Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Malthus's Abandonment of Agricultural Protectionism: A Discovery in the History of Economic Thought

Thomas Robert Malthus, it is universally known, opted for agricultural protection in the great Corn Law debates at the close of the Napoleonic Wars. He was the only major economist to do so and has been regarded ever since as something of an anomaly. This paper reports a finding that seems to remove the anomaly-the apparent fact that Malthus as early as 1824 withdrew his support for the prohibitory Corn Laws. The episode lends credence to his persistent claim that his original protectionism was not designed to defend the class interests of landowners but reflected rather his perception of the national interest-a perception which required modification with the beginning of the end of the old commercial system and in the light of the actual experience of industrial buoyancy. The volte-face entailed a profound reorientation of analytical perspective, amounting to renunciation of support for balanced growth and self-sufficiency in food in favor of industry-based growth-the Ricardian position. An historiographical addendum (Appendix) addresses Malthus's failure to correct the oversight of his contemporaries who were unaware of the change. This discussion also throws light on the puzzling neglect by scholars of the numerous statements by Malthus indicating an abandonment of agricultural protectionism. ' I. The Evidence
A category based concept for rapid development of ink-aware systems for computer-assisted education

Presentation centric lectures that draw on integration of multimedia content and new input devices gain increasing importance in the context of eLearning. The paper emphasizes the addition of digital ink, which is of increasing importance for public (schools, universities) and corporate (trainings, Webinars) teaching. We present a concept for flexibly developing custom ink-aware systems that support augmented presentations for a broad range of use cases and cover not only the core event but also pre- and post-event phases, addressing the needs of both lecturers and students. Our concept for ink-aware multimedia architectures is based on three main system components, which are in turn assisted by small signal processing units. The concept fosters development of clearly and consistently designed ink-aware applications. The paper emphasizes examples where digital ink is visualized atop image-based slides, but potential applications comprise a much broader range of underpinning application. To illustrate our concept and implementation, we present sample customizations i.e. realizations of all relevant component categories. We discuss evaluation results obtained from both interviews with lecturers as well as our experience with using and supporting customizations made by ourselves.
Serum tumor markers in breast cancer: are they of clinical value?

BACKGROUND Although multiple serum-based tumor markers have been described for breast cancer, such as CA 15-3, BR 27.29 (CA27.29), carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), tissue polypeptide antigen, tissue polypeptide specific antigen, and HER-2 (the extracellular domain), the most widely used are CA 15-3 and CEA. METHODS The literature relevant to serum tumor markers in breast cancer was reviewed. Particular attention was given to systematic reviews, prospective randomized trials, and guidelines issued by expert panels. RESULTS Because of a lack of sensitivity for early disease and lack of specificity, none of the available markers is of value for the detection of early breast cancer. High preoperative concentrations of CA 15-3 are, however, associated with adverse patient outcome. Although serial determinations of tumor markers after primary treatment for breast cancer can preclinically detect recurrent/metastatic disease with lead times of approximately 2-9 months, the clinical value of this lead time remains to be determined. Serum markers, however, are the only validated approach for monitoring treatment in patients with advanced disease that cannot be evaluated by use of conventional criteria. CONCLUSIONS CA 15-3 is one of the first circulating prognostic factors for breast cancer. Preoperative concentrations thus might be combined with existing prognostic factors for predicting outcome in patients with newly diagnosed breast cancer. At present, the most important clinical application of CA 15-3 is in monitoring therapy in patients with advanced breast cancer that is not assessable by existing clinical or radiologic procedures.
A policymaker confronts uncertainty

This article is a reprint of a speech given by William Poole, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, to the St. Louis Gateway Chapter of the National Association for Business Economics. In today's environment economic uncertainties abound both abroad and at home. In this article the author discusses the five categories of uncertainty facing today's policymakers: 1) the data; 2) future events, shocks and disturbances; 3) how the economy works; 4) market reactions to Fed policy; and 5) market anticipations of Fed policy. Poole also discusses the Federal Reserve's role in dealing with each of these uncertainties and today's policy environment.
Online automatic tipover prevention for mobile manipulators

Mobile manipulators operating in field environments are susceptible to dangerous and costly rollover or tipover instabilities, particularly when operating on an uneven terrain or when exerting large forces or moments. By monitoring the static and dynamic tipover stability margins of a mobile manipulator it is possible to predict such tipover and take appropriate actions to prevent the tipover from occurring. This paper describes a scheme for automatic tipover prediction, and prevention, which uses the static and dynamic force-angle measures of tipover stability margin. Time-until-tipover prediction is accomplished using estimated gradients of the tipover stability margins, and prevention is accomplished using a combination of the manipulator and platform actuators. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and promise of the proposed scheme for automatic tipover prevention.
Innovations in the assessment of thought disorder.

Since the early descriptions of thought disorder in psychiatric patients were recorded by clini-cians such as Bleuler and Kraepelin, numerous studies have attempted to examine this phenomenon through the use of various techniques. Harvey (1983) suggests that three main methods have been used to assess thought disorder. Clinical investigations of deviant communication patterns and natural language studies have both examined the verbal communication of individuals believed to possess thought disorder. Similarly, laboratory studies have examined cognitive deficits in these same individuals in the hope of discovering the processes that underlie deviant speech. In reviewing the present state of research on thought, it becomes immediately apparent that the vast majority of research in this area has focused on speech as a direct reflection of thought. A possible explanation for this emphasis has been postulated by Schwartz (1978), who suggests that since most patients are capable of verbal communication, this stable form of behavior may be easily obtained as an index of psycho-pathology among subjects. While deviant speech patterns have been used extensively as a tool for assessing disordered thought, agreement about the definition of thought disorder and its assessment techniques has eluded researchers thus far (Andreasen and Grove 1986). In light of this inconsistency, it has been our aim over the past several months to study thought disorder from an entirely different perspective. We are currently developing a self-report questionnaire designed to assess thought disorder in psychiatric patients. Unlike previous questionnaires of its kind, this particular inventory focuses directly on the thoughts of the patient instead of relying on speech as a potential index of thought. Since previous research has indicated that psychiatric patients can'give subjective reports of their illness (Beaber et al. 1985; Davidhizer 1985; Phillipson and Harris 1985), it was our belief that such reports would provide a more accurate and efficient means of diagnosing and predicting outcome in patients with thought disorder. Fifteen subscales composed of 304 items were generated by clinicians and researchers based on interviews with psychiatric patients. Thus far, following the method outlined in Jackson's Sequential System for Personality Scale Development (Jackson 1970), statistical analyses performed on the responses of 100 inpatient and normal subjects have yielded reliability coefficients for the subscales ranging from 0.8141 to 0.9412. In a preliminary analysis on a small sample of subjects, it was also discovered that schizophrenic subjects scored significantly higher than normal subjects on 13 of the 15 …
Emergence of Discrete and Abstract State Representation in Continuous Input Task through Reinforcement Learning

“Concept” is a kind of discrete and abstract state representation, and is considered useful for efficient action planning. However, it is supposed to emerge in our brain as a parallel processing and learning system through the learning based on a variety of experiences, and so it is difficult to be developed by hand-coding. In this paper, as a previous step of the “concept formation”, it is investigated whether the discrete and abstract state representation in formed or not through learning in a task with multi-step state transitions using Actor-Q learning method and a recurrent neural network. After learning, an agent repeated the sequence two times, in which it pushed a button to open a door and moved to the next room, and finally arrived at the third room to get a reward. After the learning, discrete and abstract state representation not depending on the door opening pattern was observed in two hidden neurons. The result of the learning with two recurrent neural networks that are for Q-values and for Actor outputs suggested that the state representation emerged to generate appropriate Q-values.
Probability Bounds for Goal Directed Queries in Bayesian Networks

We derive bounds on the probability of a goal node given a set of acquired input nodes. The bounds apply to decomposable networks; a class of Bayesian networks encompassing causal trees and causal polytrees. The difficulty of computing the bounds depends on the characteristics of the decomposable network. For directly connected networks with binary goal nodes, tight bounds can be computed in polynomial time. For other kinds of decomposable networks, the derivation of the bounds requires solving an integer program with a nonlinear objective function, a computationally intractable problem in the worst case. We provide a relaxation technique that computes looser bounds in polynomial time for more complex decomposable networks. We briefly describe an application of the probability bounds to a record linkage problem.
An efficient SVM based tumor classification with symmetry Non-negative Matrix Factorization using gene expression data

A reliable and accurate identification of the type of tumors is crucial to the proper treatment of cancers. The classification of tumors was and is both a practical and theoretic necessity and requirement. DNA microarrays provide a new technique of measuring gene expression, which has attracted a lot of research interest in recent years. It was suggested that gene expression data from microarrays (biochips) can be employed in many biomedical areas, e.g., in cancer classification. Although several, new and existing, methods of classification were tested, a selection of proper (optimal) set of genes, the expressions of which can serve during classification, is still an open problem. This paper presents a new method for tumor classification using gene expression data. In the proposed method, we first select genes using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF). In order to improve the performance of classification, Symmetry NMF (SymNMF) is used in this approach. Then, features are extracted from the selected genes by virtue SymNMF. As a last step, an efficient machine learning approach is used to classify the tumor samples using the extracted features. In order for a better classification, Support Vector Machine with Weighted Kernel Width (WSVM) is used in this classification approach. The performance of the proposed approach is tested using colon cancer data set and the acute leukemia data set. It is observed from the experimental results that the proposed approach provides better performance when compared with the traditional approaches.
Protein knowledge extension based on Web database

The amount of information related to molecular biology including gene is increasing as the research in various area produces voluminous results. With this massive amount of data and distributed information environment, bioinformatics are required to collect the necessary information and organize the collected data for their own purpose. This challenges the feasible solution that collects data in a short time and integrates the collected data into the well-organized representation. In this paper, we discuss the information integration system and the effect of middleware database for protein information with the demanded data. We also demonstrate the experimental results that show the effectiveness of the middleware database utilization.
The in uence of geometry and topology on axisymmetricmean

We study the changes in the dynamical behaviour of axisymmetric spherical mean-eld dynamo models produced by changes in their geometry and topol-ogy, by considering a two parameter family of models, ranging from a full sphere to spherical shell, torus and disc{like conngurations, within a uniied framework. We nd that the two parameter space of the family of models considered here separates into at least three diierent regions with distinct characteristics for the onset of dynamo action. In two of these regions, the most easily excited elds are oscillatory, in one case with dipolar symmetry , and in the other with quadrupolar, whereas in the third region the most easily excited eld is steady and quadrupolar. In the nonlinear regime, we nd that topo-logical changes can alter signiicantly the dynamical behaviour , whilst modest changes in geometry can produce qualitative changes, particularly for thin disc{like conng-urations. This is of potential importance, since the exact shapes of astrophysical bodies, especially accretion discs and galaxies, are usually not precisely known.
ACE Inhibition with Captopril Retards the Development of Signs of Neurodegeneration in an Animal Model of Alzheimer’s Disease

Increased generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is a significant pathological feature in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Experimental evidence indicates that inhibition of brain ROS could be beneficial in slowing the neurodegenerative process triggered by amyloid-beta (Abeta) aggregates. The angiotensin II AT1 receptor is a significant source of brain ROS, and AD patients have an increased brain angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) level, which could account for an excessive angiotensin-dependent AT1-induced ROS generation. Therefore, we analyzed the impact of ACE inhibition on signs of neurodegeneration of aged Tg2576 mice as a transgenic animal model of AD. Whole genome microarray gene expression profiling and biochemical analyses demonstrated that the centrally active ACE inhibitor captopril normalized the excessive hippocampal ACE activity of AD mice. Concomitantly, the development of signs of neurodegeneration was retarded by six months of captopril treatment. The neuroprotective profile triggered by captopril was accompanied by reduced amyloidogenic processing of the amyloid precursor protein (APP), and decreased hippocampal ROS, which is known to enhance Abeta generation by increased activation of beta- and gamma-secretases. Taken together, our data present strong evidence that ACE inhibition with a widely used cardiovascular drug could interfere with Abeta-dependent neurodegeneration.
Simple and effective feature extraction for optical character recognition

A new representation method for recognition of handwritten charcters, called LLF (Local Line Fitting), is presented. The method, based on simple geometric operations, is very eff icient and yields a relatively low-dimensional and distortion invariant representation. An important feature of the approach is that no preprocessing of the input image is required. A black & white or gray-scale pixel representation is directly used without thinning, contour following, binarization, etc. Therefore, high recognition speed can be achieved. Experiments using this parametrization method and several classification procedures on handwritten digits and letters are reported.
The Future of Electricity Demand : customers, citizens and loads

List of figures List of tables List of boxes List of contributors Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction and overview of the chapters Tooraj Jamasb, Laura M. Platchkov and Michael G. Pollitt Part I. The Economics: 1. The economics of energy (and electricity) demand Laura M. Platchkov and Michael G. Pollitt 2. Energy scenarios and implications for future electricity demand Graham Ault, Damien Frame and Nick Hughes 3. Demand side participation: price constraints, technical limits and behavioural risks Jacopo Torriti, Matthew Leach and Patrick Devine-Wright 4. Review of recent developments in economic modelling of energy demand Jevgenijs Steinbucks Part II. Technology: 5. Demand-side management and control in buildings Joe A. Clarke, Jun Hong, Cameron M. Johnstone, Jae Min Kim and Paul Tuohy 6. Smart metering: technology, economics and international experience Aoife Brophy Haney, Tooraj Jamasb and Michael G. Pollitt 7. Smart domestic appliances as enabling technology for demand-side integration: modelling, value and drivers Vera Silva, Vladimir Stanojevic, Marko Aunedi, Danny Pudjianto and Goran Strbac 8. The scope for and potential impacts of the adoption of electric vehicles in UK surface transport Gregory Marsden and Stephane Hess Part III. Social Dimensions: 9. From citizen to consumer: energy policy and public attitudes in the UK Elcin Akcura, Aoife Brophy Haney, Tooraj Jamasb and David M. Reiner 10. The local dimension of energy Scott Kelly 11. Centralisation, decentralisation and the scales in between: what role might they play in the UK energy system? Jim Watson and Patrick Devine-Wright 12. Equity, fuel poverty and demand (maintaining affordability with sustainability and security of supply) Catherine Waddams Price 13. Energy spending and vulnerable households Tooraj Jamasb and Helena Meier Part IV. Policy and Regulation: 14. Demand-side management strategies and the residential sector: lessons from the international experience Aoife Brophy Haney, Tooraj Jamasb, Laura M. Platchkov and Michael G. Pollitt 15. Electricity distribution networks: investment and regulation, and uncertain demand Tooraj Jamasb and Cristiano Marantes 16. The potential impact of policy and legislation on the energy demands of UK buildings and implications for the electrical network Joe A. Clarke, Jun Hong, Cameron M. Johnstone, Jae Min Kim and Paul G. Tuohy 17. The ADDRESS European project: a large-scale R and D initiative for the development of active demand Francois Bouffard, Regine Belhomme, Alioune Diop, Maria Sebastian-Viana, Cherry Yuen, Hannah Devine-Wright, Pedro Linares, Ramon Cerero Real De Asua and Giovanni Valtorta 18. Daylight saving, electricity demand and emissions: the British case Yu-Foong Chong, Elizabeth Garnsey, Simon Hill and Frederic Desobry 19. Concluding reflections on future active networks and demand side Tooraj Jamasb and Michael G. Pollitt Index.
CAPTCHINO - A Gamification of Image-Based CAPTCHAs to Evaluate Usability Issues

CAPTCHA technology is at a boom in the field of information security. When text CAPTCHAs are at a point of break down, it is the time for the image based CAPTCHAs to get a pace. But often the designers of the CAPTCHA forget the issues related to the usability as the objective of a CAPTCHA is to reduce the burden of solving it along with the robustness. In this paper, we have shown an analysis of some image based CAPTCHAs with different usability factors. This analysis is made manually with the data collected by the GWAP concept.
Factor Supply Response to Globalization : Information Technology and Education in India

A number of studies suggest that globalization and trade liberalization in developing countries have increased returns to education and inequality. A key question is whether this will lead to changes in factor supplies that mitigate this inequality. I study how Indian trade liberalization in the early 1990s impacted human capital investment by exploiting variation in English learning costs across districts. This variation is driven by linguistic diversity which compels individuals to learn additional languages; most people choose between English and Hindi, the native lingua franca. Individuals whose native language is linguistically further from Hindi have lower relative opportunity costs of learning English, because they nd Hindi harder to learn and often su¤er psychic costs since many non-Hindi speakers feel Hindi was imposed on them. I demonstrate that more bene ts of globalization go to districts with lower costs of learning English: I show that these districts experienced greater growth in information technology presence and greater growth in school enrollment, but smaller increases in the skilled wage premium. JEL codes: F16,I21,O15 Correspondence: shastry@fas.harvard. edu. I am grateful to David Cutler, Esther Duo, Caroline Hoxby, Michael Kremer for their advice and support, Petia Topalova for assistance with the National Sample Surveys, David Clingingsmith for access to additional data and all participants of the Labor Economics/Public Finance and Development Economics lunch workshops at Harvard, the IZA/World Bank Conference on Employment and Development 2007 and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors International Finance workshop for their comments. In addition, I thank Filipe Campante, Davin Chor, Quoc-Anh Do, Eyal Dvir and Michael Katz for useful conversations and assistance. Finally, I thank Daniel Tortorice for invaluable support and encouragement. All errors are mine.
Sex Differences in Drosophila melanogaster Heterochromatin Are Regulated by Non-Sex Specific Factors

The eukaryotic genome is assembled into distinct types of chromatin. Gene-rich euchromatin has active chromatin marks, while heterochromatin is gene-poor and enriched for silencing marks. In spite of this, genes native to heterochromatic regions are dependent on their normal environment for full expression. Expression of genes in autosomal heterochromatin is reduced in male flies mutated for the noncoding roX RNAs, but not in females. roX mutations also disrupt silencing of reporter genes in male, but not female, heterochromatin, revealing a sex difference in heterochromatin. We adopted a genetic approach to determine how this difference is regulated, and found no evidence that known X chromosome counting elements, or the sex determination pathway that these control, are involved. This suggested that the sex chromosome karyotype regulates autosomal heterochromatin by a different mechanism. To address this, candidate genes that regulate chromosome organization were examined. In XX flies mutation of Topoisomerase II (Top2), a gene involved in chromatin organization and homolog pairing, made heterochromatic silencing dependent on roX, and thus male-like. Interestingly, Top2 also binds to a large block of pericentromeric satellite repeats (359 bp repeats) that are unique to the X chromosome. Deletion of X heterochromatin also makes autosomal heterochromatin in XX flies dependent on roX and enhances the effect of Top2 mutations, suggesting a combinatorial action. We postulate that Top2 and X heterochromatin in Drosophila comprise a novel karyotype-sensing pathway that determines the sensitivity of autosomal heterochromatin to loss of roX RNA.