Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The role of technology in policy dynamics: the case of desalination in Israel.

This article examines the relationship between technology and policy change, focusing on shifts in Israel's water regime as a case example. Technologies, especially systems of large-scale infrastructures, have offered an explanation for the stability and stagnation of policy regimes in what has been termed “lock-in” and path dependency. Our paper focuses on the reverse phenomenon: on how technology or change in it can induce policy change. Israeli decision-makers have recently embraced desalination technology as a substitute for natural resources, because earlier policies, characterized by a strategy of environmental brinkmanship, have resulted in degradation of natural sources and risk future supply. This analysis is based on extensive document analysis and in-depth interviews. We suggest that technological breakthroughs that rendered desalination economically feasible also undermined long-lasting hydro-ideological support for agriculture, introduced new ideas about water abundance and engendered policy change. Desalination contributed to these shifts because it allowed the displacement of environmental externalities, economic costs and hard political choices to other policy sectors and levels of governance as well as reallocating them between political actors, bureaucrats and professionals. It is important to make displacements like these more visible in order to emphasize more comprehensive and longer-term problem solving rather than problem avoidance or postponement. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
ENFORCEMENT COSTS and THE CHOICE OF POLICY INSTRUMENTS FOR CONTROLLING POLLUTION

Economic incentive based.policies have long been advocated for controlling pollution because they can minimize firms' abatement costs. However, the social costs of controlling pollution consist not only of abatement costs but also enforcement costs. The author shows that the conditions for minimizing abatement costs and minimizing enforcement costs differ. As a result, enforcement costs can be higher for incentive based policies than for policies based on direct controls. A complete evaluation of alternative policies requires a comparison of both abatement and enforcement costs. Copyright 1992 by Oxford University Press.
Asymptomatic cerebral embolic signals in patients with carotid stenosis. Correlation with appearance of plaque ulceration on angiography.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Asymptomatic cerebral emboli may be detected in patients with carotid stenosis by transcranial Doppler ultrasonography of the middle cerebral artery (MCA). The aim of this study was to determine the angiographic correlates of such embolic signals. METHODS Doppler signals from 48 MCAs in 26 patients with carotid stenosis that was either symptomatic (n = 20) or asymptomatic (n = 6) were recorded for 40 minutes. The grade of carotid stenosis and the ulcerated or nonulcerated appearance of the plaque were assessed using the criteria of the North American Symptomatic Carotid Endarterectomy Trial. RESULTS Embolic signals were detected in 8 MCAs from 7 patients; 4 (50%) of these MCAs were clinically symptomatic compared with 16 (40%) without embolic signal. Although there was a trend toward more severe stenosis in the cases with embolic signals, this was not significant (mean +/- SD, 67 +/- 29% versus 55 +/- 36%). In contrast, an image of ulceration was found on ipsilateral carotid angiography in 5 cases (63%) with embolic signals and in only 9 cases (23%) without embolic signals (odds ratio, 5.74; 95% confidence interval, 1.15 to 28.79, by multivariate regression analysis). CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates that the occurrence of embolic signals in patients with carotid stenosis is associated with the appearance of plaque ulceration on angiography.
A Reassessment of Pakistan's Aggregate Import Demand Function: An Application of Ardl Approach

The present study re-estimated the import demand function for Pakistan on the basis of quarterly time series data by employing autoregressive distributed lag approach. The present study draws various significant conclusions from the estimation of aggregate merchandized import demand function. The results support the proposition that in Pakistan there exist a long-run relationship among, import demand, real economic growth, real effective exchange rate and real effective exchange rate volatility. It further found that aggregate import demand is income and price inelastic, implying that Pakistan's imports comprises essential goods. The study found evidence to suggest that real effective exchange rate volatility has adverse effect on import demand for Pakistan in long-run.
The Effect of Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation on PDE-Constrained Optimal Control Problems

We address a linear-quadratic optimal control problem constrained by a scalar advection-diffusion-reaction equation. We develop an anisotropic goal-oriented error analysis to show in an optimal control framework how the employment of an anisotropic finite element mesh can reduce the computational cost. The novel ingredient is the enrichment of the a posteriori analysis, already well established in an isotropic context, with information about possible directionalities of the problem at hand. To deal with the advection dominated regime, a strongly consistent anisotropic edge-oriented symmetric stabilization is employed. This has the advantage that the optimize-then-discretize and discretize-then-optimize approaches coincide. The influence of anisotropic mesh adaptivity on the optimal control problem is extensively investigated numerically on a model test case as well as on an application related to the environmental pollution issue. The analysis is then extended to the Oseen system for a model Dirichlet con.
The Politics of Waste Incineration in Beijing: The Limits of a Top-Down Approach?

The siting of waste incinerators is often a highly contentious issue. Although most studies have focused on Western countries, municipal solid waste management has become an extremely pressing issue in China. Incineration is being strongly promoted by government officials, yet this has resulted in strong societal opposition. Through documentary analysis and in-depth stakeholder interviews, this article analyses three anti-incineration campaigns in Beijing, focusing on outcomes and campaigner strategies. Anti-incineration campaigns have partly undermined the government's top-down, non-consultative approach to waste management. In developing an ‘expert strategy’, campaigners have exploited government weakness whilst depoliticizing the issue. Yet rather than lead to a more open and consultative incineration policy, it is more likely that officials will circumvent unrest through increasing opacity and by choosing sites in locations where opposition is less likely to emerge.
Persistence in corporate networks

We examine the bipartite graphs of German corporate boards in 1993, 1999 and 2005, focusing on their projections onto directors (the “personal” network) and onto companies (the “institutional” network). The novel feature here is our focus on the temporal evolution of the two projections. The personal networks exhibit cores of highly central directors who are densely connected among themselves, while the institutional networks show a persistent core of large corporations whose identity remains mostly the same. This results in the persistent presence of a core network of very large corporations, despite substantial turnover in the identity of directors and significant changes in Germany’s corporate governance during the investigated period. Our findings strongly suggest that core persistence originates from the board appointment decisions of the very largest corporations and is largely independent of personal destinies.
High-dose chemotherapy for children and young adults with stage IV rhabdomyosarcoma.

BACKGROUND Rhabdomyosarcoma is the most common soft tissue sarcoma of childhood. Prognosis for patients with metastatic disease has not improved significantly in the past decades. High-dose chemotherapy (HDC) seems to be an attractive option to treat minimal residual disease in metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma patients. OBJECTIVES The objective of the review was to assess the effectiveness of HDC with stem cell rescue (SRC) versus standard-dose chemotherapy in improving event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS) of children and young adults with metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma. SEARCH STRATEGY We searched the databases of MEDLINE (1966 to December 2009), EMBASE (1980 to December 2009) and CENTRAL (The Cochrane Library Issue 1, 2009). In addition, we handsearched the reference lists of selected papers and conference proceedings of the SIOP, ASPHO and ASCO meetings (all 2000 to 2009). SELECTION CRITERIA Randomised controlled trials (RCT), prospective or historical controlled clinical trials (CCT), in which HDC with SCR was compared to conventional chemotherapy and prospective case series (non-controlled clinical trials) including at least 20 naive metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma patients DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Two review authors independently performed the study selection, quality assessment and data extraction. MAIN RESULTS No RCTs could be identified. We identified one prospective CCT, one retrospective CCT and one non-controlled clinical trial. Another CCT has been published as an abstract. All studies have severe methodological limitations, in particular selection bias could not be excluded. One CCT reported a significantly worse OS compared to oral maintenance therapy, however in a subgroup of high-risk patients no difference could be found. The retrospective CCT reported a similar survival for HDC compared to conventional chemotherapy. The non-controlled clinical trial and the CCT reported as a conference proceeding reported survival outcomes comparable to previous studies. Data on toxicity showed more grade 3-4 toxicity in the HDC group. However, there was no difference in the number of toxic deaths. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS Overall, the results of this review do not justify the use of HDC with SCR as a standard therapy for children with metastatic rhabdomyosarcoma. However, all reported studies were possibly subject to significant bias, especially selection bias. This might have underestimated the measured effect of HDC. As a result, a clinically important excess of adverse risk patients in the HDC arms may explain the non-beneficial effect of HDC. Only a large prospective RCT will be able to answer the question of whether HDC with SCR adds to survival or not definitively.
Do Accrual Numbers Really Affect the Financial Market? An Empirical Analysis of ESA Accounts Across the EU

The adoption of a full accrual framework in the public sector is differentiated country by country both for budgeting and for reporting phases. The purpose of this article is to address the following broader research question: How do accrual numbers affect the financial markets? The 10-year average interest rate on sovereign bonds across the European Union is used as a dependent variable. The results of the research show an unclear relation among the variables investigated. Given this evidence, an alignment between micro- and macroaccounting rules could be pursued. We argue the suitability of the Australian experience in this sense.
Sex differences in the effects of chronic stress and food restriction on body weight gain and brain expression of CRF and relaxin‐3 in rats

This study investigated sex‐specific effects of repeated stress and food restriction on food intake, body weight, corticosterone plasma levels and expression of corticotropin‐releasing factor (CRF) in the hypothalamus and relaxin‐3 in the nucleus incertus (NI). The CRF and relaxin‐3 expression is affected by stress, and these neuropeptides produce opposite effects on feeding (anorexigenic and orexigenic, respectively), but sex‐specific regulation of CRF and relaxin‐3 by chronic stress is not fully understood. Male and female rats were fed ad libitum chow (AC) or ad libitum chow and intermittent palatable liquid Ensure without food restriction (ACE), or combined with repeated food restriction (60% chow, 2 days per week; RCE). Half of the rats were submitted to 1‐h restraint stress once a week. In total, seven weekly cycles were applied. The body weight of the RCE stressed male rats significantly decreased, whereas the body weight of the RCE stressed female rats significantly increased compared with the respective control groups. The stressed female RCE rats considerably overate chow during recovery from stress and food restriction. The RCE female rats showed elevated plasma corticosterone levels and low expression of CRF mRNA in the paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus but not in the medial preoptic area. The NI expression of relaxin‐3 mRNA was significantly higher in the stressed RCE female rats compared with other groups. An increase in the expression of orexigenic relaxin‐3 and misbalanced hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal axis activity may contribute to the overeating and increased body weight seen in chronically stressed and repeatedly food‐restricted female rats.
Interpreting interrelations across multiple levels in HGLM models : An application in international marketing research

Purpose – Although the use of data from different levels is very common in international marketing research, the practice of employing multi‐level analysis techniques is relatively new. The paper aims to provide an application of a specific case of multi‐level modelling – where the dependent variable is dichotomous, which is often the case in marketing research (e.g. whether a consumer buys the brand or not, whether he/she is aware of the brand or not, etc.)Design/methodology/approach – A hierarchical generalized linear model is employed.Findings – Since this is a technical paper, the authors would like to emphasize the process rather than the empirical findings. In summary, the paper: provides a brief theoretical overview of Hierarchical Linear Modeling and Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling; illustrates the application of the method using the domains of consumers within countries and a dichotomous dependent variable; focuses on interpretation of log‐odds results; and concludes with practical issue.
Compressive sensing of full wave field data for structural health monitoring applications

Numerous nondestructive evaluations and structural health monitoring approaches based on guide waves rely on analysis of wave fields recorded through scanning laser Doppler vibrometers (SLDVs) or ultrasonic scanners. The informative content which can be extracted from these inspections is relevant; however, the acquisition process is generally time-consuming, posing a limit in the applicability of such approaches. To reduce the acquisition time, we use a random sampling scheme based on compressive sensing (CS) to minimize the number of points at which the field is measured. The CS reconstruction performance is mostly influenced by the choice of a proper decomposition basis to exploit the sparsity of the acquired signal. Here, different bases have been tested to recover the guided waves wave field acquired on both an aluminum and a composite plate. Experimental results show that the proposed approach allows a reduction of the measurement locations required for accurate signal recovery to less than 34% of the original sampling grid.
Oil Industry Structure and Evolving Markets

Of all the changes in the oil industry over the past 20 years, the most radical have taken place in the market, and in theformation of prices. These are both a response to and a cause of changes in industry structure. From plannable supplies at relatively stable prices, companies have had to learn to handle short-term supplies in condition of extreme volatility. Management of the resulting price risk has become a central role of the companies' supply departments, and the use of paper markets (forward, futures and derivatives) has become an integral part of price formation. It is not impossible that the changes would be reversed, if the conditions that brought them into being—surplus production and de-integrated supply structures—were reversed in conditions of scarcity, but it is highly unlikely. Far more likely, is that risk management and the use of paper markets will increase in importance.
The Operational and Regional Vulnerability of Winter Tourism to Climate Variability and Change: The Case of the Finnish Nature‐Based Tourism Entrepreneurs

The climatic vulnerability of winter tourism activities other than downhill skiing or snowmobiling has remained unstudied even though winter tourism has lately received plenty of attention in relation to climate change. As winter tourism entrepreneurs operate in diverse environments and have diverse customer groups, the sector cannot be considered as one homogenous group. Special attention should be directed to individual activities, especially in the context of the Nordic countries where importance of downhill skiing is relatively low. In this article, the sensitivity of winter tourism activities to climatic events is assessed in a Finnish context using questionnaire data gathered from winter tourism entrepreneurs operating in Finland. According to results, the vulnerability of winter tourism to climate depends both on the activity and on the region where activities are produced. About three‐quarters of winter tourism enterprises are affected by weather events such as high or extremely low temperatures or high wind that cause cancellations. Climate change in Finland is not predicted to shorten the length of the snow season below the critical length as expressed by the entrepreneurs. Considering this, the future of winter tourism in Finland and similar areas may be more sensitive to the changes in the frequency and severity of weather extremes than to the changes in the season lengths.
Co‐Skewness and Capital Asset Pricing

VIRTUALLY ALL OF THE early studies of the Sharpe-Lintner capital asset pricing model (CAPM) found the predicted linear relationship between return and the non-diversifiable risk of risky assets, generally represented by common stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). However, they also found that this return-risk relationship seemed to imply for most periods a riskless market rate of return substantially above any reasonable measure of the actual risk-free rates of return. Recent papers point to a similar result if the market portfolio of risky assets is represented by an appropriately weighted portfolio of common stocks and bonds instead of common stocks alone.1 Thus, it is noteworthy that a study by Kraus and Litzenberger finds that a measure6 of co-skewness can be used as a supplement to the co-variance measure of risk to explain the returns on individual NYSE stocks, and in the process to explain the otherwise observed discrepancies between these returns and the returns on NYSE stocks as a whole.2 In other words, they extend capital asset pricing theory to incorporate the effect of skewness in return distributions, making the assumption that investors have a preference for positive return skewness in their portfolios (and therefore positive or negative co-skewness in individual assets depending on the skewness in the market portfolio). 3 As a consequence Kraus and Litzenberger are apparently able to explain observed returns in the stock market without the substitution of a non-observable zerobeta construct for the risk-free rate. Kraus and Litzenberger assume that just as investors are averse to variance in their portfolios, and therefore beta in individual assets, they prefer positive skewness in their portfolios. Hence, since they also assume that all investors hold the market portfolio, investors would be willing to pay a premium for assets which possess positive co-skewness with the market if
School Leadership and Strategic Planning: The Impact on Local Report Card Ratings

Patrick Pauken, Advisor The Elementary Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, reauthorized as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), increased accountability measures in public schools across the nation. One component of NCLB dictated that school districts publicly report annual summative testing scores. Noting that previous research has shown that school district leadership engaged in the strategic planning process increases student achievement, the State of Ohio formed the Ohio Leadership Advisory Council (OLAC). OLAC’s work embraced the use of leadership led strategic planning and thus wrote the Ohio Improvement Process (OIP) for use in all Ohio districts regardless of size, typology, leadership tenure, or average daily membership. This quantitative causal-comparative study investigates the effect of OIP on Local Report Card (LRC) ratings in Ohio school districts. To determine if differences exist school district leadership responded to a survey that reported 2011-2012 LRC ratings and measured their respective stage of implementation and commitment to OIP. Using responses from the 14-item research constructed survey, data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings from the research show that the impact of OIP on LRC is more complex than previously assumed. Contrary to researcher expectations, the use of OIP did not statistically impact LRC. Future research using Value Added or Performance Index Scores (both growth measures of the LRC) could potentially produce statistically significant results, as they are more specific in nature than the LRC ratings are. Research Question 1 notes 94% of the survey respondents were school district central
Expression and function of multidrug resistance transporters at the blood–brain barriers

The presence of active carrier-mediated transport of substrates from the brain to the blood is a major feature of the barrier properties of the blood–brain barrier (BBB). These proteins lie in the luminal or abluminal membranes of the endothelial cells that form the BBB. Some are ATP-binding cassette proteins (ABC) and many amphipathic cationic drugs are carried by P-glycoprotein (ABCB1) or ABCG2, which lie at the luminal pole of the BBB. Several multidrug resistance-associated proteins (MRPs, ABCCs) are also present on the membranes of brain microvessels; these are mainly involved in the efflux of anionic compounds. All these ABC proteins help to protect the brain and form a critical target for CNS pharmaceuticals, influencing the clinical variability of responses to, and the design of, these drugs.
Religiousness and spiritual support among advanced cancer patients and associations with end-of-life treatment preferences and quality of life.

PURPOSE Religion and spirituality play a role in coping with illness for many cancer patients. This study examined religiousness and spiritual support in advanced cancer patients of diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds and associations with quality of life (QOL), treatment preferences, and advance care planning. METHODS The Coping With Cancer study is a federally funded, multi-institutional investigation examining factors associated with advanced cancer patient and caregiver well-being. Patients with an advanced cancer diagnosis and failure of first-line chemotherapy were interviewed at baseline regarding religiousness, spiritual support, QOL, treatment preferences, and advance care planning. RESULTS Most (88%) of the study population (N = 230) considered religion to be at least somewhat important. Nearly half (47%) reported that their spiritual needs were minimally or not at all supported by a religious community, and 72% reported that their spiritual needs were supported minimally or not at all by the medical system. Spiritual support by religious communities or the medical system was significantly associated with patient QOL (P = .0003). Religiousness was significantly associated with wanting all measures to extend life (odds ratio, 1.96; 95% CI, 1.08 to 3.57). CONCLUSION Many advanced cancer patients' spiritual needs are not supported by religious communities or the medical system, and spiritual support is associated with better QOL. Religious individuals more frequently want aggressive measures to extend life.