Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Housing Bubbles , Wealth Inequality and Capital Income Taxation ∗

This paper combines different sources (tax records, national accounts, wealth surveys) to construct wealth distribution series for Spain since the mid-eighties until the present. The wealth inequality series and a new asset-specific wealth accumulation decomposition are then used to analyze how housing booms and busts shape the wealth distribution using two historical episodes (1984-1998 and 1999-2015). Wealth concentration drops during housing booms and rises during busts. My findings suggest that differences in rates of return and capital gains are the main drivers of wealth inequality dynamics during housing booms and saving rates during busts. Rich individuals, which are not as liquidity constrained as individuals in the middle and bottom of the distribution, are able to better diversify their portfolio during the housing bust substituting their saving on housing for saving on financial assets, contributing to revert the decreasing trend in wealth concentration of the housing boom. The importance of saving rates on financial assets was exacerbated during the recent housing bust due to a large capital income tax reform that created a wedge between the taxation of financial income (interest and dividends) and housing rents. These results provide the type of evidence needed to discipline macroeconomic theories of wealth inequality, asset price changes and capital income taxes.
Optimal Control of a PDE Model of an Invasive Species in a River

Managing invasive species in rivers can be assisted by appropriate adjustment of flow rates. Using a partial differential equation (PDE) model representing an invasive population in a river, we investigate controlling the water discharge rate as a management strategy. Our goal is to see how controlling the water discharge rate will affect the invasive population, and more specifically how water discharges may force the invasive population downstream. We complete the analysis of a flow control problem, which seeks to minimize the invasive population upstream while minimizing the cost of this management. Using an optimality system, consisting of our population PDE, an adjoint PDE, and corresponding optimal control characterization, we illustrate some numerical simulations in which parameters are varied to determine how far upstream the invasive population reaches. We also change the river’s cross-sectional area to investigate its impact on the optimal control.
A Literature Survey on Security Issues of WSN and Different Types of Attacks in Network

This review work present a gist of security issues related to the WSN network and discusses different types of attacks in the network. Sensor nodes, when deployed to form a network of wireless sensors operating under the control of central authority, namely the base station, are capable of presenting interesting applications due to their ability to be deployed ubiquitously in hostile and ubiquitous environments. But for the same reasons, security becomes a major concern for these networks. The purpose of this paper is to analyze threats to wireless sensor networks and to identify various research efforts to investigate various routing attacks targeting the network layer. A particularly devastating attack is the Wormhole attack, a denial of service attack, where attackers create a low latency link between two points of network. By studying existing Wormhole detection methods, researchers are identifying and delineating key search challenges for detecting wormhole attacks in the network layer.
Intranasal Peptide-Based FpvA-KLH Conjugate Vaccine Protects Mice From Pseudomonas aeruginosa Acute Murine Pneumonia

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic pathogen causing acute and chronic respiratory infections associated with morbidity and mortality, especially in patients with cystic fibrosis. Vaccination against P. aeruginosa before colonization may be a solution against these infections and improve the quality of life of at-risk patients. To develop a vaccine against P. aeruginosa, we formulated a novel peptide-based P. aeruginosa subunit vaccine based on the extracellular regions of one of its major siderophore receptors, FpvA. We evaluated the effectiveness and immunogenicity of the FpvA peptides conjugated to keyhole limpet hemocyanin (KLH) with the adjuvant curdlan in a murine vaccination and challenge model. Immunization with the FpvA-KLH vaccine decreased the bacterial burden and lung edema after P. aeruginosa challenge. Vaccination with FpvA-KLH lead to antigen-specific IgG and IgM antibodies in sera, and IgA antibodies in lung supernatant. FpvA-KLH immunized mice had an increase in recruitment of CD11b+ dendritic cells as well as resident memory CD4+ T cells in the lungs compared to non-vaccinated challenged mice. Splenocytes isolated from vaccinated animals showed that the FpvA-KLH vaccine with the adjuvant curdlan induces antigen-specific IL-17 production and leads to a Th17 type of immune response. These results indicate that the intranasal FpvA-KLH conjugate vaccine can elicit both mucosal and systemic immune responses. These observations suggest that the intranasal peptide-based FpvA-KLH conjugate vaccine with curdlan is a potential vaccine candidate against P. aeruginosa pneumonia.
Characteristics of Hospitalized Rhinovirus-Associated Community-Acquired Pneumonia in Children, Finland, 2003–2014

Background: Rhinovirus (RV) is the most common cause of respiratory tract infections in children but, still, the clinical characteristics of RV-associated pneumonia have not been sufficiently investigated. Methods: We identified children and adolescents younger than 18 years of age treated for community-acquired pneumonia as inpatients at the Turku University Hospital from 2003 to 2014 and analyzed for RV by PCR of a respiratory tract specimen. We collected the data from medical records and compared RV-positive children with RV-negative children. Results: Of the study population of 313 children with pneumonia who were studied for RV, it was detected in 82 (26%). RV-positive children were younger (median age 2.6 years, interquartile range [IQR] 1.1–4.6 vs. 3.5 years, IQR 1.7–8.3, p = 0.002) and they had more often a history of preterm birth (16% vs. 5%, adjusted odds ratio 2.89, 95% confidence interval 1.21–6.92, p = 0.017) than RV-negative children. RV-positive children had a higher median white blood cell count than RV-negative children at presentation with pneumonia. The signs, symptoms, and severity of pneumonia were mostly similar in RV-positive and RV-negative children. Conclusions: RV was frequently detected in young children hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia. We identified premature birth as a factor associated with RV-positive pneumonia. The clinical features of pneumonia did not clearly differ between RV-positive and RV-negative children. Further studies are needed to clarify the clinical significance of detection of RV in children with pneumonia.
Sustainability Status of Data-Limited Fisheries: Global Challenges for Snapper and Grouper

Snapper and grouper are important fisheries resources, with high commercial value and an important role in the livelihoods and food security of many local communities worldwide. However, the status of many snapper and grouper fisheries is unknown, particularly in the small-scale fisheries in developing countries. The main goals of this work are to provide an overview of the current status and trends of these resources and to find alternative sources of information that could be used to inform the status of snapper and grouper fisheries, as well as other data-limited fisheries. Several complementary approaches were explored, including determination of the status of snapper and grouper fisheries based on FAO assessment criteria, analysis of landings time-series trends, and investigation of whether other variables could be used as proxies for their status. About half of these fisheries were classified as overexploited, 30 percent as non-fully exploited and 19 percent as fully exploited. The FAO landings data indicated that the number of overexploited fisheries has been increasing over the years, and that the majority of these fisheries are in transition between fully exploited and overexploited status. The Human Development Index emerged as a potential proxy for the status of the biomass. The multinomial modelling approach explained about 44 percent of the variability observed in the biomass stock status classification data and indicated a high level of correspondence between original and estimated status, which makes this approach very attractive for applying to other data-limited fisheries.
High-Level Teleoperation System for Aerial Exploration of Indoor Environments

Exploration of challenging indoor environments is a demanding task. While automation with aerial robots seems a promising solution, fully autonomous systems still struggle with high-level cognitive tasks and intuitive decision making. To facilitate automation, we introduce a novel teleoperation system with an aerial telerobot that is capable of handling all demanding low-level tasks. Motivated by the typical structure of indoor environments, the system creates an interactive scene topology in real-time that reduces scene details and supports affordances. Thus, difficult high-level tasks can be effectively supervised by a human operator. To elaborate on the effectiveness of our system during a real-world exploration mission, we conducted a user study. Despite being limited by real-world constraints, results indicate that our system better supports operators with indoor exploration, compared to a baseline system with traditional joystick control.
Mutual Suppression of Proximal and Distal Axonal Spike Initiation Determines the Output Patterns of a Motor Neuron

Axonal spike initiation at sites far from somatodendritic integration occurs in a range of systems, but its contribution to neuronal output activity is not well understood. We studied the interactions of distal and proximal spike initiation in an unmyelinated motor axon of the stomatogastric nervous system in the lobster, Homarus americanus. The peripheral axons of the pyloric dilator (PD) neurons generate tonic spiking in response to dopamine application. Centrally generated bursting activity and peripheral spike initiation had mutually suppressive effects. The two PD neurons and the electrically coupled oscillatory anterior burster (AB) neuron form the pacemaker ensemble of the pyloric central pattern generator, and antidromic invasion of central compartments by peripherally generated spikes caused spikelets in AB. Antidromic spikes suppressed burst generation in an activity-dependent manner: slower rhythms were diminished or completely disrupted, while fast rhythmic activity remained robust. Suppression of bursting was based on interference with the underlying slow wave oscillations in AB and PD, rather than a direct effect on spike initiation. A simplified multi-compartment circuit model of the pacemaker ensemble replicated this behavior. Antidromic activity disrupted slow wave oscillations by resetting the inward and outward current trajectories in each spike interval. Centrally generated bursting activity in turn suppressed peripheral spike initiation in an activity-dependent manner. Fast bursting eliminated peripheral spike initiation, while slower bursting allowed peripheral spike initiation to continue during the intervals between bursts. The suppression of peripheral spike initiation was associated with a small after-hyperpolarization in the sub-millivolt range. A realistic model of the PD axon replicated this behavior and showed that a sub-millivolt cumulative after-hyperpolarization across bursts was sufficient to eliminate peripheral spike initiation. This effect was based on the dynamic interaction between slow activity-dependent hyperpolarization caused by the Na+/K+-pump and inward rectification through the hyperpolarization-activated inward current, Ih. These results demonstrate that interactions between different spike initiation sites based on spike propagation can shift the relative contributions of different types of activity in an activity-dependent manner. Therefore, distal axonal spike initiation can play an important role in shaping neural output, conditional on the relative level of centrally generated activity.
Maturation of Gut Microbiota and Circulating Regulatory T Cells and Development of IgE Sensitization in Early Life

Recent studies suggest that the cross-talk between the gut microbiota and human immune system during the first year of life is an important regulator of the later development of atopic diseases. We explored the changes in the gut microbiota, blood regulatory T cells, and atopic sensitization in a birth-cohort of Estonian and Finnish children followed from 3 to 36 months of age. We describe here an infant Treg phenotype characterized by high Treg frequency, the maturation of Treg population characterized by a decrease in their frequency accompanied with an increase in the highly activated Treg cells. These changes in Treg population associated first with the relative abundance of Bifidobacterium longum followed by increasing colonization with butyrate producing bacteria. High bifidobacterial abundance in the neonatal microbiota appeared to be protective, while colonization with Bacteroides and E. coli was associated with later risk of allergy. Estonian children with lower risk of IgE mediated allergic diseases than Finnish children showed an earlier maturation of the gut microbiota, detected as earlier switch to an increasing abundance of butyrate-producing bacteria, combined with an earlier maturation of Treg cell phenotype and total IgE production. The children with established allergic diseases by age 3 showed a decreased abundance of butyrate producing Faecalibacterium. These results suggest that as well as the maintenance of a bifidobacterial dominated gut microbiota is important during the first weeks of life, the overtake by butyrate producing bacteria seems to be a beneficial shift, which should not be postponed.
Multiple Pathways to More Sustainable Diets: Shifts in Diet Composition, Caloric Intake and Food Waste

Our food choices, food production pathways and household behaviors together govern the impact that our diet has on our health as well as the environment. As the planetary population grows, there is an increasing awareness of the need to both improve the quality of our diets for health reasons and to reduce its impact on the earth. From the consumer perspective, however, it is not always clear which healthy diet options and behaviours contribute most to reductions in our dietary footprint. In this paper we model and contrast the impact of the current American diet and three recommended diets from the USDA Dietary Guidelines 2015-2020 on six dimensions of the dietary footprint: land area required, blue water use, fertilizer application, primary energy input, ammonia emissions and greenhouse gas emissions based on LCIA studies. For each diet we test the relative impacts of a shift in diet composition, caloric intake and the reduction in food waste on the dietary footprint. We find that there are multiple pathways to significantly reduce the environmental impact of our diets. Shifts in diet composition from the current diet to a vegetarian diet had the greatest impact on reducing the dietary footprint, however, combinations of reducing caloric intake from 2600kcal/d to 2000kcal/d combined with 50% reduction in food loss could achieve similar results in some cases. In line with results of other studies, we find that reducing red-meat and dairy contribute most to the dietary footprint. However, recommended increases in fruits and vegetables with dietary shifts are accompanied by significant increases in blue water use. We extrapolate our estimated of environmental impacts out to 2051 when the US population is set to reach 400 million people. By combining a number of incremental shifts in diet composition, intake level, and food loss, significant land currently under production could be spared from production for other uses while still providing a nutritious diet for all.
The Relationship Between Safety Climate and Performance in Intensive Care Units: The Mediating Role of Managerial Safety Practices and Priority of Safety

Patient safety is defined as the absence of preventable harm to a patient during the delivery of healthcare. Evidence from several reports and research studies reflect the high incidence and subsequent high cost of patient harm in general and within intensive care units. Against this background, this study tests a theoretical framework addressing relationships among patient safety climate dimensions and their impact on safety performance. The dimensions refer to safety in terms of procedure suitability and information flow, managerial safety practices, and priority of safety. A retrospective cross-sectional analytical research study was conducted. The target population was recruited from the three intensive care units in the main tertiary level hospital in Malta. A sample of 215 healthcare professionals, who fit the eligibility criteria, participated in this research study, achieving a response rate of 82.7%. The “Survey on Patient Safety Climate” was utilized. Findings support the following hypotheses: the higher the extent to which safety procedures are perceived as suitable to the intensive care units' daily work demands and processes, the lower the intensive care units' clinical incidents (r = −0.269, p ≤ 0.01) and the higher the extent to which safety information flow is perceived as clear and unambiguous to the intensive care units' daily work demands and processes, the lower the intensive care units' clinical incidents (r = −0.295, p ≤ 0.01). Findings also support the following hypotheses: managerial safety practices mediate the relationship between safety procedure suitability/safety information flow and clinical incidents (p = 0.009, p = 0.014, respectively) and priority of safety mediates the relationship between safety procedure suitability/safety information flow/managerial safety practices and clinical incidents (p = 0.002, p = 0.002, p = 0.042, respectively). Health service managers must ensure employees perceive safety procedures as suitable and safety information as clear and unambiguous, emphasize the manager's role as a safety referent and safety change agent and create an organization that prioritizes safety over work pace, workload and pressure for production. Essentially, health service managers need to create safety leaders to drive the organization to patient safety.
Antecedents of Residents’ Pro-tourism Behavioral Intention: Place Image, Place Attachment, and Attitude

Few prior studies have investigated place image from the residents’ perspective, how this and residents’ place attachment influence attitude to tourism, and consequent reactions. Accordingly, this study aims to develop a model for local residents’ pro-tourism behavioral intention and to discover the relationships between constructs. Analysis was based on a sample of 370 residents in Huangshan City, China. Results indicate that residents’ attitude to tourism positively affects their pro-tourism behavioral intention. Residents’ place image is found to positively relate to place attachment and attitude to tourism, while place attachment is also related to attitude and pro-tourism behavioral intention. In addition, attitude to tourism mediates place image’s and place attachment’s respective relationships with pro-tourism behavioral intention. Lastly, place image indirectly impacts residents’ attitude to tourism and pro-tourism behavioral intention through place attachment. However, the positive relationship between place image and pro-tourism behavioral intention is not supported. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
How Radical Is Embodied Creativity? Implications of 4E Approaches for Creativity Research and Teaching

Modern ideas of embodiment have been influential in cognitive science for the past several decades, yet there is minimal evidence of embodied cognition approaches in creativity research or pedagogical practices for teaching creativity skills. With creativity research in crisis due to conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues, radical embodied cognitive science (RECS) may offer a framework to move the field forward. This conceptual analysis examines the current state of creativity research from the 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) cognition and RECS perspectives. Two streams are critiqued for their potential to further knowledge about the development of creative expertise and inform educational practices. Promising directions for future research is discussed, including ways dynamical systems approaches, such as those used in improvisational and musical creativity, might yield new insights about how people develop creative expertise and help address the “higher order thinking” criticisms of RECS.
Towards Multi-Facet Snippets for Dataset Search

Due to a recent significant increase in the number of RDF datasets available on the Web, there is a pressing need in effective search techniques for finding the right data on demand. A promising approach is to present retrieved datasets as snippets that aim at concisely explaining to the user why this dataset fulfils their demand. Snippets in particular can illustrate the main content of the dataset and explain its relevance to the user’s query. Computing optimal snippets is a non-trivial task and a number of approaches have emerged to address this problem. In this short paper, we report our ongoing work on snippets that address multiple facets of optimality. Based on our recently proposed evaluation metrics for dataset snippets, we formulate a weighted maximum coverage problem which directly optimizes three evaluation metrics. We solve the problem with a greedy algorithm, and our current implementation has outperformed four baseline methods.
Measuring Functional Independence of an Aged Person with a Combination of Machine Learning and Logical Reasoning

Various approaches to human activity recognition have been proposed to achieve better management of human health and wellness. However, there are few approaches that measure the levels of activity in an accountable way. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to measure the functional independence of an aged person with a combination of machine learning and ontology-based logical reasoning. As to combining the two different approaches, we utilize semantic contexts as the interlayer and dummy contexts as a way of handling the difﬁculty in reasoning with incomplete data. The Functional Independence Measure (FIM) is used to build an ontology to evaluate an aged person’s functional independence. Evaluation experiments using data collected in the laboratory environment of the authors’ are conducted, and the results of which show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Virtualized Ontology Query By Example

The Web has evolved to a large variety of data usually published in RDF from multiple domains. A recurrent problem in recent literature concerns to perform a search over RDF instead of using structured queries in triple-pattern-based languages like SPARQL, which only expert programmers can precisely specify their information needs. In this paper, we propose Von-QBE, an open source tool to query over RDF databases without any technical knowledge about RDF or the queried ontology structure. This differs from the-state-of-art tools by being schema-based instead of instance-based. It can be impracticable to use instance-based approaches in big data scenarios where the RDF data is huge and demands lots of computational resources to keep the knowledge base in memory. Moreover, most of these solutions need the knowledge base materialized into RDF(or triplified), which can be costly for legacy bases. We present various demonstration scenarios using the IMDB movie ontology.