Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Genetic Characterization of Common ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.) populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Background and Purpose: Common ash (Fraxinus excelsior L.) is a species with a widespread distribution in Europe. It mostly grows on mesophyll sites, mainly in karst valleys and by forest creeks, and in Herzegovina at northern expositions and higher altitudes with somewhat better types of soil. Materials and Methods: We studied 10 natural populations. We collected dormant buds with branches from 24 trees, randomly selected, but equally distributed in the population. We used six pairs of highly polymorphous microsatellite loci for identification and verification of genetic differentiation (FEMSATL 04, 10, 11, 12, 16 and 19). We additionally analyzed integration between genetic and ecological data for the area where material was selected, and also defined genetically homogenous areas of common ash. Results and Conclusions: The research of intra-population genetic structure pointed at the presence of a high level of polymorphism. Confirmation for such high polymorphism is in populations with approximately 10.2 alleles per locus (N) of the observed heterozygosis (Ho), while in the expected heterozygosis the values were considerably higher. Analysis of the inbreeding coefficient showed the value of 0.312, which demonstrates the presence of inbreeding in investigated populations. In this study we obtained a very low value of differentiation between populations, with the FST value as low as 0.023; this value measures the proportion of the total genetic diversity due to differences among populations. By correlation of the obtained microsatellite data and basic ecological parameters, climate for instance, common ash was grouped into two groups. The remaining five studied populations could not be grouped to either of these two, or a separate one, and they represent autonomous genetic units.
Relative Pricing of Options with Stochastic Volatility

This paper offers a new approach for pricing options on assets with stochastic volatility. We start by taking as given the prices of a few simple, liquid European options. More specifically, we take as given the “surface” of Black-Scholes implied volatilities for European options with varying strike prices and maturities. We show that the Black-Scholes implied volatilities of at-the-money options converge to the underlying asset’s instantaneous (stochastic) volatility as the time to maturity goes to zero. We model the stochastic processes followed by the implied volatilities of options of all maturities and strike prices as a joint diﬀusion with the stock price. In order for no arbitrage opportunities to exist in trading the stock and these options, the drift of the processes followed by the implied volatilities is constrained in such a way that it is fully characterized by the volatilities of the implied volatilities. Finally, we suggest how to use the arbitrage-free joint process for the stock price and its volatility to price other derivatives, such as standard but illiquid options as well as exotic options, using numerical methods. Our approach simply requires as inputs the stock price and the implied volatilities at the time the exotic option is to be priced, as well as estimates of the volatilities of the implied volatilities.
An exploration of the influences of female underpresentation in senior leadership positions in community secondary schools (CSSs) in rural Tanzania

This study explores the influences of female under-representation in senior leadership positions in community secondary schools in rural Tanzania. Key issues include factors contributing to women under-representation in leadership, the perceptions of members of school communities of women leaders and the challenges facing current women leaders that deter other women teachers from taking leadership posts. The empirical study included interviews, focus group discussions and questionnaires and involved 259 participants at schools and district level in one district in rural Tanzania. Twenty schools were involved and included 20 heads of schools, teachers, members of school boards, parents and a District Educational Officer. The empirical study found that, at the individual level, familial responsibilities and rejecting the post due to poor social services in rural areas deterred women from taking leadership posts. At the organisational level, the lack of transparent procedures for recommending, recruiting and appointing heads also contributed to poorer access by women. At the societal level, negative perceptions and stereotypes of female leaders, conservative expectations of women in the private domain rather than in professional and public roles, and deep-seated beliefs in some rural areas pertaining to issues such as witchcraft, at times resulted in physical risk and exploitation of female leaders. These proved to be strong barriers to leadership succession and resulted in on-going, significant challenges for incumbent female leaders. Overall, the study concludes that female under-representation in school leadership in rural Tanzania is influenced by a number of interrelated factors at the individual, societal and organisational level (Fagenson, 1990a), with dominant social norms and values having a cross-cutting influence on the access, experience and perceptions of female school leaders. The study thus suggests a number of measures for improving female representation in community secondary school leadership in Tanzania at the professional and personal development level, recruitment level and policy level.
A long memory panel unit root test: PPP revisited

In this paper two techniques, long memory and panel data models, are combined in order to increase the power of unit root tests. The power is shown to be always better against fractional alternatives and usually against autoregressive alternatives. The test is then used to reanalyze data sets investigated by Cheung and Lai (1993), Oh (1996) and Papell (1997) who studied the purchasing power parity. In some cases, the test rejected the hypothesis of no cointegration between foreign and domestic prices where the other authors tests did not.
Repetitive Immunization Enhances the Susceptibility of Mice to Peripherally Administered Prions

The susceptibility of humans and animals to prion infections is determined by the virulence of the infectious agent, by genetic modifiers, and by hitherto unknown host and environmental risk factors. While little is known about the latter two, the activation state of the immune system was surmised to influence prion susceptibility. Here we administered prions to mice that were repeatedly immunized by two initial injections of CpG oligodeoxynucleotides followed by repeated injections of bovine serum albumin/alum. Immunization greatly reduced the required dosage of peripherally administered prion inoculum necessary to induce scrapie in 50% of mice. No difference in susceptibility was observed following intracerebral prion challenge. Due to its profound impact onto scrapie susceptibility, the host immune status may determine disease penetrance after low-dose prion exposure, including those that may give rise to iatrogenic and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Essays in Life-Cycle Finance : Understanding Personal Investment and Consumption Choices

This dissertation is dedicated to my mum Guoping and dad Shengwei. iii Acknowledgements My thanks and appreciation to Jens C. Jackwerth for preserving with me as my advisor throughout the time it took me to complete the dissertation. The doctoral program in Quantitative Economics and Finance at the Department of Economics provided me with inspiration and methodologies for doing the research. Guenter Franke, Winfried Pohlmeier, and other members of the faculty have generously given their time and expertise to better my work. I thank them for their contribution and their support. I must acknowledge as well the many friends, colleagues, students, teachers and administrative staff that assisted, advised, and supported my research and writing efforts over the years. Especially, I need to express my gratitude and deep appreciation to Olga Kolokolova, Radoslav Zahariev, and Monika Fischer. My thanks must go also to Lars Pfeiffer for help translate the summary of the dissertation into German. iv Executive Summary This dissertation is a collection of three stand-alone research papers containing theoretical and empirical research on household portfolio choice and consumption decision in the life time. Household finance is a new interesting field in financial economics that has attracted a lot of attention among financial economists recently. Campbell even gave his presidential address titled " Household Finance " at the 2006 AFA annual meeting. Modeling household finance is different from traditional finance because household financial problems have many special features such as long but finite horizon, non-traded human capital, illiquid housing, borrowing constraints, and complex taxation. Also, household asset demands are important in determining asset prices. Therefore, household portfolio choice is a valuable topic for a doctoral dissertation. Empirical analyses show that low-wealth households tend to be non-participants concerning risky assets and tend to hold a large portfolio share of risky asset if they participate at all (gamblers). So far, few theoretical models have been able to satisfactorily provide a joint understanding of these two observations. Chapter Two solves a novel life-cycle model in which social links to relatives, friends, and public welfare programs play the key role in explaining both types of behaviors. Social and family transfers induce low-wealth households to over-consume and depress the savings motive since social transfers are available only if personal savings are exhausted. The depressed investment demand further increases the fixed participation cost and thus, increases non-participation. On the other hand, if low-wealth households decide to hold …
A Consolidated Open Knowledge Representation for Multiple Texts

We propose to move from Open Information Extraction (OIE) ahead to Open Knowledge Representation (OKR), aiming to represent information conveyed jointly in a set of texts in an open text-based manner. We do so by consolidating OIE extractions using entity and predicate coreference, while modeling information containment between coreferring elements via lexical entailment. We suggest that generating OKR structures can be a useful step in the NLP pipeline, to give semantic applications an easy handle on consolidated information across multiple texts.
DOUBLE COMPACT OBJECTS AS LOW-FREQUENCY GRAVITATIONAL WAVE SOURCES

We study the Galactic field population of double compact objects (DCOs; NS–NS, BH–NS, BH–BH binaries) to investigate the number (if any) of these systems that can potentially be detected with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) at low gravitational wave frequencies. We calculate the Galactic numbers and physical properties of these binaries and show their relative contributions from the disk, bulge, and halo. Although the Galaxy hosts ∼105 DCO binaries emitting low-frequency gravitational waves, only a handful of these objects in the disk will be detectable with LISA, but none from the halo or bulge. This is because the bulk of these binaries are NS–NS systems with high eccentricities and long orbital periods (weeks/months) causing inefficient signal accumulation (a small number of signal bursts at periastron passage in one year of LISA observations) and rendering them undetectable in the majority of these cases. We adopt two evolutionary models that differ in their treatment of the common envelope (CE) phase that is a major (and still mostly unknown) process in the formation of close DCOs. Depending on the evolutionary model adopted, our calculations indicate the likely detection of about four NS–NS binaries and two BH–BH systems (model A; likely survival of progenitors through CE) or only a couple of NS–NS binaries (model B; suppression of the DCO formation due to CE mergers).
Multifeature-Based Surround Inhibition Improves Contour Detection in Natural Images

To effectively perform visual tasks like detecting contours, the visual system normally needs to integrate multiple visual features. Sufficient physiological studies have revealed that for a large number of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) of monkeys and cats, neuronal responses elicited by the stimuli placed within the classical receptive field (CRF) are substantially modulated, normally inhibited, when difference exists between the CRF and its surround, namely, non-CRF, for various local features. The exquisite sensitivity of V1 neurons to the center-surround stimulus configuration is thought to serve important perceptual functions, including contour detection. In this paper, we propose a biologically motivated model to improve the performance of perceptually salient contour detection. The main contribution is the multifeature-based center-surround framework, in which the surround inhibition weights of individual features, including orientation, luminance, and luminance contrast, are combined according to a scale-guided strategy, and the combined weights are then used to modulate the final surround inhibition of the neurons. The performance was compared with that of single-cue-based models and other existing methods (especially other biologically motivated ones). The results show that combining multiple cues can substantially improve the performance of contour detection compared with the models using single cue. In general, luminance and luminance contrast contribute much more than orientation to the specific task of contour extraction, at least in gray-scale natural images.
Sentrin/SUMO Specific Proteases as Novel Tissue-Selective Modulators of Vitamin D Receptor-Mediated Signaling

Vitamin D receptor (VDR) is a substrate for modification with small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO). To further assess the role of reversible SUMOylation within the vitamin D hormonal response, we evaluated the effects of sentrin/SUMO-specific proteases (SENPs) that can function to remove small ubiquitin-like modifier (SUMO) from target proteins upon the activities of VDR and related receptors. We report that SENP1 and SENP2 strikingly potentiate ligand-mediated transactivation of VDR and also its heterodimeric partner, retinoid X receptor (RXRα) with depletion of cellular SENP1 significantly diminishing the hormonal responsiveness of the endogenous vitamin D target gene CYP24A1. We find that SENP-directed modulation of VDR activity is cell line-dependent, achieving potent modulatory effects in Caco-2 and HEK-293 cells, while in MCF-7 cells the vitamin D signal is unaffected by any tested SENP. In support of their function as novel modulators of the vitamin D hormonal pathway we demonstrate that both SENP1 and SENP2 can interact with VDR and reverse its modification with SUMO2. In a preliminary analysis we identify lysine 91, a residue known to be critical for formation and DNA binding of the VDR-RXR heterodimer, as a minor SUMO acceptor site within VDR. In combination, our results support a repressor function for SUMOylation of VDR and reveal SENPs as a novel class of VDR/RXR co-regulatory protein that significantly modulate the vitamin D response and which could also have important impact upon the functionality of both RXR-containing homo and heterodimers.
Option Pricing under GARCH models with Generalized Hyperbolic innovations ( II ) : Data and

In this paper, we provide a new dynamic asset pricing model for plain vanilla options and we discuss its ability to produce minimum mispricing errors on equity option books. The data set is the daily log returns of the French CAC 40 index, on the period January 2, 1988, October 26, 2007. Under the historical measure, we estimate an EGARCH model with Generalized Hyperbolic innovations, using this dataset. We showed in Chorro, Guégan and Ielpo (2008) that when the pricing kernel is an exponential affine function of the state variables, the risk neutral distribution is unique and implies again a Generalized Hyperbolic dynamic, with changed parameters. Thus, using this theoretical result associated to Monte Carlo simulations, we compare our approach to natural competitors in order to test its efficiency. More generally, our empirical investigations analyze the ability of specific parametric innovations to reproduce market prices in the context of the exponential affine specification of the stochastic discount factor.
Revising mid-latitude summer-temperatures back to AD 600 based on a wood 1 density network 2

Department of Geography, Johannes Gutenberg University, 55099 Mainz, Germany 5 Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Palisades, NY 10964, USA 6 Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, 8903 Birmensdorf, Switzerland 7 School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews, St Andrews KY16 9AL, Scotland, UK 8 Institute for the Humanities, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, 660041, Russia 9 V.N. Sukachev Institute of Forest SB RAS, Akademgorodok, Krasnoyarsk, 660036, Russia 10
Energy-Efficient ECG Compression on Wireless Biosensors via Minimal Coherence Sensing and Weighted $\ell_1$ Minimization Reconstruction

Low energy consumption is crucial for body area networks (BANs). In BAN-enabled ECG monitoring, the continuous monitoring entails the need of the sensor nodes to transmit a huge data to the sink node, which leads to excessive energy consumption. To reduce airtime over energy-hungry wireless links, this paper presents an energy-efficient compressed sensing (CS)-based approach for on-node ECG compression. At first, an algorithm called minimal mutual coherence pursuit is proposed to construct sparse binary measurement matrices, which can be used to encode the ECG signals with superior performance and extremely low complexity. Second, in order to minimize the data rate required for faithful reconstruction, a weighted ℓ1 minimization model is derived by exploring the multisource prior knowledge in wavelet domain. Experimental results on MIT-BIH arrhythmia database reveals that the proposed approach can obtain higher compression ratio than the state-of-the-art CS-based methods. Together with its low encoding complexity, our approach can achieve significant energy saving in both encoding process and wireless transmission.
Forecasting stock index prices and domestic credit: Does cointegration help?

In this paper, monthly flnance and macro data from Norway is analyzed in order to investigate whether previously documented long term relationships (e.g. Kwon and Shin (1999), Lauvsnes (2006)) can be exploited to improve stock index and credit growth forecasts. Basing our choice of variables on the hypothesis about fragile endogenous relationships in the economy (Minsky (1987)) we compare forecasts from VAR models with and without imposing cointegrating restrictions with some simple univariate models. The forecasts are evaluated for difierent forecasting horizons. Our results indicate that the stock index is better predicted when cointegration is imposed. The credit variable is better predicted with the multivariate models than with the univariate. The signiflcance of choosing the appropriate order of integration for each variable in the multivariate system is also shown for the stock price variable.
System To Assess Genome Sequencing Needs for Viral Protein Diagnostics and Therapeutics

ABSTRACT Computational analyses of genome sequences may elucidate protein signatures unique to a target pathogen. We constructed a Protein Signature Pipeline to guide the selection of short peptide sequences to serve as targets for detection and therapeutics. In silico identification of good target peptides that are conserved among strains and unique compared to other species generates a list of peptides. These peptides may be developed in the laboratory as targets of antibody, peptide, and ligand binding for detection assays and therapeutics or as targets for vaccine development. In this paper, we assess how the amount of sequence data affects our ability to identify conserved, unique protein signature candidates. To determine the amount of sequence data required to select good protein signature candidates, we have built a computationally intensive system called the Sequencing Analysis Pipeline (SAP). The SAP performs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations, each calling the Protein Signature Pipeline, to assess how the amount of sequence data for a target organism affects the ability to predict peptide signature candidates. Viral species differ substantially in the number of genomes required to predict protein signature targets. Patterns do not appear based on genome structure. There are more protein than DNA signatures due to greater intraspecific conservation at the protein than at the nucleotide level. We conclude that it is necessary to use the SAP as a dynamic system to assess the need for continued sequencing for each species individually and to update predictions with each additional genome that is sequenced.
Association of polymorphisms in complement component C3 gene with susceptibility to systemic lupus erythematosus.

OBJECTIVE Identification of the genes responsible for systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). METHODS All the exons and putative promoter regions of 53 candidate genes (TNFRSF6/Fas, TNFSF6/FasL, Fli1, TNFSF10/TRAIL, TNFSF12/TWEAK, Bcl-2, PTEN, FADD, TRADD, CDKN1A, TNFRSF1A/TNFR1, TNFRSF4/OX40, TNFSF4/OX40L, TNFSF5/CD40L, TNFSF13B/BAFF, ICOS, CTLA4, CD28, FYN, G2A, CR2, PTPRC/CD45, CD22, CD19, Lyn, PDCD1, PTPN6, TGFB1, TGFB2, TGFB3, TGFBR1, TGFBR2, TGFBR3, CD3Z, DNASE1, APCS, MERTK, C3, C1QA, C1QB, C1QG, C2, MBL2, IGHM, IL-2, IL-4, IL-10, IFNG, TNFA, MAN2A1, TNFRSF11A/RANK, TNFRSF11B/OPG, TNFSF11/OPGL) were screened for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and their association with SLE was assessed by case-control studies. A total of 509 cases and 964 controls of Japanese descent were enrolled. RESULTS A total of 316 SNPs was identified. When analysed in the Japanese population, the allele frequencies of T at rs7951 and G at rs2230201 of the C3 gene were 0.110 and 0.626, respectively, in SLE patients; significantly higher than the frequencies of 0.081 and 0.584, respectively, in controls [odds ratio (OR) = 1.40, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.05-1.86, P = 0.016 and OR=1.19, 95% CI = 1.01-1.41, P = 0.038, respectively]. The mean serum C3 level of carriers of the rs7951 T allele was significantly lower than that of non-carriers of the T allele in 87 SLE patients whose medical records were available (P = 0.0018). CONCLUSION rs7951 T allele of the C3 gene was significantly associated with SLE, and decreased serum level of C3 seems to be correlated with this allele.
PENGARUH RETURN ON ASSET PADA PRAKTIK MANAJEMEN LABA DENGAN MODERASI CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

ABSTRAK Penelitian ini menguji pengaruh Return on As s ets (ROA) dan Corporate Governance (CG) pada praktik manajemen laba. Penelitian ini tidak hanya untuk mengetahui pengaruh ROA dan CG pada praktik manajemen secara parsial. Variabel CG juga diduga dapat memoderasi pengaruh variabel ROA pada praktik manajemen laba. Proksi dari manajemen laba dalam penelitian ini adalah akrual diskresioner dan diukur menggunakan Modified Jones Model . Uji Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA) serta uji residual digunakan sebagai teknik analisis data. Corporate Governance Perception Index (CGPI) digunakan sebagai proksi dari penerapan CG pada perusahaan. Temuan penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa ROA serta CG berpengaruh signifikan pada manajemen laba, Selain itu hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa corporate governance mampu memoderasi hubungan antara ROA pada praktik manajemen laba. Kata kunci : manajemen laba, akrual diskresioner, return on assets, corporate governance