Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fiscal decentralization, macrostability and growth

This paper examines how fiscal decentralization may influence economic growth. Previous research on this question has primarily focused on the potential direct relationship between decentralization and growth. In this paper, we also examine the potential indirect influence of decentralization on growth through its impact on macroeconomic stability. Using an international panel data set, we find that fiscal decentralization appears to reduce the rate of inflation in the sample countries and it does not appear to directly influence economic growth. Fiscal decentralization, however, appears to have an indirect, positive effect on growth through its positive influence on macroeconomic stability. The indirect effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth via macroeconomic stability has not been previously identified in the literature.
Learning to resolve geographical and temporal references in text

Geo-temporal information is pervasive over textual documents, since most of them contain references to particular locations, calendar dates, clock times or duration periods. An important text analytics problem is therefore related to resolving the place names and the temporal expressions referenced in the texts, i.e. linking the character strings in the documents that correspond to either locations or temporal instances, to the specific geospatial coordinates or the time intervals that they refer to. However, geo-temporal reference resolution presents several non-trivial problems to the area of text mining, due to the inherent ambiguity and contextual assumptions of natural language discourse.
Isolation of osteogenic growth peptide from osteoblastic MC3T3 E1 cell cultures and demonstration of osteogenic growth peptide binding proteins

The osteogenic growth peptide (OGP) was recently characterized in regenerating bone marrow. In experimental animals it increases osteogenesis and hemopoiesis. In stromal cell cultures OGP stimulates proliferation, alkaline phosphatase activity, and matrix mineralization. OGP in high abundance is present in normal human and animal serum mainly complexed to OGP binding protein (OGPBP) or proteins. Here we show the presence of two OGPBPs, OGPBP‐1, and OGPBP‐2, in cultures of osteoblastic MC3T3 E1 cells. Immunoreactive OGP (irOGP) also accumulates in the medium of these cultures and in cultures of NIH 3T3 fibroblasts. A large amount of irOGP was released by heat inactivation of OGPBP‐2 and purified by ultrafiltration and hydrophobic HPLC. The purified irOGP was identical to OGP obtained previously from rat regenerating bone marrow and human serum in terms of its amino acid sequence, immunoreactivity, and mitogenicity. Osteoblastic and fibroblastic cell proliferation can be arrested by anti‐OGP antibodies and rescued by exogenous OGP, indicating that in the absence of serum or other exogenous growth stimulators the endogenously produced OGP is both necessary and sufficient for baseline proliferation. The OGP production is up‐ and down‐regulated, respectively, by low and high doses and exogenous OGP in a manner consistent with an autoregulated feedback mechanism. The most effective OGP dose in MC3T3 E1 cells is at least two orders of magnitude lower than that in non‐osteoblastic cell systems. This differential sensitivity of the osteoblastic cells could result in a preferential anabolic effect of OGP in bone. J. Cell. Biochem. 65:359–367. © 1997 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Interdomain traffic engineering in a locator/identifier separation context

The Routing Research Group (RRG) of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is currently discussing several architectural solutions to build an interdomain routing architecture that scales better than the existing one. The solutions family currently being discussed concerns the addresses separation into locators and identifiers, LISP being one of them. Such a separation provides opportunities in terms of traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose an open and flexible solution that allows an ISP using identifier/locator separation to engineer its interdomain traffic. Our solution relies on the utilization of a service that transparently ranks paths using cost functions. We implement a prototype server and demonstrate its benefits in a LISP testbed.
MACNET: Mobile Adhoc Collaborative NETworks

Resource limitation is considered as a major bottleneck in smart phones. This paper aims to address this problem by proposing a collaborative ad-hoc network of smart phones which utilizes trust relationship among peer devices to provide a computationally powerful, resilient, available, and low cost solution. MACNET (Mobile Ad-hoc Collaborative NETwork) implements a middleware to address the issues of collaboration, trust, and network connectivity. A large number of applications can utilize the MACNET framework for improved connectivity, rapid response, and better communication. The paper elaborates sample applications and addresses the architectural details of the solution. It also explains the implementation details and provides results to demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits.
Self-Neglect: An Overview

SUMMARY Initially described in 1953, the concept of self-neglect is complex. Definitional problems exist because it can be redefined by changes in context. This article examines the epidemiology, etiology, detection, ethical/legal issues, management/intervention, and outcome. Prevention is particularly difficult given the nature of the problem, the poorly understood etiology, and the slow insidious progression of the syndrome before it reaches public attention. This complexity is compounded by the fact that respect for autonomy and personal rights is given paramount importance over paternalism when an intervention at an earlier stage could potentially result in a better outcome.
Human membrane cofactor protein (CD46) acts as a cellular receptor for measles virus

A monoclonal antibody (MCI20.6) which inhibited measles virus (MV) binding to host cells was previously used to characterize a 57- to 67-kDa cell surface glycoprotein as a potential MV receptor. In the present work, this glycoprotein (gp57/67) was immunopurified, and N-terminal amino acid sequencing identified it as human membrane cofactor protein (CD46), a member of the regulators of complement activation gene cluster. Transfection of nonpermissive murine cells with a recombinant expression vector containing CD46 cDNA conferred three major properties expected of cells permissive to MV infection. First, expression of CD46 enabled MV to bind to murine cells. Second, the CD46-expressing murine cells were able to undergo cell-cell fusion when both MV hemagglutinin and MV fusion glycoproteins were expressed after infection with a vaccinia virus recombinant encoding both MV glycoproteins. Third, M12.CD46 murine B cells were able to support MV replication, as shown by production of infectious virus and by cell biosynthesis of viral hemagglutinin after metabolic labeling of infected cells with [35S]methionine. These results show that the human CD46 molecule serves as an MV receptor allowing virus-cell binding, fusion, and viral replication and open new perspectives in the study of MV pathogenesis.
Preferential Presentation of Japanese Near-synonyms using Definition Statements

This paper proposes a new method of ranking near-synonyms ordered by their suitability of nuances in a particular context. Our method distincts near-synonyms by semantic features extracted from their definition statements in an ordinary dictionary, and ranks them by the types of features and a particular context. Our method is an initial step to achieve a semantic paraphrase system for authoring support.
Ultrastructural Cutaneous Microvascular Pathology of Young Adults Aged up to 50 Years with Chronic Kidney Disease and Vascular Cognitive Impairment

Background: Studies suggest a link between chronic kidney disease and cognitive impairment. Skin biopsy is hire in the study of leucoaraiosis since permit establish the responsible vascular pathology of subcortical white matter changes because the pathological hallmark is systemic. The aim was to study the ultrastructural changes of cutaneous small vessel of patients aged up to 50 years with chronic kidney disease (CKD) and vascular cognitive impairment (VCI). Methods: Clinical, laboratorial, cerebral imaging, neuropsycological evaluation for executive functions (Clox test), and skin biopsy to 4 patients aged up to 50 years with CKD and VCI were done. Skin biopsy was prepared for conventional transmission electron microscopy study. Results: Clinical diagnosis included hypertension, diabetes, and CKD in all cases. All cases developed VCI in a relatively short period. Small vessels study revealed small vessel disease type-degenerative microangiopathy. The principal findings were increase of wall–lumen ratio, thickened basal membrane, and collagen fibers proliferation. Conclusions: Cutaneous degenerative microangiopathy is matched with cerebral microvascular pathology and could be important for the development of cognitive impairment in young adults with CKD. The characterization of microvascular pathology in skin biopsies, in this type of patients, could contribute to the knowledge of some pathophysiological and therapeutical topics and possibly be useful in clinical setting. Added patients are needed to establish a complete characterization of microangiopathy.
Kinematics and singularity analysis of a novel decoupled translational parallel manipulator

A novel three-degrees-of-freedom fully-decoupled translational parallel manipulator, in which every limb contains a parallelogram, is presented. The analytic equations of the direct and the inverse kinematics are derived. Motion range of the actuated cylindrical joints is discussed. Furthermore, the singular configuration of the parallel manipulator is analyzed systemically according to the singularity of both the direct and the inverse Jacobian matrices. Because Jacobian matrix remains a triangular matrix throughout the entire workspace, the mechanism is a fully-decoupled one. Thus, it is simpler in aspects of controllability and path planning of the mechanism. In addition, the existence of the parallelogram in the limbs improves the manipulator's stiffness. Therefore, the manipulator has a potential wide range of applications in coordinate measuring machine, virtual machine tool and others.
VirtuOS: an operating system with kernel virtualization

Most operating systems provide protection and isolation to user processes, but not to critical system components such as device drivers or other system code. Consequently, failures in these components often lead to system failures. VirtuOS is an operating system that exploits a new method of decomposition to protect against such failures. VirtuOS exploits virtualization to isolate and protect vertical slices of existing OS kernels in separate service domains. Each service domain represents a partition of an existing kernel, which implements a subset of that kernel's functionality. Unlike competing solutions that merely isolate device drivers, or cannot protect from malicious and vulnerable code, VirtuOS provides full protection of isolated system components. VirtuOS's user library dispatches system calls directly to service domains using an exceptionless system call model, avoiding the cost of a system call trap in many cases. We have implemented a prototype based on the Linux kernel and Xen hypervisor. We demonstrate the viability of our approach by creating and evaluating a network and a storage service domain. Our prototype can survive the failure of individual service domains while outperforming alternative approaches such as isolated driver domains and even exceeding the performance of native Linux for some multithreaded workloads. Thus, VirtuOS may provide a suitable basis for kernel decomposition while retaining compatibility with existing applications and good performance.
Locating TDs in Policy Spaces: The Computational Text Analysis of Dáil Speeches

This article adapts a new technique for the computerised analysis of political texts, previously used to analyse party manifestos, to the analysis of speeches made in a legislature. The benefits of computerised text analysis come from the ability to analyse, for the first time, complex and daunting electronic sources of text, such as the parliamentary record. This allows the systematic estimation of the policy positions of individual political actors, with huge benefits both for theory development and empirical analysis. In this article, the technique is used to analyse all 58 English language speeches made in the October 1991 confidence debate on the future of the incumbent Fianna Fáil-PD coalition. The task was to use the words spoken in the debate to locate every one of the individual speakers on a 'pro- versus anti-government' dimension. The purpose was, first, to examine the validity of computerised text analysis when applied to legislative speeches and, second, to answer substantively interesting questions about the positions of individual Irish legislators in 1991. The results vindicate the use of computerised analysis in the context of legislative speeches and locate all speakers in the 1991 debate in a substantively interesting policy space.
Sequential and parallel letter processing in letter-by-letter dyslexia

Four experiments are reported that focus on the issue of sequential vs. parallel letter processing in letter-by-letter (LBL) dyslexia; these were conducted on patient IH. Expt. 1 showed a large linear reduction of word naming times with an increase in the number of orthographic neighbours of the target (i.e., words of the same length differing by just one letter; N size). Given the large negative linear correlation existing between word length and N size, this result raises the possibility that the large word length effect diagnostic of LBL dyslexia may be, in fact, an artefact of uncontrolled N size. Expt. 2 falsified this possibility by showing that the word length effect is unaffected by whether N size is controlled for or not. This result also suggested that the facilitatory effect of increased N size in LBL dyslexia is based on the parallel processing of the constituent letters of the target. Further supporting a contribution of parallel letter processing to overt word recognition performance in the disorder, Expt. 3 showed significant but independent effects of word length and letter confusability (i.e., similarity of the constituent letters of the target word with other letters of the alphabet). The letter confusability effect therefore appears to rest on the parallel analysis of the letters in the target word. Finally, Expt. 4 showed that the facilitatory effect of N size is prevented with high letter-confusability targets. These observations suggest that LBL dyslexia rests on an impairment of letter encoding that results in an excessive level of background noise in the activation of lexical-orthographic representations when letters are processed in parallel. This prevents overt identification of the target and forces sequential letter processing in order to achieve this goal.
Semantic-PlaceBrowser : Understanding Place for Place-Scale Context-Aware Computing

Our view of environment for context-aware applications is a place, which contains devices, digital services and people with their social contexts. Therefore, understanding place will contribute to the successful of applications. In this paper, we introduce two issues: (i) there is a need for sharing context knowledge about place; (ii) using a multiagent framework for modeling place will improve the system scalability and robustness. To support the idea, we have built a tool called SematicPlaceBrowser for discovering place context and contributing to the knowledge base. The knowledge base can be shared and contributed among different applications. The SemanticPlaceBrowser can be deployed at different scales, such as from a place as small as a room or as big as a shopping complex.
Multi-object Motion Pattern Classification for Visual Surveillance and Sports Video Retrieval

This paper presents a method to classify scenes based on motion information. While they use object trajectories or optical flow field as motion information in previous work, we use the instantaneous motions of multiple objects in each image. In order to deal with variable number of objects in a scene, we use moment statistics as features. Our approach is based on clustering, a form of unsupervised learning, and needs little human intervention. Furthermore, the probabilistic model based clustering makes it easy to detect scenes with novel patterns.
Transformational classroom leadership: a novel approach to evaluating classroom performance

In higher education, student evaluation of teaching is widely used as a measure of an academic’s teaching performance despite considerable disagreement as to its value. This paper begins by examining the merit of teaching evaluations with reference to the factors influencing the accuracy of the teaching evaluation process. One of the central assumptions on which student evaluation of teaching is based is that there is a relationship between student achievement and student rating of teachers. However, the findings of the majority of studies do not support this assumption. The absence of a strong link between student achievement and teaching evaluations suggests that there is scope for examining other approaches to measuring effective classroom dynamics. This paper presents such an approach based on the notion of transformational classroom leadership.
The impact of formative feedback on the development of academic writing

This paper presents a small‐scale exploratory study, which focuses on the impact of formative assessment that was provided as part of a writing intervention in a first‐year undergraduate programme. Qualitative data were collected to find evidence of use of formative feedback, and of resulting improvements, as well as to shed some light on students’ inclination to use feedback. Uptake and use of the formative feedback was assessed by an analysis of feedback comments on students’ texts as well as by students’ interviews. The findings showed that students who had utilised their feedback comments improved in the areas previously criticised. In the texts of several students, however, the same problems persisted; it became apparent in the interviews that they had paid little attention to their feedback comments and not acted upon them. The interviews also uncovered reasons for engagement or non‐engagement with the feedback. These include students’ high or low motivation based on the enjoyment of the degree programme and self‐perceptions of their ability as writers. It is argued that more attention needs to be paid to tone, style and amount of feedback comments to ensure that students with low motivation and a low self‐perception utilise them.
Deadlock risk assessment in architectural models of real-time systems

Software Architectural Assessment is a key discipline to identify at early stages of a system synthesis the problems that may become critical in its operation. This matter is especially relevant for those systems with real-time constraints. In this paper a special emphasis shall be made on concurrency issues. Typical mechanisms supporting concurrency, such as semaphores or monitors, usually lead to concurrency problems in execution time hard to identify, reproduce and solve. For this reason it is crucial to understand the root causes of these problems and to provide support to identify and mitigate them at early stages of the system lifecycle.
Latent Semantic Analysis for Classifying Scene Images

—With the increase of digital images, how to classify digital images efficiently becomes an important research topic. Semantic analysis that is used in the scene image classification has received much attention. The digital images are represented by low-level features often. It is a valuable research to reduce semantic gap between the high-level semantic and low-level features. This study proposes a new scene image classification method. The latent semantic analysis is used to select the important low-level features of the scene. Then scene similarity measurement is used to classify images. Experimental results show that the proposed method in the classifying scenes images has better correct classification ratio than frequency feature analysis. Index Terms—image classification latent semantic analysis low-level features scene image.
Optimal trade-off between sampling rate and quantization precision in A/D conversion

The jointly optimized sampling rate and quantization precision in A/D conversion is studied. In particular, we consider a basic pulse code modulation A/D scheme in which a stationary process is sampled and quantized by a scalar quantizer. We derive an expression for the minimal mean squared error under linear estimation of the analog input from the digital output, which is also valid under sub-Nyquist sampling. This expression allows for the computation of the sampling rate that minimizes the error under a fixed bitrate at the output, which is the result of an interplay between the number of bits allocated to each sample and the distortion resulting from sampling. We illustrate the results for several examples, which demonstrate the optimality of sub-Nyquist sampling in certain cases.
A miniaturized rat-race coupler with arbitrary power division using dual transmission lines

In this paper, the dual transmission line is exploited to implement a miniaturized rat-race coupler with an arbitrary power division ratio. The dual transmission line is composed of two parallel-connected high-impedance transmission lines with unequal electrical lengths. It has the advantage of the circuit layout flexibility and the circuit size reduction. The developed rat-race coupler only occupies a 41.5 % circuit size of the conventional one.