Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tarification au marché et variation des marges à l'exportation. Une étude des prix d'exportation allemands, français et italiens

This paper analyzes the impact of increasing international competition on the evolution of export prices in the last three decades. We investigate both the sensitivity of export prices to exchange rate movements, and the dynamics of profit margins for a large number of manufacturing products exported by France, Germany and Italy. We find that export price dynamics are mainly determined by source and destination market characteristics, whereas product specific features do not appear to play a crucial role. For what concerns export margins, we find that on average they have either remained stable or augmented in the last three decades. While estimated coefficients have to be taken with caution, our results suggest that the increased international integration seems not to have reduced firms? market power. JEL Classification: D40, E30, F14, L16, L60.
A Comparison Study of Input ESD Protection Schemes Utilizing NMOS, Thyristor, and Diode Devices

For three fundamental input-protection schemes suitable for high-frequency CMOS ICs, which utilize protection devices such as NMOS transistors, thyristors, and diodes, we attempt an in-depth comparison on HBM ESD robustness in terms of lattice heating inside protection devices and peak voltages developed across gate oxides in input buffers, based on DC, mixed-mode transient, and AC analyses utilizing a 2-dimensional device simulator. For this purpose, we construct an equivalent circuit model of input HBM test environments for CMOS chips equipped with input ESD protection circuits, which allows mixed-mode transient simulations for various HBM test modes. By executing mixed-mode simulations including up to six active protection devices in a circuit, we attempt a detailed analysis on the problems, which can occur in real tests. In the procedure, we suggest to a recipe to ease the bipolar trigger in the protection devices and figure out that oxide failure in internal circuits is determined by the peak voltage developed in the later stage of discharge, which corresponds to the junction breakdown voltage of the NMOS structure residing in the protection devices. We explain strength and weakness of each protection scheme as an input ESD protection circuit for high-frequency ICs, and suggest valuable guidelines relating design of the protection devices and circuits.
Exits from Unemployment Spells in Germany and the United Kingdom : A Cross-National Comparison ( 1990-1996 )

Panel Survey (BHPS). The data are used with the permission of all responsible authorities, who bear no responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. improvement of the paper. All errors and deficiencies remaining in the paper are our own. ABSTRACT This paper investigates unemployment from the angle of unemployment spells experienced by individuals in Germany and the United Kingdom in the first part of the 1990s using longitudinal micro data of the British and German part of the EPAG dataset which is based on the BHPS and the GSOEP. Preceding information on ordinary unemployment rates and a brief description of the labour market regimes is given in advance. Discussing survivor curves of unemployment phases, we find the following evidence: Explicit gender differences concerning unemployment rates reappear in the shape of survivor rate curves: British females display shorter unemployment phases as opposed to their male counterparts whereas the reverse is true for Germany. Additionally the extension of this gender discrepancy is more serious in East-Germany than in West-Germany. Comparing the population continuing with employment to those who exit into economic inactivity in the United Kingdom we observe a completely different pattern. Up to a specific threshold in time, a relatively high proportion of both sexes remains in unemployment. After this point an increasing proportion of females exits to economic inactivity whereas a high proportion of males still remains in unemployment. General assumptions of the human capital approach could clearly be verified when examining the effects of individual characteristics on the exit process from unemployment. Accordingly, individuals with a relatively high (low) educational attainment tend to experience relatively short (long) unemployment phases. Additionally the factor age matters. The pattern 'the younger (older), the higher (lower) the likelihood to leave unemployment' occurs for males and females both in Germany and in the UK. Nevertheless those who are young and less skilled do not have an comparative advantage to those who are old and less skilled in the UK.
Extensive frameshift at all AGG and CCC codons in the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 gene of Perkinsus marinus (Alveolata; Dinoflagellata)

Diverse mitochondrial (mt) genetic systems have evolved independently of the more uniform nuclear system and often employ modified genetic codes. The organization and genetic system of dinoflagellate mt genomes are particularly unusual and remain an evolutionary enigma. We determined the sequence of full-length cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (cox1) mRNA of the earliest diverging dinoflagellate Perkinsus and show that this gene resides in the mt genome. Apparently, this mRNA is not translated in a single reading frame with standard codon usage. Our examination of the nucleotide sequence and three-frame translation of the mRNA suggest that the reading frame must be shifted 10 times, at every AGG and CCC codon, to yield a consensus COX1 protein. We suggest two possible mechanisms for these translational frameshifts: a ribosomal frameshift in which stalled ribosomes skip the first bases of these codons or specialized tRNAs recognizing non-triplet codons, AGGY and CCCCU. Regardless of the mechanism, active and efficient machinery would be required to tolerate the frameshifts predicted in Perkinsus mitochondria. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence of translational frameshifts in protist mitochondria and, by far, is the most extensive case in mitochondria.
Tau in MAPK Activation

The nature of “toxic” tau in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been unclear. During pathogenesis, the importance of tau oligomerization vs. tau phosphorylation is controversial and the investigation of both remains critical toward defining the “toxicity” of tau. The phosphorylation of tau on serines and/or threonines occurs early in the disease course and altering phosphorylation has been shown to disrupt neuropathogenesis. We have recently reported that in PC12-derived cells, tau had a role in signal transduction processes activated by NGF. By depleting tau, NGF-induced MAPK activation was attenuated and by restoring tau, MAPK activation was restored. Furthermore, the phosphorylation of tau on Thr231 was required for tau to potentiate MAPK activation. Here we report the effects of additional disease-related tau phosphorylation sites and tau isoform on the ability of tau to potentiate MAPK activation. Our findings, which tested three other sites of phosphorylation, showed that phosphorylation at these other sites mainly lessened MAPK activation; none potentiated MAPK activation. In comparing 0N3R tau to the other five brain tau isoforms, most showed a trend toward less MAPK activation, with only 2N4R tau showing significantly less activation. Since MAPK activation has been reported in AD brain and is characteristic of cell proliferation mechanisms, tau phosphorylation that promotes MAPK activation could promote cell cycle activation mechanisms. In neurons, the activation of the cell cycle leads to cell death, suggesting that abnormally phosphorylated tau can be a toxic species. The relationship between tau oligomerization and its ability to potentiate MAPK activation needs to be determined.
Decisions and Noise: The Scope of Evolutionary Synthesis and Dynamical Analysis

The agents evolved by Randall Beer for active object discrimination perform an undeniably interesting task. It may seem modest from the point of view of an external human observer but, for a robot with limited sensory capability trying to work out two-dimensional shapes from a flux of one-dimensional data, it is indeed challenging. Already in this fact we find a serious answer to critics who think that simple experiments in mobile robotics like this one have little relevance for understanding cognition as a natural phenomenon. Whether a task is cognitively interesting cannot be judged in a vacuum, or only by human standards, but depends on the dynamical, bodily, and environmental conditions with which an agent must cope. If by his initial judgment the designer cannot foresee a trivial way to perform the task given the resources provided to the agent, then the synthesis of successful behavior is an event from which something can certainly be learned. Such is the motivation that is intuitive for many people working within autonomous and evolutionary robotics, but which often seems to escape those who think that these disciplines are solely focused on synthesizing human level intelligence from the bottom up. Of course, the question remains whether what is learned by understanding the mechanisms that give rise to an agent’s behavior is useful, suggestive, and of potential generality, or whether it is instead applicable only to one particular case or the product of an undesired design constraint. Arguably, Beer’s (2003) thorough analysis provides us with one example for each option, though interestingly both examples contain something to learn from. Let’s take the second case first. Beer’s evolved agents, at least those analyzed in the paper, rely heavily on the maximum apparent diameter of an object to perform the discrimination. Beer demonstrates this by studying catching and avoidance performance for different profiles and dropping a variety of shapes with the same diameter as the diamonds and obtaining the same response from the agents. Disappointing? Perhaps. Indeed, if we were expecting some sophisticated visual shape discrimination this may not be what we had in mind. Evolutionary robotics is full of examples (often unreported) where evolution manages to bypass the complexities of a problem by taking advantage of what at first look like innocuous design assumptions— in this case the fact that the shapes always have different maximum diameters and that these are fixed. But unlike situations where the evolved solutions rely on a design artifact or a bug in the simulation code, here we simply get what we asked for. Discrimination is successful and utilizes a readily available environmental variable. The clues provided by this variable must still be exploited appropriately using active strategies that may well be described as visual scanning. How this is done is not trivial. The situation is
Neuroanatomical Abnormalities in Violent Individuals with and without a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia

Several structural brain abnormalities have been associated with aggression in patients with schizophrenia. However, little is known about shared and distinct abnormalities underlying aggression in these subjects and non-psychotic violent individuals. We applied a region-of-interest volumetric analysis of the amygdala, hippocampus, and thalamus bilaterally, as well as whole brain and ventricular volumes to investigate violent (n = 37) and non-violent chronic patients (n = 26) with schizophrenia, non-psychotic violent (n = 24) as well as healthy control subjects (n = 24). Shared and distinct volumetric abnormalities were probed by analysis of variance with the factors violence (non-violent versus violent) and diagnosis (non-psychotic versus psychotic), adjusted for substance abuse, age, academic achievement and negative psychotic symptoms. Patients showed elevated vCSF volume, smaller left hippocampus and smaller left thalamus volumes. This was particularly the case for non-violent individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. Furthermore, patients had reduction in right thalamus size. With regard to left amygdala, we found an interaction between violence and diagnosis. More specifically, we report a double dissociation with smaller amygdala size linked to violence in non-psychotic individuals, while for psychotic patients smaller size was linked to non-violence. Importantly, the double dissociation appeared to be mostly driven by substance abuse. Overall, we found widespread morphometric abnormalities in subcortical regions in schizophrenia. No evidence for shared volumetric abnormalities in individuals with a history of violence was found. Finally, left amygdala abnormalities in non-psychotic violent individuals were largely accounted for by substance abuse. This might be an indication that the association between amygdala reduction and violence is mediated by substance abuse. Our results indicate the importance of structural abnormalities in aggressive individuals.
Estimating Demand with Varied Levels of Aggregation

The response of consumer demand to prices, income, and other characteristics is important for a range of policy issues. Naturally, the level of detail for which consumer behaviour can be estimated depends on the level of disaggregation of the available data. However, it is often the case that the available data is differently aggregated in different time periods, with the information available in later time periods usually being more detailed. The applied researcher is thus faced with choosing between detail, in which case the more highly aggregated data is ignored; or duration, in which case the data must be aggregated up to the "lowest common denominator". This paper develops a specification/estimation technique that exploits the entire information content of a variably-aggregated data set.
The Author's Place in the Future of Copyright

Two encroachments, one long-standing, the other a product of the digital era, cramp the author’s place in copyright today. First, most authors lack bargaining power; the real economic actors in the copyright system have long been the publishers and other exploiters to whom authors cede their rights. These actors may advance the figure of the author for the moral lustre it lends their appeals to lawmakers, but then may promptly despoil the creators of whatever increased protections they may have garnered. Second, the advent of new technologies of creation and dissemination of works of authorship not only threatens traditional revenue models, but also calls into question whatever artistic control the author may – or should - retain over her work. After reviewing these challenges, I will consider legal measures to protect authors from leonine contracts, and measures in the marketplace to obtain compensation for the exploitation of their rights, in order to assure authors better remuneration, as well as more power over the ways their works encounter their public.The author’s place in the future of copyright (assuming copyright has a future) will not be assured until the full range of her interests, monetary and moral, receive both recognition and enforcement. Online micropayment and other systems for remunerating individual authors (including by means of collective licensing), albeit often embryonic, hold promise. But will these new means of remunerating authors (or for that matter older business models which, while often divesting authors of their rights, also often afforded them an income stream) remain viable in a digital environment in which paying for creativity increasingly seems an act of largesse? Most fundamentally, we need to appreciate authorship, and to recognize that a work in digital form is a thing of value, lest the old adage that “information” (meaning, works of authorship) “wants to be free” presage works of authorship that don’t “want” to be created.
Continuous statistics of the Lyα forest at 0 <z < 1.6: the mean flux, flux distribution and autocorrelation fromHST FOS spectra

We measure the amount of absorption in the Lya forest at 0 < z < 1.6 in Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph spectra of 74 quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). Starting with a 334 QSO sample compiled by Bechtold et al., we selected 74 QSOs that have the highest signal-to-noise ratio and complete coverage of rest-frame wavelengths 1070-1170 A. We measure the absorption from the flux in each pixel in units of the unabsorbed continuum level. We mask out regions of spectra that contain metal lines, or strong Lya lines that are accompanied by other Lyman series line or metals at the same redshift, leaving Lyα absorption from the low-density intergalactic medium (IGM). At 0 < z < 1.6 we find that 79 per cent of the absorption is from the low-density IGM, 12 per cent from metals and 9 per cent from the strong Hi lines, nearly identical to the percentages (78, 15 and 7) that we measured independently at z = 2 from spectra taken with the Kast spectrograph on the Lick 3-m. At z = 1 the low-density IGM absorbs 0.037 ± 0.004 of the flux. The error includes some but not all of the uncertainty in the continuum level. The remaining part gives relative errors of approximately 0.21 when we report the mean absorption in eight independent redshift intervals, and 0.047 when we average over all redshifts. We find 1.46 times more absorption from the low-density IGM than comes from Lya lines that Bechtold et al. listed in the same spectra. The amount of absorption increases with z and can be fit by a power law (1 + z) α , with a = 1.01. If the absorption comes entirely from lines with fixed rest equivalent width, this result implies the number density of lines evolves like (1 + z) 0.01 , or no change in the number of lines per unit redshift, consistent with the Janknecht et al. results on the distribution of lines. When we include similar measurements from higher redshifts, we need more degrees of freedom to fit the amount of absorption at 0 < z < 3.2. A power law with a break in slope, changing from index 1.5 at low z to 3.0 above z ∼ 1.1 is a better but only marginally acceptable fit. We also calculate two other continuous statistics, the flux probability distribution function and the flux autocorrelation function that is non-zero out to v ∼ 500 km s -1 at 0.5 < z < 1.5.
The hippocampal-striatal circuit for goal-directed and habitual choice

It is now widely accepted that one of the roles of the hippocampus is to maintain episodic spatial representations, while parallel striatal pathways contribute to both declarative and procedural value computations by encoding different input-specific outcome predictions. In this paper we investigate the use of these brain mechanisms for action selection, linking them to model-based and model-free controllers for decision making. To this aim we propose a biologically inspired computational model that embodies these theories and explains the functioning of the hippocampal-striatal circuit in a rat navigation task. Its main characteristic is to allow the cooperation of habitual and goal-directed behaviors, with the hippocampus primarily involved in encoding spatial information and simulating possible navigation paths, and the ventral and dorsal striatum involved in learning stimulus-response behaviors and evaluating the reward expectancies associated to predicted locations and sensed stimuli, respectively. The architecture we present employs an unsupervised reinforcement learning rule for the hippocampal-striatal network that is able to build a representation of the environment in which rewarding sites and informative landmarks produce value gradients that are used for planning and decision making. Additionally, it utilizes an arbitration mechanism that balances between exploitation, i.e. stimulus-response behaviors, and mental exploration, i.e. motor imagery processes, based on the intensity and the variability of the responses of striatal neurons. We interpret these results in light of recent experimental data that show anticipatory activations in hippocampal and striatal areas.
Features of Using the Cryptocurrency

The article highlights the issues of emergence and existence of cryptocurrency. Exploring online space, you canselect the most popular existing electronic currency which is bitcoin (Bitcoin). The article analyzed the pros andcons and the legality of these "money" in Russia and abroad. Some people believe the money that exist in theonline space are simply "cheating", and therefore it is not worth to trust them, but others say that this currencywill proceed the future of electronic payments.
Behavior-Based Problem Localization for Parallel File Systems

We present a behavior-based problem-diagnosis approach for PVFS that analyzes a novel source of instrumentation--CPU instruction-pointer samples and function-call traces--to localize the faulty server and to enable root-cause analysis of the resource at fault. We validate our approach by injecting realistic storage and network problems into three different workloads (dd, IO-zone, and PostMark) on a PVFS cluster.
Constellation Shaping for WDM Systems Using 256QAM/1024QAM With Probabilistic Optimization

In this paper, probabilistic shaping is numerically and experimentally investigated for increasing the transmission reach of wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical communication systems employing quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). An optimized probability mass function (PMF) of the QAM symbols is first found from a modified Blahut-Arimoto algorithm for the optical channel. A turbo coded bit interleaved coded modulation system is then applied, which relies on many-to-one labeling to achieve the desired PMF, thereby achieving shaping gains. Pilot symbols at rate at most 2% are used for synchronization and equalization, making it possible to receive input constellations as large as 1024QAM. The system is evaluated experimentally on a 10 GBd, 5 channels WDM setup. The maximum system reach is increased w.r. t. standard 1024QAM by 20% at input data rate of 4.65 bits/symbol and up to 75% at 5.46 bits/symbol. It is shown that rate adaptation does not require changing of the modulation format. The performance of the proposed 1024QAM shaped system is validated on all 5 channels of the WDM signal for selected distances and rates. Finally, it is shown via EXIT charts and BER analysis that iterative demapping, while generally beneficial to the system, is not a requirement for achieving the shaping gain.
A graph based characterization of functional resting state networks for patients with disorders of consciousness

Disorder of consciousness (DOC) is a consequence of severe brain injuries. Diagnosis of DOC is very challenging because it requires the patient collaboration. Research in hemodynamic brain activity in resting state conditions suggests that healthy brain is organized into large-scale resting state networks (RSNs) of sensory/cognitive relevance. Recently, relationships among these RSNs have been explored as a possible biomarker of loss of consciousness. The RSN functional connectivity is computed as the temporal relationship between pairs of RSNs time-courses. It results in the so called functional network of brain connectivity (FNC). The properties of this network in the DOC conditions remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigated some local complex network properties of the brain FNC,, during altered states of consciousness. For this, we characterized a population of 49 DOC patients and 27 healthy controls. fMRI data was acquired and processed for each subject to built a FNC for each one. Network characterization was performed by computing the strength and the clustering coefficient measurements at individual level on the corresponding FNC. These nodal measurements allows to understand brain alterations of single RSN in the FNC. Our results show that strength and clustering variations may reflect brain network reconfiguration, and they may be associated to loss of consciousness states in patients with DOCs.