nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
The effectiveness and sustainability of foreign exchange market interventions and sterilisation policies
Year: 2013

The main motivation for this thesis comes from the lack of studies on issues related to central bank's monetary sterilisation bonds (MSBs) The MSBs have been, in particular, issued in emerging economies to offset the impacts of sterilised FX market interventions. The objectives of this thesis are to examine the impacts of and motivation for sterilised FX interventions and to explore methodologies to assess the sustainability of MSB dependent sterilisation policy. Chapter 2 overviews the main theoretical issues and statistical facts related to sterilisations, Chapter 3 and 4 investigate the impacts, profits and motives of sterilised FX interventions in selected countries, focusing on the asymmetric intervention preferences. Chapter 5 compares the degree of sterilisation and de facto capital mobility focusing on emerging countries under inflation targeting by estimating sterilisation and offset coefficient with panel data for 30 countries. Chapter 6 proposes several methodologies for assessing the sustainability of MSB dependent sterilisation policy. We modify theories of fiscal sustainability and then derive central bank's intertemporal budget constraint, which is separated from the central governments. Several sustainability conditions are obtained, based on cointegration relation between total revenues and expenditures or on central bank's monetary reaction function. Then, the sustainability tests are applied to empirical studies on the Bank of Korea's sterilisation policy.
Homestaging Fenomenet a avdragsratten
Year: 2006

Around year 2004, a new service was introduced on the Swedish housing market with the purpose of increasing the sell price, namely homestaging. Homestaging means that a home gets in order before a open house, for example by removing personal affections or the leasing of new furniture. The phenomenon originates from the United States, where it has existed for several decades.Most components, but not all, that is included in the homestaging concept is tax deductible and this has lead to several questions around the law and foremost within tax law. To elucidate this complexity of problems around the right to deduction for homestaging, the Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, has formulated a letter stating the authority's attitude towards the phenomenon. The letter functions as a recommendation but is not comparable with law.The operators within the real estate sector that is most likely to come in contact with the concept is homestagers and real estate agents. How extensive is these operators' knowledge within the right to deduction and the complex of problem around this? On these premises, a telephone survey has been carried out to find out which knowledge 20 real estate agents and 25 homestagers posseses within the right to deduction and which information they give to their customers. To check which information is given via the homestagers webpages, 50 homepages has also been analyzed. Moreover, a representative from the Swedish tax agency has been interviewed to create deeper understanding regarding the authority's attitude.In addition to these interviews, a survey has been done with the aim to find what tax law legislated demarcations considered compitable to what applies for homestaging and the right to deduction.The survey of the webpages shows that the homestagers with a webpage linking/referring to Skatteverkets letter is the homestagers that is most knowledgeable within the tax law and the right to deduction. The interviews with the real estate brokers and homestagers show existence of significant knowledge gap in both groups concerning the right of deduction. The deficiency is more alarming in the real estate agent group, because of their legal advisory role.The different components within the concept of homestaging are related to the following cost areas; sale costs, improvement costs or personal living expenses. Costs that are related to sale costs are tax deductible without reservations, costs that are related to improvement costs is considered as tax deductible if they meet certain criteria and costs that are related to personal living expenses are never tax deductible. Sometimes, the boundaries are somewhat indistinct and the nature of the costs becomes a matter of interpretation.The letter from Skatteverket, the right to deduction, the media attention, requests from homestagers and real estate brokers and the possibility to get a higher sale price for a real estate, concludes that homestaging is not a temporary fad but is here to stay.
Unique Eomes+ NK Cell Subsets Are Present in Uterus and Decidua During Early Pregnancy
Venue: Front. Immunol.
Year: 2016

Decidual and uterine natural killer (NK) cells have been shown to contribute to the successful pregnancy both in humans and mice. NK cells represent "cytotoxic" group 1 innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) and are distinct from the recently described "helper" ILC1. Here, we show that both in humans and mice the majority of group 1 ILC in endometrium/uterus and decidua express Eomesodermin (Eomes) thus suggesting that they are developmentally related to conventional NK cells. However, they differ from peripheral NK cells. In humans, Eomes+ decidual NK (dNK) cells express CD49a and other markers of tissue residency, including CD103, integrin b7, CD9, and CD69. The expression of CD103 allows the identification of different subsets of IFNg producing Eomes+ NK cells. We show that TGFb can sustain/induce CD103 and CD9 expression in dNK cells and decidual CD34 derived NK cells, indicating that the decidual microenvironment can instruct the phenotype of Eomes+ NK cells. In murine decidua and uterus, Eomes+ cells include CD49a CD49b+ conventional NK cells and CD49a+ cells. Notably, Eomes+CD49a+ cells are absent in spleen and liver. Decidual and uterine Eomes+CD49a+ cells can be dissected in two peculiar cell subsets according to CD49b expression. CD49a+CD49b and CD49a+CD49b+ cells are enriched in immature CD11blowCD27high cells, while CD49a CD49b+ cells contain higher percentages of mature CD11bhighCD27low cells, both in uterus and decidua. Moreover, Eomes+CD49a+CD49b cells decrease during gestation, thus suggesting that this peculiar subset may be required in early pregnancy rather than on later phases. Conversely, a minor Eomes CD49a+ ILC1 population present in decidua and uterus increases during pregnancy. CD49b Eomes+ cells produce mainly TNF, while CD49a CD49b+ conventional NK cells and CD49a+CD49b+ cells produce both IFNg and TNF. Thus, human and murine decidua contains unique subsets of group 1 ILCs, including Eomes+ and Eomes cells, with peculiar phenotypic and functional features. Our study contributes to re examination of the complexity of uterine and decidual ILC subsets in humans and mice and highlights the role of the decidual microenvironment in shaping the features of these cells.
Treatment Resistant Depression Revisited: A Glimmer of Hope
Venue: Journal of personalized medicine
Year: 2021

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder worldwide. It causes individual suffering, loss of productivity, increased health care costs and high suicide risk. Current pharmacologic interventions fail to produce at least partial response to approximately one third of these patients, and remission is obtained in approximately 30% of patients. This is known as Treatment Resistant Depression (TRD) The burden of TRD exponentially increases the longer it persists, with a higher risk of impaired functional and social functioning, vast losses in quality of life and significant risk of somatic morbidity and suicidality. Different approaches have been suggested and utilized, but the results have not been encouraging. In this review article, we present new approaches to identify and correct potential causes of TRD, thereby reducing its prevalence and with it the overall burden of this disease entity. We will address potential contributory factors to TRD, most of which can be investigated in many laboratories as routine tests. We discuss endocrinological aberrations, notably, hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation and thyroid and gonadal dysfunction. We address the role of Vitamin D in contributing to depression. Pharmacogenomic testing is being increasingly used to determine Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in Cytochrome P450, Serotonin Transporter, COMT, folic acid conversion (MTHFR) As the role of immune system dysregulation is being recognized as potentially a major contributory factor to TRD, the measurement of C reactive protein (CRP) and select immune biomarkers, where testing is available, can guide combination treatments with anti inflammatory agents (e.g. selective COX 2 inhibitors) reversing treatment resistance. We focus on established and emerging test procedures, potential biomarkers and non biologic assessments and interventions to apply personalized medicine to effectively manage treatment resistance in general and TRD specifically.
SDExplorer: A Generic Toolkit for Smoothly Exploring Massive Scale Sequence Diagram
Venue: 2018 IEEE/ACM 26th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)
Year: 2018

To understand program's behavior, using reverse engineered sequence diagram is a valuable technique. In practice, researchers usually record execution traces and generate a sequence diagram according to them. However, the diagram can be too large to read while treating real world software due to the massiveness of execution traces. Several studies on minimizing/compressing sequence diagrams have been proposed; however, the resulting diagram may be either still large or losing important information. Besides, existing tools are highly customized for a certain research purpose. To address these problems, we present a generic toolkit SDExplorer in this paper, which is a flexible and lightweight tool to effectively explore a massive scale sequence diagram in a highly scalable manner. Additionally, SDExplorer supports popular features of existing tools (i.e. search, filter, grouping, etc. We believe it is an easy to use and promising tool in future research to evaluate and compare the minimizing/compressing techniques in real maintenance tasks.
Litter decomposition driven by soil fauna, plant diversity and soil management in urban gardens.
Venue: The Science of the total environment
Year: 2019

In the face of growing urban densification, green spaces in cities, such as gardens, are increasingly important for biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the influences of urban green space management on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships is poorly understood. We investigated the relationship between soil fauna and litter decomposition in 170 urban garden sites along a gradient of urbanisation intensity in the city of Zurich, CH. We used litter bags of 1 and 4 mm mesh size to evaluate the contribution of soil meso and macrofauna on litter decomposition. By using multilevel structural equation models (SEM) we investigated direct and indirect environmental effects and management practices on litter decomposition and litter residue quality. We evaluated the role of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity of soil fauna species on litter decomposition, based on a sample of 120 species (81,007 individuals; 39 collembola, 18 earthworm, 16 isopod, 47 gastropod species) We found highest litter decomposition rates using 4 mm mesh size litter bags, highlighting the importance of soil macrofauna. Urban warming, a proxy for urbanisation intensity, covaried positively, whereas soil disturbances, such as intensive soil and crop management, were negatively correlated with decomposition rates. Interestingly, soil fauna species richness decreased, with the exception of gastropods, and soil fauna abundance increased with urban warming. Our data also show that plant species richness positively affected litter decomposition by increasing soil fauna species richness and microbial activity. A multivariate analysis of organic compounds in litter residues confirmed the importance of soil fauna species richness and garden management on litter decomposition processes. Overall, we showed, that also in intensively managed urban green spaces, such as gardens, biodiversity of plants and soil fauna drives key ecosystem processes. Urban planning strategies that integrate soil protecting management practices may help to maintain important ecosystem services in this heavily used urban environment.
The Determinants of Environmental Information Disclosure in Vietnam Listed Companies
Year: 2020

Environmental pollution and climate change in Vietnam are now becoming a major concern. This situation is increasing the pressure on the companies to improve their social responsibility in production and business activities and disclose the environmental information to meet the requirements of stakeholders. This study investigates the internal and external factors of the company that affects the environmental information disclosure of listed companies on the Vietnam stock market as business sector, firm size, corporate manager perceptions, profitability, financial leverage, community pressure, pressures from stakeholders, government pressure influencing environmental information disclosure. Analytical data collected through the survey of 120 listed companies on the Ho Chi Minh City Stock Exchange (HOSE) By testing Cronbach's Alpha, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and logistic regression analysis, the results of the study show that the level of environmental information disclosure of listed companies on the stock market in Vietnam depends heavily on government regulations, followed by the pressure from stakeholders, community pressure, views of business managers, companies size, business sector, and particularly profitability and financial leverage factors that have a negative relationship with environmental information disclosure.
Pixel Based Machine Learning in Medical Imaging
Venue: Int. J. Biomed. Imaging
Year: 2012

Machine learning (ML) plays an important role in the medical imaging field, including medical image analysis and computer aided diagnosis, because objects such as lesions and organs may not be represented accurately by a simple equation; thus, medical pattern recognition essentially require "learning from examples." One of the most popular uses of ML is classification of objects such as lesions into certain classes (e.g. abnormal or normal, or lesions or nonlesions) based on input features (e.g. contrast and circularity) obtained from segmented object candidates. Recently, pixel/voxel based ML (PML) emerged in medical image processing/analysis, which use pixel/voxel values in images directly instead of features calculated from segmented objects as input information; thus, feature calculation or segmentation is not required. Because the PML can avoid errors caused by inaccurate feature calculation and segmentation which often occur for subtle or complex objects, the performance of the PML can potentially be higher for such objects than that of common classifiers (i.e. feature based MLs) In this paper, PMLs are surveyed to make clear (a) classes of PMLs, (b) similarities and differences within (among) different PMLs and those between PMLs and feature based MLs, (c) advantages and limitations of PMLs, and (d) their applications in medical imaging.
Human adenovirus: Viral pathogen with increasing importance.
Venue: European journal of microbiology immunology
Year: 2014

The aim of this review is to describe the biology of human adenovirus (HAdV) the clinical and epidemiological characteristics of adenoviral epidemic keratoconjunctivitis and to present a practical update on its diagnosis, treatment, and prophylaxis. There are two well defined adenoviral keratoconjunctivitis clinical syndromes: epidemic keratoconjunctivitis (EKC) and pharyngoconjunctival fever (PCF) which are caused by different HAdV serotypes. The exact incidence of adenoviral conjunctivitis is still poorly known. However, cases are more frequent during warmer months. The virus is endemic in the general population, and frequently causes severe disease in immunocompromised patients, especially the pediatric patients. Contagion is possible through direct contact or fomites, and the virus is extremely resistant to different physical and chemical agents. The clinical signs or symptoms of conjunctival infection are similar to any other conjunctivitis, with a higher incidence of pseudomembranes. In the cornea, adenoviral infection may lead to keratitis nummularis. Diagnosis is mainly clinical, but its etiology can be confirmed using cell cultures, antigen detection, polymerase chain reaction or immunochromatography. Multiple treatments have been tried for this disease, but none of them seem to be completely effective. Prevention is the most reliable and recommended strategy to control this contagious infection.
Exploring entrepreneurial orientation and intentions among technical university students
Venue: Education Training
Year: 2019

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of the contextual antecedents on the individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) of university graduates, which, in turn, affects their entrepreneurial intentions (EIs)  Primary data were collected in the form of 510 valid responses from engineering students across two technical universities in India, through a structured questionnaire consisting of scales adapted from the extant literature, and the data were empirically validated in this study. The reliability and validity measures of the constructs were validated through the confirmatory factor analysis, and the proposed hypotheses were validated using structural equation modelling.  The results of this empirical analysis validate that the contextual antecedents have a significant positive impact on students' entrepreneurial orientation (EO) which, in turn, has a significant positive influence on EIs.  This analysis depicts the significance of EO as a perceptual driver at the individual level and substantiates that the availability of resources such as startup capital, access to business information, social networks and supportive university context significantly affects the decision making process of an individual to venture into an otherwise uncertain occupation of entrepreneurship.  The study has the likely potential to help university administrators and policymakers to allocate resources, develop strategies and provide effective entrepreneurial learning in entrepreneurship oriented courses aimed at honing entrepreneurial skills and self confidence of the university students. This holistic model can be used as a tool for resource planning and prioritising in order to provide the desired contextual support essential for fostering the IEO of the university students towards adopting entrepreneurial career, thereby assisting them to achieve their career goals and the broader objective of nation building.  This study adopts an innovative approach to empirically validate the EO construct at the individual level, which has been studied at the organisation (firm) level till today. This research explores the relevant contextual antecedents and analyses their impact on IEO as well as the explanatory capacity of IEO to explain students' EIs in the contextual backdrop of universities in a fast transitioning economy like India.
Predicting demersal fish distributions using presence only algorithms
Year: 2009

Information on the spatial distribution and essential habitat requirements of fishes is important for developing management plans that balance resource extraction and conservation needs in marine environments. Spatially explicit modelling approaches provide the capacity to make predictions about where a particular species could be found based on existing seascape information. When compared to landscape applications, however, marine researchers have little guidance when choosing between competing methods because few comparative studies exist. This study compares six modelling methods for five commonly observed demersal fish species. We used presence only data to fit models, and independent presence pseudo absence data to evaluate predictions. Species distribution data were based upon observations from towed underwater video footage. Thirteen seafloor related variables were derived from multibeam sonar to define seafloor characteristics for model input. Bioclimatic envelope model (BIOCLIM; DIVA GIS) DOMAIN (DIVA GIS) and four habitat suitability algorithms (Median, Distance geometric mean, Distance harmonic mean and Minimum distance; Biomapper 4.06) were used for each species to build distribution models. Models were developed using 75/25% split of training and validation data. Area Under Curve (AUC) validation tests were used to assess predictive performance. Validation statistics for the test data found that across all species Median Distance, BIOCLIM, Harmonic and Geometric Mean models yielded the lowest predictive capabilities, although all differ from a purely random prediction (i.e. greater than 50% The Minimum Distance and DOMAIN algorithms produced significantly better prediction performance, with Minimum Distance yielding highest predictive capabilities for four out of the five species investigated.
Location, Automotive Policy, and Multinational Strategy: The Position of South Africa in the Global Industry since 1995
Year: 2009

The South African automotive sector has become much more integrated into the global industry since 1995. Rapid export expansion has shifted its orientation fundamentally away from its focus on the small domestic market and the industry is widely regarded as a success story of South Africa's democratic transition. However, important vulnerabilities remain, and it is by no means clear that the mode of integration has been particularly favorable to the long term development of the industry. The relatively small size of South Africa's domestic market and its regional location pose clear disadvantages in terms of attracting international investment. Integration into the global industry has therefore been partial and continues to reflect a degree of hesitancy by multinational firms to make really major commitments to the South African industry. The warning signs include recent import expansion and low local content in domestically assembled vehicles. Automotive policy has also produced distortions, encouraged uneconomic investments, and led to unforeseen side effects. These impacts limit the gains that have been made and are likely to cause complications in the future.