Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What happens when ants fail at plant defence? Cordia nodosa dynamically adjusts its investment in both direct and indirect resistance traits in response to herbivore damage

Ants provide variable protection against herbivores to ant‐plants (i.e. myrmecophytes and myrmecophiles). The ways in which ant‐plants dynamically adjust both their direct (chemical and physical) and indirect (biotic) defences in response to varying levels of herbivory are not well understood. We experimentally generated a broad range of ant‐attendance levels and herbivory pressures in a tropical myrmecophyte, Cordia nodosa, which allowed exploration of the inducibility of and interactions between direct and indirect resistance traits. In response to increased herbivory, host plants encouraged indirect (biotic) defence by increasing domatium volume, regardless of whether ants were present on the plant. When ants were present, larger domatia housed more workers, which in turn decreased herbivory on adjacent leaves. Independent of the presence of ants, plants responded to increased herbivory by inducing both chemical (phenolics) and structural (leaf toughness, trichomes) resistance traits; these traits were associated with reduced palatability to a folivorous beetle. Synthesis. Our results show that both direct and indirect defences are inducible in C. nodosa, which suggests that C. nodosa may retain direct defences as insurance against varying levels of protection from its ant bodyguards. Thus, the predictions of optimal defence theory are not violated: although C. nodosa invests in multiple forms of defence, they are not redundant.
UNDERSTANDING THE MECHANISM OF CROSS-LINKING AGENTS (POCL3, STMP, AND EPI) THROUGH SWELLING BEHAVIOR AND PASTING PROPERTIES OF CROSS-LINKED WAXY MAIZE STARCHES

ABSTRACT The effects of cross-linking waxy maize starch with phosphorous oxychloride (POCl3), sodium trimetaphosphate (STMP), or epichlorohydrin (EPI) on degree of swell and pasting properties were studied. As expected, increased concentration of cross-linking agent resulted in decreased granule swelling potential, Q (mL/g). The slower acting reagents, STMP (4-hr reaction time) and EPI (17-hr reaction time), showed a similar relation between Q value and molar concentration of agent, which was different from the faster-acting POCl3 (30-min reaction time). Brabender viscoamylograph results show decreased peak viscosity with increasing amounts of cross-link agent due to increased inhibition to swelling. Brabender viscosities (BU) continued to increase after the time interval in which an uncross-linked sample would dissolve, which may be a sign of flocculation. The magnitude of BU for all of the treatments after 41 min, plotted versus calculated molar concentration of cross-linking agent, showed a similar tre.
On Term Structure of Yield Rates. 4. The Duffie – Kan Two Factor Model

Interest rate models in which the short-term rate is a unique state variable are usually considered. These models are attractive that analytical decisions often give the chance to receive and provide concerning the simple computing analysis. However one-factor models have certain lacks. Basic of them consists that all term structure determines by only the unique value of the short-term rate fixed at the initial moment of construction of term structure. And it is represented unreasonable from the economic point of view. To avoid this lack authors suggest to use for modeling of dynamics of the interest rate more than one state variable. At transition from the unique factor to several there should be an improvement of approximation of term structure. In general the price for it is loss of possibility of receiving of analytical decisions, receiving of the equations with partial derivatives with the raised dimension and complication of procedure of receiving of results. In the paper the Duffie-Kan models, describing dynamics of the short-term interest rate in a case when the state of the financial market is characterized not only by level of the interest rate, but also one more other parameter changing in time are investigated. It is considered two cases. In the first in quality of an additional state variable local on time the average value of the short-term interest rate is accepted. In the second case as an additional state variable the instant variance of the interest rate is accepted. Two-factor models are under construction so that they led to affine term structure of yield. The basic attention is given to definition of functions of term structure. As the equations turning out for these functions do not suppose analytical decisions, it is offered to find their approximations. In view of that in real cases the volatility is usually small, the method of small parameter of Poincare is for this purpose used.
Firms’ Perspectives On Innovation Policy Measures

The article explores the effectiveness of public policies to encourage innovation by industry, and in particular to develop industry-science interactions. The demand and impact of innovation policy measures on enterprises’ behaviour is investigated based on the results from a specialized survey of high-tech and medium high-tech manufacturing enterprises in Russia, conducted in 2018. The empirical approach is based on the concept of additionality allowing to determine the net effects of policy interventions. Particular attention is paid to the comparison of changes in the behaviour of enterprises (behavioral additionality) depending on their innovation strategies, including the decision to cooperate with universities and R&D organizations. The results indicate that while there is a strong demand for policy instruments used to promote innovation, they do not provide significant additional impacts to the business’ innovation activity. State efforts to promote industry-science cooperation seem to be ineffective. Public support contributes to reinforcing already established links, but does not lead to the emergence of new research partnerships.
Mining and Social Movements: Struggles over Livelihood and Rural Territorial Development in the Andes

Social movements have been viewed as vehicles through which the concerns of poor and marginalised groups are given greater visibility within civil society, lauded for being the means to achieve local empowerment and citizen activism, and seen as essential in holding the state to account and constituting a grassroots mechanism for promoting democracy. However, within development studies little attention has been paid to understanding how social movements can affect trajectories of development and rural livelihood in given spaces, and how these effects are related to movements' internal dynamics and their interaction with the broader environment within which they operate. This paper addresses this theme for the case of social movements protesting contemporary forms of mining investment in Latin America. On the basis of cases from Peru and Ecuador, the paper argues that the presence and nature of social movements has significant influences both on forms taken by extractive industries (in this case mining), and on the effects of this extraction on rural livelihoods. In this sense one can usefully talk about rural development as being co-produced by movements, mining companies and other actors, in particular the state. The terms of this co-production, however, vary greatly among different locations, reflecting the distinct geographies of social mobilisation and of mineral investment, as well as the varying power relationships among the different actors involved.
Anticipating Early Data Revisions to US GDP and the Effects of Releases on Equity Markets

The effects of data uncertainty on real-time decision-making can be reduced by predicting early revisions to US GDP growth. We show that survey forecasts efficiently anticipate the first-revised estimate of GDP, but that forecasting models incorporating monthly economic indicators and daily equity returns provide superior forecasts of the second-revised estimate. We consider the implications of these findings for analyses of the impact of surprises in GDP revision announcements on equity markets, and for analyses of the impact of anticipated future revisions on announcement-day returns.
Employment Generation Through the Development of Non-Oil Sector in Nigeria: Issues and Challenges

A major characteristic of oil industry is that it is capital intensive, limiting its capacity to generate employment. It has been argued that economic diversification from oil to non-oil sector will create a veritable arena for employment generation and poverty reduction. This paper analyses the socio-economic conditions in Nigeria, identifies four priority sectors for the purpose of developing non-oil economy and proposes a development policy framework for creating income, reducing poverty and generating employment.
DYNAMICS OF INTERMITTENT STREAM HABITAT REGULATE PERSISTENCE OF A THREATENED FISH AT MULTIPLE SCALES

Traditionally, threatened species management has emphasized conservation of individual populations and has assumed that abundance within suitable habitats is primarily governed by local environmental factors. However, recent research has revealed that landscape-level processes such as disturbance, dispersal, and habitat patch mosaic structure may also strongly influence local populations. We studied the population and habitat dynamics of a threatened fish, the Arkansas darter (Etheostoma cragini) at four spatial scales (pool, reach, segment, watershed) in two intermittent Colorado plains streams. At each scale, information on hydrology, habitat, and fish populations was combined to evaluate factors influencing darter persistence. At the pool scale, Arkansas darters persisted in most permanent pools during summer drought, tolerated extremes of hyperthermia and hypoxia, and were extirpated only when pools dried. Deeper pools had a higher probability of persisting during summer drought. At the reach scale, s.
Decompose Composite Equity Issuance Anomaly

Composite equity issuance (CEI) anomaly was one of well-known stock anomalies. Kent Daniel and Sheridan Titman in their 2006 paper, “Market Reaction to Tangible and Intangible Information”, broke down stock return into tangible and intangible return and argued that intangible return can explain both return reversal effect and book to price effect. In their paper, composite equity issuance was used as a measure of intangible return. Despite wide citations of CEI anomaly by various publications, we found little understanding on fundamental drivers behind this anomaly. In this paper, we decompose this anomaly through a simple transformation and show that efficacy of CEI anomaly rests on two most powerful stock factors: share change and dividend yield.
Capacity Management, Investment, and Hedging: Review and Recent Developments

This article reviews the literature on strategic capacity management concerned with determining the sizes, types, and timing of capacity investments and adjustments under uncertainty. Specific attention is given to recent developments to incorporate multiple decision makers, multiple capacity types, hedging and risk aversion. Capacity is a measure of processing abilities and limitations and is represented as a vector of stocks of various processing resources, while investment is the change of capacity and includes expansion and contraction. After discussing general issues in capacity investment problems, the article reviews models of capacity investment under uncertainty in three settings: The first reviews optimal capacity investment by single and multiple risk-neutral decision makers in a stationary environment where capacity remains constant. Allowing for multiple capacity types, the associated optimal capacity portfolio specifies the amounts and locations of safety capacity in a processing network. Its key feature is that it is unbalanced, i.e., regardless of how uncertainties are realized, one typically will never fully utilize all capacities. The second setting reviews the adjustment of capacity over time and the structure of optimal investment dynamics. The article ends by reviewing how to incorporate risk-aversion in capacity investment and contrasts hedging strategies involving financial versus operational means.
Measuring Labour Market Frictions: A Cross-Country Comparison

In this Paper we define and estimate measures of labour market frictions using data on job durations. We compare different estimation methods and different types of data. We propose and apply an unconditional inference method that can be applied to aggregate duration data. It does not require wage data, it is invariant to the way in which wages are determined, and it allows workers to care about other job characteristics. The empirical analysis focuses on France, but we perform separate analyses for the USA, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. We quantify the monopsony power due to search frictions and we examine the policy effects of the minimum wage, unemployment benefits and search frictions.
What Do Professional Forecasters Actually Predict?

In this paper we study what professional forecasters predict. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, business-cycle, and irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters, we regress their forecasts on the estimated components extracted from both the spectral analysis and the state space model. For both decomposition methods we find that the Survey of Professional Forecasters in the short run can predict almost all variation in the time series due to the trend and business-cycle, but the forecasts contain little or no significant information about the variation in the irregular component.
Physicians as Double Agents in a Universal Health Care System: Evidence from Generic Pharmaceutical Adoption in Taiwan

Physicians’ generic pharmaceutical adoption involves not only patients’ and insurance payers’ cost, but also their own interests. This study examines this double agency problem for physicians by using Taiwanese data because two of its institutional features: First, patients and physicians in a universal health care system did not self-select their insurance plans. Second, physicians in Taiwan respond to strong financial incentives because they are allowed to both prescribe and dispense drugs. The empirical results show that a larger price difference between brand-name and generic drugs increases physicians’ likelihood for prescribing generic prescriptions. However, this effect decreases as the payer’s cost share percentage increases. These results indicate that physicians’ prescriptions decision internalize patients’ cost but not the payer’s ones. This study also demonstrates that physicians who are more responsive to profits prescribed more generic drugs, including owners of hospitals and clinics, and physicians in clinics and private institutions. However, this effect decreases as the number of competitors in the drug market increases.
Rapid divergence in physiological and life-history traits between northern and southern populations of the British introduced neo-species, Senecio squalidus

Alien plants provide a unique opportunity to study evolution in novel environments, but relatively little is known about the extent to which they become locally adapted to different environments across their new range. Here, we compare northern and southern populations of the introduced species Senecio squalidus in Britain; S. squalidus has been in southern Britain for approximately 200 years and reached Scotland only about 50 years ago. We conducted common garden experiments at sites in the north and south of the species' range in Britain. We also conducted glasshouse and growth chamber experiments to test the hypothesis that southern genotypes flower later, are more drought-tolerant, germinate and establish better at warmer temperatures, and are less sensitive to cold stress than their more northern counterparts. Results from the common garden experiments are largely consistent with the hypothesis of rapid adaptive divergence of populations of the species within the introduced range, with genotypes typically showing a home-site advantage. Results from the glasshouse and growth chamber experiments demonstrate adaptive divergence in ability to tolerate drought stress and high temperatures, as well as in phenology. In particular, southern genotypes were more tolerant of dry conditions and high temperatures and they flowered later than northern genotypes. Our results show that rapid local adaptation can occur in alien species, and they have implications for our understanding of the ecological genetics of range expansion of introduced weeds.
Relationships between nestling condition and variability in coccidian prevalence among three species of wild-nesting birds in New Zealand

Coccidian protozoa are widespread intestinal parasites of vertebrate species. Currently, our understanding of the dynamics of host–coccidia relationships among birds remains poor beyond domestic poultry and species held in captivity. The various threats that parasites can impose have resulted in demands to monitor and quantify different parasites and incorporate their impacts on hosts into ecological models of risk assessment. Here, we estimate prevalence of coccidian infections from nestlings of three species of exotic, free-living European passerines in New Zealand (Turdus merula, T. philomelos, Sturnus vulgaris). We find that despite high prevalence of infection among clutches (~40%) these infections appear asymptomatic and are not related to indices of nestling condition or fledging success. We encourage additional studies to provide results on variation in parasite prevalence and pathogenicity in order to build our understanding of host dynamics.
Regulatory Capital Planning and Deferred Tax Assets in a Post-Financial Crisis Environment

Insurance regulators substantially relaxed rules on deferred tax asset (DTA) inclusion in regulatory capital calculations during and following the financial crisis. We find evidence that firms use increased discretion in regulation to increase the share of their regulatory capital relating to DTAs. As DTAs are less liquid relative to other assets, our study raises the concern that insurance firms may appear more financially stable than the reality of their underlying economic condition. Consistent with this concern, we find firms with relatively low levels of regulatory capital include higher levels of DTAs in their regulatory capital calculations relative to their peers, higher levels of DTAs are associated with a higher likelihood of insolvency, and ratings agencies are not incorporating DTAs into their life insurer rating criteria. Our study has important implications for regulators considering changes to capital standards for other financial institutions.
Exclusive Dealing

In this paper, we provide a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of exclusive dealing, and we explore the motivations for and effects of its use. For a broad class of models, we characterize the outcome of a contracting game in which manufacturers may employ exclusive dealing provisions in their contracts. We then apply this characterization to a sequence of specialized settings. We demonstrate that exclusionary contractual provisions may be irrelevant, anticompetitive, or efficiency‐enhancing, depending on the setting. More specifically, we exhibit the potential for anticompetitive effects in noncoincident markets (i. e., markets other than the ones in which exclusive dealing is practiced), and we explore the potential for the enhancement of efficiency in a setting in which common representation gives rise to incentive conflicts. In each instance, we describe the manner in which equilibrium outcomes would be altered by a ban on exclusive dealing. We demonstrate that a ban may have surprisingly subtle and unintended effects.
Behavioural observations and use of burrow systems by an endangered Australian arid-zone lizard, Slater’s skink (Liopholis slateri)

Abstract. The endangered Slater’s skink (Liopholis slateri) is restricted to the river floodplain habitat of central Australia. It is an obligate burrower and creates complex, multientrance burrow systems in the mound of soil that builds up around the base of some shrubs and small trees. We provide detailed information about the behaviour and use of the burrow systems by Slater’s skink. The behaviour of lizards remained consistent over the four months (October–January) of the study, and lizards performed almost all of their daily activities around their burrow/mound systems. Lizards also showed signs of sociality, as pairs of lizards were observed to share occupancy of single burrow systems over extended periods, and demonstrated a high level of tolerance to conspecifics. This study emphasises the importance of the burrow systems for the daily life of this lizard and suggests that conservation measures should focus on ensuring that the lizards have a reliable supply of stable and suitable burrows in their preferred habitat.
Avaliação de tecnologias de refúgio no cultivo de milho transgênico

The objective of this work was to compare the traditional refuges in separated areas with the alternative technology of refuge provided by the mixture of conventional seeds in the bag (refuge in the bag, RIB) with different proportions. The commercial transgenic hybrids AG 7000YG and DKB 390YG were used with the refuges sown with their respective conventional cultivars. Seven treatments were evaluated: RIB with four mixing rates of nontransgenic seeds (2.5, 5.0, 7.5, and 10%); traditional refuge, with 10% of the area sown exclusively with nontransgenic cultivar; and entirely cultivated areas with transgenic or nontransgenic plants. The DKB 390YG hybrid was the most productive. For this hybrid, there were no yield differences between treatments, except for the control (entirely conventional), which had lower yield. With the AG 7000YG, RIB technology with 5.0 and 7.5% of nontransgenic seeds provided the best yields, significantly higher than the one from traditional refuge, which did not differ from the conventional control. In the RIB treatments, differences in damage intensities by Spodoptera frugiperda did not reflect in yield differences. Refuge in the bag is a viable alternative to the currently used refuge method.
Corporate Governance and Unemployment Rate Determinants: A Study on Volkswagen’s 'Diesel Scandal'

Corporate governance is a system by which a company is controlled and directed. There are six principles of corporate governance which are accountability, transparency, fairness, sustainability, independence and responsibility. Scandal arises when the board of directors violates these principles. This study aims to investigate the influence of firm-specific factors (return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Altman-Z) and macroeconomic factors (gross domestic product (GDP), inflation rate, unemployment rate and Tobin’s q) affecting the corporate governance performance of Volkswagen. Multiple regression analysis of firm-specific factors and macroeconomic factors is conducted for the year from 2013 to 2017. The findings and analysis show that macroeconomic factor (unemployment) have a greater influence on the company’s corporate governance performance as compared to firm-specific factors. The rise in unemployment indicates that the economy is unstable, companies will try to cut down their operation costs in order to survive and usually they will retrench their employees and/or reducing the wages. Having a fully functional board of directors will be too costly to maintain, hence the company will decide to even reduce the remuneration payment of the board of directors. This will cause the efficiency of the board of directors to drop as they will no longer have the encouragement to fulfil their fiduciary duty. As a result, the corporate governance performance of the company will drop.