Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Low cost inferential forecasting and tourism demand in accommodation industry.

This paper establishes a low cost inferential model that allows reliable time series forecasts. The model provides a naive unique computationally straightforward approach based on widely-used additive models. It refers to the decomposition of every time series value in “random” components, which are compounded to constitute a “Fibonacci type” predictor random variable. The expected value of this predictor gives a forecast of a future time series value. The standard deviation of the predictor serves to construct a prediction interval at a predefined confidence level. The major features of our model are: forecasting accuracy, simplicity of the implementation technique, generic usefulness, and extremely low cost effort. These features enable our model to be adopted by tourism practitioners on various types of forecasting demands. In this paper, we present an application study to forecast tourism demand that exists in the Greek accommodation industry (i.e. in Greece and in the broad region of Athens). In the application study, two independent approaches have been adopted. In the first approach we implemented our model, and in the second approach we implemented the well-known Box-Jenkins method.
Reversible Function Synthesis of Large Reversible Functions with No Ancillary Bits Using Covering Set Partitions

This paper presents a synthesis algorithm, Covering Set Partitions (CSP), for reversible binary functions with no ancillary (garbage) bits. Existing algorithms are constrained to functions of small number of variables because they store the entire truth table of 2n terms in memory or require a huge amount of time to yield results because they must calculate all possible permutations of an input vector. In contrast, the CSP algorithm harnesses the natural mathematical properties of binary numbers, partially ordered sets and covering graph theory, to construct input vectors which are guaranteed to produce valid results. A randomly selected subset of all valid input vectors are processed where the best input vector sequence wins. The CSP algorithm is capable of synthesizing functions of large number of variables (30 bits) in a reasonable amount of time.
Stem Cell Research: A Novel Boulevard towards Improved Bovine Mastitis Management

The dairy industry is a multi-billion dollar industry catering the nutritional needs of all age groups globally through the supply of milk. Clinical mastitis has a severe impact on udder tissue and is also an animal welfare issue. Moreover, it significantly reduces animal value and milk production. Mammary tissue damage reduces the number and activity of epithelial cells and consequently contributes to decreased milk production. The high incidence, low cure rate of this highly economic and sometimes deadly disease is an alarming for dairy sector as well as policy makers. Bovine mammary epithelial cells (MECs) and their stem cells are very important in milk production and bioengineering. The adult mammary epithelium consists of two main cell types; an inner layer of luminal epithelial cells, which produce the milk during lactation, and an outer layer of myoepithelial cells resting on a basement membrane, which are responsible for pushing the milk through the ductal network to the teat cistern. Inner layer of columner/luminal cells of bovine MECs, is characterized by cytokeratin18, 19 (CK18, CK19) and outer layer such as myoepithelial cells which are characterized by CK14, α-smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) and p63. Much work has been done in mouse and human, on mammary gland stem cell research, particularly in cancer therapy, but stem cell research in bovine is still in its infancy. Such stem/progenitor cell discoveries in human and mouse mammary gland bring some hope for application in bovines. These progenitors may be therapeutically adopted to correct the structural/cytological defects in the bovine udder due to mastitis. In the present review we focused on various kinds of stem/progenitor cells which can have therapeutic utility and their possibilities to use as a potential stem cell therapy in the management of bovine post-mastitis damage in orders to restore milk production. The possibilities of bovine mammary stem cell therapy offers significant potential for regeneration of tissues that can potentially replace/repair diseased and damaged tissue through differentiation into epithelial, myoepithelial and/or cuboidal/columnar cells in the udder with minimal risk of rejection and side effects.
Left Inferior Frontal Activations Differentially Modulated by Scrambling in Ditransitive Sentences

In order to clarify the relationship among grammatical knowledge, processing components, and neural substrates in sentence comprehension, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how brain activation is affected by two types of scrambling (short scrambling and middle scrambling) in ditransitive sentences in Japanese. Short scrambling and middle scrambling enhanced activation in the anterior and posterior left inferior frontal gyrus respectively. This finding accords with the view that the anterior left inferior frontal gyrus is involved in the automatic processing that establishes a dependency relation between a verb and its arguments, and the posterior left inferior frontal gyrus supports this kind of processing through its role in verbal working memory. This result is more congruent with a process-based approach to neural bases for sentence processing, which searches for neurological correlates of psycholinguistically defined processing components, than with a grammar-based approach, which probes neural networks with the assumption that major grammatical operations are neurologically individuated.
Orthographic Processing in Baboons (Papio papio)

Monkey See, Monkey Read An orthographic object such as a set of letters, and the ability to recognize such sets as words, is a key component of reading. The ability to develop these skills has often been attributed to the prior acquisition of a complex language. For example, we learn how letters sound and thus recognize when a particular letter makes up part of a word. However, orthographic processing is also a visual process, because we learn to recognize words as discrete objects, and the ability to read may thus be related to an ability to recognize and classify objects. Grainger et al. (p. 245; see the Perspective by Platt and Adams) tested orthographic skills in baboons. Captive, but freely ranging, baboons were trained to distinguish real English words from combinations of similar letters that are not words, and they were able to distinguish real words with remarkable accuracy. Thus, a basic ability to recognize words as objects does not require complex linguistic understanding. Baboons discriminate words from nonwords on the basis of spelling. Skilled readers use information about which letters are where in a word (orthographic information) in order to access the sounds and meanings of printed words. We asked whether efficient processing of orthographic information could be achieved in the absence of prior language knowledge. To do so, we trained baboons to discriminate English words from nonsense combinations of letters that resembled real words. The results revealed that the baboons were using orthographic information in order to efficiently discriminate words from letter strings that were not words. Our results demonstrate that basic orthographic processing skills can be acquired in the absence of preexisting linguistic representations.
Hacia la interculturalidad desde la cultura de paz. Una perspectiva educativa TITLE: Towards an intercultural understanding from the culture of peace. An educational perspective

Las relaciones entre la Interculturalidad y la Cultura de Paz son evidentes ya desde su propia denominacion: cualquier cultura esta influida por las aportaciones de otra cultura y muchas de esas influencias se traducen, en ocasiones, en componentes interculturales factibles de ser compartidos por los grupos etnicos que entran en contacto y, en otros casos, en conflictos entre ellos. Sus implicaciones para la educacion van desde la teoria y la politica educativa a la propia practica. Valores como la solidaridad y el respeto, tematicas como el rechazo y la prevencion de la violencia, la resolucion de conflictos, etc., comunes a ambos conceptos, contienen un alto potencial educativo que podemos aprovechar para favorecer una educacion de autentica calidad para todo tipo de alumnado. ABSTRAC The relationships between Interculturality and the Culture of Peace is evident of we look at their denomination: any culture is influenced by any other, and many of these influences are at times translated into intercultural components shared by ethnic groups in contact and, in other cases, into conflicts between them. The educational implications involve theoretical, political and practical factors. Values such as solidarity and respect, themes such as the rejection or prevention of violence, and the resolution of conflicts, linked to both concepts, contain great educational potential that we can use to facilitate high-quality education for all kinds of students.
Scheduling for Cellular Multicast: A Cross-Layer Perspective

Recent years have witnessed the importance of cross-layer design in wireless communication systems. The adoption of simplified on/off models for the wireless channel, in an attempt to reduce it to the traditional wireline case, has been shown to be highly sub-optimal. In this paper, we consider more realistic models for the wireless channel and demonstrate the significant performance gains that can be leveraged from the wireless medium through intelligent scheduling strategies. We consider a cellular multicast channel, where a central base station transmits the same information stream to all the users within the system. We design scheduling algorithms for this scenario from a cross-layer perspective, which aids us in exploiting the characteristics of the wireless medium. We consider three classes of scheduling algorithms with progressively increasing complexity and study their asymptotic throughput-delay performance with the number of users in the system. The first class strives for minimum complexity by resorting to static scheduling along with memoryless decoding. Our analysis reveals the existence of a scheduling scheme, within this class, that achieves near-optimal scaling laws of both delay and throughput. The second scheduling policy resorts to a higher complexity incremental redundancy encoding/decoding strategy to achieve a superior throughput-delay tradeoff. The third, and most complex, scheduling strategy benefits from the cooperation between the different users and is shown to simultaneously achieve the optimal scaling laws of both delay and throughput. We further study the effect of equipping the base station with multiple transmit antennas on the throughput performance of the proposed low-complexity static schedulers. Finally, we present simulation results that validate our theoretical claims.
Variation in ejaculate quality in dark-eyed juncos according to season, stage of reproduction, and testosterone treatment

To assess natural variation in ejaculate quality of male Dark-eyed Juncos (Jun- co hyemalis), as well as to measure any effect of experimental treatment with testosterone (T), we used cloacal massage to collect sperm samples from captive (1993) and free-ranging (1994, 1995) populations. We made three measurements of ejaculate quality in males, ap- proximately half of which had been treated with T: (1) volume, (2) sperm concentration, and (3) total number of sperm per ejaculate (ejaculate size). Ejaculate volume and concentration varied by year, but ejaculate size did not; therefore, we used ejaculate size as our primary measure of ejaculate quality. Control (C-males) and hormone-treated (T-males) males from the captive population did not differ in any measure of ejaculate quality, but in the free- ranging population, C-males produced larger ejaculates than T-males. Independent of treat- ment, ejaculate size varied significantly with season and stage of reproduction in the free- ranging population. C-males had significantly fewer sperm at the beginning of the breeding season than in midseason and thereafter, but reserves in T-males did not differ significantly with season. For males in both treatments, ejaculates were smallest when their mates were fertile and increased significantly when their mates were incubating and when the pair was feeding nestlings. We then asked whether the observed patterns were more likely attributable to differences in rate of sperm production or rate of sperm utilization (i.e. copulation fre- quency). The finding that free-ranging T-males had fewer sperm than C-males, whereas cap- tives did not, suggests that treatment with T may have led to differences in utilization (i.e. by copulation). The observation that in both T- and C-males ejaculates were smallest when their mates were fertile also suggests that frequent copulation depletes sperm reserves. Re-
Regulatory Free Cash Flow and the High Cost of Insurance Company Failures

Why is the cost of resolving insurance company failures so high? Evidence in this paper suggests that the state insurance regulatory bodies in charge of the liquidation process turn over an average of only 33 cents for each $1.00 of pre-insolvency assets to the guaranty funds (the state agencies responsible for paying claims). This very low ex ante regulatory failure -- the assets of the company are not worth much, reflecting regulatory problems prior to liquidation. Or the low recovery rate could reflect ex post regulatory failure -- a regulatory version of the 1986). In this latter case, cash-rich liquidators, who pay their own expenses out of the liquidation receipts first, are reluctant to turn over the money from asset sales to the guaranty funds. The evidence suggests that the low recovery rates arise from both types of regulatory failure.
Nonlinear Analysis of Charge Pump Phase-Locked Loops

This paper presents an analysis of the nonlinear dynamics of a Charge Pump Phase-Locked Loop. The closed-loop circuit is modelled using decision-based equations developed by Van Paemel. State space plots; bifurcation diagrams and the presence of a chaotic attractor all indicate a significant level of underlying nonlinear phenomena. A calculation of the fractal dimension of the chaotic attractor is performed, and its basin of attraction is found through simulations. Finally, the results obtained are compared to the results of a previous analysis of a different CP-PLL model.
Hypercomplex structures on four-dimensional Lie groups

The purpose of this paper is to classify invariant hypercomplex structures on a 4-dimensional real Lie group G. It is shown that the 4dimensional simply connected Lie groups which admit invariant hypercomplex structures are the additive group IHE of the quaternions, the multiplicative group H* of nonzero quaternions, the solvable Lie groups acting simply transitively on the real and complex hyperbolic spaces, RH4 and CH2, respectively, and the semidirect product C i C. We show that the spaces CH2 and C x C possess an Rp2 of (inequivalent) invariant hypercomplex structures while the remaining groups have only one, up to equivalence. Finally, the corresponding hyperhermitian 4-manifolds are determined.
Clinical studies of three oral prodrugs of 5-fluorouracil (capecitabine, UFT, S-1): a review.

Although 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) was first introduced in 1957, it remains an essential part of the treatment of a wide range of solid tumors. 5-FU has antitumor activity against epithelial malignancies arising in the gastrointestinal tract and breast as well as the head and neck, with single-agent response rates of only 10%-30%. Although 5-FU is still the most widely prescribed agent for the treatment of colorectal cancer, less than one-third of patients achieve objective responses. Recent research has focused on the biomodulation of 5-FU to improve the cytotoxicity and therapeutic effectiveness of this drug in the treatment of advanced disease. As all the anticancer agents, 5-FU leads to several toxicities. The toxicity profile of 5-FU is schedule dependent. Myelotoxicity is the major toxic effect in patients receiving bolus doses. Hand-foot syndrome (palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia), stomatitis, and neuro- and cardiotoxicities are associated with continuous infusions. Other adverse effects associated with both bolus-dose and continuous-infusion regimens include nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, alopecia, and dermatitis. All these reasons explain the need for more effective and less toxic fluoropyrimidines. In the first part of this review, we briefly present the metabolic pathways of 5-FU responsible for the efficacy and toxicity of this drug. This knowledge is also necessary to understand the target(s) of biomodulation. The second part is devoted to a review of the literature on three recent prodrugs of 5-FU, i.e., capecitabine, UFT (ftorafur [FTO] plus uracil), and S-1 (FTO plus 5-chloro-2,4-dihydroxypyridine plus potassium oxonate). The pharmacological principles that have influenced the development of these new drugs and our current knowledge of the clinical pharmacology of these new agents, focusing on antitumor activity and toxicity, are presented. The literature was analyzed until March 2002. This review is intended to be as exhaustive as possible since it was conceived as a work tool for readers wanting to go further.
Costs and benefits of mandatory subordinated debt regulation for banks

Proposals for regulation requiring that banks maintain some minimum level of subordinated debt have gained support recently. These proposals focus on the benefits of such regulation, specifically, that supervisors are expected to free ride on debtholders’ monitoring efforts. But there are also monitoring and other costs: there is no real free ride. This paper uses the theory of capital structure to look at both costs and benefits of mandating subordinated debt for banks. The theory encompasses the touted monitoring benefits, but also identifies potential pitfalls such as excessive monitoring and opportunity costs, increased risk of bankruptcy, and distortion of market signals. The analysis suggests that, to tap into the benefits of subordinated debt, it is more sensible to eliminate disincentives from holding it than to force banks away from optimal levels. JEL Codes: G21, G28, G32
Nuclear anomalies in the buccal cells of calcite factory workers

The micronucleus (MN) assay on exfoliated buccal cells is a useful and minimally invasive method for monitoring genetic damage in humans. To determine the genotoxic effects of calcite dust that forms during processing, MN assay was carried out in exfoliated buccal cells of 50 (25 smokers and 25 non-smokers) calcite factory workers and 50 (25 smokers and 25 non-smokers) age- and sex-matched control subjects. Frequencies of nuclear abnormalities (NA) other than micronuclei, such as binucleates, karyorrhexis, karyolysis and ‘broken eggs', were also evaluated. Micronuclei and the other aforementioned anomalies were analysed by two way analysis of covariance. The linear correlations between the types of micronucleus and nuclear abnormalities were determined by Spearman's Rho. There was a positive correlation between micronuclei and other types of nuclear abnormalities in accordance with the Spearman's Rho test. Results showed statistically significant difference between calcite fabric workers and control groups. MN and NA frequencies in calcite fabric workers were significantly higher than those in control groups (p < 0.05). The results of this study indicate that calcite fabric workers are under risk of significant cytogenetic damage.
Competition and Prices in the Deregulated Gas Pipeline Network: A Multivariate Cointegration Analysis

This research uses multivariate cointegration analysis to assess the degree of competition in the U.S. natural gas industry following the move to open access pipeline transportation. The testing methodology allows multiple nodes in the pipeline network to be analyzed simultaneously and is based on recent advances by Johansen (1988, 1991) and Johansen and Juselius (1990) on estimation and hypothesis testing in multivariate cointegrated systems. Daily price data across the North American natural gas transmission grid are analyzed and the results indicate that the pattern of prices between production areas is consistent with allocative efficiency.
On the utility of the population size for inversely fitness proportional mutation rates

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are an emerging new field of research in Computational Intelligence that are used in many areas of application, e. g. optimization, anomaly detection and classification. For optimization tasks usually hypermutation operators are used. In this paper, we show that the use of populations can be essential for the utility of such operators by analyzing the runtime of a simple population-based immune inspired algorithm on a classical example problem. The runtime bounds we prove are tight for the problem at hand. Moreover, we derive some general characteristics of the considered mutation operator as well as properties of the population, which hold for a class of pseudo-Boolean functions.
Quarterly Progress and Status Report Duration of syllable-sized units in casual and elaborated speech : Cross-language observations on Swedish and Spanish Engstrand

Recordings of careful readings and unscripted monologues in Swedish and Argentinean Spanish were auditorily and acoustically analyzed to test the hypothesis that temporal equalization of syllable-sized contoid-vocoid (CV) sequences typically occurs in casual as opposed to elaborated speaking styles. Results indicated 1) that CV durations and standard deviations appearing in unscripted Swedish tended to resemble those in Argentinean Spanish, 2) that durational differences between unstressed and stressed CV units in unscripted Swedish were smaller than those observed in Swedish careful reading, and 3) that, in both languages and speaking conditions, timing of syllabic units was partly determined by their size. Timing of CV units was, thus, significantly affected by alterations in speaking style. This supports the view that rhythmic patterns associated with stressand syllable-timing may arise as consequences of more primary phonetic intentions rather than themselves representing such intentions.
Modelling the clumping-induced polarimetric variability of hot star winds

Context. Clumping in the winds of massive stars may significantly reduce empirical mass-loss rates, and which in turn may have a large impact on our understanding of massive star evolution. Aims. Here, we investigate wind-clumping through the linear polarization induced by light scattering off the clumps. Methods. Through the use of an analytic wind clumping model, we predict the time evolution of the linear polarimetry over a large parameter space. We concentrate on the Luminous Blue Variables, which display the greatest amount of polarimetric variability and for which we recently conducted a spectropolarimetric survey. Results. Our model results indicate that the observed level of polarimetric variability can be reproduced for two regimes of parameter space: one of a small number of massive, optically-thick clumps; and one of a very large number of low-mass clumps. Conclusions. Although a systematic time-resolved monitoring campaign is required to distinguish between the two scenarios, we currently favour the latter, given the short timescale of the observed polarization variability. As the polarization is predicted to scale linearly with mass-loss rate, we anticipate that all hot stars with very large mass-loss rates should display polarimetric variability. This is consistent with recent findings that intrinsic polarization is more common in stars with strong Hα emission.