Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Political Identity and Financial Risk Taking: Insights from Social Dominance Orientation

This article investigates how people’s political identity is associated with their financial risk taking. The authors argue that conservatives’ financial risk taking increases as their self-efficacy increases because of their greater social dominance orientation, whereas liberals’ financial risk taking is invariant to their self-efficacy. This central hypothesis is verified in six studies using different measures of political identity, self-efficacy, and financial risk taking. The studies also use different samples of U.S. consumers, including online panels, a large-scale data set spanning five election cycles, and a secondary data set of political donations made by managers at companies. Finally, the authors articulate and demonstrate the mediating effect of individuals’ focus on the upside potential of a decision among conservatives but not liberals.
A Model for Evaluating the ‘Habitat Potential’ of a Landscape for Capercaillie Tetrao urogallus: A Tool for Conservation Planning

Abstract Most habitat models developed for defining priority conservation sites target areas currently exhibiting suitable habitat conditions. For species whose habitats have been altered by land use practices, these models may fail to identify sites with the potential of producing suitable habitats, if management practices were modified. Using capercaillie Tetrao urogallus as an example, we propose a model for evaluating the potential of ecological conditions at the landscape level to provide suitable habitat at the local scale. Initially, we evaluated the influence of selected landscape parameters on the structural characteristics of vegetation relevant to capercaillie. Then we used capercaillie presence data and an ecological niche factor analysis (ENFA) to identify landscape and land use variables relevant to capercaillie habitat selection. We also studied the effect of scale on predictive model quality. Despite high variance, correlations between landscape variables and forest structure were detected. The greatest influence on forest structure was recorded for climate and soil conditions, which were also found to be the best predictors of capercaillie habitat selection in the ENFA. The final model, retaining only two landscape variables (soil conditions and days with snow) and three land use variables (proportion of forest, distance to roads and forest-agricultural borders), explained a high degree of capercaillie habitat selection, even before considering patch size and connectivity. By restricting the analyses to areas with stable subpopulations and a set of relatively stable landscape variables capable of explaining habitat quality at a local scale, we were able to identify areas with long-term relevance to conservation of capercaillie.
Evaluation of the software bases of the candidate architectures for the military computer family

One of the Army-Navy Committees' primary motivations for selecting a proven computer architecture for the basis of a family of software compatible military computers is the potential utility of the existing software base. Therefore, the evaluation of the software bases of the candidate architectures constituted one very important factor in the final selection. This paper describes that software base evaluation process and results thereof.
A unified approach to the design, measurement, and tuning of coupled-resonator filters

The concept of coupling coefficients has been a very useful one in the design of small-to-moderate bandwidth microwave filters. It is shown in this paper that the group delay of the input reflection coefficients of sequentially tuned resonators contains all the information necessary to design and tune filters, and that the group-delay value at the center frequency of the filter can be written quite simply in terms of the low-pass prototype values, the LC elements of a bandpass structure, and the coupling coefficients of the inverter coupled filter. This provides an easy method to measure the key elements of a filter, which is confirmed by results presented in this paper. It is also suggested that since the group delay of the reflection coefficient (i.e., the time taken for energy to get in and out of the coupled resonators) is easily measured, it is a useful conceptual alternative to coupling concepts.
Misregulation of PPAR Functioning and Its Pathogenic Consequences Associated with Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease in Human Obesity

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease in human obesity is characterized by the multifactorial nature of the underlying pathogenic mechanisms, which include misregulation of PPARs signaling. Liver PPAR-α downregulation with parallel PPAR-γ and SREBP-1c up-regulation may trigger major metabolic disturbances between de novo lipogenesis and fatty acid oxidation favouring the former, in association with the onset of steatosis in obesity-induced oxidative stress and related long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid n-3 (LCPUFA n-3) depletion, insulin resistance, hypoadiponectinemia, and endoplasmic reticulum stress. Considering that antisteatotic strategies targeting PPAR-α revealed that fibrates have poor effectiveness, thiazolidinediones have weight gain limitations, and dual PPAR-α/γ agonists have safety concerns, supplementation with LCPUFA n-3 appears as a promising alternative, which achieves both significant reduction in liver steatosis scores and a positive anti-inflammatory outcome. This latter aspect is of importance as PPAR-α downregulation associated with LCPUFA n-3 depletion may play a role in increasing the DNA binding capacity of proinflammatory factors, NF-κB and AP-1, thus constituting one of the major mechanisms for the progression of steatosis to steatohepatitis.
Semi-Supervised Learning For Sentiment Analysis

We leverage vector space embeddings of sentences and nearest-neighbor methods to transform a small amount of labelled training data into a significantly larger training set using an unlabelled corpus. The quality of the larger training set is measured by prediction accuracy on a benchmark sentiment analysis task. Our results indicate it is possible to achieve accuracy within 3-5% of the baseline using only 5-8% the amount of labelled data.
A Case Study of Corruption and Public Accountability in Nigeria

Executive Summary In 2011, Nigeria was ranked 143th out of 182 countries surveyed by the Transparency International in its corruption perception index indicating the level of corruption in the country as compared to other countries. Although this came as an improvement from the previous years, it did not result from an improved system of governance, rather it was due to an increase in the number of countries that participated in the survey. Between 2010 and 2011, Nigeria's rank actually decreased by 9 spots, showing an increase in corruption despite the efforts of the government to rid the nation of corruption. This survey shows a lack of accountability from public officials and a lax system of governance in the country. As a result corruptible acts are not harshly penalized and easier to get away with, within the country's public sector. It is important to highlight the public sector in Nigeria because it plays a key role in the implementation of public services that are vital to the economic growth of the country. It coordinates the federal ministries, advises political officials, formulates and implements government's policies, gathers and supplies data for policymakers, ensures continuity of services and public relations services. These roles are important in running the country efficiently because the public sector can either make or ruin any administration. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to explore the problem of corruption and public accountability in Nigeria, and 2) to offer some reform measures for the reduction of corruption in the public sector. It is hopeful that the public sector will become more efficient and effective if the recommendations delineated in this analysis are implemented. In order to accomplish the study purpose, the analysis uses an exploratory case method to give a historic synopsis of the country and the impact of politics on corruption. This is followed by a literature review on the ii causes of corruption and the need for government accountability. In sum, the paper concludes with some recommendations on how to increase accountability in the public sector. Acknowledgements I would like to thank God Almighty for giving me the grace to complete a masters degree in public administration. I want to thank my family and friends, for their continuous support and encouragement, because I could not have done this without them. My gratitude goes to the entire Master of Public Administration (MPA) faculty for teaching me what …
Use of Evidence-Based Practices in Pregnancy and Childbirth: South East Asia Optimising Reproductive and Child Health in Developing Countries Project

Background The burden of mortality and morbidity related to pregnancy and childbirth remains concentrated in developing countries. SEA-ORCHID (South East Asia Optimising Reproductive and Child Health In Developing countries) is evaluating whether a multifaceted intervention to strengthen capacity for research synthesis, evidence-based care and knowledge implementation improves adoption of best clinical practice recommendations leading to better health for mothers and babies. In this study we assessed current practices in perinatal health care in four South East Asian countries and determined whether they were aligned with best practice recommendations. Methodology/Principal Findings We completed an audit of 9550 medical records of women and their 9665 infants at nine hospitals; two in each of Indonesia, Malaysia and The Philippines, and three in Thailand between January-December 2005. We compared actual clinical practices with best practice recommendations selected from the Cochrane Library and the World Health Organization Reproductive Health Library. Evidence-based components of the active management of the third stage of labour and appropriately treating eclampsia with magnesium sulphate were universally practiced in all hospitals. Appropriate antibiotic prophylaxis for caesarean section, a beneficial form of care, was practiced in less than 5% of cases in most hospitals. Use of the unnecessary practices of enema in labour ranged from 1% to 61% and rates of episiotomy for vaginal birth ranged from 31% to 95%. Other appropriate practices were commonly performed to varying degrees between countries and also between hospitals within the same country. Conclusions/Significance Whilst some perinatal health care practices audited were consistent with best available evidence, several were not. We conclude that recording of clinical practices should be an essential step to improve quality of care. Based on these findings, the SEA-ORCHID project team has been developing and implementing interventions aimed at increasing compliance with evidence-based clinical practice recommendations to improve perinatal practice in South East Asia.
Optimizations of Brakerski's fully homomorphic encryption scheme

In this paper, we propose two methods to improve the efficiency of the scheme. Our main optimization is a new method to fulfill the tensor product of vectors, which can significantly reduce the computational overhead in the key switching algorithm, and the basic homomorphic operation is about 40%-50% faster than before by using this method. By truncating the least significant bits from every element of ciphertext vector, another optimization is presented. Using this method, the ciphertext vector can be represented concisely, which can further improve the efficiency.
Emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness in organizations of PR China: A cultural explanation

This paper tries to shed light on whether emotional intelligence (EI) predicts leadership effectiveness (LE) in the Chinese context. To do this, we apply Bar-On's EI dimensions and LE dimensions in Leadership Effectiveness Analysis as the instrument in this study. The finding, contrast to the hypothesis, is that EI can not predict LE in the Chinese context. As one of the pioneer research in such domain, this study has important literature contribution in cross-cultural leadership effectiveness, and helps companies in talent assessment.
AMP-Activated Protein Kinase Promotes the Differentiation of Endothelial Progenitor Cells

Objective—Endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) can differentiate into endothelial cells (ECs) and participate in postnatal vasculogenesis, but the mechanism of EPC differentiation remains largely unknown. We investigated the role of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) in EPC differentiation and functions. Methods and Results—Vascular endothelial growth factor caused the phosphorylation of AMPK, acetyl-coenzymeA (CoA) carboxylase (ACC), and eNOS in human cord blood-derived EPCs. The expression of EC markers, including VE-cadherin and intercellular adhesion molecule1 (ICAM-1), was also increased but blocked by Compound C, an AMPK inhibitor. AICAR, an AMPK agonist, increased the phosphorylation of ACC and eNOS and the expression of EC markers in a time- and dose-dependent manner, which reinforces the positive effect of AMPK on EPC differentiation. The effects of AICAR could be blocked by treatment with L-NAME, an eNOS inhibitor. Functionally, AICAR increased but Compound C decreased the angiogenesis of EPCs in vitro and in vivo. Furthermore, lovastatin promoted the activation of AMPK and eNOS, the expression of EC markers, tube formation, adhesion, and in vivo vasculogenesis of EPCs, which could be blocked by treatment with Compound C. Conclusion—The activation of eNOS by AMPK during EPC differentiation provides a novel mechanism for the pleiotropic effects of statins in benefiting the cardiovascular system.
Preface the International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems

It showcases multiple (personal) researchers' journeys coming from many directions and traditional disciplines and backgrounds, to help advance the emerging science of Agent Technologies and Systems. Anything surrounding us could serve as a motivation for a study or exercise in agents or multi-agent systems. That is what I, as well as many of my colleagues find fascinating about what we do. For example , if you have an infant or own a pet, you are probably fascinated when watching them learn new environments and interact with them and other agents in these environments. The motivations in my personal research at its early days, for example, came from being intrigued in watching infant explore of an environment and watching humans interact with their pets. I became fascinated by the emergent behaviors in agents and their societies, regardless whether they are artificial or biological, homogenous or heterogeneous. How people think, make decisions, communicate, and imitate each other are questions that have always been challenging to me. Everyone else that researches these areas, I believe, has their personal story from where the passion for studying this emergent cross/interdisciplinary area stems. In this section we will review the founding principles behind International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems that have been shared with the scientific community in the wide campaign of soliciting contributions. International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems publishes original contributions in the areas of theories of agency and multiagent systems. It covers conceptual frameworks, case studies, empirical analysis, analytical and simulation models of agent anthropologies and sociologies, and their application. It covers topics that include the following general areas: • Conceptual agent frameworks • Agent development environments • Agent models and architectures • Representation of agents and representation in agents
A Compact 2-D Finite-Difference Frequency-Domain Method Combined With Implicitly Restarted Arnoldi Technique

A compact 2-D finite-difference frequency-domain (FDFD) method is proposed to analyze the propagation characteristics of arbitrary guiding structures. Unlike other FDFD methods, which calculate the propagation constant for a given frequency, this method adopts the technique that is usually used in the compact 2-D finite-difference time-domain method, i.e., extracting the eigenfrequency based on an initial phase constant. Similar with other FDFD methods, this method will lead to a standard eigenvalue problem. However, the difference equations of this method are much simpler compared to the previous methods. When being combined with the implicitly restarted Arnoldi technique, this method can be used to simulate large-scale guided-wave problems due to the significantly increased speed of calculation and the greatly decreased memory requirement. Besides, by means of the concept of an equivalent resonator, the method can also be used to calculate the attenuation constant of arbitrary guiding structures.
Multiple strategies to prevent oxidative stress in Arabidopsis plants lacking the malate valve enzyme NADP-malate dehydrogenase

The nuclear-encoded chloroplast NADP-dependent malate dehydrogenase (NADP-MDH) is a key enzyme controlling the malate valve, to allow the indirect export of reducing equivalents. Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. T-DNA insertion mutants of NADP-MDH were used to assess the role of the light-activated NADP-MDH in a typical C3 plant. Surprisingly, even when exposed to high-light conditions in short days, nadp-mdh knockout mutants were phenotypically indistinguishable from the wild type. The photosynthetic performance and typical antioxidative systems, such as the Beck–Halliwell–Asada pathway, were barely affected in the mutants in response to high-light treatment. The reactive oxygen species levels remained low, indicating the apparent absence of oxidative stress, in the mutants. Further analysis revealed a novel combination of compensatory mechanisms in order to maintain redox homeostasis in the nadp-mdh plants under high-light conditions, particularly an increase in the NTRC/2-Cys peroxiredoxin (Prx) system in chloroplasts. There were indications of adjustments in extra-chloroplastic components of photorespiration and proline levels, which all could dissipate excess reducing equivalents, sustain photosynthesis, and prevent photoinhibition in nadp-mdh knockout plants. Such metabolic flexibility suggests that the malate valve acts in concert with other NADPH-consuming reactions to maintain a balanced redox state during photosynthesis under high-light stress in wild-type plants.
Optimizing the Population of Free Shuttle Buses in Macau

This paper aims to optimize the population of the free shuttle bus (FSB) in Macau. Firstly, we investigate the operational conditions of the FSBs among the fifteen casinos in Macau, including the transit time of FSBs and the number of passengers. Then we build an effective decision model to optimize the population of FSBs. Finally, we conclude that the present number of FSBs could be reduced by 49.4% with the present service level.
Annotating Music Collections: How Content-Based Similarity Helps to Propagate Labels

In this paper we present a way to annotate music collections by exploiting audio similarity. Similarity is used to propose labels (tags) to yet unlabeled songs, based on the content‐based distance between them. The main goal of our work is to ease the process of annotating huge music collections, by using content-based similarity distances as a way to propagate labels among songs. We present two different experiments. The first one propagateslabelsthatarerelatedwiththestyleofthepiece, whereas the second experiment deals with mood labels. On the one hand, our approach shows that using a music collection annotated at 40% with styles, the collection can be automatically annotated up to 78% (that is, 40% already annotated and the rest, 38%, only using propagation), with a recall greater than 0.4. On the other hand, for a smaller music collection annotated at 30% with moods, the collection can be automatically annotated up to 65% (e.g. 30% plus 35% using propagation).
Symbol Grounding for Robot Dialog Research Proposal

Advancements in robotics have led to an ever-growing repertoire of software capabilities (e.g., recognition, mapping, and object manipulation). However, robotic capabilities grow, the complexity of operating and interacting with such robots increases (such as through speech, gesture, scripting, or programming). Language-based communication can offer users the ability to work with physically and computationally complex robots without diminishing the robot’s inherent capability. However, it remains an open question how to build a common ground in human language that will scale with the growth of robot capabilities, for instance within development environments such as ROS (the Robot Operating System). We examine this scaling problem through large-scale symbol grounding for robot dialog. We explore this problem in two parts through the development of: (1) a generic software framework for ROS that grounds parts of speech (verbs for now) into robotic capabilities using the proposed action hierarchy model and (2) a dialog interface for human-robot interaction through an expressive subset of natural language. We will evaluate the framework and interface through mobile manipulation experiments with a PR2, with consideration of the future scalability of our approach. Background and Related Work [Winograd, 1971] developed SHRDLU, a system which processed natural-language instructions and performed actions in a virtual environment. From this, researchers pushed forward trying to extend SHRDLU’s capabilities into real-world environments and soon branched into tackling various subproblems, including NLP and robotics systems. Research conducted on the robotics systems side has resulted in frameworks such as ROS, developed by [Quigley et al., 2009], which has been used in several domains of modern robotics research. NLP research including robotic components has also lead to advancements. Notably, [Kollar et al., 2010] and [MacMahon et al., 2006] have developed methods of following route instructions given in natural language. [Dzifcak et al., 2009] studied translating natural language instructions into goal descriptions and actions. [Chernova et al., 2010] implemented natural-language and action-oriented human-robot interaction with humans in a task by data-mining previous human-human interactions of the same task. However, the scalability of these solutions outside of their test domain remains open. Attempts have been made recombining these fields. For instance, [Tenorth et al., 2010] has developed robotic systems capable of inferring and acting upon implicit commands using knowledge databases.
Linear-Time Maximum Likelihood Decoding of Surface Codes over the Quantum Erasure Channel

Surface codes are among the best candidates to ensure the fault-tolerance of a quantum computer. In order to avoid the accumulation of errors during a computation, it is crucial to have at our disposal a fast decoding algorithm to quickly identify and correct errors as soon as they occur. We propose a linear-time maximum likelihood decoder for surface codes over the quantum erasure channel. This decoding algorithm for dealing with qubit loss is optimal both in terms of performance and speed.