Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Why New Cities Form

Municipal incorporation can have profound impacts on the urban and political geography of the regions in which they incorporate. These impacts and declines in the rate of municipal formation lead to the question of why municipalities incorporate. The authors synthesize an overview and analysis of the historical literature with a media literature review to construct a comprehensive classification system of theories that explain municipal incorporations. Twelve new micromotives such as eligibility for government grants and economic development are identified. Moreover, the review surprisingly reveals that spatial motives, in contrast to service motives, play the largest role in new municipal incorporations.
Computer-based assessment of left ventricular wall stiffness in patients with ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy

Ischemic dilated cardiomyopathy (IDCM) is a degenerative disease of the myocardial tissue accompanied by left ventricular (LV) structural changes such as interstitial fibrosis. This can induce increased passive stiffness of the LV wall. However, quantification of LV passive wall stiffness in vivo is extremely difficult, particularly in ventricles with complex geometry. Therefore, we sought to (i) develop a computer-based assessment of LV passive wall stiffness from cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging in terms of a nominal stiffness index (E*); and (ii) investigate whether E* can offer an insight into cardiac mechanics in IDCM. CMR scans were performed in 5 normal subjects and 5 patients with IDCM. For each data sample, an in-house software was used to generate a 1-to-1 corresponding mesh pair of the LV from the ED and ES phases. The E* values are then computed as a function of local ventricular wall strain. We found that E* in the IDCM group (40.66 – 215.12) was at least one order of magnitude larger than the normal control group (1.00 – 6.14). In addition, the IDCM group revealed much higher inhomogeneity of E* values manifested by a greater spread of E* values throughout the LV. In conclusion, there is a substantial elevated ventricular stiffness index in IDCM. This would suggest that E* could be used as discriminator for early detection of disease state. The computational performance per data sample took approximately 25 seconds, which demonstrates its clinical potential as a real-time cardiac assessment tool.
Comparison of T1rho measurements in agarose phantoms and human patellar cartilage using 2D multislice spiral and 3D magnetization prepared partitioned k-space spoiled gradient-echo snapshot techniques at 3 T.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this article is to compare in vitro T1rho measurements in agarose phantoms and articular cartilage specimens using 2D multislice spiral and 3D magnetization prepared partitioned k-space spoiled gradient-echo snapshot MRI sequences. MATERIALS AND METHODS Six phantoms (agarose concentration, 2%, 3%, and 4%; n = 2 each) and 10 axially sliced patellar specimens from five cadaveric donors were scanned at 3 T. T1rho-weighted images were acquired using 2D spiral and 3D magnetization prepared partitioned k-space spoiled gradient-echo snapshot sequences. Regions of interest were analyzed to measure T1rho values centrally within phantoms, to evaluate effects of pulse sequence and agarose concentration. In patellar specimens, regions of interest were analyzed to measure T1rho values with respect to anatomic location (the medial and lateral facets and the median ridge in deep and superficial halves of the cartilage) as well as location that exhibited magic angle effect in proton density-weighted images, to evaluate the effects of pulse sequence, anatomic location, and magic angle. RESULTS In phantoms, T1rho values were similar (p = 0.9) between sequences but decreased significantly (p < 0.001), from ∼55 to ∼29 milliseconds, as agarose concentration increased from 2% to 4%. In cartilage specimens, T1rho values were also similar between sequences (p = 0.3) but were significantly higher (p < 0.001) in the superficial layer (95-120 milliseconds) compared with the deep layer (45-75 milliseconds). CONCLUSION T1rho measurements of human patellar cartilage specimens and agarose phantoms using 2D spiral and 3D magnetization prepared partitioned k-space spoiled gradient-echo snapshot sequences gave similar values. Lower T1rho values for phantoms with higher agarose concentrations and proteoglycan concentrations that are higher in deeper layers of cartilage than in superficial layers suggest that our method is sensitive to concentration of macromolecules in biologic tissues.
CHINA’S ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES IN AFRICA: TRADE, FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT AND AID

The paper examines the nature of China’s economic activities in Africa in three dimensions: merchandise trade, foreign direct investment, and aid. These are three main channels through which China’s presence on the continent affects Africa’s economic growth and development. China’s economic relations with Africa are, to a large extent, driven by Chinese demand for natural resources, especially oil and minerals. It is the most visible in Sino-African trade, where fuels alone account for about two thirds of China’s imports from Africa. Natural resource extraction has also significant impact on Chinese decisions regarding foreign direct investment (FDI) and aid. Mutual cooperation between China and Africa has brought obvious advantages for both sides. For African countries, closer trade relations with China have been associated with gains in the form of lower import prices and improving terms of trade. Chinese FDI in non-extractive sectors has become a chance for economic diversification on the African continent. China’s aid and FDI can significantly contribute to the development of local infrastructure and technology upgrading. However, China’s economic presence on the continent has also its negative side. African countries may suffer, for example, from trade related losses, unfair competition or further debt accumulation.
Robust Formulation for PCA: Avoiding Mean Calculation With L2, p-norm Maximization

Most existing robust principal component analysis (PCA) involve mean estimation for extracting low-dimensional representation. However, they do not get the optimal mean for real data, which include outliers, under the different robust distances metric learning, such as L1-norm and L2,1-norm. This affects the robustness of algorithms. Motivated by the fact that the variance of data can be characterized by the variation between each pair of data, we propose a novel robust formulation for PCA. It avoids computing the mean of data in the criterion function. Our method employs L2,p-norm as the distance metric to measure the variation in the criterion function and aims to seek the projection matrix that maximizes the sum of variation between each pair of the projected data. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that our methods are efficient and superior to most existing robust methods for data reconstruction.
How it essentially was: Truth claims in history and accounting

This paper compares and contrasts the conceptualization of “profession” in history and accounting. Professional history and, to a more limited extent, professional accounting have their 19th century origins in notions of scientific method and objectivity as well as in motives of “closure” and exclusivity. The paper argues that these “scientific” origins of both history and accounting rendered them exclusive not only in membership but in methodology. As scientific approaches relied on documentary evidence, various rich, if less reliable, sources of evidence were excluded. This resulted in the representation of a limited and flawed “reality” in both history and accounting which led to 20th century threats to their legitimacy. The paper concludes that exploration of the interfaces between history and accounting offers new perspectives on both disciplines as we enter the 21st century.
The dynamics of trade integration and the political value of commitment

The paper analyzes the importance of credible institutions in the process of trade liberalization. It combines aspects of credible policy announcements with adjustment costs. We show that if industries' profits are subject to adjustment costs, a dynamic link between periods arises that creates constituencies for a non-discretionary trade policy regime. The conditions for a government to select such an institutional solution are derived.
A 2.4 GHz ZigBee Receiver Exploiting an RF-to-BB-Current-Reuse Blixer + Hybrid Filter Topology in 65 nm CMOS

A 2.4 GHz ZigBee receiver unifying a balun-LNA-I/Q-mixer (Blixer) and a baseband (BB) hybrid filter in one cell is fabricated in 65 nm CMOS. Without any external components, wideband input matching and passive pre-gain are concurrently achieved via co-optimizing an integrated low-Q network with a balun-LNA. The latter also features active-gain boosting and partial-noise canceling to enhance the gain and noise figure (NF). Above the balun-LNA are I/Q double-balanced mixers driven by a 4-phase 25% LO for downconversion and gain-phase balancing. The generated BB currents are immediately filtered by an IF-noise-shaping current-mode Biquad and a complex-pole load, offering first-order image rejection and third-order channel selection directly atop the Blixer. Together with other BB and LO circuitries, the receiver measures 8.5 dB NF, 57 dB gain and -6-dBm IIP3out-band at 1.7 mW power and 0.24 mm2 die size. The S11-bandwidth (<;-10 dB) covers 2.25 to 3.55 GHz being robust to packaging variations. Most performance metrics compare favorably with the state-of-the-art.
Beamforming-based spatial precoding in FDD massive MIMO systems

In order to enable frequency-division duplex (FDD) massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems, a beam-grouping, precoding and feedback scheme is proposed to reduce the downlink training overhead and channel state information (CSI) feedback overhead. When the number of transmit antennas on a base station (BS) is growing large, the downlink training overhead for CSI estimation and the CSI feedback overhead are growing tremendously. In addition to the downlink training overhead, simulation results show that the proposed method is able to reduce the feedback overhead without sacrificing the downlink achievable information rate (AIR). Furthermore, the proposed method has a lower computation complexity comparing with other methods in the recent literature.
Drivers and Thresholds for Protected Area Tourism in Costa Rica: Exploring a Socio-ecological Systems Approach

This study proposes a novel approach to examine the applicability of resilience thinking and its framework to an emergent area of study there is currently little research available. The ability to examine the drivers and slow changing variables affecting the resilience of tourism in Costa Rica's Guayabo National Monument allows for the opportunity to recognize and work with changes in a complex system while taking advantage of emergent systems thinking from a socioecological perspective. Focus on the importance of drivers and thresholds affecting a protected area are further reviewed in order to analyze the resilience of protected area tourism from a socio-ecological systems approach.
More vocational education and supplementary training through equalization of costs? An analysis of a training and development fund in the Netherlands

Abstract In a market economy, individual employers are confronted with several dilemmas when they have to make long-term investments in (re)training and HRD. Especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), these dilemmas can easily lead to under-investment in education and supplementary training, unless institutional arrangements are created to reduce the risks of those investments. Since the mid-1980s, sectoral training funds, which operate on the basis of the principle of equalization, have been providing such an institutional arrangement in The Netherlands. They are jointly administered by representatives of the trade unions and employers' associations. In this article we investigate, on the basis of empirical data, if the most important goal of a sectoral training fund (i.e. to provide sufficient volume and professional quality in the workforce of the sector, by stimulating both the initial vocational education and the supplementary training) is actually achieved. We conclude that the desired effects of the equalization instrument are not achieved. This results in five challenges to prevent underinvestment in – and to continue to stimulate – education and training.
Ultrasound contrast image segmentation using a modified level set method

Manual segmentation of ultrasound contrast images is time-consuming and inevitable to variability, and computer-based segmentation algorithms often require user interaction. This paper proposes a novel level set model for fully automated segmentation of vascular ultrasound contrast images. The initial contour of arterial boundaries is acquired based on an automatic procedure. The level set model moves the initial contour towards the boundaries of arterial inner wall based on minimization of the energy function. The traditional energy function is improved by introducing an edge detector based on image gradient and the standard difference image. Both spatial and temporal information of the image are considered, and the robustness and accuracy of the level set model is enhanced. Ultrasonic contrast images of living mouse are acquitted with high frequency ultrasound system. Images of carotid arteries are processed with our method. The segmentation results using the proposed method are evaluated against two observers' hand-outlined boundaries, showing that computer-generated boundaries agree well with the observers' hand-outlined boundaries as much as the different observers agree with each other.
Taxing Indirect Transfers: Improving an Instrument for Stemming Tax and Legal Base Erosion

Numerous countries (e.g. Canada, Australia and Japan) tax foreigners on the gain realized on their transfers of interests in foreign entities that invest in real estates in these countries. In the last few years, actions taken by tax authorities in India, China, Brazil, Indonesia and other non-OECD countries have highlighted the possibility of taxing a broader range of “indirect transfers” by foreigners. This Article argues taxing indirect transfers can have vital policy significance in countries where foreign inbound investments are actively traded in offshore markets: it may not only deter tax avoidance, but also stanch “legal base erosion” — the substitution of offshore investment structures for deploying legal mechanisms in onshore markets. However, the successful implementation of a broad policy of taxing indirect transfers depends crucially on securing voluntary taxpayer compliance. To this end, this Article proposes to rationalize existing practices for taxing indirect transfers in two major ways: (1) striking a better balance between ex ante and ex post lawmaking, and (2) consistently treating taxable indirect transfers as sales of underlying target assets (thus allowing conforming adjustments in tax basis). These improvements better target tax avoidance, result in fewer arbitrary consequences, and create incentives in the market place that facilitate compliance.
Do Fair Trade Pricing Policies Reduce Inequalities in Coffee Production and Trade?

type="main"> This article assesses the Fair Trade pricing model for coffee, investigating the ability of minimum prices and a social premium to reduce price risk and remedy inequalities. It highlights some of the challenges involved in controlling prices. Inequalities exist among Fair Trade-certified farmers; some are poorer than others, and the poorer ones typically produce less coffee. If Fair Trade succeeds in its aim of raising the prices received by farmers, this will benefit more those farmers producing greater volumes of coffee and who are typically less vulnerable. In addressing inequalities, the Fair Trade social premium is superior to minimum prices.
Governance and takeovers: are public-to-private transactions different from traditional acquisitions of listed corporations?

Abstract Using a unique hand-collected dataset comprising 96 public-to-private (PTP) transactions and 258 acquisitions of listed corporations by existing corporate groups completed during the period 1998 to 2000, this paper investigates the extent to which PTPs have different internal and external governance and other characteristics from traditional acquisitions of listed corporations by existing corporate groups. The paper analyses acquisition activity during a period in which three new features were present: the decline in hostile takeovers, the increase in the adoption of governance Codes of Best Practice and the growth in PTP activity. PTPs are usually a response to takeover threat (Lehn and Poulsen, 1989) and so the paper analyses the acquisition decision from two perspectives: first, takeovers as a disciplinary mechanism which substitute for weak internal governance and second, as part of a non-disciplinary perspective where takeovers are complementary to internal governance mechanisms. We find support for the argument that improved internal governance and non-disciplinary takeovers, that is takeovers where the motive is not as a response to under-performing management, are complementary. PTPs are more likely to have higher board ownership and are likely to have duality of CEO and chairman. They are also more likely to have lower growth prospects and lower valuations. However, they do not have sub-optimal internal corporate governance structures in terms of lower proportions of outside directors. With respect to external governance, they are not more likely to experience pressure from the market for corporate control in the form of greater takeover speculation and are also not more likely to suffer hostile threats. We find that PTPs involving management buy-outs (MBIs) have fewer non-executive directors and a greater incidence of duality. MBO also have higher board shareholdings. We find no evidence that management buy-ins (MBIs) have different characteristics. Our results suggest that going private by MBO may result from management's knowledge of private information that leads them to believe that the market has an incorrect perspective of the company's prospects.
A Problem with Referendums

When some voters have nonseparable preferences across multiple binary issues, majority rule may not select a Condorcet winning set of outcomes when one exists, and the social choice may be a Condorcet loser or Pareto-dominated by every other set of outcomes. We present an empirical example of one such paradox from voting on the Internet. We evaluate potential solutions to the problem of nonseparable preferences in referendums, including set-wise voting, sequential voting, and vote-trading. Sequential voting and vote-trading prevent the selection of Condorcet losers and universally Pareto-dominated outcomes. Legislatures facilitate sequential voting and vote-trading better than referendums, suggesting that referendums increase the quantity of participants in democratic decision-making but decrease the quality of participation.
Cross-domain Human Parsing via Adversarial Feature and Label Adaptation

Human parsing has been extensively studied recently due to its wide applications in many important scenarios. Mainstream fashion parsing models (i.e., parsers) focus on parsing the high-resolution and clean images. However, directly applying the parsers trained on benchmarks of high-quality samples to a particular application scenario in the wild, e.g., a canteen, airport or workplace, often gives non-satisfactory performance due to domain shift. In this paper, we explore a new and challenging cross-domain human parsing problem: taking the benchmark dataset with extensive pixel-wise labeling as the source domain, how to obtain a satisfactory parser on a new target domain without requiring any additional manual labeling? To this end, we propose a novel and efficient cross-domain human parsing model to bridge the cross-domain differences in terms of visual appearance and environment conditions and fully exploit commonalities across domains. Our proposed model explicitly learns a feature compensation network, which is specialized for mitigating the cross-domain differences. A discriminative feature adversarial network is introduced to supervise the feature compensation to effectively reduces the discrepancy between feature distributions of two domains. Besides, our proposed model also introduces a structured label adversarial network to guide the parsing results of the target domain to follow the high-order relationships of the structured labels shared across domains. The proposed framework is end-to-end trainable, practical and scalable in real applications. Extensive experiments are conducted where LIP dataset is the source domain and 4 different datasets including surveillance videos, movies and runway shows without any annotations, are evaluated as target domains. The results consistently confirm data efficiency and performance advantages of the proposed method for the challenging cross-domain human parsing problem.
Social Steering and Household Strategies: the macropolitics and the microsociology of welfare states

ABSTRACT An analytical perspective for grasping how welfare states relate to the ordinary life-pursuits of their population and how the latter relates to the welfare state is needed. What welfare states do is distinguished into social administration, social education, social reform, and social steering. Steering reaches furthest into people's lives. As such it is problematic both to integrative and aggregative theories of democracy; it can also include the possibility of calling forth more signals from the population than less ambitious democratic policies. A systematic overview of aggregate Swedish household data the major activities of households provides a basis for analysing how the population is affected by and affects the welfare state. The state appears as an important provider of work, housing, childcare, and leisure; the most effective signals from households to the state come forward when public provision and subsidy have created tight markets. From the household perspective, signals to government through individual action of various sorts, direct or mediated, appear crucial even in very organized Sweden.
Does marriage require a stronger economic underpinning than informal cohabitation

A large proportion of cohabitors in the Statistics Norway Omnibus Surveys of 1996 reported economic reasons for their hesitation to marry, and in particular the costs of the wedding. In line with this, the Norwegian Family and Occupation Survey of 1988 revealed effects both of women's cumulated income and men's non-employment on the actual choice of union type. Also some other evidence suggests that affordability matters, although there are plausible alternative interpretations. On the other hand, several estimates suggest that economic strength does not induce marriage. Since there also has been no deterioration of young adults' economic situation in Norway, except for the delay of economic independence owing to longer college enrolment, one can hardly claim that lack of affordability is a dominating force behind the massive drift away from marriage. The analysis is anchored in a theoretical framework that may prove useful in other studies of cohabitation as an alternative to marriage.