Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Public goods, congestion, and fiscal policy: Do consumption-based instruments matter?

We examine the impact of scal policy on macroeconomic performance when public goods play a dual role by simultaneously providing both productive and utility services to the private sector. When these services are subject to congestion, a consumption tax is distortionary, generating a dynamic adjustment that contrasts an income tax. The design of optimal scal policy demonstrates the possibilities for using both incomeand consumption-based scal instruments as opposed to relying on the income tax alone. In correcting for congestion, an income tax-consumption subsidy combination is the preferred policy when factor-substitutability in production is limited. On the other hand, an increase in the elasticity of substitution in production raises the e cacy of a consumption tax as an alternative to the income tax. Not internalizing the dual bene ts of public goods might lead to misleading predictions regarding the e ect of public policies on welfare.
Logic minimization using exclusive OR gates

Recently introduced pseudoproducts and sum of pseudoproduct (SPP) forms have made it possible to represent Boolean functions with much shorter expressions than standard sum of products (SP) forms. A pseudo product is a product (AND) of exclusive OR (EXOR) factors, and an SPP form is a sum (OR) of pseudoproducts. The synthesis of SPP minimal forms requires greater effort than SP minimization. In this paper we present a new data structure for this problem, leading to an efficient minimization method for SPP forms implemented with an exact algorithm and an heuristic. Experimental results on a classical set of benchmarks show that the new algorithms are fast, and can be applied to "complex" functions with a reasonable running time.
Phoneme, Phone Boundary, and Tone in Automatic Scoring of Mandarin Proficiency

Not every phone, word, or sentence is equally good for assessing language proficiency. We investigated three phonetic factors that may affect automatic scoring of Mandarin proficiency – phoneme, phone boundary, and tone. Results showed that phone boundaries performed the best, and within-syllable boundaries were better than cross-syllable boundaries. The retroflex consonants as well as the vowel following these consonants outperformed the other phonemes. Tone0 and Tone3 outperformed the other tones, and ditone models significantly improved the performance of Tone0. These results suggest that phone boundary models and phonemeand tonedependent scoring algorithms should be employed in automatic assessment of Mandarin proficiency. It may also be helpful to separate phoneme and tone scoring prior to the combination of individual scores, as we found that the worst phoneme and the best tone, with respect to automatic scoring of Mandarin proficiency, appeared in the same word.
Quantitative Trait Loci for Resistance to the Congenital Nephropathy in Tensin 2-Deficient Mice

The ICR-derived glomerulonephritis (ICGN) mouse is a chronic kidney disease (CKD) model that is characterized histologically by glomerulosclerosis, vascular sclerosis and tubulointerstitial fibrosis, and clinically by proteinuria and anemia, which are common symptoms and pathological changes associated with a variety of kidney diseases. Previously, we performed a quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis to identify the causative genes for proteinuria in ICGN mice, and found a deletion mutation of the tensin 2 gene (Tns2nph, MGI no: 2447990). Interestingly, the congenic strain carrying the Tns2nph mutation on a C57BL/6J (B6) genetic background exhibited milder phenotypes than did ICGN mice, indicating the presence of several modifier genes controlling the disease phenotype. In this study, to identify the modifier/resistant loci for CKD progression in Tns2-deficient mice, we performed QTL analysis using backcross progenies from susceptible ICGN and resistant B6 mice. We identified a significant locus on chromosome (Chr) 2 (LOD = 5.36; 31 cM) and two suggestive loci on Chrs 10 (LOD = 2.27; 64 cM) and X (LOD = 2.65; 67 cM) with linkage to the severity of tubulointerstitial injury. One significant locus on Chr 13 (LOD = 3.49; approximately 14 cM) and one suggestive locus on Chr 2 (LOD = 2.41; 51 cM) were identified as QTLs for the severity of glomerulosclerosis. Suggestive locus in BUN was also detected in the same Chr 2 region (LOD = 2.34; 51 cM). A locus on Chr 2 (36 cM) was significantly linked with HGB (LOD = 4.47) and HCT (LOD = 3.58). Four novel epistatic loci controlling either HGB or tubulointerstitial injury were discovered. Further genetic analysis should lead to identification of CKD modifier gene(s), aiding early diagnosis and providing novel approaches to the discovery of drugs for the treatment and possible prevention of kidney disease.
Three New Compounds from Aspergillus terreus PT06-2 Grown in a High Salt Medium

To investigate the structurally novel and bioactive natural compounds from marine-derived microorganisms under high salinity, the fungus Aspergillus terreus PT06-2 was isolated from the sediment of the Putian Sea Saltern, Fujian, China. Three new compounds, terremides A (1) and B (2) and terrelactone A (3), along with twelve known compounds (4–15) were isolated and identified from the fermentation broth of A. terreus PT06-2 at 10% salinity. Among these metabolites, compounds 4 and 15 only produced in the 10% salinity culture, were identified as methyl 3,4,5-trimethoxy-2-(2-(nicotinamido) benzamido) benzoate, and (+)-terrein, respectively. The new compounds 1 and 2 exhibited antibacterial activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter aerogenes with MIC values of 63.9 and 33.5 μM, respectively. Compounds 5 showed moderate anti-H1N1 activity and lower cytotoxicity with IC50 and CC50 values of and 143.1 and 976.4 μM, respectively.
A Method for Retrieving Mean Horizontal Wind Profiles from Single-Doppler Radar Observations Contaminated by Aliasing

The velocity–azimuth display (VAD) technique was designed to estimate the areal mean vertical profile of the horizontal wind above a ground-based Doppler radar. The method uses radial velocity observations under the assumption of a linear wind field, though it encounters difficulty when the observations are contaminated by velocity ambiguities, large noise, and when viable data exist only over a restricted azimuthal range. The method suggested in this paper uses gradients of radial velocity, rather than only the velocity itself, to derive wind profiles and thus is termed the gradient velocity–azimuth display (GVAD) technique. Both the VAD and GVAD methods are tested first on simulated data to examine their sensitivity to different type of errors in radial velocity. The retrieved mean wind profiles are shown to be insensitive to random errors in radial velocity, even at large amplitude. However, the VAD method is very sensitive to systematic errors caused by velocity ambiguities. The experiments indicate t.
A study of the experiences of Black college female student athletes at a predominantly White institution

The purpose of this study was to gather descriptive data on the experiences of Black female student athletes. A better understanding of the experiences of Black female student athletes as students, as athletes, and as developing young women may help student affairs practitioners better understand their collegiate experience; provide them with information to make decisions about student affairs programs, policies, services, and practices; and offer a subgroup of students who have historically been underrepresented in research an opportunity to share their stories. The study addressed the following research question: What are the college experiences of Black female student athletes during athletic eligibility at a large, predominantly White, Division I, Midwestern, public university? Eight Black female eligible college student athletes were purposefully selected to participate in the qualitative study. Participants’ ages ranged from 18-23 years and they self-identified as Black (n=3), Caribbean (n=3), and West Indian (n=2). The women participated in both individual and team sports. Participants participated in two hour-long interviews. Data were coded and analyzed into categories. A process analysis enabled the key themes from the findings to be identified. Credibility and dependability were accounted through member checks and the use of three outside auditors. Four major themes emerged: unfulfilled expectations during the college experience as an athlete, student, and developing young person; perceptions of being treated differently than her White female peers; complex relationships that deeply impacted participants’ experiences in college both positively and negatively; and positive and negative forms of resistance in which participants’ engaged in response to experiences during college. Five implications for student affairs practiced were introduced: cultural competence, validating experiences of racism, collaboration with athletics, climate issues at PWIs, and Black female role models. Four programming considerations were also
The Effects of Mathematics Anxiety on Matriculation Students as Related to Motivation and Achievement.

The study investigated the effects of mathematics anxiety on matriculation students as related to motivation and achievement. Subjects included 88 students who were at the end of their second semester of study. Anxiety and motivation were measured using the Fennema-Sherman Math Anxiety Scale (MAS) and Effectance Motivation Scale (EMS) respectively. The instrument used to measure achievement was the Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT). The ANOVA results showed that the mean achievement scores and motivation scores of low, moderate and high anxiety groups were significantly different. Findings also revealed a low (r=-0.32) but significant (p < 0.05) negative correlation between mathematics anxiety and achievement and also a strong (r=-0.72) significant (p<0.05) negative correlation between mathematics anxiety and motivation. The study also revealed a significant low positive correlation (r=0.31) between motivation and achievement
Complex trauma, complex reactions: Assessment and treatment.

Complex trauma occurs repeatedly and escalates over its duration. In families, it is exemplified by domestic violence and child abuse and in other situations by war, prisoner of war or refugee status, and human trafficking. Complex trauma also refers to situations such as acute/chronic illness that requires intensive medical intervention or a single traumatic event that is calamitous. Complex trauma generates complex reactions, in addition to those currently included in the DSM‐IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This article examines the criteria contained in the diagnostic conceptualization of complex PTSD (CPTSD). It reviews newly available assessment tools and outlines a sequenced treatment based on accumulated clinical observation and emerging empirical substantiation. Complex trauma refers to a type of trauma that occurs repeatedly and cumulatively, usually over a period of time and within specific relationships and contexts. The term came into being over the past decade as researchers found that some forms of trauma were much more pervasive and complicated than others (Herman, 1992a, 1992b). The prototype trauma for this change in understanding was child abuse. The expanded understanding now extends to all forms of domestic violence and attachment trauma occurring in the context of family and other intimate relationships. These forms of intimate/domestic abuse often occur over extended time periods during which the victim is entrapped and conditioned in a variety of ways. In the case of child abuse, the victim is psychologically and physically immature—his or her development is often seriously compromised by repetitive abuse and inadequate response at the hands of family members or others on whom he or she relies for safety and protection. The expanded understanding also extends to other types of catastrophic, deleterious, and entrapping traumatization occurring in childhood and/or adulthood, for example, ongoing armed conflict and combat, POW status, and the displacement of populations through ethnic cleansing, refugee status, and relocation and through human trafficking and prostitution. It might also result from situations of acute and chronic illness that require ongoing and intensive (and often painful) medical intervention or may even result from a single catastrophic trauma, for example, witnessing the sudden traumatic death of another individual or experiencing a brutal gang rape.
A novel relaying protocol in a cooperative network with decode-and-forward relays

Cooperative diversity techniques make a reduction in spectral efficiency despite of an increase in reliability. In this paper we propose a novel relaying protocol in a cooperative network with decode and forward (DF) relays to improve the spectral efficiency in addition to achieving full diversity order (maximum available reliability). The proposed protocol keeps the transmission rate fixed to the rate of point-to-point transmission and outperforms rather than conventional relaying protocols such as fixed, selection and incremental relaying protocols. The simulation results show the effectiveness of our method and confirm our claim.
Dynamic Modelling under Uncertainty: The Case of Trypanosoma brucei Energy Metabolism

Kinetic models of metabolism require detailed knowledge of kinetic parameters. However, due to measurement errors or lack of data this knowledge is often uncertain. The model of glycolysis in the parasitic protozoan Trypanosoma brucei is a particularly well analysed example of a quantitative metabolic model, but so far it has been studied with a fixed set of parameters only. Here we evaluate the effect of parameter uncertainty. In order to define probability distributions for each parameter, information about the experimental sources and confidence intervals for all parameters were collected. We created a wiki-based website dedicated to the detailed documentation of this information: the SilicoTryp wiki (http://silicotryp.ibls.gla.ac.uk/wiki/Glycolysis). Using information collected in the wiki, we then assigned probability distributions to all parameters of the model. This allowed us to sample sets of alternative models, accurately representing our degree of uncertainty. Some properties of the model, such as the repartition of the glycolytic flux between the glycerol and pyruvate producing branches, are robust to these uncertainties. However, our analysis also allowed us to identify fragilities of the model leading to the accumulation of 3-phosphoglycerate and/or pyruvate. The analysis of the control coefficients revealed the importance of taking into account the uncertainties about the parameters, as the ranking of the reactions can be greatly affected. This work will now form the basis for a comprehensive Bayesian analysis and extension of the model considering alternative topologies.
A novel sine wave based UWB pulse generator design for single/multi-user systems

In this study, a novel Ultra Wideband (UWB) pulse generator design for single- and multi-user systems is presented. The proposed pulse generator is based on new simple and effective design to generate the UWB pulses through sine wave shaping. For single-user systems, three models for the proposed pulse generator working with Frequency Modulation (FM), Bi-Phase Modulation (BPM) and On-Off Keying (OOK) are introduced. The first generator model has 250 Mbps throughput from a 250 MHz sine wave oscillator, while the second model works on 500 Mbps. The third model for three separate users for multi- user systems using Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), while the same model can be configured to work for a single-user with 750 Mbps using Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technique. The generated pulse is compatible with the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) regulations of UWB indoor emission mask. A lumped low pass filter has been designed to achieve the sine wave shaping. The simulation results verify the proposed design and its effectiveness of using sine wave shaping for UWB pulse generators.
Preliminary INNOVATION SYSTEMS : ANALYTICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES

The focus of this paper is on the analytical and methodological issues arising from various system concepts. There are three issues that stand out as problematic. First, what is the appropriate level of analysis for the purpose at hand? It matters, for example, whether we are interested in a certain technology, product, set of related products, a competence bloc, a particular cluster of activities or firms, or the science and technology base generally and for what geographic area, as well as for what time period. The choice of components and system boundaries depends on this, as does the type of interaction among components to be analyzed. The attributes or features of the system components that come into focus also depend on the choice of level of analysis.
Building a Dataset for Possessions Identification in Text

Just as industrialization matured from mass production to customization and personalization, so has the Web migrated from generic content to public disclosures of one’s most intimately held thoughts, opinions and beliefs. This relatively new type of data is able to represent finer and more narrowly defined demographic slices. If until now researchers have primarily focused on leveraging personalized content to identify latent information such as gender, nationality, location, or age of the author, this study seeks to establish a structured way of extracting possessions, or items that people own or are entitled to, as a way to ultimately provide insights into people’s behaviors and characteristics. In order to promote more research in this area, we are releasing a set of 798 possessions extracted from blog genre, where possessions are marked at different confidence levels, as well as a detailed set of guidelines to help in future annotation studies.
Urban Nonprofits, City Governance, and the Pursuit of Sustainability in American Cities

American cities vary greatly in the degree to which they demonstrate a commitment to sustainability. Determining why some cities develop an array of programs designed to promote sustainability while others cities do little is a complex undertaking. We focus here on the interaction between various interest group sectors and city councilors. Our measurements draw on a combination of two databases, one a survey of 50 large American cities and the other a comprehensive index of city-level programming in the area of environmental protection and sustainability. Particular attention is paid to the role of urban nonprofits, including neighborhood associations, environmental groups, and non-environmental civic associations. Although the relationships are not consistent through all tests, there is an overall pattern that links nonprofit advocacy to increased levels of sustainability programs and policies. In a multivariate analysis labor union advocacy proves to be most powerful predicator of serious city-level sustainability efforts. This belies the image of labor as being anti-environmental. Our modern, post-industrial economy generates jobs with the development of green businesses. Overall, we find that city governments appear relatively open with a diverse array of advocacy groups participating in the policymaking process.
Use Gate Charge to Design the Gate Drive Circuit for Power MOSFETs and IGBTs

Designers unfamiliar with MOSFET or IGBT input characteristics begin drive circuit design by determining component values based on the gate-to-source, or input, capacitance listed on the data sheet. RC value based on the gate-to-source capacitance normally lead to a gate drive that is hopelessly inadequate. Although the gate-to-source capacitance is an important value, the gate-to-drain capacitance is actually more significant—and more difficult to deal with—because it is a non-linear capacitance affected as a function of voltage; the gate-to-source capacitance is also affected as a voltage function, but to a much lesser extent. This gate-to-drain capacitance function is similar to that found in vacuum tube amplifiers.
LASSO AND DANTZIG SELECTORS FOR NON-PARAMETRIC AND HIGH-DIMENSIONAL REGRESSION

where we wish to estimate the function g given the data under the assumption that the Wi are independent indentically distributed Gaussian error terms and g lies inside of some function space F . One reasonable method of doing this is to select a finite dictionary of functions {f1, . , fM} such that any function in F can be well approximated by sparse span of the dictionary. In this setting it is generally assumed that M > n, and we have thus reduced the non-parametric regression in equation 1, to the high-dimensional regression problem:
Differentially private network data release via structural inference

Information networks, such as social media and email networks, often contain sensitive information. Releasing such network data could seriously jeopardize individual privacy. Therefore, we need to sanitize network data before the release. In this paper, we present a novel data sanitization solution that infers a network's structure in a differentially private manner. We observe that, by estimating the connection probabilities between vertices instead of considering the observed edges directly, the noise scale enforced by differential privacy can be greatly reduced. Our proposed method infers the network structure by using a statistical hierarchical random graph (HRG) model. The guarantee of differential privacy is achieved by sampling possible HRG structures in the model space via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We theoretically prove that the sensitivity of such inference is only O(log n), where n is the number of vertices in a network. This bound implies less noise to be injected than those of existing works. We experimentally evaluate our approach on four real-life network datasets and show that our solution effectively preserves essential network structural properties like degree distribution, shortest path length distribution and influential nodes.
The muscular flexibility training and the range of movement improvement: A critical literature review

O treino da flexibilidade muscular poe em evidencia uma serie de principios neurofisiologicos e um conjunto intrincado de propriedades musculares e visco-elasticas. Sao diversos os metodos de estiramentorealizados nos contextos clinico e desportivo. Apesar da sua utilizacao ser comum, nao e usual os profissionais de saude e educacao reflectirem sobre as componentes e eficacia dos diversos metodos de estiramento. Neste artigo, realizamos uma revisao critica dos diversos metodos utilizados no treino de flexibilidade, assim como dos principios e parâmetros que com eles se relacionam. Daremos especial enfase aos principios em que se baseia a facilitacao neuromuscular proprioceptiva e os diversos metodos de relaxamento local, como o aquecimento. Para alem disso, teremos em conta os dados reveladores relativos ao paradoxo do Coeficiente de elasticidade, os quais podem ajudar a conceber uma filosofia de intervencao do treino de flexibilidade divergente relativamente ao que classicamente tem sido defendido e efectivado.