Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of alternative AGE model specifications for simulations of climate change policy instruments

Besides benchmark data and parameter values, the model structure is key in explaining results of an applied general equilibrium model. This paper compares five alternative specifications of the computable general equilibrium model developed by Wissema and Dellink (2007a, 2007b), which simulates implementation of carbon taxation and an auctioned emission permits system in Ireland using different revenue recycling methods through endogenous taxes and transfers. These alternative specifications involve endogenous labour supply, the LES, the production structure concerning labour, capital and energy, an assumption that trading partners implement similar policies and the place of peat in the production function for electricity generation. We show the importance of modelling these features differently in a CGE model and evaluate the robustness of the model.
Inward FDI performance in the muslim world: assesing business and political environments

This article aims to make a survey of business and political environments for inward Foreign Direct Investment performance of the Muslim countries. It offers a cross-country analysis of the 57 Muslim majority countries’ FDI performance during 1995-2007. The research finds that the business environment in the Muslim countries is not favourable for smooth transactions, and secondly, there exists a high level of political instability throughout the Muslim world. Unfavourable business environment and a high level of political instability might be held responsible for low FDI performance in the Muslim countries.
Comparative Analysis Of 105 Higher Education Doctoral Programs In The United States

The mission types of 105 current doctoral programs in higher education and the extent to which their missions have changed since a similar study was conducted by Dressel and Mayhew in 1974 was studied. The curricula offerings of these programs by degree type (e.g., Ed.D. & Ph.D.) were compared with Fife’s 1991 findings. Finally, the study examined the various modes of instruction (e.g., classroom, online, cohort, blended) these programs utilize. The population was the 131 U.S. higher education doctoral program coordinators or directors who were identified using the ASHE Higher Education Program Directory. A total of 46 hosted Ed.D. programs and 59 hosted Ph.D. programs for a combined total of 105 doctoral programs. An electronic survey, developed by utilizing an expert panel and the cognitive interviewing technique, was sent to each participant. A total of 46 hosted Ed.D. programs and 59 hosted Ph.D. programs for a combined total of 105 doctoral programs. A total of 77 institutions (59%) returned usable questionnaires, and six other universities (5%) indicated their doctoral higher education programs no longer existed. Twenty-three of the responding institutions identified with a research-focused mission; 25 institutions identified with a practitioner-based mission; and 28 institutions identified with both types of missions. Pearson r correlation analysis revealed no statistically significant relationship between degree type and course offerings (r = .123, p = .05). However, ? 2 revealed that, compared to Ed.D. programs, Ph.D. programs enrolled significantly more full-time students (? 2 (3) = 14.504, p < . 05). Through further analysis, a core of nine courses emerged for more than 75% of all higher education doctoral programs. Those courses are general administration of higher education, finance of higher education, legal studies, history of higher education, philosophy and theoretical foundations of higher education, teaching/learning in higher education, student affairs administration, college student research, and a dissertation seminar. Nearly 80% of all doctoral programs utilize some form of alternate delivery method (e.g., online, cohort, blended) in addition to traditional classroom instruction. Furthermore, Ph.D. programs employ larger full-time faculties, conduct more research, obtain more external funding, and publish more scholarship than Ed.D. programs.
A BRIEF SURVEY ON THE COMPUTER SCIENCE PROGRAMS IN THE UK HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEMS

The recent decline in computer science (CS) majors has been a great concern in the UK higher education systems. The trend is multifactorial, and one cannot simply assume the influence of job market since IT job projections are positive despite the global economic downturn. The more liable explanation could be a negative perception of computer science fields in the young people who have fear of failing the program. In this brief survey, we took a snapshot of the CS programs in the UK higher education thereby identifying the underlying problems. In order to make numerical evaluations, we analyzed data from Guardian University guide 2010: University league table published in 2009. As gauge of quality of program, we chose Career Prospects, Expenditure per Students, % Satisfied with Teaching, % Satisfied with Assessment, Student/Staff ratio and Average Entry Tariff. The results illustrated the current situation of CS programs in the UK universities.
ONLINE DEGREES AS CREDENTIALS FOR EMPLOYMENT: HOW DO CANADIAN EMPLOYERS VIEW ONLINE DEGREES?

Abstract Canadian post-secondary institutions cumulatively deliver over 300 programs online or at distance as alternatives to on-campus teaching, and student enrollments in online programs are expected to increase (Canadian Virtual University (CVU), 2013). However, little is known about online degrees as credentials for employment. Focusing on bachelor’s degrees awarded by Canadian universities for online and distance education, this mixed methods study investigated the views of a convenient sample of 87 employers using hypothetical hiring and job promotion scenarios. A total of 84 surveys and 4 interviews were conducted with management and human resources personnel at Canadian organizations in the public, private, and social sectors. The findings indicated that 75% of participants considered online degrees equivalent to campus-based face-to-face degrees in the hiring scenario, and over 90% had no preference between campus-based and online degrees in the employment promotion scenario. Four themes emerged related to credibility of online degrees, educational quality of online degrees, affordances and constraints of online education, and gaps in awareness. The findings are relevant to graduates and students of online education as well as educational institutions offering online degrees.
Test Generation from Bounded Algebraic Specifications using Alloy

Algebraic specification languages have been successfully used for the formal specification of abstract data types (ADTs) and software components, and there are several approaches to automatically derive test cases that check the conformity between the implementation and the algebraic specification of a software component. However, existing approaches do not assure the coverage of conditional axioms and conditions embedded in complex axioms. In this paper, we present a novel approach and a tool to automatically derive test cases from bounded algebraic specifications of ADTs, assuring axiom coverage and of all minterms in its full disjunctive normal form (FDNF). The algebraic specification is first translated into the Alloy modelling language, and the Alloy Analyzer tool is used to find model instances for each test goal (axiom and minterm to cover), from which test cases in JUnit are extracted.
SCD1 Inhibition Causes Cancer Cell Death by Depleting Mono-Unsaturated Fatty Acids

Increased metabolism is a requirement for tumor cell proliferation. To understand the dependence of tumor cells on fatty acid metabolism, we evaluated various nodes of the fatty acid synthesis pathway. Using RNAi we have demonstrated that depletion of fatty-acid synthesis pathway enzymes SCD1, FASN, or ACC1 in HCT116 colon cancer cells results in cytotoxicity that is reversible by addition of exogenous fatty acids. This conditional phenotype is most pronounced when SCD1 is depleted. We used this fatty-acid rescue strategy to characterize several small-molecule inhibitors of fatty acid synthesis, including identification of TOFA as a potent SCD1 inhibitor, representing a previously undescribed activity for this compound. Reference FASN and ACC inhibitors show cytotoxicity that is less pronounced than that of TOFA, and fatty-acid rescue profiles consistent with their proposed enzyme targets. Two reference SCD1 inhibitors show low-nanomolar cytotoxicity that is offset by at least two orders of magnitude by exogenous oleate. One of these inhibitors slows growth of HCT116 xenograft tumors. Our data outline an effective strategy for interrogation of on-mechanism potency and pathway-node-specificity of fatty acid synthesis inhibitors, establish an unambiguous link between fatty acid synthesis and cancer cell survival, and point toward SCD1 as a key target in this pathway.
Changing Foodservice Systems

Abstract Whether it is to maintain profit margin, food cost, or staying on budget, foodservice businesses continually need to be evaluating procedures to be cost effective and stay competitive. Healthcare food-service has an additional challenge: healthcare is refocusing on patient service to become more customer driven. This refocus necessitates looking at the effectiveness in balancing patient satisfaction with cost containment. The challenge is implementing a healthcare meal service system that is cost efficient yet maintain patient satisfaction with meals. At one of the 157 Veterans Administration healthcare facilities, the balance was achieved by changing to Cook/Chill System. Patient Satisfaction Scores stayed constant while productivity increased slightly and food cost decreased.
USING TEXTURE AND SHAPE FEATURES TO RETRIEVE SETS OF SIMILAR MEDICAL IMAGES

In this paper, a novel scheme has been proposed for image retrieval task using the feature extracted directly from a compressed or uncompressed image. The texture information is first extracted by exploiting the multiresolution nature of wavelet decomposition, which represent the horizontal, vertical and diagonal frequency distribution of an image. We then calculate the mean and standard deviation of wavelet coefficients of each sub-band as texture features. In additions, we also extract shape feature by using the fixed-resolution block representation, which divides the image into isometric blocks and calculate the overlapped degree of each block with binary codes. The experimental results show that the retrieval efficiency is considerably improved by the proposed approach.
WHY DO THEY ADAPT? - A discussion of motives, power, benefits and drawbacks of adaptation among suppliers in the metal industry Work-in-Progress

WHY DO THEY ADAPT? -A discussion of motives, power, benefits and drawbacks of adaptation among suppliers in the metal industry Abstract The article discusses adaptive behaviour among suppliers in the metal industry. The results of the empirical study show that smaller companies seem to more passively adapt in their daily business routines, whereas the bigger ones seem to more actively invest in the relationship. This can also be seen as a more defensive versus a more offensive approach to adaptation.
Pathways to Boosting the Earnings of Low-Income Students by Increasing Their Educational Attainment.

Attaining a post-secondary credential has become increasingly important for securing opportunities to get high-return jobs in the United States in the 21 st century. Students from low-income families are underrepresented at every milestone in the educational pipeline. That limits their ability to attain post-secondary credentials and break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. This study seeks to identify educational pathways to high-paying careers that may improve social mobility. We also assess the extent to which successful transit of these pathways is contingent upon students' educational preparation and performance. This study uses comprehensive data on the high school, postsecondary, and workforce experiences of every public school student in the state of Florida belonging to a cohort of 144,545 students in the 9 th grade in 1996. Florida has one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the country, and thus faces particular challenges to increasing the educational attainment of its students. The following sections summarize the key findings from our analyses. The Effect of Education on Earnings • Higher levels of postsecondary degrees are associated with higher earnings. However, certificates from two-year colleges also lead to well-paid careers, particularly among low-performing students. • Professional and health-related fields of academic concentration are associated with high earning among all degree programs. For students with credentials from four-year colleges, concentrations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) tend to be the most lucrative. • Across concentrations and degree programs there is considerable overlap of earnings between the 25 th and 75 th percentiles. Postsecondary Outcomes • High school preparation and performance are key predictors of postsecondary persistence and credential attainment. High-performing students are also the most likely to select concentrations associated with high post-college earnings. • Low-performing students are unlikely to remain in college for more than a year or receive a credential. Many of these students concentrate their courses in remedial subjects. • Among low-performing students who do persist beyond the first year of college, those that concentrate in health-related or professional fields at two-year colleges have the greatest likelihood of attaining a credential. Differences in Earnings and Postsecondary Outcomes by Family Income • Low-income students are underrepresented at every stage of the educational pipeline, from high school graduation to the completion of postsecondary curricula. The gap by family income increases at each educational milestone. • Six years after high school, students from low-income families earn approximately 10 percent less than their peers. …
Internet access denial by higher-tier ISPS: A NAT-based solution

The Internet is an interconnection of Autonomous Systems (ASes) of which many are controlled by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). ASes use Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to communicate routing information to each other. BGP does not allow a network to control how its traffic is routed. As a result, traffic belonging to a specific network can be intentionally dropped as it is routed by BGP through a malicious ISP; a behavior we define as Internet access denial. The impact of Internet access denial, especially when performed by higher-tier ISPs, can be severe. In this paper, Network Address Translation (NAT) is used as a solution to overcome the Internet access denial problem by hiding the traffic identity. The proposed solution is scalable to fit large networks, by using pools of IP addresses across several NAT routers. Under high network load, the performance degradation of introducing NAT on the end-to-end delay and throughput is at most 0.2% and 0.3%, respectively.
In vivo evaluation of antibiotic activity against Mycobacterium abscessus.

BACKGROUND The prognosis of Mycobacterium abscessus infections is poor due to the lack of effective drug treatment. The objective of this study was to set up an animal model suitable to test antibiotic activity against M. abscessus. METHODS The following mouse strains were evaluated: Swiss, BALB/c, C57BL/6, nude, beige, A/J, and GKO. Antibiotic activity was tested for clarithromycin, amikacin, cefoxitin, tigecycline, and bedaquiline (TMC207). Finally, we evaluated the 3-drug combination clarithromycin, cefoxitin, and amikacin. RESULTS Nude and GKO mice fulfilled criteria for the model but only nude mice offered sufficient availability for large therapeutic experiments. Among the 3 drugs usually combined for treatment of M. abscessus infection, cefoxitin was the most active because it improved survival and reduced bacillary loads in spleen whereas clarithromycin and amikacin prevented death but had little impact on bacillary loads. The triple-drug combination was not more active than cefoxitin alone. Tigecycline displayed bactericidal activity whereas bedaquiline was almost inactive. CONCLUSIONS Nude mice are an adequate model for in vivo chemotherapy studies. Among tested drugs, cefoxitin and tigecycline showed promising in vivo activity against M. abscessus. The best drug combination remains to be determined.
A Dynamic Scheme for Blocking of Injected False Data in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks individual sensors subjected to security compromises. A Diverse filtering en-route scheme is used to addresses both false report injection and DoS attacks in wireless sensor networks. While the same event can be detected by multiple sensors, in diverse filtering en- route scheme each of the detecting sensors generates a keyed message authentication code (MAC) and multiple MACs are attached to the event report. Each node in wireless sensor networks can have a hash chain of authentication keys that are used to send the reports. First, each node disseminates its key to the forwarding nodes. After sending the reports, the sending nodes disclose their keys, allowing the forwarding nodes to verify their reports. Diverse filtering en-route scheme exploits the network to filter out false reports, through collective decision- making by multiple detecting nodes and collective false detection by multiple forwarding nodes. A ESFID (En-route scheme of false injected data) approach is used to ensure stronger filtering capacity. The results indicate that compared to existing solutions, the diverse filtering en-route scheme can drop false reports in highly dynamic sensor networks.
Lexicons or phrase tables? An investigation in sampling-based multilingual alignment

Sampling-based multilingual alignment is an example-based approach to sub-sentential alignment that has proven to be able to outperform ubiquitous statistical models on some tasks. As for machine translation however, it still typically does not provide as good results as was first expected. In this paper, we propose two experiments to determine the nature of alignments produced by this method, and what they would still lack of. We then deduce what possible improvements will make the method perform better on machine translation tasks.
Fiscal Policy, Employment per Age Group and Growth in Oecd Economies

We build and parameterize a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations for an open economy to study and explain within one coherent framework hours of work in three age groups, education of the young, and per capita growth. The composition of fiscal policy plays a crucial role. The government sets tax rates on labor, capital and consumption. It allocates its revenue to productive expenditures (mainly for education), consumption and ‘non‐employment’ benefits. Labor taxes and benefits may differ across age groups. We find that our fiscal policy model explains the facts remarkably well for all key variables in many OECD countries. Given the actual variation in fiscal policy composition, cross‐country differences in taste for leisure have very little role to play. We then use the model to investigate the strength of the effects of various fiscal policy shocks on steady state employment per age group and growth. We identify ‘non‐employment’ benefits and labor taxes as the main policy variables affecting employment. Effects are the strongest when policy measures focus on older workers. Productive government expenditures are the most effective with respect to growth. Growth may benefit also from labor tax cuts targeted at older workers. By contrast, tax cuts targeted at younger workers tend to imply lower growth.
Improving Strong-Scaling on GPU Cluster Based on Tightly Coupled Accelerators Architecture

The Tightly Coupled Accelerators (TCA) architecture that we proposed in previous work enables direct communication between accelerators over nodes. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept GPU cluster called the HA-PACS/TCA using the PEACH2 chip that we designed as an interconnection router chip based on the TCA architecture. Our system demonstrated 2.0 ? sec of latency on inter-node GPU-to-GPU communication with a PCIe Gen2 x8 by RDMA, reducing minimum latency to just 44% of the InfiniBand-QDR and MPI using GPUDirect for RDMA. Through results of Himeno benchmark tests, we demonstrated that our TCA architecture improved performance scalability with the small-sized problem by up to 61%.
The Short Put Ladder Strategy and its Application in Trading and Hedging

The first aim of this paper is to propose another way of an option strategy formation known as Short Put Ladder, describe the functions of profit in their analytical forms and propose an optimal algorithm for the use of this strategy in trading. The other goal is to propose the application of the Short Put Ladder Strategy in hedging against a price drop of the underlying asset and compare the result with the results of hedging using the known Long Combo option strategy.
Three‐dimensional flow and reaction in porous media: Implications for the Earth's mantle and sedimentary basins

We present a theoretical and numerical study of the reorganization of a porous matrix due to fluid flow coupled with dissolution or precipitation processes. We find that under certain conditions, flow of corrosive fluids results in unstable growth of the permeability and increasing disequilibrium in fluid chemistry with time. High-permeability channels may form parallel to the direction of flow. In time, these channels cause the distribution of porosity to become increasingly correlated and anisotropic and cause flow rates to be increasingly variable. Flow coupled with crystallization has the opposite effect: With time, permeability reduction occurs at a decreasing rate. Mineral composition in the fluid approaches chemical equilibrium. Precipitation destroys existing preferred paths for flow and acts to homogenize and disperse the flow. Connectivity of the porous media is reduced. Implications of these results for two geological systems are discussed: (1) Modes of melt extraction from the Earth's mantle, where the expected different modes of flow and reaction may help explain different geochemical and geological observations at hot spots and mid-ocean ridges, and (2) Precipitation and formation of abnormal pressure zones in sedimentary basins.