Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Central Banks or Single Financial Authorities? A Political Economy Approach

The objective of this work is to offer a political delegation approach for the analysis of the financial sector supervision. Focusing on the key issue in the debate on financial supervision structure - single authority versus multi-authorities model - the paper claims that the optimal degree of financial supervision unification cannot be defined a priori; rather it is an expected variable, calculated by the policymakers that maintains or reform the supervisory regime. The adopted approach is to consider the supervisory regime with one or more authorities as an endogenous variable, determined in turn by the dynamics of other structural variables, economic and institutional, that can explain the political delegation process. In order to construct this endogenous variable, it is introduced a Financial Authorities' Concentration Index (FAC Index). Then, given the importance to consider the nature of the institutions involved in the control responsibilities - i.e. what role the central bank plays - it is used as an index of the central bank's involvement in financial supervision, the Central Bank as Financial Authority Index (CBFA Index). Each national supervisory regime can be identified with the two above characteristics. Two the most frequent models: countries with a high concentration of powers with low central bank involvement (Single Financial Authority Regime); countries with a low concentration of powers with high central bank involvement (Central Bank Dominated Multiple Supervisors Regime). Finally, to empirically gauge the possible structural determinants of the degree of supervision unification, it is performed an econometric analysis of the Probit and Logit types. The econometric results signal that the probability of supervision unification is inversely linked to the involvement of the central bank. The two possible explanation of this relationship are the blurring hazard effect and the monopolistic bureau effect. The unification of financial supervision also seems to be a more markedly European phenomenon, linked especially to the Germanic and Scandinavian roots of the legal institutions.
Risk of progression to hypertension in nonhypertensive Japanese workers aged 20–64 years

Objective: Prehypertension is a known risk factor for hypertension in individuals aged less than 20 or more than 35 years, but no large studies have investigated this risk in individuals aged 20–34 years. This study investigated progression to hypertension in nonhypertensive individuals aged 20–34 years and compared this group with individuals aged 35–64 years. Methods: A total of 12 639 nonhypertensive individuals aged 20–64 years were followed from 1999 to 2008. Hazard ratios for progression to hypertension were calculated for men and women according to three blood pressure (BP) categories (optimal BP: <120/80 mmHg; normal BP: 120–129/80–84 mmHg; high-normal BP: 130–139/85–89 mmHg) and three age groups (20–34, 35–49 and 50–64 years). Results: Progression to hypertension occurred in 4617 individuals (36.5%). The risk of progression to hypertension increased significantly with increasing baseline BP category in men and women in all age groups. The association between baseline BP and progression to hypertension was stronger in the group aged 20–34 years than in the older age groups, especially in men. Conclusion: The results of this study confirm that normal or high-normal BP increases the risk of progression to hypertension in individuals aged 20–34 years. In men, the association between baseline BP and progression to hypertension is stronger in this age group than in older age groups. Health providers should be aware that normal or high-normal BP is a risk factor for progression to hypertension even in individuals aged 20–34 years.
Long-term effects of boron supplementation on reproductive characteristics and bone mechanical properties in gilts.

An experiment was conducted to determine long-term effects of dietary boron (B) on reproductive and bone characteristics in gilts. Weanling gilts (n = 50) were allotted to 10 pens based on weaning weight and litter origin. Pens were randomly assigned to receive one of two dietary treatments that consisted of a basal diet low in B (control) and the basal diet supplemented with 5 mg of B/kg diet as sodium borate. Gilts remained on their respective experimental diets throughout the nursery phase, growing-finishing phase, sexual maturity, breeding, gestation, and lactation. The day of first observed standing estrus was defined as puberty, and each pubertal gilt was bred via AI at the second observed standing estrus. Eight randomly selected gilts per treatment were slaughtered at d 35 of gestation for the assessment of embryonic and reproductive characteristics, bone characteristics, and tissue B concentrations. The remaining pregnant gilts (control, n = 11; 5 mg supplemental B/kg diet, n = 10) farrowed, and litter characteristics at farrowing and weaning were determined. Age at puberty was not affected (P = 0.72) by B, and neither were the number of corpora lutea on the ovaries (P = 0.44) or the total number of embryos (P = 0.95) at d 35 of gestation. Boron supplementation increased (P = 0.05) pig weaning weight and tended (P = 0.11) to increase pig birth weight; however, no other litter characteristics were affected (P > 0.12) by B. Extrinsic and intrinsic strength measures of bone were increased (P < 0.09) by B. Fat-free bone ash percentage and bone mineral concentrations were not affected (P > or = 0.19) by dietary B. Supplemental B increased (P < or = 0.06) the B concentrations of the muscle, liver, and reproductive tissues. Serum osteocalcin concentrations tended (P = 0.13) to be increased by dietary B, which may be related to increased bone turnover in B-supplemented gilts. Results indicate that B may have beneficial effects upon reproductive and bone characteristics.
Beyond best effort: router architectures for the differentiated services of tomorrow's Internet

With the transformation of the Internet into a commercial infrastructure, the ability to provide differentiated services to users with widely varying requirements is rapidly becoming as important as meeting the massive increases in bandwidth demand. Hence, while deploying routers, switches, and transmission systems of ever increasing capacity, Internet service providers would also like to provide customer-specific differentiated services using the same shared network infrastructure. We describe router architectures that can support the two trends of rising bandwidth demand and rising demand for differentiated services. We focus on router mechanisms that can support differentiated services at a level not contemplated in proposals currently under consideration due to concern regarding their implementability at high speeds. We consider the types of differentiated services that service providers may want to offer and then discuss the mechanisms needed in routers to support them. We describe plausible implementations of these mechanisms (the scalability and performance of which have been demonstrated by implementation in a prototype system) and argue that it is technologically possible to considerably raise the level of differentiated services which service providers can offer their customers, and that it is not necessary to restrict differentiated services to rudimentary offerings even in very-high-speed networks.
FPGA implementation of optimized XBM specifications by transformation for AFSMs

The asynchronous paradigm is an alternative to digital system design because it eliminates the problems related to the clock signal, such as clock skew, clock distribution and power dissipation of the clock. An interesting style for asynchronous design, which is familiar to designers, divides the system in an asynchronous controller with synchronous datapath. A specification known as Extended Burst-Mode (XBM) is the most adequate one to describe the asynchronous controllers in this design style. The XBM specification must meet a number of properties to be implementable. A property known as the signal polarity may affect the controller performance. To satisfy the signal polarity, the designer must often introduce some state transitions that do not perform any operation, which are called in this paper as “dead transitions”. An XBM specification with dead transitions can reduce the controller performance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that eliminates dead transitions in a XBM specification. This elimination occurs by transforming the original XBM specification, which leads to an optimization of the system performance. The algorithm was applied to seven well-known benchmarks and obtained a reduction of up to 37% in processing time.
A More Realistic Thinning Scheme for Call Admission Control in Multimedia Wireless Networks

A call admission control scheme named thinning scheme, which smoothly throttles the admission rates of calls according to their priorities and aims to provide multiple prioritized traffic with a desired quality of service, is investigated under more general conditions. Using the theory of multidimensional Markov birth-death process, analytical formulas for call blocking probabilities are derived.
Clarifying the Triangular Circuit Theory of Attention and its Relations to Awareness Replies to Seven Commentaries

Replies are given to the commentaries of the seven cognitive science experts. Additional circuit diagrams clarify thalamic operations in attention and basal ganglia operations by which motivation affects attention. Selection-by-suppression and negative priming are accounted for within frontal control areas. Confusions between the terms awareness and consciousness persist, owing to the powerful habit of using awareness as a synonym for consciousness. Leaving consciousness as an umbrella term to denote many loosely-defined aspects of experience, the term awareness denotes the aspect of experience in which attention is directed to bodily sensations, thereby involving the self in ongoing experience.
PGC-1α mRNA expression is influenced by metabolic perturbation in exercising human skeletal muscle

Endurance training leads to many adaptational changes in several tissues. In skeletal muscle, fatty acid usage is enhanced and mitochondrial content is increased. The exact molecular mechanisms regulating these functional and structural changes remain to be elucidated. Contractile activity-induced metabolic perturbation has repeatedly been shown to be important for the induction of mitochondrial biogenesis. Recent reports suggest that the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma coactivator 1alpha (PGC-1alpha)/mitochondrial transcription factor A (Tfam) pathway is involved in exercise-induced mitochondrial biogenesis. In the present study, nine healthy men performed two 45-min bouts of one-legged knee extension exercise: one bout with restricted blood flow, and the other with nonrestricted blood flow to the working muscle. Muscle biopsies were obtained from the vastus lateralis muscle before exercise and at 0, 30, 120, and 360 min after the exercise bout. Biopsies were analyzed for whole muscle, as well as fiber-type specific mRNA expression of myocyte-enriched calcineurin interacting protein (MCIP)-1, PGC-1alpha, and downstream mitochondrial transcription factors. A novel finding was that, in human skeletal muscle, PGC-1alpha mRNA increased more after exercise with restricted blood flow than in the nonrestricted condition. No changes were observed for the mRNA of NRF-1, Tfam, mitochondrial transcription factor B1, and mitochondrial transcription factor B2. Muscle fiber type I and type II did not differ in the basal PGC-1alpha mRNA levels or in the expression increase after ischemic training. Another novel finding was that there was no difference between the restricted and nonrestricted exercise conditions in the increase of MCIP-1 mRNA, a marker for calcineurin activation. This suggests that calcineurin may be activated by exercise in humans and does not exclude that calcineurin could play a role in PGC-1 transcription activation in human skeletal muscle.
Explorative public transport flow analysis from uncertain social media data

In this paper, we propose a framework to detect human mobility transportation hubs and infer public transport flows from unstructured georeferenced social media data using semantic topic modeling and spatial clustering techniques. An infrastructure for receiving and storing large sets of social media data has been developed together with an ad hoc processing framework in order to consider the high uncertainty of our retrieved data. Given the detected and extracted social media signals indicating human mobility, we compared the results with the public transport network from OpenStreetMap and classified observed mobility patterns for an exemplary case study. To analyze collected datasets a web based visualization tool has been setup.
A General Wrapper Approach to Selection of Class-Dependent Features

In this paper, we argue that for a C-class classification problem, C 2-class classifiers, each of which discriminating one class from the other classes and having a characteristic input feature subset, should in general outperform, or at least match the performance of, a C-class classifier with one single input feature subset. For each class, we select a desirable feature subset, which leads to the lowest classification error rate for this class using a classifier for a given feature subset search algorithm. To fairly compare all models, we propose a weight method for the class-dependent classifier, i.e., assigning a weight to each model's output before the comparison is carried out. The method's performance is evaluated on two artificial data sets and several real-world benchmark data sets, with the support vector machine (SVM) as the classifier , and with the RELIEF, class separability, and minimal-redundancy-maximal-relevancy (mRMR) as attribute importance measures. Our results indicate that the class-dependent feature subsets found by our approach can effectively remove irrelevant or redundant features, while maintaining or improving (sometimes substantially ) the classification accuracy, in comparison with other feature selection methods.
7000 m class ROV KAIKO7000

On May 29th, 2003, 10000 m class ROV KAIKO cruised for research mission in Nankai Trough at the southeast of 130km off Cape Muroto in Kochi prefecture. After completing the research mission at a depth of 4675 m, the vehicle of KAIKO has been missing because the secondary cable connecting the launcher and vehicle was snapped. Immediately, the vehicle has been searched from surface and air but it could not find. JAMSTEC has planned to remodel the 7000m class thin cable system ROV UROV7K as a replacement of the KAIKO vehicle, though operation depth and kinematical performance of it are lower than KAIKO vehicle. And JAMSTEC would use it temporarily for deep sea research, until new KAIKO system would be built. The system with KAIKO launcher and remodeled UROV7K is called KAIKO7000. UROV7K had the battery for power source and it was linked with the support vessel using a fiber optic cable of 1mm in diameter. It was developed for the missions of monitoring deep sea mooring systems and to survey deep seafloor. Some parts of UROV7K have been remodeled for replacement of the KAIKO vehicle. Main remodeling points were power supply system, increasing thrust and communication line. Furthermore, the safety measures pointed out by the Committee for the Investigation of Accident, have been included, too. KAIKO7000 has been finished remodeling in March, 2004, and the sea trials have been started in April, 2004. This paper describes about remodeling of KAIKO7000.
Lung cancer risk associated with occupational exposure to nickel, chromium VI, and cadmium in two population-based case-control studies in Montreal.

BACKGROUND Nickel, chromium VI, and cadmium have been identified as lung carcinogens in highly exposed cohorts. The purpose of this study was to examine the etiological link between lung cancer and these metals in occupations, that usually entail lower levels of exposure than those seen in historical cohorts. METHODS Two population-based case-control studies were conducted in Montreal, from 1979 to 1986 and from 1996 to 2001, comprising 1,598 cases and 1,965 controls. A detailed job history was obtained to evaluate lifetime occupational exposure to many agents, including nickel, chromium VI, and cadmium compounds. RESULTS Lung cancer odds ratios were increased only among former or non-smokers: 2.5 (95% CI: 1.3-4.7) for nickel exposure, 2.4 (95% CI: 1.2-4.8) for chromium VI, and 4.7 (95% CI: 1.5-14.3) for cadmium. The metals did not increase risk among smokers. CONCLUSIONS While excess risks due to these metal compounds were barely discernable among smokers, carcinogenic effects were seen among non-smokers.
Understanding the Biobehavioral and Mental Health Consequences of IPV

10. 10. Thurston RC, Chang Y, Derby CA, Bromberger JT, Harlow SD, Janssen I, et al. Abuse and subclinical cardiovascular disease among Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) and its consequences are many. My early legal work representing women in family court as they seek Protection from Abuse (PFA) led me to explore the relationship among negative life experiences, depression and T-cell function in women in IPV. The purpose of the project was to examine differences in the levels of negative life experiences (environmental), depression (sociobehavioral) and immune function (biological) in abused and non-abused women. We learned significant differences with women in abusive relationship reporting more negative life experiences, higher levels of depression, and lower levels T-cell function than non-abused women [1]. Further along my clinical and legal representation of women in IPV relationships, we observed physical (multiple schlerosis), psychosocial and behavioral manifestations of IPV as they relate to abused women [2-4] and collaborated with other researchers in Jordan to evaluate the mental health of Jordanian women in IPV [5].
Targeted re-sequencing reveals the genomic signatures of multiple barley domestications

Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) is an established model to study domestication of the Fertile Crescent cereals. Recent molecular data suggested that domesticated barley genomes consist of the ancestral blocks descending from multiple wild barley populations. However, the relationship between the mosaic ancestry patterns and the process of domestication itself remained unclear. To address this knowledge gap, we identified candidate domestication genes using selection scans based on targeted resequencing of 433 wild and domesticated barley accessions. We conducted phylogenetic, population structure, and ancestry analyses to investigate the origin of the domesticated barley haplotypes separately at the neutral and candidate domestication loci. We discovered multiple selective sweeps that occurred on all barley chromosomes during domestication in the background of several ancestral wild populations. The ancestry analyses demonstrated that, although the ancestral blocks of the domesticated barley genomes descended from all over the Fertile Crescent, the candidate domestication loci originated specifically in its eastern and western parts. These findings provided first molecular evidence in favor of multiple barley domestications in the Levantine and Zagros clusters of the origin of agriculture.
Do adults adjust their socio-economic status identity in later life

ABSTRACT Previous research shows that socio-economic status (SES) identity, also referred to as perceived or subjective social status, is shaped by objective measures of status, socio-cultural influences and psychological attributes and predicts current and future wellbeing. Prior studies, however, have not examined whether older adults reassess their SES identity over time. In this study, we use two assessments of subjective social status measured six years apart in a sample of older Taiwanese adults to: (a) determine the degree to which respondents adjust their perceptions of social rank; and (b) identify the characteristics of individuals who are most likely to revise their assessments. We find that many older Taiwanese adults reassess their SES identity, but most respondents show small to moderate levels of change. Females, more highly educated respondents, and those who have a positive economic outlook tend to revise their subjective social status upward relative to their respective counterparts; those who become widowed during the period adjust their rankings downward compared with those who do not become widowed. These findings suggest that SES identity may be dynamic, highlighting the importance of collecting information on SES identity at multiple points in the lifecourse.
Application of a new 2D time-domain full-waveform inversion scheme to crosshole radar data

Crosshole radar tomography is a useful tool in diverse investigations in geology, hydrogeology, and engineering. Conventional tomograms provided by standard ray-based techniques have limited resolution, primarily because only a fraction of the information contained in the radar data i.e., thefirst-arrivaltimesandmaximumfirst-cycleamplitudesis included in the inversion. To increase the resolution of radar tomograms,wehavedevelopedaversatilefull-waveforminversion scheme that is based on a finite-difference time-domain solution of Maxwell’s equations. This scheme largely accountsforthe3Dnatureofradar-wavepropagationandincludes an efficient method for extracting the source wavelet from the radar data.After demonstrating the potential of the newschemeontworealisticsyntheticdatasets,weapplyitto two crosshole field data sets acquired in very different geologic/hydrogeologic environments. These are the first applications of full-waveform tomography to observed crosshole radar data.The resolution of all full-waveform tomograms is showntobemarkedlysuperiortothatoftheassociatedraytomograms. Small subsurface features a fraction of the dominant radar wavelength and boundaries between distinct geological/hydrological units are sharply imaged in the fullwaveformtomograms.
Lexical traps in Hong Kong English

Despite a large and growing literature on Hong Kong English (HKE), few studies have been conducted on its emerging language features, particularly its grammar or vocabulary. According to Gisborne (2009), studies on HKE to date have focused on language attitudes, code-switching, learner errors, and the local accent. A quick review of the research on vocabulary reveals that even those studies with a specific lexical focus have tended to be fairly limited in scope, focusing on borrowing, politicized expressions and localized vocabulary. Additionally, by their nature, these studies have tended to only cover vocabulary items that are unique and obviously have a different meaning in the local setting. In particular, there is a noticeable dearth of in-depth studies on semantic shift, in particular extensions or adaptations of meaning for simple words or phrases which are taken for granted as being at the common core of English varieties throughout the world. This kind of usage is more likely to cause comprehension difficulties than the more-often studied borrowings or coinages, simply because it might not be apparent to either a native speaker or a Hong Kong speaker that there is a difference in meaning when it comes to the Hong Kong terms used, and therefore there is a greater potential for misunderstanding.