Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plasma beta-endorphin, adrenocorticotropin hormone, and cortisol in autism.

Plasma levels of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis hormones beta-endorphin (BE), adrenocorticotropin hormone (ACTH), and cortisol were measured in autistic (N = 48), mentally retarded/cognitively impaired (MR/CI, N = 16), and normal control (N = 26) individuals. Comparison of log transformed data from the three groups revealed that levels of BE and ACTH were significantly higher (p < .05) in the autistic individuals than in normal controls. The higher means in the autistic group were due to significantly higher plasma levels of BE and ACTH, indices of acute stress response, in the more severely affected individuals. The data support the idea that individuals with severe autism have a heightened response to acute stressors rather than chronic hyperarousal or elevated basal stress response system functioning.
Issues in Museum Management Policies: Evidence from Xi’an, China

ABSTRACT This article is based on a survey of 493 visitors to Shaanxi History Museum, Xi’an, China. The purpose of the research was to assess attitudes toward the exhibitions and the sources of visitor satisfaction, and the consequences of a free entry policy adopted by the Museum in response to the directive of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and State Administration of Cultural Heritage of January 23, 2008. Three dimensions for visitor satisfaction were found—an affective reaction to the modes of presentation, a cognitive reaction to learning about Chinese history, and an affective reaction of a sense of awe and pride in that history. As part of the pricing policy, additional charges are made for special exhibitions, and evidence exists of a consumer surplus for significant groups of visitors at current entry prices that are normally 20 RMB. In this article the authors discussed issues related to a need to adopt merchandising, the provision of better ancillary services, and the role that such services can play in enhancing visitor satisfaction.
Taxes and the Pricing of Stock Index Futures

Stock index futures prices are generally below the level predicted by simple arbitrage models. This paper suggests that the discrepancy between the actual and predicted prices is caused by taxes. Capital gains and losses are not taxed until they are realized. As Constantinides demonstrates in a recent paper, this gives stockholders a valuable timing option. If the stock price drops, the investor can pass part of the loss on to the government by selling the stock. On the other hand, if the stock price rises, the investor can postpone the tax by not realizing the gain. Since this option is not available to stock index futures traders, the futures prices will be lower than standard no-tax models predict. ON 24 FEBRUARY 1982, the Kansas City Board of Trade began trading futures contracts on the Value Line Average stock index. During the next two months, both the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Futures Exchange also initiated trading in stock index futures. Although these contracts are actively traded, their prices have puzzled both practitioners and academics. The observed
Bank Supervision Russian Style: Evidence of Conflicts Between Micro- and Macro-Prudential Concerns

Supervisors sometimes have to manage both the micro- and macro- prudential dimensions of bank stability. These may either conflict or complement each other. We analyze prudential supervision by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR). We find evidence of micro-prudential concerns, measured as the rule-based enforcement of bank standards. Macro-prudential concerns are also documented: Banks in concentrated bank markets, large banks, money center banks and large deposit banks are less likely to face license withdrawal. Further, the CBR is reluctant to withdraw licenses when there are “too many banks to fail”. Finally, macro-prudential concerns induce regulatory forbearance, revealing conflicts with micro-prudential objectives.
Wage Differentials, Rate of Return to Education, and Occupational Wage Share in the Labour Market of Pakistan

This paper examines the magnitude of public/private wage differentials in Pakistan using data drawn from the 2001-02 Labour Force Survey. Pakistan Labour Force Survey is a nationwide survey containing micro data from all over the country containing demographic and employment information. As in many other countries, public sector workers in Pakistan tend to have higher average pay and educational levels as compared to their private sector counterparts. First, this paper presents the inter-sectoral earning equations for the three main sectors of the economy, i.e., public, private, and state-owned enterprises. These results are further decomposed into “treatment” and “endowment effect”. To examine the role of human capital in wage gap, the rate of return to different levels of schooling is calculated. These rates of return to education may be important for policy formulation. The relative earning share is also worked out to look into the distribution of wages across the occupational categories. The earning equations are estimated with and without correction for selectivity, which is also the main objective of the study, i.e., to find out if any non-random selection is taking place within these three sectors of employment
Pediatric orthopedic physical examination of the infant: a 5-minute assessment.

A review of recent literature in pediatrics, pediatric orthopedics, and general orthopedics revealed a lack of information on pediatric orthopedic assessment of the newborn and infant. This paper presents a description of a 3-to-5 minute physical examination intended to detect congenital anomalies of the musculo-skeletal system, or to reassure the concerned parents that their offspring is healthy. An initial review of the family, prenatal, and birth history may alert the examiner to specific problems. Difficult vaginal labor and delivery of a large infant may cause clavicular fracture or brachial plexus injury. Breech delivery suggesting developmental dysplasia of the hip joint is one such example. Physical examination is performed from head to toe with the baby laid supine in a warm room with no direct light shining on the face. It is useful to talk throughout the physical examination.
Language, logic, and the brain

Summary form only given. Language is primarily a physical, more particularly a biological phenomenon. To say that it is primarily so is to say that that is how, in the first instance, it presents itself to observation. It is curious then that theoreticians of language treat it as though it were primarily semantic or syntactic or a fusion of the two, and as though our implicit understanding of semantics and the syntax regulates both our language production and our language comprehension. The brain is both a repository of semantic and syntactic constraints, and is the instrument by which we draw upon these accounts for the hard currency of linguistic exchange. With this view comes a division of the vocables of language into those that carry semantic content (lexical vocabulary) and those that mark syntactic form (functional and logical vocabulary). Logical theory of the past 150 years has been understood by many as a purified abstraction of linguistic forms. So it is not surprising that the "logical" vocabulary of natural language has been understood in the reflected light of that formal science. Those internal transactions in which "logical" vocables essentially figure, the transactions that we think of as reasonings, are seen by many as constrained by those laws of thought that logic was thought to codify. Of course no vocabulary can be entirely independent of semantic understanding, but whereas the meaning of lexical vocabulary varies from context to context (run on the treadmill, run on the market, run-on sentence, etc.) logical vocabulary has fixed minimal semantic content independent of context.
Cooperative Investments and the Value of Contracting

Recent articles have shown that contracts can support the efficient outcome for bilateral trade even in the face of specific investments and incomplete contracting. These studies typically considered 'selfish' investments that benefit the investor (e.g., the seller's investment reduces her production costs). The authors find very different results for 'cooperative' investments that directly benefit the investor's partner (e.g., the seller's investment improves the buyer's value of the good). Most importantly, if committing not to renegotiate the contract is impossible, then contracting has no value, i.e., the parties cannot do better than to abandon contracting altogether in favor of ex post negotiation.
The Virtual Workspace: Telework, Disabilities and Public Policy

Although policymakers are beginning to recognize that the use of ICTs can be used to help create reasonable workplace accommodation for people with disabilities, focused, comprehensive programs targeted at advancing these applications of ICT have yet to be developed. This paper provides an overview and a philosophical comparison of both the U.S. and European policies on telework for people with disabilities.
Welfare Caseload Change: An Alternative Approach

In the last decade, caseloads in AFDC/TANF have shifted dramatically up, then down. Of existing studies based on time series or state panel data, some tend to underplay the role of welfare reform. All say little about what policies drove the decline or about the role of governmental quality. An approach using cross-sectional models explains interstate differences in caseload change rather than the national trend but allows more discussion about the role of policy and government. Results suggest that grant levels, work and child support requirements, and sanctions are important explainers of change, along with some demographic terms and unemployment. These policies in turn are tied to states’ political opinion, political culture, and institutional capacity. Moralistic states seem the most capable of transforming welfare in the manner the public wants.
Serum ferritin is a different predictor from transfusion history for allogeneic transplantation outcome in patients with severe aplastic anemia

ABSTRACT Objectives: Severe aplastic anemia (SAA) patients receive more red blood cell (RBC) transfusions as supportive management. We aim to clarify the associations between transfusion history or pre-transplantation serum ferritin (SF) and the overall survival of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) among SAA patients. Material and methods: We retrospectively investigated 96 SAA patients undergoing allo-HSCT, and grouped them according to pre-transplantation duration. Pre-transplantation SF, transfused units and other iron-related parameters were collected. Comparisons in transplantation outcomes and complications were made in groups with different SF levels and different transfusion histories. Results: Among the 96 SAA patients, 45 patients received transplantation within 2 months after diagnosis (short-term pre-transplantation period), and the rest of the patients had long-term pre-transplantation treatment. Among the patients with short-term pre-transplantation treatment, a higher risk of death was seen in the high-ferritin group (p < 0.05). Elevated SF also predicted a trend in incidence of higher bloodstream infection (p = 0.108). Significant correlations were observed between pre-transplantation SF and infection incidence, as well as transfusion history. However, for patients with longer pre-transplantation duration, transfusion history was associated with worse outcome (p = 0.026), in terms of higher incidence of acute graft versus host disease (p = 0.048). High SF was only significantly associated with prolonged RBC transfusion dependence post-transplantation (p = 0.044). Discussion and conclusions: Transfusion history was a stronger predictor of outcome than SF in patients undergoing transplantation more than 2 months after diagnosis.
Pinteresting: towards a better understanding of user interests

The ascendance of interest-based social networks allows for developing better models of user interest in the context of established and new tasks, connecting interests with demographic characteristics, studying changes in user interests with respect to time and location or mining interest data to build broadly useful resources. This submission focuses on Pinterest, a growing social bookmarking site; it identifies research avenues for improving the user experience and for exploiting Pinterest data for broader uses.
South Asia

Unlike many other regions of the world that have been experiencing steadily increasing levels of economic and political integration, South Asia remains stubbornly slow in enhancing levels of regional cooperation. This article looks at the issue through the mechanism of the Regional Security Community Theory and asks whether this theory has any relevance for South Asia. It concludes that purist notions of what makes such communities are not likely to be relevant to South Asia for some time. But if one takes a more flexible approach to the theoretical construct, and looks to issues which attend the nascent phase of the development of such communities, one may both discern developments and outline possible strategies that can help to bring about changes in the region's political and strategic reality.
Report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress

As GDP is a measure of market capacity and not economic well-being, this report has been commissioned to more accurately understand the social progress indicators of any given state. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used measure of economic activity. There are international standards for its calculation, and much thought has gone into its statistical and conceptual bases. But GDP mainly measures market production, though it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions. One reason why money measures of economic performance and living standards have come to play such an important role in our societies is that the monetary valuation of goods and services makes it easy to add up quantities of a very different nature. When we know the prices of apple juice and DVD players, we can add up their values and make statements about production and consumption in a single figure. But market prices are more than an accounting device. Economic theory tells us that when markets are functioning properly, the ratio of one market price to another is reflective of the relative appreciation of the two products by those who purchase them. Moreover, GDP captures all final goods in the economy, whether they are consumed by households, firms or government. Valuing them with their prices would thus seem to be a good way of capturing, in a single number, how well-off society is at a particular moment. Furthermore, keeping prices unchanged while observing how quantities of goods and services that enter GDP move over time would seem like a reasonable way of making a statement about how society’s living standards are evolving in real terms. As it turns out, things are more complicated. First, prices may not exist for some goods and services (if for instance government provides free health insurance or if households are engaged in child care), raising the question of how these services should be valued. Second, even where there are market prices, they may deviate from society’s underlying valuation. In particular, when the consumption or production of particular products affects society as a whole, the price that individuals pay for those products will differ from their value to society at large. Environmental damage caused by production or consumption activities that is not reflected in market prices is a well-known example.
Why money matters: Wicksell, Keynes, and the new consensus view on monetary policy

One of the greatest achievements of the modern mainstream approach to monetary policy is to have rejected the old quantity-theoretic framework, and to have replaced it with a Wicksellian two-interest-rate analysis, which closely reflects the actual behavior of central banks around the world. Starting with a presentation of Wicksell's two-interest-rate analysis and its policy implications, this paper evaluates these recent developments in monetary thought and monetary policy in terms of the acceptance or not of the axiom of neutrality of money and monetary policy.
Low voltage, high speed RF switch with high switching capacitance ratio

In this paper the principle, design and fabrication process of low-voltage, high speed RF switch is presented. The aluminium as the electrodes and the PECVD silicon carbide were selected as electrodes and shield materials, respectively. The operating voltage as low as 0.8 volt and high switching capacitance ratio of 180 is reported
A market-augmented model for SIMEX Brent crude oil futures contracts

Brent crude oil futures contracts are traded on both the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX) and the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE). Through a mutual offset system between SIMEX and IPE, Brent crude oil futures contracts can be traded up to nineteen hours each day. The inter-relationship between the two futures contracts, the spot price of Brent crude oil and the riskfree interest rate, suggest the existence of cointegration among SIMEX Brent crude oil futures prices, lagged IPE Brent crude oil futures prices, Brent spot prices and the London Inter-bank Offer Rate (LIBOR). Error-correction representations of two standard futures pricing models, namely the unbiased expectations and cost-of-carry hypotheses, are formulated for SIMEX Brent crude oil futures contracts. These formulations are augmented by including the lagged IPE futures price in the mispricing error. The resulting Augmented Unbiased Expectations Hypothesis (AUEH) and the Augmented Cost-of-Carry (ACOC) models are estimated and tested against each other, and also against the standard unbiased expectations and cost-of-carry models, using nested and non-nested testing procedures. Forecasting comparisons are also made among the various models and the autoregressive integrated moving average models fitted to SIMEX Brent crude oil futures prices. Results from the nonnested tests and the forecasting criteria show clearly that the augmented models outperform their standard (non-augmented) counterparts.
CHINA AND ITS DOLLAR PEG - THE TRUE SOURCE OF GROWTH?

In recent years, the Chinese economy has been growing rapidly and attracting attention of researchers worldwide. However, its policy of fixing Yuan to US Dollar has attracted criticisms from one of Chinas main competitors in the world market  the USA, demanding appreciation of Yuan. This essay by Maria Bridgeman makes an enquiry into the validity of these allegations. The author uses the Mundell-Fleming IS/LM/BP framework to analyse the situation, assesses the role played by the peg in this countrys economic expansion, examines the theory of pegging in the context of other countries experiences and presents her arguments for sustaining the peg, denying the American critique of this policy.
The Role of Perspective-Taking Ability in Negotiating under Different Forms of Arbitration

This study investigates whether the ability of negotiators to adopt the perspective of their opponents is a key to success in negotiating under conventional and final-offer arbitration. The authors tested this question in an experiment in which 80 pairs of students engaged in two sets of negotiations. The results suggest that both the perspective-taking ability of the negotiators and the type of arbitration affect negotiations—as measured by concession rate, number of issues resolved, and outcome success (the dollar value of the contract obtained)—and such attitudes as perceived agreement with and control over the outcome. The authors also find that negotiating experience affects various process and outcome measures of the negotiation as well as perceived control over and agreement with the outcome.
Intra-Firm Diffusion of Innovation: Evidence from Tunisian SMEs Regarding Information and Communication Technologies

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we want to explore the intra-firm diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) within Tunisian firms and to characterize its general trends regarding adoption and usage. Second, we want to emphasize the rank and epidemic effects highlighted by the disequilibrium models of intra-firm diffusion of innovation following the traditional view of Mansfield (1963a) and Antonelli (1985). Based on a face-to-face questionnaire of a random sample of 175 firms, our article shows that: (i) Three technological waves of ICT adoption are well characterized in the Tunisian manufacturing sector. This dynamic of adoption is linked to the age of the technologies. Time is the main explanatory variable for intra-firm diffusion of these technologies. (ii) A positive correlation between the size of the firm, seniority and the depth of adoption is found. This econometric estimation shows that the rank effect is well characterized within the Tunisian firms. (iii) A positive correlation between technological absorptive capacity building and intensity of ICT usage is found. This correlation confirms the epidemic effect. Our results show that disequilibrium model explanations of intra-firm diffusion of innovation are valid within the Tunisian manufacturing sector and seem more appropriate than the equilibrium theory for developing countries.
IgA and IgG Antitransglutaminase 2 Antibodies in the Diagnosis of Celiac Disease

Screening for celiac disease (CD) dramatically improved when techniques able to measure blood autoantibodies against tissue transglutaminase 2 (TTG) were developed. Although typically increased in CD, these antibodies are not pathognomonic since they are also detected in several other autoimmune processes. IgA deficiency among celiac patients is more frequent than in general population (up to 25% vs 1-3%). This led to develop kits able to measure IgG-TTG, which until today represent a helpful diagnostic tool during diagnosis of CD in IgA deficient individuals. Today, commercial kits measuring IgG- TTG (and other) antibodies are widely available, are frequently used and create confusion in diagnosing CD in IgA-sufficient individuals. This is attributed to the fact that sensitivity and specificity of IgG-TTG is lower when applied to IgA-sufficient persons, and also because IgG-TTG is detected in several autoimmune disorders, with variable frequency and isotypes depending on the condition. Evidence analyzed indicate that to date available data: i) is insufficient to understand the difference of classes and subclasses detected in CD and other autoimmune conditions; ii) does not support the use of IgG-TTG for diagnosing CD in IgA-sufficient individuals and therefore iii) IgG should not be used in the routine diagnostic process of CD.