Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the social stability of coalitional property rights regimes

Abstract. We present a model of coalitional property rights (CPR) regimes– regimes in which ownership of a good is attributable to coalitions of various sizes. Specifically, for each good, we define a legal structure that specifies the legal coalitions of individuals that share a communal claim to that good. Generally, each legal coalition may use exclusionary rules to allocate its holdings internally. These rules allow eligible subcoalitions to recontract by expropriating some fraction of the legal coalition's endowment. We then ask: what types of CPR regimes are socially stable in the sense of having a nonempty core? We give conditions on the legal structure and the primitives of the economy that achieve social stability in this sense. We emphasize two cases of particular interest. (I) Unanimity. Unanimity is required for a legal coalition to recontract against (block) the status quo. In this case, the core is nonempty under standard assumptions. Each agent's ability to veto an alternative allocation allows a partial characterization in terms of the economies that are privatized by dividing up the communal endowment among the members of each legal coalition. We show that in some economies' collective vs private ownership matters in terms of social stability. (II) Exclusion. Many eligible subcoalitions can expropriate the legal coalition's entire endowment. An example is the collection of simple majorities. The presence of cycles can easily lead to social instability. We show that if endowment holdings are sufficiently “specialized” and each agent's “veto power” sufficiently large, then stability can be achieved despite the presence of cycles in some goods.
Politicians, Bureaucrats and Administrative Reform

1. Civil servants and politicians: the changing balance B. Guy Peters and Jon Pierre Part I The Anglo-American Democracies 2. Public service bargains and public service reform Christopher Hood 3. Reinventing government, or reinventing politics? The american experience Joel D. Alberach and Bert A. Rockman 4. Agencies, ministers and civil servants in Britain Brian W. Hogwood, D. Judge and M. McVicar Part II Continental Europe 5.Bureaucrats and politicians in the politics of administrative reforms in France (1988-1997) Phillipe Bezes 6. A solid rock in rough seas? Institutional change and continuity in the German federal bureaucracy Eckhard Schroter 7. New public management from a theoretical and Austrian perspective Barbara Liegl 8. Politicians, bureaucrats and administrative reform in Hungary: who stops whom? Laszlo Vass 9. Bureaucratic politics in Spain: a long lasting tradition Carlos Alba 10. (Re)shaping the politics-administration nexus in Greece: the decline of a symbiotic relationship? Calliope Spanou Part III Scandinavia 11. Bureaucratic autonomy as a political asset Jorgen Gronnegaard Christensen 12. Parallel paths? : administrative reform, public policy and politico-bureaucratic relationships in Sweden Jon Pierre 13. Reform "industry" in the Finnish government: towards the new welfare idea through the central and local administrative reforms of the 1980s and 1990s Ari Salminen Part IV The Pacific Region 14. Politicians, bureaucrats and public sector reform in Australia and New Zealand John Halligan 15. Party members, elite bureaucrats and government reform in Japan's changing political landscape Akira Nakamura Part V Conclusions 16. The comparative dimension of administrative reform: creating open villages nad redesigning the politics of administration Theo Toonen
Computer vision based object detection and recognition for vehicle driving

Applying computer technology to vehicle driving has been studied for many years. Most of the studies focused on autonomous vehicle driving in a simplified environment like freeways, or life independent systems like GPS. A general case where kind of unexpectedly fatal conditions may occur which we are driving in an urban area, however, has not been considered. We proposed a system to satisfy the basic criteria for such a general driving assistance. We detect the obstacles on the ground in front of the vehicle we are driving, and then classify them into three predefined categories: pedestrians, vehicles and others. In the proposed system, we exploit a simplified stereovision system to detect the obstacles instantly. After that, to search and track pedestrians and vehicles, different methods are used for adapting to their heterogeneity. For the sake of implementation, we also propose a method to decide the maximal speed of driving to keep such kind of systems working.
Anti-inflammatory effects of potato extract on a rat model of cigarette smoke–induced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Highlights: (1) Potato extract (PE) exhibits non-toxic effects on mice. (2) Cigarette smoke (CS)–induced COPD rats exhibit significant thickened and disordered lung markings. (3) PE could improve the histopathological symptoms of lung tissue in COPD. (4) PE could increase the expression of IL-10 and reduce the expression of TNF-α and G-CSF in COPD rats. Objective This study aimed to evaluate the therapeutic effects of potato extract (PE) on cigarette smoke (CS)–induced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Methods PE was first prepared by frozen centrifugation, and its amino acid composition was detected. Toxicity of PE was analyzed by changes in morphology, behavior, routine blood indexes, and biochemical criteria of mice. Then, the COPD rat model was established by CS exposure, and PE, doxofylline, and prednisolone acetate were used to treat these rats. After 45 days of treatment, the morphology and behavior of rats were recorded. In addition, the histopathology of lung tissue was evaluated by chest x-ray and hematoxylin and eosin staining. The expression of interleukine-10 (IL-10), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) was detected in serum and lung tissue by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and immunohistochemistry, respectively. Results Various amino acids were identified in PE, and no toxicity was exhibited in mice. The CS-induced COPD rat model was successfully established, which exhibited significant thickened and disordered lung markings on 90% of the rats. After administering doxofylline and prednisolone acetate, inflammation symptoms were improved. However, side effects such as emaciation, weakness, and loosening of teeth appeared. In the PE group, obviously improved histopathology was observed in lung tissues. Meanwhile, it was revealed that PE could increase the expression of IL-10 and reduce the expression of TNF-α and G-CSF in COPD rats, and doxofylline and prednisolone acetate also elicited similar results. Conclusion Our study suggests PE might be effective in the treatment of CS-induced COPD by inhibiting inflammation.
Caveolin-1 in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex Modulates Chronic Neuropathic Pain via Regulation of NMDA Receptor 2B Subunit

Chronic pain is still a basic science and clinical challenge. Unraveling of the neurobiological mechanisms involved in chronic pain will offer novel targets for the development of therapeutic strategies. It is well known that central sensitization in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) plays a critical role in initiation, development, and maintenance of chronic pain. However, the underlying mechanisms still remain elusive. Here, we reported that caveolin-1 (Cav-1), a scaffolding protein in membrane rafts, was persistently upregulated and activated in the ACC neurons after chronic constriction injury (CCI) in mice. Knockdown or blocking of Cav-1 in the contralateral ACC to the injury side reversed CCI-induced pain behavioral and neuronal sensitization and overexpression of Cav-1 in the ipsilateral ACC-induced pain behavior in the unaffected hindpaw. Furthermore, we found that Cav-1 directly binding with NMDA receptor 2B subunit (NR2B) and promotion of NR2B surface levels in the ACC contributed to modulation of chronic neuropathic pain. Disrupting the interaction of Cav-1 and NR2B through microinjection of a short peptide derived from the C-terminal of NR2B into the ACC exhibited a significant anti-nociception effect associated with decrease of surface NR2B expression. Moreover, Cav-1 increased intracellular Ca2+ concentration and activated the ERK/CREB signaling pathway in an NR2B-dependent manner in the ACC. Our findings implicate that Cav-1 in the ACC neurons modulates chronic neuropathic pain via regulation of NR2B and subsequent activation of ERK/CREB signaling, suggesting a possible caveolin-mediated process would participate in neuronal transmission pathways implicated in pain modulation.
Concordance of folate receptor-α expression between biopsy, primary tumor and metastasis in breast cancer and lung cancer patients

Folate receptor alpha (FRα) is known to be upregulated in a variety of cancers, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and breast cancer. To ensure reliable implementation of diagnostic- and therapeutic agents, concordance of FRα expression between biopsy, primary tumor and metastases is important. Using immunohistochemistry (Mab 26B3.F2) these concordances were investigated in 60 NSCLC and 40 breast cancer patients. False positivity of FRα expression on breast and lung cancer biopsies was limited to less than 5%. In NSCLC, FRα expression was shown in 21/34 adenocarcinomas and 4/26 squamous cell carcinomas (SCC). Concordance of FRα expression between biopsy and primary tumor was achieved in respectively 83% and 91% of adenocarcinomas and SCCs. Approximately 80% of all local and distant metastases of NSCLC patients showed concordant FRα expression as their corresponding primary tumor. In breast cancer, FRα positivity was shown in 12/40 biopsies, 20/40 lumpectomies and 6/20 LN metastases, with concordance of 68% between biopsy and primary tumor and 60% between primary tumor and LN metastases. In conclusion, this study shows high concordance rates of FRα expression between biopsies and metastases compared to primary NSCLC and breast cancers, underscoring the applicability of FRα-targeted agents in these patients.
Static losses and controllability of current fed dimmable LED drivers

The paper presents synthesis and comparison of several drivers of original topologies for LED dimming. The work is based on the hypothesis that the direct current control, in contrast to indirect voltage control, is very useful in LED applications where luminous flux is almost proportional to LED's current. In order to confirm or disprove this hypothesis, several current fed LED ballasts have been synthesized based on corresponding voltage fed converters and known rules of their transformation. The synthesized circuits are mathematically described and experimentally tested. The obtained results show that the approach is useful from the point of view of controllability of LED lamp. Special attention is paid to the estimation of static losses of the LED drivers presented in the given paper. It is concluded that although these parameters are not as good as for voltage fed drivers they remain on an acceptable level. Finally, it is concluded that the current fed step-down driver is advantageous from many points of view and it is worth to work on its further improvement. At the same time, some practical difficulties of implementation of the current fed converters have been detected. This, first of all, regards to the lack of the natural current sources and the risk of their open loop operation. These problems, however, are subject of future works.
of the Combined workshop on Self-organizing , Adaptive , and Context-Sensitive Distributed Systems and Self-organized Communication in Disaster Scenarios ( SACS / SoCoDiS 2013 ) Decentralized Coordination in Self-Organizing Systems based on Peer-to-Peer Coordination Spaces

Coordination is an important aspect to realize Self-organizing Systems usually implemented as part of the functional properties of the system. This paper promotes a separation of concerns via a declarative approach to realize decentralized coordination in Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In previous work the concept of Coordination Spaces was developed which provides explicit support for the task of coordination in MAS. Coordination Spaces are part of the agent environment and handle a declarative description of the coordination process. Thereby, this approach allows developers rather focusing on what to coordinate than on how to coordinate. Also by releasing the developer from programming coordination manually, the approach offers benefits like reusability and interoperability of coordination processes. This paper extends the approach by a distribution concept for coordination spaces. By using different techniques like remote service calls, group communication and publish/subscribe models the distribution of information among multiple platforms in a peer-to-peer like approach is achieved.
Microbiome sharing between children, livestock and household surfaces in western Kenya

The gut microbiome community structure and development are associated with several health outcomes in young children. To determine the household influences of gut microbiome structure, we assessed microbial sharing within households in western Kenya by sequencing 16S rRNA libraries of fecal samples from children and cattle, cloacal swabs from chickens, and swabs of household surfaces. Among the 156 households studied, children within the same household significantly shared their gut microbiome with each other, although we did not find significant sharing of gut microbiome across host species or household surfaces. Higher gut microbiome diversity among children was associated with lower wealth status and involvement in livestock feeding chores. Although more research is necessary to identify further drivers of microbiota development, these results suggest that the household should be considered as a unit. Livestock activities, health and microbiome perturbations among an individual child may have implications for other children in the household.
The Causes of High Unemployment: Labor Market Sclerosis versus Macroeconomic Policy

The conventional wisdom is that high European unemployment is the result of job markets that are rigid and inflexible. This paper presents new empirical evidence that challenges this received wisdom. A major contribution of the paper is that it fully accounts for both microand macroeconomic factors, as well as taking account of cross-country economic spillovers. The evidence shows that macroeconomic factors dominate in explaining unemployment. These factors are robust to changes in empirical specification. Labor market institutions do matter for unemployment, but not in the way conventionally spoken about. Unemployment benefits and union density have no effect. The level of wage bargaining coordination and the extent of union wage coverage both matter, and if properly paired can raise incomes without causing unemployment. Lower tax burdens can also lower unemployment, but a far more cost effective fiscal approach is to increase spending on active labor market policies. The bottom line is that high unemployment in Western Europe has been the result of self-inflicted dysfunctional macroeconomic policy. European policy makers adopted a course of disinflation, high real interest rates, and slower growth that raised unemployment. Moreover, they all adopted this course at the same time, thereby generating a wave of trade based spillovers that generated a continent wide macroeconomic funk and further raised unemployment.
In vivo biosynthesis and transport of oxytocin, vasopressin, and neurophysins to posterior pituitary and nucleus of the solitary tract

A growing body of literature suggests that oxytocin (OXY) and arginine- vasopressin (AVP), in addition to their neuroendocrine roles, may serve as neuromodulators within the central nervous system of mammals. The present study investigated the biosynthesis of OXY, AVP, and their associated neurophysins in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) and the transport of these peptides to the neural lobe and the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS) in the brainstem of the rat. Rats were cannulated bilaterally in the PVN, and 24 hr later a 2-hr pulse of [35S]cysteine was administered using an Alzet minipump delivery system. After a 10-hr chase period, the neural lobe was removed and the PVN and NTS were punched. Tissue homogenates were adsorbed to and eluted from octadecyl-silica cartridges and analyzed by linear high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) gradient elution, chemical and enzymatic modification, and exponential gradient HPLC elution followed by linear HPLC gradient analysis using an ion-pairing buffer system. This rigorous approach has allowed us to identify 35S- labeled material which co-purifies with OXY and AVP from the PVN, neural lobe, and NTS samples. Specific transport of the nonapeptides to the NTS was demonstrated when a unilateral transection of the hypothalamic fibers resulted in a unilateral depletion of the radiolabeled peptides from the NTS samples. Additionally, each of the neurophysins was purified from the neural lobe and NTS samples after linear HPLC gradient analysis, ion-pairing buffer linear gradient analysis, then tryptic digestion followed by exponential gradient HPLC analysis. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Lexical Chains Segmentation in Summarization

In this paper we propose a new method of linear text segmentation based on lexical cohesion of a text. The usual steps (to compute the lexical chains according to relatedness criteria, to score the chains after different parameters,to select the strong chains, to obtain the segments) are replaced by a single procedure. Namely, a single chain of disambiguated words in a text is established and the rips of this single chain are considered as boundaries of the segments of the cohesion structure of the text (CohesionTextTiling or CTT). The summaries of arbitrarily length are obtained by extraction using three different methods applied to the obtained segments. The informativeness of the obtained summaries is compared with the informativeness of the pair summaries of the same length obtained using an earlier method of logical segmentation (coherence segmentation) by text entailment (logical TextTiling or LTT). Some experiments about CTT and LTT methods are made for four rdquoclassicalrdquo texts in summarization literature. The conclusion is that the quality of the summarization using cohesion segmentation (CTT) is better than the quality using logical (coherence) segmentation (LTT).
Localization of Glutamate-like Immunoreactive Neurons in the Central and Peripheral Nervous System of the Adult and Developing Pond Snail, Lymnaea stagnalis

We investigated the distribution and projection patterns of central and peripheral glutamate-like immunoreactive (GLU-LIR) neurons in the adult and developing nervous system of Lymnaea. Altogether, 50–60 GLU-LIR neurons are present in the adult central nervous system. GLU-LIR labeling is shown in the interganglionic bundle system and at the varicosities in neuropil of the central ganglia. In the periphery, the foot, lip, and tentacle contain numerous GLU-LIR bipolar sensory neurons. In the juvenile Lymnaea, GLU-LIR elements at the periphery display a pattern of distribution similar to that seen in adults, whereas labeled neurons increase in number in the different ganglia of the central nervous system from juvenile stage P1 up to adulthood. During embryogenesis, GLU-LIR innervation can be detected first at the 50% stage of embryonic development (the E50% stage) in the neuropil of the cerebral and pedal ganglia, followed by the emergence of labeled pedal nerve roots at the E75% stage. Before hatching, at the E90% stage, a few GLU-LIR sensory cells can be found in the caudal foot region. Our findings indicate a wide range of occurrence and a broad role for glutamate in the gastropod nervous system; hence they provide a basis for future studies on glutamatergic events in networks underlying different behaviors.
Assessing Market Efficiency

Abstract Government regulations through import licensing and “seasonal calendars” entail large transaction costs for traders operating in the fruit and vegetable wholesale market in Oman. Monitoring and enforcing these market regulations increase search costs and reduce market efficiency. The objective of this study is to develop a methodology to categorize and measure transactions costs by analyzing traders perceptions and attitude toward regulatory measures, and other market activities. Results show that importers operating at Al-Mawaleh market face the highest level of transaction costs. The changing nature of import calendar as well as the import license procedure represents significant elements of uncertainty that rise the importers' search and monitoring costs. It is suggested that the conversion of these non-tariff barriers into tariffs along WTO rules would reduce market uncertainty and increase market efficiency.
Analytical Modeling for Affinity-Based Thread Scheduling on Multicore Platforms ∗

This paper proposes an analytical model to estimate the cost of running an affinity-based thread schedule on multicore shared-memory systems. This model considers a memory architecture as a generic tree structure and allows for a portable, architecture-aware optimization framework to find an optimized schedule for multi-threaded programs. It consists of three submodels in order to measure the cost of executing a thread schedule: affinity graph model, memory hierarchy model, and a cost model that characterize machines, programs, and costs respectively. With the aid of the model, we formalize the problem of finding the best thread schedule as an optimization problem. Due to the NP-hardness of the problem, we designed a hierarchical graph partitioning algorithm to compute an approximate solution. We then extended the algorithm to support threads with data dependencies (i.e., DAGs). The algorithm has been implemented in a feedback-directed optimization framework and applied to two real-world scientific applications: a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) kernel and Cholesky factorization. We conducted our experiments on both SMP and DSM machines. The results show that our analytical model is accurate enough, and using the optimized thread schedule improves the program performance by 25% to 4 times, demonstrating that our method is efficient and practical.
Gamma-approximation for the waiting time distribution function of the M/G/1-/spl infin/ queue

In this paper we propose to approximate the waiting time distribution function (DF) of the waiting customers in a M/G/1-infin queuing system by a gamma-distribution whose parameters alpha and beta are set by means of the first and second moment of the waiting time that are obtained from the Takacs recursion formula. Discrete-time analysis (DTA) is another approximation approach for the same objective. We show first for analytically feasible special cases that DTA is very accurate and then we use it to validate the accuracy of the new gamma-approximation for wide parameter ranges regarding the service time distribution. We show that the gamma-approximation respects well even the third moment of the service time distribution. As the new approach is very simple and fast, it may be used by engineers with only little background in queuing theory to calculate quantiles for real-time control loops in technical systems