Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EMU and Enlargement

We speculate about how Europe's monetary union will evolve in the next five to ten years. We concentrate on what is likely to be the most important change in that period, namely, the increased number and heterogeneity of the participating states. New members will be sharply different from the incumbents in terms of their per capita incomes and economic structures. We concentrate on the implications of this development for the structure, organization and operation of the monetary union. We focus on the implications for the conduct of monetary policy of voting and representation rules on the ECB Board on the grounds that these will have to change with the accession of additional members. We focus on prudential supervision and lending in the last resort on the grounds that the inclusion of countries with recently-created and still-developing financial systems will be among the most prominent consequences of EMU enlargement. We focus on the coordination of fiscal policies on the grounds that the fiscal positions and problems of the accession economies will differ from those of the incumbents. And we focus on labor market flexibility on the grounds that labor-market effects will be among the leading consequences of the admission of new members.
Managing Human Resources in a Decentralized Context

by moving government closer to the people, it brings public sector activities and decisions in line with popular preferences. Yet, in practice, the civil service—a critical component of government— rarely enters the decision calculus of decentralization design. The civil service is often recognized as an afterthought rather than seen as essential to successful decentralization. This is lamentable but not surprising, as decentralization is quintessentially a political process. In East Asia, whether it was the desire to quell the forces of regional disintegration in the Philippines and Indonesia, the urgent need to meet the demands of economic transition in China and Vietnam, or pressure to improve service delivery and citizen participation in Cambodia and Thailand, the primary motivation for decentralization has been political—notwithstanding varied proximate causes. The common failure to address the details of civil service management as an integral part of the decentralization package has significant implications. Civil servants form a crucial link between the delivery of financial resources to the government and the delivery of essential public services to the people (World Bank 2003a). The relationship between decentralization and civil service 129 7
Making Free/Open-Source Software (F/OSS) Work Better

This paper describes some characteristics of the OSS development approach and identified opportunities to improve the development practices and the developed software products. This includes e.g. process elements for quality assurance and the appropriate infrastructural support for the distributed development activities and their high level of parallelism and autonomy. Whereas central maintainers and core developers seem to be necessary for all OSS projects, the depencies between the distributed community and these central actors should be reduced to minimize entry barriers. The aspect of requirements documentation is important for traditional software development and for the collaborative OSS approach to increase the transparency and to enable the high level of process parallelism. Keywords—Open, Source, Software, Engineering, Development, Process, Model, Development, Quality, Assurance.
Preschool reading and writing: literacy and predictors

The present paper project attempts to enter a new "value" to the Pre-primary education, in relation to learning processes of basic reading and writing skills. Numerous studies, including those of Ferreiro and Teberosky (1985), show that reading and writing learning process is done slowly, in children aged 3 years and older, through a process of review and restatement of the language code made by the child on the basis of the environmental stress surrounding him. Chaney (1992) states that many preschoolers show the presence of a Rudimentary Awareness. Consequently, they are able to recognize rhymes and alliterations, thus owning a certain level of phonological awareness level. This skill is developed further, if it is enhanced properly. Therefore, the act of learning to read and to write is constituted as a natural, cognitive process, defined Emergent Literacy or Emerging Literacy, in which the child formulates hypotheses regarding red and written material, which are compared time after time to the linguistic stress coming from the adult context and are measured according to this context. Consequently, possible "learning predictors" are needed to be identified to facilitate learning process and to prevent potential learning disabilities. In particular, this research arises two objectives. On one hand, it is intended to check that children attending pre-primary school aged 4 and 5 years, fulfil prerequisites to acquire basic Italian language skills and to face learning successfully (Hypothesis 1); on the other hand, the research aims to analyse whether enhancement activities (training of prerequisites) are effective in increasing basic language skills, especially those of people having low performance profiles (Hypothesis 2). Since some studies show the existence of a positive correlation between literacy level and economic growth measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), by highlighting how the literacy affects economic productivity, it is really needed to intervene on basic reading and writing skills, in order to give a "depth change" to the various spheres of human life, so that men may learn to perceive the knowledge (reading and writing) as an essential tool for individual and collective growth.
Energy restriction and the risk of spontaneous mammary tumors in mice: A meta‐analysis

Our meta‐analysis was aimed at providing a systematic review of the literature regarding the effect of energy restriction on spontaneous mammary tumors in mice and at providing a more precise pooled (summary) estimate of the risk of mammary tumors. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to obtain insight in potential heterogeneity between the animal studies. A literature search was conducted with the following terms to identify relevant articles: animal studies, mammary tumors, fat restricted, dietary carbohydrates, energy restriction and calorie restriction. A criteria list for the assessment of quality items (i.e., study characteristics) in animal experiments was developed that was intended to quantitatively assess potential factors that underlie heterogeneous results of different animal experiments. Incidence figures were used to calculate the risk difference. The pooled risk difference was calculated by random effects meta regression analysis. Fourteen animal experiments were included in this meta‐analysis. Publication bias could not be identified. The pooled risk difference for the 14 studies was −0.55 with a narrow 95% confidence interval (−0.69; −0.41), implying that the energy‐restricted animal groups developed 55% less mammary tumors than the control groups. No heterogeneity could be detected between the studies based on study characteristics that included the age of mice at the start of intervention, duration of intervention, allocation of the mice, use of ad libitum control group, fertility of the mice and the type of energy‐providing nutrient (fat, carbohydrate or protein). This meta‐analysis confirms that energy restriction in itself consistently protects against the development of mammary tumor in mice, irrespective of the type of restricted nutrient or other study characteristics. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Transcriptomic Analysis Implies That GA Regulates Sex Expression via Ethylene-Dependent and Ethylene-Independent Pathways in Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.)

Sex differentiation of flower buds is an important developmental process that directly affects fruit yield of cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.). Plant hormones, such as gibberellins (GAs) and ethylene can promote development of male and female flowers, respectively, however, the regulatory mechanisms of GA-induced male flower formation and potential involvement of ethylene in this process still remain unknown. In this study, to unravel the genes and gene networks involved in GA-regulated cucumber sexual development, we performed high throughout RNA-Seq analyses that compared the transcriptomes of shoot tips between GA3 treated and untreated gynoecious cucumber plants. Results showed that GA3 application markedly induced male flowers but decreased ethylene production in shoot tips. Furthermore, the transcript levels of M (CsACS2) gene, ethylene receptor CsETR1 and some ethylene-responsive transcription factors were dramatically changed after GA3 treatment, suggesting a potential involvement of ethylene in GA-regulated sex expression of cucumber. Interestingly, GA3 down-regulated transcript of a C-class floral homeotic gene, CAG2, indicating that GA may also influence cucumber sex determination through an ethylene-independent process. These results suggest a novel model for hormone-mediated sex differentiation and provide a theoretical basis for further dissection of the regulatory mechanism of male flower formation in cucumber. Statement: We reveal that GA can regulate sex expression of cucumber via an ethylene-dependent manner, and the M (CsACS2), CsETR1, and ERFs are probably involved in this process. Moreover, CAG2, a C-class floral homeotic gene, may also participate in GA-modulated cucumber sex determination, but this pathway is ethylene-independent.
Model-Based Debugging using Multiple Abstract Models

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces an automatic debuggingframework that relies on model–based reasoning techniquesto locate faults in programs. In particular, model–based diagnosis, together with an abstract interpretationbased conﬂict detection mechanism is used to derive diagnoses, which correspond to possible faults in pro-grams. Design information and partial speciﬁcations are applied to guide a model revision process, whichallows for automatic detection and correction of structural faults. KEYWORDS : Model–based Debugging, Diagnosis, Abstract Interpretation, Program Analysis 1 Introduction Detecting a faulty behavior within a program, locating the cause of the fault, and ﬁxing the faultby means of changing the program, continues to be a crucial and challenging task in software de-velopment. Many papers have been published so far in the domain of detecting faults in software,e.g., testing or formal veriﬁcation [CDH + 00], and locating them, e.g., program slicing [Wei84] andautomatic program debugging [Llo87]. More recently model–based diagnosis [Rei87] has been usedfor locating faults in software [CFD93, MSWW02a]. This paper extends previous research in several directions: Firstly, a parameterized debuggingframework is introduced, which integrates dynamic and static properties, as well as design infor-mation of programs. The framework is based on results derived in the ﬁeld of abstract interpreta-tion [CC77], and can therefore be parameterized with different lattices and context selection strate-gies.Secondly, the one–to–one correspondence between model components and program statementsis replaced by a hierarchy of components, which provides means for more efﬁcient reasoning proce-dures, as well as more ﬂexibility when focusing on interesting parts of a program.This work is organized as follows. In Section 2, we give an introduction to model-based debug-ging. Section 3 describes mapping from source code to model components and the (approximate)computation of program effects in the style of [CC77] and [Bou93]. The next section discusses themodeling of programs and the reasoning framework. In Section 5, we provide an example whichputs together the different models and demonstrates the debugging capabilities of our approach.
On the Genus-One Gromov-Witten Invariants of a Quintic Threefold

We rederive a relation between the genus-one GW-invariants of a quintic threefold in $\Pf$ and the genus-zero and genus-one GW-invariants of $\Pf$. In contrast to the more general derivation in a separate paper, the present derivation relies on a widely believed, but still unproven, statement concerning rigidity of holomorphic curves in Calabi-Yau threefolds. On the other hand, this paper's derivation is more direct and geometric. It requires a bit more effort, but relies on less outside work.
TeaPOT : People Oriented Technology 2008-0101 Communication of Medical Information Using Agents

Agents are self-contained software entities which act faithfully and autonomously on behalf of a body of knowledge. They can operate in a standalone capacity, or as part of a social group collaborating and coordinating activities with other software agents. To access their knowledge, agents are interfaced with using message passing communication. The principle behind medical communications is to provide a means for exchanging information and knowledge from one computerised location to another, whilst preserving its true meaning and understanding between the listener and sender. Agent communication is similar to medical communications, but must provide an additional framework element to allow agents to interact at a social and operational level. Social aspects relate to agents collaborating on shared objectives, and operational aspects relate to coordination of tasks between the loosely coupled agents working as part of a group. Medical communications focus on data exchanges specific to the medical domain, while agent communication was designed for a much broader audience. Therefore, it is essential to verify if agent communications can support standard medical data exchanges. This paper investigates current forms of agent based communications and demonstrates they can support medical communication, yet retain their social and interaction information exchange functionality.
Students’ Impression towards Science Virtual Test (SVT) on Digestive System Topic

During the past few years, technology has significantly support the improvements in assessment.Computer-based test (CBT) comes up as a new type of assessment which offers many benefits. The implementation of computer-based test in term of students’ perspective gives rise to numbers of mixed reactions. Students’ impression is one of the essential things for the implementation of SVT. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impression of students toward SVT. The method used in this research was descriptive method. The participant was 98 students from Junior High School “X” in East Bandung. Students’ impression questionnaire was used as the instrument. There are four aspects tested in this instrument which are students’ experience, technical activity, preference and media of SVT. The result shows that SVT generally gives positive impression to students. Students have a positive experience and did not encounter significant problem when implementing SVT. Students prefer to use SVT and students think the media of SVT is already good.
University of Trento Software Model Checking via Large-block Encoding Software Model Checking via Large-block Encoding

The construction and analysis of an abstract reachability tree (ART) are the basis for a successful method for software verification. The ART represents unwindings of the control-flow graph of the program. Traditionally, a transition of the ART represents a single block of the program, and therefore, we call this approach single-block encoding (SBE). SBE may result in a huge number of program paths to be explored, which constitutes a fundamental source of inefficiency. We propose a generalization of the approach, in which transitions of the ART represent larger portions of the program; we call this approach large-block encoding (LBE). LBE may reduce the number of paths to be explored up to exponentially. Within this framework, we also investigate symbolic representations: for representing abstract states, in addition to conjunctions as used in SBE, we investigate the use of arbitrary Boolean formulas; for computing abstract-successor states, in addition to Cartesian predicate abstraction as used in SBE, we investigate the use of Boolean predicate abstraction. The new encoding leverages the efficiency of state-of-the-art SMT solvers, which can symbolically compute abstract large-block successors. Our experiments on benchmark C programs show that the large-block encoding outperforms the single-block encoding.
Quasi-markets, school diversity and social selection: Analysing the case of free schools in England, five years on

The opening of new state schools by non-state actors has intensified debates about social selection and inequality in quasi-markets. This article examines the case of England, where the government allows anyone to apply to open a new 'free school', arguing this will improve social equity. Using data from the National Pupil Database for all 325 free schools established between 2011/12 and 2015/16, we analyse whether the students attending free schools are representative of their local neighbourhoods. We develop the first analysis of whether the specifics of who opens and provides a free school impacts on who attends the school. We also analyse whether opening a free school has an impact on neighbouring schools. We find that free schools are located in areas with above-average deprivation but admit intakes that are more affluent than the average for the neighbourhoods from which they recruit. This is particularly the case for primary free schools, which also recruit students with above-average prior attainment. There is no evidence that free schools become more representative as they admit additional year groups. Significantly, we find that all categories of free school providers have opened schools whose populations are more affluent than their neighbourhoods, with the exception of academy chains. We also find that the opening of a free school leads to a concentrated loss of pupils at the closest school, except in cities, but we do not identify an impact on the student composition of neighbouring schools. Discussing the reasons for this, we conclude that free schools are socially selective and reproduce socio-economic inequalities.
Persian Language telephone and Microphone Speaker identification using neural networks

Speaker identification has attracted much attention as an identity identification method in security systems. Identity identification based on telephone conversations may be very useful in guaranteeing personal information security. Nowadays, virtual neural network algorithms are highly used in machine learning. These networks are trained by labeled data and they perform classification. In this study, speaker identification systems based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are designed for Persian language speakers. The results of two tests have been reported: Cepstral Coefficients and neural networks are used in the first test to detect microphone speaker; the data base used in this test is the authenticated data of Farsdat, and we used 7 speakers in them. The second test performs the telephone speaker identification for 10 Persian language speakers using lDC data; this test used the Persian language speakers’ part of this database. The best results in microphone mode are obtained having 15 minutes training data and the proposed system achieved the identification rate of 100 percent. The best identification result with 3 minutes of training data achieved 82 percent.
Discovery of Non-Taxonomic Concept Pairs from Unstructured Text in Support of Ontology Learning

Ontology consists of concepts, taxonomic relations a d non-taxonomic relations. The majority of the ontology learning to ols focus on discovering concepts and taxonomic relations. Very little effor t has been put on discovering non-taxonomic relations. In this paper, we present a concept correlation search framework to discover non-taxono mic concept pairs from unstructured text. Our framework features the (a) extraction of correlated concepts beyond ordinary search window s ize of a single sentence; (b) use of lift as interestingness measu r for association rule mining; (c) harness of 2itemsets association rul es from nitemsets association rules where n>2; and (d) identification of non-taxonomic concept pairs based on existing domain ontology. Th e proposed framework has been tested with the Fisheries Oceano gr phy journals, and the results demonstrate significant improvements ov er traditional association rule approach in search of non-taxonomi c concept pairs.
Statin drugs and risk of advanced prostate cancer.

BACKGROUND Statins are commonly used cholesterol-lowering drugs that have proapoptotic and antimetastatic activities that could affect cancer risk or progression. Results from previous epidemiologic studies of the association between statin use and cancer have been inconsistent. We investigated the association of statin use with total and advanced prostate cancer, the latter being the most important endpoint to prevent. METHODS We analyzed data from an ongoing prospective cohort study of 34,989 US male health professionals who were cancer free in 1990 and were followed to 2002. Participants reported their use of cholesterol-lowering drugs on biennial questionnaires. Prostate cancer diagnosis was confirmed by medical record review. Multivariable-adjusted relative risks (RRs) were estimated from Cox proportional hazards regression models. Statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS During 376,939 person-years of follow-up, we ascertained 2579 prostate cancer cases, 316 of which were advanced (regionally invasive, metastatic, or fatal). The age-standardized incidence rates of advanced prostate cancer were 38 and 89 per 100,000 person-years in current statin users and in past or never users, respectively. The multivariable-adjusted relative risk of advanced disease was 0.51 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.30 to 0.86) and of metastatic or fatal disease was 0.39 (95% CI = 0.19 to 0.77) for current statin use compared with no current use. The associations remained after adjusting for prostate-specific antigen screening history (advanced disease: RR = 0.57, 95% CI = 0.30 to 1.11; metastatic or fatal disease: RR = 0.35, 95% CI = 0.14 to 0.92). Risk of advanced disease was lower with longer statin use (P(trend) = . 003); compared with never use, the relative risk for less than 5 years of use was 0.60 (95% CI = 0.35 to 1.03) and for 5 or more years of use was 0.26 (95% CI = 0.08 to 0.83). We found no association between statin use and risk of total prostate cancer (RR = 0.96, 95% CI = 0.85 to 1.09). CONCLUSIONS In this cohort of male health professionals, use of statin drugs was not associated with risk of prostate cancer overall but was associated with a reduced risk of advanced (especially metastatic or fatal) prostate cancer.
Autonomous mobile digital signage: persuasiveness of life-like behaviors on daily zodiac horoscope

We examined the effects of life-like movements on persuasion and attention-drawing in an Autonomous Mobile Digital Signage (AMDS) that offered zodiac horoscopes. The study employed a one-factor three-level between-participants design where we manipulated the life-likeness of movement of the AMDS (life-like vs. monotonic vs. Fixed). We set up the three versions of the AMDS for eight days in rotation, and collected the data of the number of users and the percentage of the users who were agreed with the horoscope results told by the AMDS. As the results, we found that the AMDS with life-like movement had higher number of users than the AMDS with no movement. We also found that the percentage of the users who were agreed with the horoscope results increased when the AMDS performed life-like movement compared with other two conditions.