Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Financing the integration of climate change mitigation into development

The Bali Action Plan and many other authoritative recent climate reports point to expectations that additional financing will be central to future international agreements to address climate change. Several donor governments have announced commitments to contribute significant additional amounts of funding to support climate change financing in developing countries. However, the context for financing of climate change mitigation is evolving rapidly, with significant implications for climate policy. Two key changes are the dramatic improvement in access to capital in many of the most rapidly growing, large greenhouse-gas-emitting, developing nations and the increasing shift of wealth to oil-exporting countries and Asian central banks. Energy investment is fundamental to development and is capital-intensive, and access to finance is not equally available across countries and for different types of investments. Less carbon-intensive, clean energy investments frequently remain more difficult to finance, due to their smaller scale and innovative nature. Taking climate risk into account as an element of financing is potentially consistent with the investor's need to balance risks with expected returns, but the methodologies, geographical scale, and data required are not yet commensurate with the time periods and project scope typical of financing for developing countries. The policy challenge is in making the financing available commensurate with the scale and short time available for addressing climate change. Most of the likely targeted financing programmes will not be adequate for this purpose. Rather, policy makers need to focus on creating adequate signals that climate change will be an important and continuing factor in government policies for the foreseeable future in ways that will affect investor expectations of relative risk and reward. If this is done, financing will follow.
Structural changes in models for I(1) and I(2) converging series: the case of PPP

Introduction The procedure suggested by Lee and Strazicich (2003) and applied in Strazicich et al. (2004) for assessing convergence between incomes of different OECD countries, aims at testing for a unit root, but allowing for possible breaks in the levels and in the trends of the series. In contrast to other testing procedures that reject the null of a unit root in the presence of breaks, they show that their testing methodology is not subject to this kind of spurious rejection and therefore, if the null is rejected the series is indeed stationary. They apply their methodology in order to test for stochastic convergence in incomes in OECD countries over a very long period of observation, during which structural breaks have effectively occurred (Strazicich, Lee and Day, 2004). Rejection of the null of a unit root in relative incomes, even with significant structural breaks in the observed series, means that shocks to relative incomes are temporary and implies that incomes are converging according to the definition of Bernard and Durlauf (1995). The aim of the present paper is to empirically investigate the purchasing power parity (PPP) condition between three Eastern European economies and the euro-area economy as a convergence process. We consider, as the period of observation, the recent years corresponding to the catching-up process of these economies towards their accession to the EMU. The idea is that the persistent deviations from PPP that we observe may be due to the fact that an I(2) common stochastic trend is driving the variables towards convergence to the PPP condition, and not just an I(1) common trend as assumed by Bernard and Durlauf (1995). Absolute PPP is usually written as:
Fear and Greed in Global Asset Allocation

The level of implied volatility in the U.S. equity market, as represented by the market volatility index of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, is a good indicator of the level of fear or greed in U.S. and global capital markets. When investors are fearful, the VIX level is significantly higher than normal. Market participants require additional compensation in the form of above-average excess returns for riskier assets. The authors find that global equity markets outperform the respective bond markets after periods of relatively high expected volatility in the U.S. market. Similarly, U.S. and international equity markets underperform bonds after periods of unusually low implied volatility. Using implied volatility as an asset allocation factor would have added significant value over the last thirteen years.
Curriculum as a public policy enterprise: Australian state differences and the past forty years of curriculum reforms

Since the 1970s, curriculum reforms in Australia and in the UK have faced a number of common challenges, including drives to improve retention, concerns about unemployment and vocational preparation in a global economy, impact of international benchmarking and assessment programs, questions about how to deal with both the basics and the proliferating expansion of knowledge in the 21 st century, challenges in relation to difference and inequalities and student engagement, and highly visible and volatile press discussions about particular curriculum reforms. This paper is a discussion of findings from a project funded by the Australian Research Council that set out to examine commonalities and differences in how different Australian states developed curriculum agendas over that period, and more broadly to contribute to some more general thinking about how curriculum gets made as a public policy. The project examined policy documents for each of the Australian states at decade intervals between 1975 and 2005; and it included oral history interviews with a number of key curriculum actors in each state, people who had had an active and sustained role in different aspects of curriculum making of that state. This paper discusses three key findings of this project that are relevant to analysis of curriculum as public policy. First, ‘evidence-based’ policy discourse obscures the intrinsic significance of values and purposes in curriculum, and the differences between Australian states in recent decades show the impact of their demography, geography and history in how they address purposes and starting points. Second, the impact of accountability and audit regimes has been a key driver of recent decades but also a central component of why a number of curriculum reforms have failed. And thirdly, this recent history and the different processes and conflicts apparent in different states brings to the fore the question, in a democratic society, where does the appropriate authority in relation to curriculum lie?
Does environmental performance affect companies’ environmental disclosure?

Purpose – This study aims to verify the presence, evolution and determinants of voluntary environmental disclosure from companies listed on the Milan Stock Exchange. The authors examined documentation of listed firms from 2006 and 2009. These years immediately precede and follow Italian legislative decree n. 32/2007, which introduced (albeit on a voluntary basis) disclosure of environment-related company information. Design/methodology/approach – The authors’ approach utilizes multivariate regression analysis. The disclosure index of the years 2006 and 2009 represents the dependent variable. Independent variables include firm size, business industry, public shareholders, legislation and environmental performance. Findings – The results show positive effects on environmental disclosure related to legislative decree n. 32, the presence of government shareholdings in firms’ ownership structure, business industry and firm size. The interrelation between firm size and environmental performance shows that large.
Private club trends in the USA – a statistical review

Notes that the private club industry is a unique segment within the broader hospitality industry and, relative to other segments of the hospitality industry, very little research has focused on it. Pannell Kerr Forster (PFK) publishes an annual publication that tracks the operating and financial performance of more than 200 private clubs. Provides a statistical analysis of data from PKF’s Clubs in Town & Country publication in order to identify top line trends emerging in the North American club market. Membership, revenue and expense trends are explored over a 20‐year time line.
Stealth Trading in Options Markets

Abstract We investigate how price discovery occurs in the options markets through traders' trade size choice. By employing transactions data on all options traded on a sample of 100 firms, we show that informed traders fragment their orders into small (medium) trades for low (high) volume contracts. We also find that almost 60% of the price discovery occurs in the exchange with the largest market share for a given option, where informed traders favor medium size trades. Upon examining distinct option series for a given stock, we find that at-the-money calls display the highest information share.
An integrative model for social marketing

Purpose – Social marketing has evolved differently in the developing and developed worlds, at times leading to different emphases on what social marketing thought and practice entail. This paper aims to document what those differences have been and provide an integrative framework to guide social marketers in working with significant social and health issues.Design/methodology/approach – An integration of views about social marketing is proposed that is focused on the core roles of audience benefits; analysis of behavioral determinants, context and consequences; the use of positioning, brand and personality in marketing strategy development; and use of the four elements of the marketing mix to tailor offerings, realign prices, increase access and opportunities; and communicate these in an evolving media environment.Findings – Ideas about branding and positioning, core strategic social marketing concerns, have been better understood and practiced in developing country settings. Social marketing in developi.
Immigrants and the Dynamics of High-Wage Jobs

The authors exploit immigrant identifiers in the Canadian Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the longitudinal dimension of these data to compare the labor force and job dynamics of immigrants and native-born workers. They examine the role of job, as opposed to worker, heterogeneity in driving immigrant wage disparities and investigate how the paths into and out of jobs of varying quality compare between immigrant and native-born workers. They find that the disparity in immigrant job quality, which does not appear to diminish with years since arrival, reflects a combination of relatively low transitions into high-wage jobs and high transitions out of these jobs. The former result appears to be due equally to difficulties obtaining high-wage jobs directly out of unemployment and to using low-wage jobs as stepping-stones. The authors find little or no evidence, however, that immigrant job seekers face barriers to low-wage jobs.
Effects of hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) seed oil press-cake and decaffeinated green tea leaves (Camellia sinensis) on functional characteristics of gluten-free crackers.

UNLABELLED A mixture, simplex centroid, 2 components experimental design was used to evaluate the addition of hemp seed oil press-cake and decaffeinated green tea leaves, as functional ingredients to assess nutritional characteristics and antioxidant properties of gluten-free crackers. All samples with added hemp flour had much better nutritional qualities than the brown rice flour crackers in terms of higher protein, crude fibers, minerals, and essential fatty acids content. Likewise, all samples with added decaffeinated green tea leaves had much better antioxidant properties than crackers with no added green tea leaves. All crackers with added hemp flour had a significantly increased fiber content (39% to 249%) and decreased carbohydrate content (8.4% to 42.3%), compared to the brown rice flour crackers. All samples had antioxidant properties, even without the addition of green tea leaves. Optimization of the responses was conducted based on the maximized values for protein, fibers, omega-3 fatty acids content, as well as for the antioxidant activity and overall score. The suggested values for the addition of the hemp oil press-cake was 20% (total flour weight) with 4 g of decaffeinated green tea leaves that would provide protein content of 14.1 g/100 g; fibers content of 8.4 g/100 g; omega-3 fatty acids content of 3.2 g/100 g; antioxidant activity measured via 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl value of 30.3 μmol TE/g d.w. ; and an overall score of 8.9. This formulation has demonstrated potential application in the baking industry and marketing of these gluten-free crackers as a value-added functional product. PRACTICAL APPLICATION Hemp seed oil press-cake as a by-product of cold-pressed oil processing and brown rice flour were used to design a functional gluten-free snack-type product-savory crackers. All crackers were high in minerals, fibers, and omega-3 fatty acids with a desirable omega-6/omega-3 fatty acids ratio. Green tea leaves were added to improve antioxidant activity, which greatly contributed to their functional properties. This qualified the crackers as a healthy snack with a minimal content saturated fatty acids and an abundance of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids that originated from chia seeds residual oil present in the hemp flour.
Accounting and taxation in Europe — A comparative overview

This overview article describes the relationship between accounting and taxation in those thirteen European countries that are included in this volume. A basic distinction is made between the six countries where accounting and taxation are dependent and the seven countries where they are independent. Even within these two groups distinctions can be made on the basis of the different influences of taxation on individual and group accounts, the development from a dependence to an independence structure, and the existence and contents of regulation on deferred taxation. The current lack of harmonisation is surprising. Only two countries, the Netherlands and Norway, are very similar to IASC E49. It is, however, expected that E49 (more precisely, the IAS that will result from it) will be an important basis for harmonising the group accounts in all thirteen countries.
Title of Document: CULTURAL CAPITAL TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

Title of Document: CULTURAL CAPITAL TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS. JONATHAN A. LEMICH, MASTER OF ARTS, 2007 Directed By: LORY JANELLE DANCE, PHD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY Though Coleman (1966) claimed many school factors do not matter for students’ educational outcomes, the role of extracurricular activities are not well understood. This study explores whether numbers and types of extracurricular activities in public schools are linked to the proportion of graduating seniors who go on to four year college. School-level data from 129 traditional public high schools in Maryland was examined in an elaboration model with proportion of students going on to four year college as a dependent variable, socioeconomic status (SES) as the category variable and number of different extracurricular activities available as the core independent variable. The higher SES schools showed a positive relationship between extracurricular activities and college attendance while the lower SES schools did not. A rough content analysis also revealed that in general, schools in higher SES areas offered activities with greater cultural value. Theoretical connections and policy implications are discussed. CULTURAL CAPITAL TRANSMISSION MECHANISMS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
On Binary Similarity Measures for Privacy-preserving Top-N Recommendations

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms fundamentally depend on similarities between users and/or items to predict individual preferences. There are various binary similarity measures like Kulzinsky, Sokal-Michener, Yule, and so on to estimate the relation between two binary vectors. Although binary ratings-based CF algorithms are utilized, there remains work to be conducted to compare the performances of binary similarity measures. Moreover, the success of CF systems enormously depend on reliable and truthful data collected from many customers, which can only be achieved if individual users’ privacy is protected. In this study, we compare eight binary similarity measures in terms of accuracy while providing topN recommendations. We scrutinize how such measures perform with privacy-preserving topN recommendation process. We perform real data-based experiments. Our results show that Dice and Jaccard measures provide the best outcomes.
Intergovernmental functionalism? The council of Europe in European integration

The Council of Europe is a significant presence in European integration but, although appreciated by human rights lawyers, its varied policy competences and outputs are largely overlooked by social scientists. Functional and intergovernmental theoretical approaches are considered for their potential insights. The workings of the COE are analysed, using evidence from official sources and participant interviews, to establish the nature of the policy process. Five key institutional aspects are discussed: access to membership, policy coverage, the institutional apparatus, decision procedures and processes, and mechanisms to ensure output compliance. Substantial contributions by national officials and experts, and the importance of publicly accepted norms in setting the limits within which policy consensus can be achieved are important features. Both functionalism and intergovernmentalism offer insights into the incremental operation and flexible policy achievements of the COE. Its explicit commitment to promoting democratic values reduces the need to choose between the two theoretical approaches.
Modelling the impact of the CAP Single Farm Payment on farm investment and output.

This paper analyses the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy arable crop regime on farm investment and output, introducing explicitly farmers' risk attitudes into a dynamic dual model of farm decision-making. Estimation and simulation results are based on a Farm Accounting Data Network sample of Italian arable farms. The main finding is that an increase in intervention price would significantly affect farm investment, mainly through reduced price volatility, while policy changes not affecting price uncertainty, like an increase in the Single Farm Payment, would have a much smaller impact. Oxford University Press and Foundation for the European Review of Agricultural Economics 2009; all rights reserved. For permissions, please email journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.
Anisotropic Filter Based Modified Canny Algorithm

Canny algorithm is a classical edge detection algorithm, but the decision is based on incomplete information and the presupposition that the image is isotropic everywhere, which will give rise to low accuracy or wrong result. Based on directional filter, more adjacent pixels are introduced into Canny algorithm, unified matrix representation and triangular masks provide a instinct understanding and groundwork for the further application such as three- dimension edge detection of Canny algorithm. The new algorithm is described with some examples and the comparison between the old method and the proposed method proves that the proposed algorithm has advantage in the ability to detect edges and suppress noises. And the change of parameters has a slight effect on the proposed algorithm.
THE OXYGEN AND CARBON DIOXIDE CONTENT OF ARTERIAL AND OF VENOUS BLOOD IN NORMAL INDIVIDUALS AND IN PATIENTS WITH ANEMIA AND HEART DISEASE

1. The oxygen content of venous and of arterial blood from fifteen essentially normal individuals at rest in bed has been determined. 2. The percentage saturation of the arterial blood has varied between 100 and 94.3. The average is 95.5 per cent. 3. The oxygen consumption has varied between 2.6 and 8.3 volumes per cent. 4. The oxygen content and the percentage saturation of arterial blood taken at close intervals from three different peripheral arteries of a normal individual have shown values agreeing within the limits of error. Analyses of the blood gases of a normal individual, at rest and after exercise, have shown a lowering of the percentage oxygen saturation of the arterial blood and a diminished carbon dioxide content after exercise. 5. In three persons with severe anemia the saturation of the arterial blood has not differed from the normal. Very low absolute values were found for the oxygen content of the venous blood, but the normal oxygen consumption has been maintained. 6. The carbon dioxide content of the arterial blood from ten normal individuals has varied between 54.7 and 44.6 volumes per cent. That of the venous blood has varied between 60.4 and 48.3 volumes per cent. 7. No deviations from the normal values for oxygen and carbon dioxide were found in venous and arterial blood from cardiac patients without arrhytiunias, well compensated, and at rest in bed. 8. A series of determinations has been made upon nine cardiac patients with varying degrees of decompensation. The percentage oxygen saturation of the arterial blood on admission was abnormally low in seven of these cases. With the return to compensation and with the clearing up of pulmonary symptoms, the percentage saturation of the arterial blood returned to normal in four of them. 9. In a case of long standing mitral endocarditis with auricular fibrillation it remained low over a period of I month of observation. 10. In a case of chronic myocarditis secondary to emphysema and chronic bronchitis, it remained low over the period of observation. 11. Normal values for the percentage saturation of the arterial blood were found in two individuals with decompensated aortic disease but without physical signs of extensive pulmonary involvement. 12. The oxygen consumption tended to be high in individuals with cardiac disease during the periods of marked decompensation and to be lower as compensation was regained. 13. The data presented indicate that at least in many circulatory diseases during decompensation, particularly when there are physical signs of pulmonary congestion, there is a disturbance of the pulmonary exchange, as indicated by the lowering of the percentage saturation of the arterial blood with oxygen.
Determinants of Locations of Foreign Direct Investment in China

Abstract This study examines the factors that affect the choice of location for foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. We identify three groups of factors that may affect the location choice by foreign firms: agglomeration economies, infrastructure, and institutional changes resulting from the economic reform. The study utilizes the most recent data from China's industrial census for the empirical testing. The findings show that agglomeration economies, in particular the clustering of foreign firms and domestic firms, exert the strongest effect on FDI location. Higher FDI concentration tends to attract more foreign firms. The clustering of domestic firms exerts a negative effect on FDI locations. Better infrastructure (electricity, telecommunications, and road) and greater institutional change (open policies, privatization, and legal development) also show positive effects on FDI location. The size of the local economy does not seem to affect the choice of location of FDI. 摘要 本文研究了影响外商投资在中国分布的相关因素。 作者提出了三类影响外资企业选址的主要因素：群聚效应，基础设施，以及由经济改革引起的制度变迁。 通过对最新中国工业普查数据的分析，本文发现群聚经济效应，特别是外资企业与当地企业的集群，对外资企业选址影响最大。 较高的外资企业集中率容易吸引更多的外商投资。 相反，内资企业群聚对外资的选址有负面影响。 较好的基础设施（电力、通讯和交通）和更多的制度变迁（开放政策、私有化和法制发展）亦对外资分布有正面作用。 区域经济的规模则对吸引外商投资没有影响。