x 10^14 solar masses. (3) Using a particular measure for the weak lensing effect, viz. the aperture mass, cluster masses can be determined with a relative accuracy of ~20% if their density profile is known. Consequently, the mass function of the combined sample can accurately be measured. (4) For low-density universes, I predict a sharp peak in the measured (aperture) mass function near 5 x 10^14 solar masses and explain its origin, showing that the peak will be absent in high-density universes. (5) The location of the peak and the exponential decrease of the mass function on its high-mass side will allow the determination of the amplitude of the dark-matter power spectrum on the cluster scale and the baryon fraction in clusters, and constrain the thermal history of the intracluster gas.
Housing, Fuel Poverty and Health: A Pan-European Analysis

Contents: Introduction Housing deprivation in the EU Fuel poverty in the EU: developing a composite measurement The severity of fuel poverty in Ireland Housing deprivation and self-reported health in the EU Fuel poverty and health in Ireland Fuel-poor households and risk factors Fuel poverty, thermal comfort and household occupancy in Ireland Excess winter mortality in the EU: identifying key risk factors Policy implications, strategies and recommendations Summary and conclusions Appendices Bibliography Index.
Sex Determination and Differentiation

The goal of evolutionary behavioral analysis is to understand the source of variation in behavior within a species. This search must include a discussion of proximate mechanism. Proximate mechanisms begin with an understanding of how genes get translated into proteins, how such proteins build organs that produce hormones, how proteins and hormones get assembled into regulatory networks, and how such networks govern the physiological and developmental events that result in behaviors. It is at this point in the development of an organism that the system can no longer be described in terms of genetics per se, but a complete explanation of proximate mechanisms must resort to epigenetic explanations of the development of behavior.