Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protective and damaging effects of stress mediators.

Over 60 years ago, Selye1 recognized the paradox that the physiologic systems activated by stress can not only protect and restore but also damage the body. What links these seemingly contradictory roles? How does stress influence the pathogenesis of disease, and what accounts for the variation in vulnerability to stress-related diseases among people with similar life experiences? How can stress-induced damage be quantified? These and many other questions still challenge investigators. This article reviews the long-term effect of the physiologic response to stress, which I refer to as allostatic load.2 Allostasis — the ability to achieve stability through change3 — .
Children's perspectives on playground use as basis for children's participation in local play space management

Implementing children's perspectives into playground management could be a way of improving play possibilities for children in the local public space and supporting sustainable development, but it requires adults' understanding. Children's perspectives on playground use were studied through group interviews in two Swedish towns and were also compared with the understanding among the local park workers. Children described their playground use through challenges, manipulation and place-making, something which was partly recognised by the park workers. The results indicate that children's perspectives on playground use, particularly manipulation, should be implemented more fully into management work. Children's participation in on-site management activities is discussed as a way of making playgrounds more adapted to children's use and perspectives.
Currency Hedging and the Risk of Loss

The most commonly cited argument against currency hedging is the assertion that foreign exchange risk washes out over the long run. But even if we set aside these facts and accept the view that foreign exchange risk washes out over long horizons, it does not necessarily follow that we should ignore the volatility introduced by currency exposure. It depends critically on how we perceive risk. This study reviews currency arithmetic and shows explicitly how exchange rate fluctuations affect a foreign asset's risk. It also contains a derivation of the minimum risk and optimal exposures to currency forward contracts. The article presents two alternative approaches for measuring risk of loss, and it shows the effect of currency exposure on these two measures of risk of loss.
The City and Corporate Performance: Condemned or Exonerated?

This paper summarizes the conventional wisdom concerning differences between financial systems. It argues that many of them do not stand up to close scrutiny. Instead, it suggests that the main differences concern the concentration and nature of ownership. Systems with high concentrations of ownership (frequently in the hands of families and other companies) may encourage more direct monitoring and control, greater stability in decision-taking, and greater commitment to other stakeholders than systems with more dispersed ownership. On the other hand, they are more subject to the private benefits of control and less flexible in responding to external factors. Different systems may, therefore, be suited to different types of corporate activity. Instead of seeking to impose uniform forms of corporate governance, the paper concludes that regulation should be permissive in allowing companies to choose their preferred forms of ownership and control. Copyright 1997 by Oxford University Press.
What Makes the Output–Inflation Trade‐Off Change? The Absence of Accelerating Deflation in Japan

It is standard to model the output-inflation trade-off as a linear relationship with a time-invariant slope. We assess empirical evidence for two sets of theories that allow for endogenous variation in the slope of the short-run Phillips curve. At an empirical level, we examine why large negative output gaps in Japan in the late 1990s did not lead to accelerating deflation but instead coincided with stable, albeit moderately negative inflation. Our results suggest that this episode is most convincingly interpreted as reflecting a gradual flattening of the Phillips curve. We find that this flattening is best explained by models with endogenous price durations. These models imply that in any economy where trend inflation is substantially lower (or substantially higher) today than in past decades, time variation in the slope of the Phillips curve has become too important to ignore. Copyright (c) 2009 The Ohio State University.
Cash Flows and Reserve of Elasticity

The topic of the paper is the liquidity as the ability of firm to face at all times payment obligations arising from the unfolding of management. This ability is usually assessed with the financial statements, however, not have a short-term perspective and consider only tangible aspects. Hence the reason and the question of this work that suggests a new way to study and estimates if the firm is able to meet its cash commitments without compromising the performance of the management. According to this way, it is necessary to estimate the financial imbalance in the short terms and maintain a sufficient degree of financial elasticity. On this basis, the paper, in particular, examines the forecast cash flows dynamics of a given numeral example, to demonstrate that a firm can have a monthly financial imbalance even if it has an annual financial balance, and then, it concludes explaining the reserve of elasticity, as the intangible tool that allows management to face unexpected changes of cash flows.
A core leader based label propagation algorithm for community detection

A large number of community discovery algorithms have been proposed in the last decade. Recently, the sharp increase of network scale has become a great challenge for traditional community discovery algorithms. Label propagation algorithm is a semi-supervised machine learning method, which has linear time complexity when coping with large scale networks. However, the output result has less stability and the quality of the output communities still remains to be improved. Therefore, we propose a novel core-leader based label propagation algorithm for community detection called CLBLPA. Firstly, we find core leaders of potential community by using a greedy method. Then we utilize the label influence potential to guide the process of label propagation. Thus we can accelerate the convergence of algorithm and improve the stability of the output. Experimental results on synthetic datasets and real networks show that CLBLPA can significantly improve the quality of the output communities.
Comparison of prenatal ultrasound and postmortem findings in fetuses and infants with congenital heart defects

Detection of congenital heart defects by prenatal ultrasound examination has been one of the great challenges since the investigation for fetal anomalies became part of the routine fetal examination. This prospective study was designed to evaluate the concordance of prenatal ultrasound findings with autopsy examination in a population consisting of both referred women and non‐selected pregnant women.
The Political Economy of Employment Protection

This paper develops a model of job creation and job destruction in a growing economy with embodied technical progress, which I use to analyze the political support for employment protection laws such as the ones that are observed in most European countries. In voting in favor of employment protection, incumbent employees trade off lower living standards (because employment protection maintains workers in less productive activities) against longer job duration. The latter is valued because the employed have rents, achieving wages above their alternative value. The gains from, and consequently the political support for, employment protection are larger the lower the rate of creative destruction (i.e., the lower the growth rate) and the larger the employed’s bargaining power. Hence, employment protection is more likely to arise in economies with greater worker bargaining power. Also, workers in older vintages are more in favor of employment protection. Consequently, greater initial protection increases its own support by maintaining a larger fraction of the workforce in older vintages. Finally, if workers can invest ex ante in match‐specific human capital, multiple steady‐state political equilibria may arise, as the outcome of the mutual feedback between employee rents and employment protection.
Public Administrators Under Democratic Governance in Ghana

The politicization of the public service has been the subject of scholarly interest and debate. This article based on a desk study makes a contribution to this debate by examining the constitutional, legal, and political framework and environment within which public administrators operate in Ghana since the return to constitutional rule in 1993. It discusses the participation of public administrators in partisan politics and the challenges faced as well as benchmarking the Ghanaian experience against some countries. The article found that there has been growing politicization of the public service and an increase in the number of public administrators in partisan politics. The Ghanaian case reinforces the highly intense political environment within which public administrators operate and the myth of the politics-administration dichotomy.
The Impact of Dividend Payments on Shareholders' Wealth: Evidence from the Vector Error Correction Model

To date, a vast body of research has been established on dividend policy. However, little research has been done on the impact of dividend payments on shareholders’ wealth while considering the short- and long-run effects. This study is based on a sample of 46 companies listed on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange (JSE) for the period 1995 to 2010. The Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) was used to describe the short-run and long-run dynamics or the adjustment of the co-integrated variables toward their equilibrium values. Results indicate that in the long run, dividend yield is positively related to market price per share, while earnings per share do not have a significant impact on the market price per share.
Entrepreneurial Opportunities and Poverty Alleviation

Entrepreneurial activity does not always lead to economic growth. While improvements have been made to human capital, property rights protection, and access to financial capital in abject poverty contexts with the assumption that they will increase entrepreneurial activity, the results have been mixed. More recently, many entrepreneurs interested in poverty alleviation are crossing borders to engage in initiatives aimed at reducing poverty internationally. These efforts have also had mixed results. This paper posits that one reason is that entrepreneurial opportunities and their wealth creation potential vary, and the impact of exploiting these opportunities on economic growth in poverty contexts can also vary. This paper identifies self–employment opportunities, often exploited in abject poverty, that do not lead to sustainable growth solutions. Alternatively, discovery and creation opportunities while difficult to exploit in poverty contexts hold the greatest potential for significant economic impact.
Measuring the Degree of Market Power Exerted by Government Trade Agencies

The principle of profit maximization is used to derive an equilibrium condition for noncompetitive markets and to provide explicit parametric tests for market power exerted in both domestic and foreign markets by a government trade agency. Our study goes beyond previous work by considering simultaneous exertion of market power in both domestic and foreign markets and by jointly estimating market power parameters with cost and demand parameters. These innovations allow nested tests of market power as opposed to prevailing nonnested tests based on simulation models or conditional tests based on prior estimates of demand and cost parameters. Japan is found to exert a high degree of monopsony power in the world wheat market and no monopoly power in the domestic market.
Dependency Theory, Imperialism, and the Production of Surplus Value On a World Scale

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979: xxiii) have announced what has long been suspected, i.e., that dependency theory is no more. This should give rise to few regrets. Its well known emphasis upon relations among nations rather than among classes (cf. Roxborourgh,, 1979: 46) and its characteristic definition of modes of production in terms of circulation (Laclau, 1977: 15-50) marked it as a theory which sought to understand the dynamics of capitalism without a grasp of its basic organizational units. However, the demise of dependency theory has left a vacuum in the theory of the international capitalist system, for the turn to local class relations does not provide an alternative to the general systematics of the dependency school. Neither does the classical theory of imperialism fill the gap. On the contrary, both the theory of imperialism and dependency theory are strongly circulationist in character, and neither can come to terms with transformations in the system of division of labor. We will provide an alternative based on the global organization of the production of surplus value, attempting to periodize the international capitalist system in terms of internal contradictions in systems of production (in both core and periphery) giving rise to transformations in the structure of production in both areas in a complementary fashion involving the articulation of modes of production on a global scale. What follows will attempt to provide a framework for an analysis based on contradictions within complex, unevenly developed systems of production of surplus value as well as to indicate some of the fundamental issues giving rise to the theories of dependency (especially in the Brazilian case) and imperialism as perspectives incapable of realizing in thought the changing forms of capitalist production and accumulation on a world scale.
Epidemiology of oral cancer diagnosed at a Singapore tertiary healthcare institution.

INTRODUCTION Oral and pharyngeal cancers grouped together are the sixth most common cancer seen worldwide. Oral cancers are, however, relatively not common in Singapore. There are few published epidemiological studies of oral cancers seen in Singapore. This article is a retrospective study of oral cancer incidence in a major tertiary institution in Singapore from 1991 to 2001. MATERIALS AND METHODS All oral cancers diagnosed from 1991 to 2001 were extracted from the register of histopathology results and case notes were reviewed. RESULTS In our study, it was found that oral malignancies preferentially affect older males. Chinese, being the predominant ethnicity, reports the highest incidence of oral malignancy. Squamous cell carcinoma was the most common oral malignancy with the tongue being the most commonly affected site. The majority of patients who sought treatment had complaints of swelling and were referred from restructured government hospitals and clinics. CONCLUSION Dental professional should be aware of the common clinical presentation of oral cancers. As oral cancer is a disease of high morbidity and mortality, a concerted effort from the government and healthcare profession will be required to improve the outcome of the disease.
Analyzing technical trade barriers in agricultural markets: Challenges and priorities

Technical trade barriers are increasingly important in the international exchange of primary and processed agricultural products. Designing technical trade measures that can satisfy the growing demand for food safety, product differentiation, environmental amenities, and product information at the lowest cost to the consumer and to the international trading system requires an understanding of the complex economics of regulatory import barriers. This article proposes a definition and classification scheme to frame discussion and evaluation of such measures. [Econ-Lit citations: Q170, L510] © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
NDRC: A Disease-Causing Genes Prioritized Method Based on Network Diffusion and Rank Concordance

Disease-causing genes prioritization is very important to understand disease mechanisms and biomedical applications, such as design of drugs. Previous studies have shown that promising candidate genes are mostly ranked according to their relatedness to known disease genes or closely related disease genes. Therefore, a dangling gene (isolated gene) with no edges in the network can not be effectively prioritized. These approaches tend to prioritize those genes that are highly connected in the PPI network while perform poorly when they are applied to loosely connected disease genes. To address these problems, we propose a new disease-causing genes prioritization method that based on network diffusion and rank concordance (NDRC). The method is evaluated by leave-one-out cross validation on 1931 diseases in which at least one gene is known to be involved, and it is able to rank the true causal gene first in 849 of all 2542 cases. The experimental results suggest that NDRC significantly outperforms other existing methods such as RWR, VAVIEN, DADA and PRINCE on identifying loosely connected disease genes and successfully put dangling genes as potential candidate disease genes. Furthermore, we apply NDRC method to study three representative diseases, Meckel syndrome 1, Protein C deficiency and Peroxisome biogenesis disorder 1A (Zellweger). Our study has also found that certain complex disease-causing genes can be divided into several modules that are closely associated with different disease phenotype.
A dual-band frequency tunable planar inverted F antenna

The design process of dual-band reconfigurable PIFA antenna is introduced and investigated. The design procedure is based on loading a lumped capacitor (or varactor) at one fixed location along a slot of the radiator. The changes in first and second resonances are significantly quite similar and almost cover the entire dual-band operation, with considerable frequency ratio tuning range. The proposed antenna was implemented and tested using chip capacitors varied between 1.5 to 4pF. The proposed tuning method has been demonstrated and measured over the range of 1.1 to 2.2GHz. Good agreement is obtained between the predicted and measured results over the whole frequency range.
Beyond Black-Litterman in Practice: A Five-Step Recipe to Input Views on Non-Normal Markets

The copula-opinion pooling (COP) approach extends in principle the Black-Litterman methodology to non-normally distributed markets and views. However, the implementations of the COP framework presented so far rely on restrictive quasi-normal assumptions. Here we present a general recipe to implement the COP approach in practice under all possible market and views specifications.
Immune Reconstitution Immune reconstitution , infectious complications and post transplant supportive care measures after autologous blood and marrow transplantation in children

We retrospectively analyzed data on Tand B-cell reconstitution and infectious complications in 58 children undergoing ABMT, in order to evaluate post-transplant supportive care measures used during the study period. Normalization of T-cell number and lymphocyte proliferative responses to phytohemagglutinin (PHA) and alloantigen (MLC) occurred in two-thirds of children by 6 months post transplant. Normal IgM levels developed in 75% of children by 6 months post transplant. A total of 34 children (59%) developed 39 episodes of infection between neutrophil engraftment and 1 year post transplant. The most common infections included bacteremia, varicellazoster virus infection and pneumonia, which represented 46, 23 and 9% of infections, respectively. All patients with bacteremia had a central venous catheter in place at the time of infection. Most infections (77%) developed by 6 months post transplant. In this small patient cohort, time to normalization of tests of Tand B-cell function was not significantly different between patients with and without infection. Earlier removal of an indwelling central venous catheter may decrease the risk of bacteremia post transplant. Post-transplant supportive care measures may be discontinued at 6 months post ABMT in most children, as the risk of infection decreases after that time. Bone Marrow Transplantation (2003) 32, 687–693. doi:10.1038/sj.bmt. 1704196
People make the difference: The influence of the coaching staff's human capital and diversity on team performance

In following the resource‐based view of the firm, the purpose of this study was to examine the impact of coaching staff characteristics on team performance. Specifically, the effects of codified knowledge, previous playing experience, previous coaching experience, and racial diversity were examined. Data were collected from members of Division I‐A football coaching staff (N = 323) and aggregated to the staff level (n = 77). Hierarchical regression analysis with a stepwise process indicated that, after controlling for the previous season's success, collective collegiate coaching experience, collective professional coaching experience, and racial diversity all held significant associations with team performance, accounting for 14% unique variance. The findings have implications for human resource professionals and athletic administrators, particularly in the areas of hiring decisions and organizational culture.
Charge-recovery computing on silicon

Three decades ago, theoretical physicists suggested that the controlled recovery of charges could result in electronic circuitry whose power dissipation approaches thermodynamic limits, growing at a significantly slower pace than the fCV/sup 2/ rate for CMOS switching power. Early engineering research in this field, which became generally known as adiabatic computing, focused on the asymptotic energetics of computation, exploring VLSI designs that use reversible logic and adiabatic switching to preserve information and achieve nearly zero power dissipation as operating frequencies approach zero. Recent advances in CMOS VLSI design have taken us to real working chips that rely on controlled charge recovery to operate at substantially lower power dissipation levels than their conventional counterparts. Although their origins can be traced back to the early adiabatic circuits, these charge-recovering systems approach energy recycling from a more practical angle, shedding reversibility to achieve operating frequencies in the hundreds of MHz with relatively low overhead. Among other charge-recovery designs, researchers have demonstrated microcontrollers, standard-cell ASICs, SRAMs, LCD panel drivers, I/O drivers, and multiGHz clock networks. In this paper, we present an overview of the field and focus on two chip designs that highlight some of the promising charge recovering techniques in practice.
Managing Alliance Relationships: Key Challenges in the Early Stages of Collaboration

Recent surveys indicate that executives of technology companies consider strategic alliances to be central to their competitive strategies. Yet the barriers to successful alliances are formidable. In many instances, these barriers develop in the early stages of an alliance. This study identifies and analyzes the types of challenges that companies face in the start-up phase of their alliances. It is based on a survey and interviews with executives in the Canadian high technology industry. The study finds that the principal challenges in the first year of an alliance relate to relationship issues between the partners. It suggests stronger attention to these issues in the design and implementation of an alliance. The paper concludes with guidelines to build and sustain effective working relationships between partners.