The Corruption-Growth Relationship: Does the Political Regime Matter?

Corruption is widely believed to have an adverse effect on the economic performance of a country. However, many East and Southeast Asian countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption- the so-called East-Asian-Paradox. A common feature of these countries was that they were autocracies. We re-examine the corruption-growth relationship, in light of the East-Asian-Paradox. We examine the role of political regimes, in mediating corruption-growth relationship using panel data over one hundred countries for the period 1984-2016. We find clear evidence that corruption-growth relationship differs by the type of political regime, and the growth enhancing effect of corruption is more likely in autocracies than in democracies. The marginal effect analysis shows that in strongly autocratic countries, higher corruption may actually lead to significantly higher growth, while this is not the case in democracies. Alternatively, democracy is not good for growth if there is a high level of perceived corruption. We provide suggestive evidence that the mechanism by which corruption is growth enhancing in autocracies is through the perceived credibility of commitment of ruling political elites to economic freedom, thereby providing confidence to the firms to invest, leading to long-term growth

Chemometric QSAR Modeling and In Silico Design of Antioxidant NO Donor Phenols

An acceleration of free radical formation within human system exacerbates the incidence of several life-threatening diseases. The systemic antioxidants often fall short for neutralizing the free radicals thereby demanding external antioxidant supplementation. Therein arises the need for development of new antioxidants with improved potency. In order to search for efficient antioxidant molecules, the present work deals with quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) studies of a series of antioxidants belonging to the class of phenolic derivatives bearing NO donor groups. In this study, several QSAR models with appreciable statistical significance have been reported. Models were built using various chemometric tools and validated both internally and externally. These models chiefly infer that presence of substituted aromatic carbons, long chain branched substituents, an oxadiazole-N-oxide ring with an electronegative atom containing group substituted at the 5 position and high degree of methyl substitutions of the parent moiety are conducive to the antioxidant activity profile of these molecules. The novelty of this work is not only that the structural attributes of NO donor phenolic compounds required for potent antioxidant activity have been explored in this study, but new compounds with possible antioxidant activity have also been designed and their antioxidant activity has been predicted in silico

Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) Infection of Herpesvirus Saimiri-Immortalized Human CD4-Positive T Lymphoblastoid Cells: Evidence of Enhanced HIV-1 Replication and Cytopathic Effects Caused by Endogenous Interferon-γ

AbstractHerpesvirus saimiri (HVS) is a nonhuman primate gamma herpesvirus which can immortalize human T lymphocytes similar to Epstein–Barr virus immortalization of B cells. The HVS-immortalized T cell lines can be cloned and they remain functional, including susceptibility of CD4 expressing T cells to infection with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). In this report, we have used five such HVS-transformed CD4-positive T cell clones to reevaluate the role of endogenous interferon gamma (IFNγ) in HIV-1 replication in T cells. All five clones had similar phenotypes; and four clones constitutively produced IFNγ and one clone did not. All five clones could be efficiently infected with HIV-1. HIV-1 infection of the IFNγ-positive cells also upregulated IFNγ mRNA production and IFNγ secretion but not production of IL-2 or IL-4. In contrast, infection of IFNγ-negative cells did not induce IFNγ, IL-2, or IL-4. Exposure to anti-IFNγ antibodies after HIV-1 infection significantly reduced virus production and inhibited virus-induced death of IFNγ-positive cells but had no effect on IFNγ-negative cells. We conclude that in CD4-positive T lymphocytes immortalized by HVS endogenous IFNγ does not inhibit HIV-1 but enhances HIV-1 replication and cytolysis. The potential augmenting effects of IFNγ on HIV-1 replication in CD4-positive T cells recommend caution in a therapeutic use of this cytokine in AIDS

SuryaKiran at MEDIQA-Sum 2023: Leveraging LoRA for Clinical Dialogue Summarization

Finetuning Large Language Models helps improve the results for domain-specific use cases. End-to-end finetuning of large language models is time and resource intensive and has high storage requirements to store the finetuned version of the large language model. Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) methods address the time and resource challenges by keeping the large language model as a fixed base and add additional layers, which the PEFT methods finetune. This paper demonstrates the evaluation results for one such PEFT method Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), for Clinical Dialogue Summarization. The evaluation results show that LoRA works at par with end-to-end finetuning for a large language model. The paper presents the evaluations done for solving both the Subtask A and B from ImageCLEFmedical {https://www.imageclef.org/2023/medical

Do economic and political crises lead to corruption? The role of institutions

A large body of literature exists on the institutions’ role in combating corruption and its influence on economic development. However, there is a paucity of literature on the inter-relationships between economic and political crises, institutions, and corruption. This paper addresses the question: how does institutional quality matter in affecting corruption during political and economic crises? To answer this question, we use a recently released historical panel dataset called V-Dem for over 130 countries during 1800-2020. The results suggest some heterogenous effects depending on the type of crisis and how we measure it. For example, strong institutions can control corruption in cases of political and civil violence and economic slowdown, but the effect disappears in other crisis such as democracy breakdowns, coups, armed-conflict and civil-war and currency, inflation, and debt crisis. Furthermore, strong institutions in the advanced economies prevent corruption in a profound way during political and civil violence

Extensive Fixed Drug Eruption Due to Diclofenac

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A Case of Multiple Myeloma Presenting with Diabetes Insipidus

Multiple myeloma (MM) can present with involvement of the central nervous system in the form of nerve palsy, plasma cell masses or, rarely, with endocrinological effects due to involvement of the pituitary gland. Usually, in such cases, the disease has a rapid progression and poor prognosis. We report a 52-year-old man who was admitted to the Kolkata Medical College, Kolkata, India, in 2016 with a prolonged low-grade fever and hypernatremia. Shortly afterwards, the patient began to complain of increased urinary frequency and drowsiness. The hypernatremia was treated with intranasal desmopressin and free water replacement. Serum protein electrophoresis and an immunofixation study revealed an immunoglobulin G-κ monoclonal band. Magnetic resonance imaging of the pituitary gland revealed the absence of a posterior bright spot and spotty infiltration of the pituitary fossa. A bone marrow biopsy confirmed a diagnosis of cranial diabetes insipidus due to posterior pituitary MM infiltration

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis