Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Business Cycles: A Role for Imperfect Competition in the Banking System

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or reverse causation. The countercyclical pattern is explained by the procyclical entry of foreign banks, which occurs mostly at the wholesale level and signals the intention to spread to the retail level. My hypothesis is that wholesale entry triggers incumbents' limit-pricing strategies, which are aimed at deterring entry into retail niches and which, in turn, dampen bank markups. In the second part of the paper, I develop a general equilibrium model that accounts for these features of the data. I find that this monopolistic behavior in the intermediary financial sector increases the volatility of real variables and amplifies the business cycle. I interpret this bank-supply channel as an extension of the credit channel pioneered by Bernanke and Blinder (1988).
A Molecular Study on Intestinal Microsporidiosis ( Enterocytozoon bieneusi and Encephalitozoon intestinalis ) in Renal Transplant Patients in Tabriz.

Microsporidia are obligate intracellular protozoan. Six genera of microsporidia have been reported to infect humans. Enterocytozoon bieneusi and Encephalitozoon intestinalis have been identified as important agents for chronic diarrhea and wasting syndrome in patients with AIDS. Gastrointestinal complications are frequent in immunsupressed patients. Routine detection of microsporidia in stool specimens is usually performed by staining methods. There is no documented study in Iran about microsporidial infections in the renal transplant recipients. This study was designed to identify the microsporidial infections in renal transplant recipients Tabriz Imam Reza hospital. Sixty four renal transplant patients with or without diarrhea were included in this study. Stool samples were examined by light microscopy for the presence of ova and parasites. Samples were fixed in formalin 10% for permanent staining (Weber’s method). Formalin fixed stools were used for DNA extraction. DNA was extracted by using SDS, CTAB and proteinase k. V1 and EB450 pair primers were used to amplify E. bieneusi and V1 and SI500 primers to amplify E. intestinalis DNA. Light microscopy examination of samples showed eight cases of infection with Giardia lamblia . Study of chromotrope stained slides showed in five patients, microsporidia spores. A study of first step PCR products using V1/PMP2 primers showed that only four samples gave a positive signal in 250 bp. By using V1/EB450 and V1/SI500 primers positive signals were achieved only by V1/EB450 primers in approximately 350bp for all five samples. Microsporidiasis in immunocompetent individuals and patients with immunodeficiency other than AIDS showed gastro-intestinal signs. Gastro intestinal system (GIS) complications like nausea, vomiting and diarrhea are quite frequent during the post-transplant and chemotherapy period. The etiology of severe diarrhea is complex. Correct diagnosis of the cause of severe diarrhea in such patients should help to protect graft survival in transplant recipients. PCR has been used to detect and identify microsporidia from clinical specimens. Study of PCR results demonstrated that four of five patients can identify by V1/PMP2 primers and one sample was negative. This study confirmed that using a combination of diagnostic methods may lead to accurate diagnosis.
: Undisclosed SEC Investigations and Voluntary CEO Turnover

Prior research finds that the public revelation of misconduct leads to severe career penalties for managers, raising an interesting question about whether managers can avoid career penalties by voluntarily leaving their employer before accusations become public. We exploit the private nature of SEC investigations to examine this question. We find that the likelihood of CEO voluntary turnover is positively related to the presence of an undisclosed SEC investigation, but not to disclosed SEC investigations. Additionally, we find that there is no difference in future rehire rates between those turned-over CEOs whose firms are under an investigation that is not disclosed and peers at non-investigated firms, suggesting that there is no evidence of career penalties for managers at firms with undisclosed investigations. Last, we find that hiring a privately investigated CEO increases the subsequent employer’s likelihood of being investigated by the SEC.
Lipoprotein‐Cholesterol Distributions in Selected North American Populations: The Lipid Research Clinics Program Prevalence Study

SUMMARYTotal plasma lipid and lipoprotein-cholesterol distributions of 4756 white men and women ages 20–59 years are presented. Measurements were obtained during the visit-2 survey of the Lipid Research Clinics Program Prevalence Study and correspond to a 15% random sample of 35,748 white adults screened during the LRC visit-1 survey. Standardized examinations were carried out by 10 North American clinics using a common protocol, on diverse target populations chosen to include a range of sociodemographic characteristics. Age-specific means, medians and selected percentiles are given by sex, with stratification on exogenous sex hormone use in women.Plasma lipid and lipoprotein concentrations in men and women vary with age. Differences in lipid and lipoprotein levels between the study populations are also present and manifest themselves as parallel trends of age-related changes in the 10 populations examined.Higher total cholesterol values in men compared with women appear between the ages 20–50 years and higher LDL cholesterol between the ages 20–55 years. VLDL cholesterol levels are similar in both sexes at ages 20 and 59 years but higher in men than in women in all intermediate age groups. HDL cholesterol is higher in women than in men throughout the age range considered.Women taking sex hormone preparations have higher total cholesterol than women not on hormones between ages 20–50 years, and higher LDL cholesterol between ages 20–40 years. From the third age decade onward, HDL cholesterol levels are progressively higher in women taking hormones than in women not taking sex hormones. Compared with women not taking exogenous sex hormones, women taking hormones have higher total plasma triglyceride values at all ages from 20–59 years. VLDL cholesterol values are higher in women on hormones compared with nonusers of hormones younger than 55 years.
DRAG PREDICTION AND VALIDATION OF STANDARD M549, 155mm PROJECTILE

: Ever-increasing demands for accuracy and range in modern warfare have expedited the optimization of projectile design. The crux of projectile design lies in the understanding of its aerodynamic properties early in the design phase. In this research first investigated the aerodynamic properties of a standard M549, 155mm projectile. Aerodynamic data from wind tunnel and range testing was benchmarked against aerodynamic prediction and semi empirical design codes like MCDRAG, NSWCAP and Aero-Prediction. Further we deal with the prediction of drag by benchmarking the results of standard M549 projectile design and the predicting the boat tail angle effect for different drag coefficient. The detailed study is done and validated to reduce drag and see its effect on the projectile design for both transonic and supersonic speeds.
Convolutional deep rectifier neural nets for phone recognition

Rectifier neurons differ from standard ones only in that the sigmoid activation function is replaced by the rectifier function, max(0, x). Several recent studies suggest that rectifier units may be more suitable building units for deep nets. For example, we found that with deep rectifier networks one can attain a similar speech recognition performance than that with sigmoid nets, but without the need for the time-consuming pre-training procedure. Here, we extend the previous results by modifying the rectifier network so that it has a convolutional structure. As convolutional networks are inherently deep, rectifier neurons seem to be an ideal choice as their building units. Indeed, on the TIMIT phone recognition task we report a 6% relative error reduction compared to our earlier results, giving an 18.6% error rate on the core test set. Then, with the application of the recently proposed ‘dropout’ training method we reduce the error rate further to 17.8%, which, to our knowledge, is the best result to date on this database.
A Uniﬁed Model Spectrum for Anisotropic Stratiﬁed and Isotropic Turbulence in the Ocean and Atmosphere

In the decade or so below the Ozmidov wavenumber ( N 3 / « ) 1/2 , that is, on scales between those attributed to internal gravity waves and isotropic turbulence, ocean and atmosphere measurements consistently ﬁnd k 1/3 horizontal wavenumber spectra for horizontal shear u h and horizontal temperature gradient T h and m 2 1 verticalwavenumber spectraforverticalshear u z and strain j z . Dimensional scalingisusedto constructmodel spectra below as well as above the Ozmidov wavenumber that reproduces observed spectral slopes and levels inthesetwobandsinbothverticalandhorizontalwavenumber.Aspectratiosbecomeincreasinglyanisotropic below the Ozmidov wavenumber until reaching ; O ( f / N ), where horizontal shear u h ; f . The forward energy cascade below the Ozmidov wavenumber found in observations and numerical simulations suggests that anisotropic and isotropic turbulence are manifestations of the same nonlinear downscale energy cascade to dissipation,andthatthisturbulentcascadeoriginatesfromanisotropicinstabilityofﬁnescaleinternalwavesat horizontal wavenumbers far below the Ozmidov wavenumber. Isotropic turbulence emerges as the cascade proceeds through the Ozmidov wavenumber where shears become strong enough to overcome stratiﬁcation. This contrasts with the present paradigm that geophysical isotropic turbulence arises directly from breaking internal waves. This new interpretation of the observations calls for new approaches to understand anisotropic generation of geophysical turbulence patches.
Querying Tourism Information Systems in Natural Language

With the increasing amount of information available on the Internet one of the most challenging tasks is to provide search interfaces that are easy to use without having to learn a specific syntax and provides a means for finding what they really want. In this paper we present a query interface for an information system in the tourism domain exploiting the intuitiveness of natural language. Furthermore, we will describe the results and our insights from analyzing the natural language queries collected during a field trial in which the interface was publicly accessible. This analysis shows how users formulate queries when their imagination is not limited by conventional search interfaces with structured forms consisting of check boxes, radio buttons and special-purpose text fields.
Text Normalization for Text-to-Speech

Text normalization plays a crucial role in text-to-speech systems by ensuring that the input text is in an appropriate format and consists of standardized words prior to grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for text-to-speech. The aim of this study was to assess the performance of ﬁve text normalization systems based on diﬀerent methods. These text normalization systems were evaluated on the English Google text normalization dataset. The evaluation was based on the similarity between the ground truth and normalized outputs from each text normalization system. Since multiple ground truth issues occurred during the evaluation, the original similarity scores needed to be manually re-scored. The re-scoring was employed on a sample data semi-randomly extracted from the evaluation dataset. According to the results, the accuracy of these text normalization systems can be ranked as follows: the Duplex system, the Hybrid system, the VT system, the RS system, and the WFST system. For the two rule-based systems from ReadSpeaker, the VT system performed slightly better than the RS system, with a slight diﬀerence in the original similarity score. By analyzing the error patterns produced during the normalization process, the study provided valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of these systems. The ﬁndings of this study contribute to the reﬁnement of internal rules, leading to improved accuracy and eﬀectiveness of text normalization in text-to-speech applications.
Correlation between clonotypic T‐cell receptor beta chain variable region (TCR‐Vβ) gene expression and aberrant T‐cell antigen expression in cutaneous T‐cell lymphoma

Immunohistochemical studies can augment the clinicopathologic diagnosis of cutaneous T‐cell lymphoma (CTCL). Our goal was to determine whether a panel of 11 T‐cell receptor (TCR) beta chain variable region (Vβ) monoclonal antibodies (moAbs) could consistently identify clonal T‐cell populations within CTCL skin infiltrates, and whether these cells exhibited aberrant T‐cell antigen expression. Biopsies from 24 CTCL and 3 parapsoriasis patients were analyzed. Of the 27 patients, 4 (15%) demonstrated T‐cell clonality by restricted TCR‐Vp moAb staining. The Vp+ restricted cells expressed aberrant antigen profiles. Overall, aberrant antigen profiles were detected in 18/24 (75%) CTCL patients. Vβ18 moAb crossreacted with a 85 kD protein produced by basal and suprabasal keratinocytes. We conclude: 1) Restricted TCR‐Vp expression correlated with aberrant T‐cell antigen profiles; 2) In the absence of a complete panel of TCR‐Vp moAbs, localization of aberrant T‐cell antigen expression can be useful in identifying malignant T‐cells within CTCL skin infiltrates; 3) The detection sensitivity and specificity of the currently available TCR‐Vβ moAbs may limit their utility to consistently detect clonal T‐cell populations in CTCL skin biopsies; 4) A 85 kD protein present on basal and suprabasal keratinocytes is recognized by Vβ18 moAb and may be related to immune function (s) of the epidermis.
Graph-Based Generation of Referring Expressions

This article describes a new approach to the generation of referring expressions. We propose to formalize a scene (consisting of a set of objects with various properties and relations) as a labeled directed graph and describe content selection (which properties to include in a referring expression) as a subgraph construction problem. Cost functions are used to guide the search process and to give preference to some solutions over others. The current approach has four main advantages: (1) Graph structures have been studied extensively, and by moving to a graph perspective we get direct access to the many theories and algorithms for dealing with graphs; (2) many existing generation algorithms can be reformulated in terms of graphs, and this enhances comparison and integration of the various approaches; (3) the graph perspective allows us to solve a number of problems that have plagued earlier algorithms for the generation of referring expressions; and (4) the combined use of graphs and cost functions paves the way for an integration of rule-based generation techniques with more recent stochastic approaches.
Unsupervised domain adaptation of virtual and real worlds for pedestrian detection

Vision-based object detectors are crucial for different applications. They rely on learnt object models. Ideally, we would like to deploy our vision system in the scenario where it must operate. Then, the system should self-learn how to distinguish the objects of interest, i.e., without human intervention. However, the learning of each object model requires labelled samples collected through a tiresome manual process. For instance, we are interested in exploring the self-training of a pedestrian detector for driver assistance systems. Our first approach to avoid manual labelling consisted in the use of samples coming from realistic computer graphics, so that their labels are automatically available [12]. This would make possible the desired self-training of our pedestrian detector. However, as we showed in [14], between virtual and real worlds it may be a dataset shift. In order to overcome it, we propose the use of unsupervised domain adaptation techniques that avoid human intervention during the adaptation process. In particular, this paper explores the use of the transductive SVM (T-SVM) learning algorithm in order to adapt virtual and real worlds for pedestrian detection (Fig. 1).
Optimal target localization for subthalamic stimulation in patients with Parkinson disease

Objective: To further determine the causes of variable outcome from deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (DBS-STN) in patients with Parkinson disease (PD). Methods: Data were obtained from our cohort of 309 patients with PD who underwent DBS-STN between 1996 and 2009. We examined the relationship between the 1-year motor, cognitive, and psychiatric outcomes and (1) preoperative PD clinical features, (2) MRI measures, (3) surgical procedure, and (4) locations of therapeutic contacts. Results: Pre- and postoperative results were obtained in 262 patients with PD. The best motor outcome was obtained when stimulating contacts were located within the STN as compared with the zona incerta (64% vs 49% improvement). Eighteen percent of the patients presented a postoperative cognitive decline, which was found to be principally related to the surgical procedure. Other factors predictive of poor cognitive outcome were perioperative confusion and psychosis. Nineteen patients showed a stimulation-induced hypomania, which was related to both the form of the disease (younger age, shorter disease duration, higher levodopa responsiveness) and the ventral contact location. Postoperative depression was more frequent in patients already showing preoperative depressive and/or residual axial motor symptoms. Conclusion: In this homogeneous cohort of patients with PD, we showed that (1) the STN is the best target to improve motor symptoms, (2) postoperative cognitive deficit is mainly related to the surgery itself, and (3) stimulation-induced hypomania is related to a combination of both the disease characteristics and a more ventral STN location.
Does regional development explain international youth mobility?. Spatial patterns and global/local determinants of the recent emigration of young Italians

In this essay, we tackle the issue of the international mobility of young Italians in relation to regional disparities. Our intention is to determine if and to what extent a relationship exists between regional development and the international mobility of young people. We analyze the international migration of Italian citizens aged 15-34 who left the country in the period 2010-2017 using several variables that reflect the varying conditions found in different NUTS 3-level regions in terms of economic dynamism, labor-market efficiency, social fragility, educational underdevelopment and spatial peripherality.Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models show that the international mobility of young Italians is very much dependent on local conditions and affected by spatial differences. It is greatest in the most economically dynamic areas of the country, in border regions and in metropolitan areas, with factors relating to spatial proximity and peripherality, imbalances in local labor markets, and paucity of human capital proving particularly significant.
Moving Towards Non-Relational Databases

RDBMS has been around since long. It is the founder stone of many application stacks. It provides the users with the best mix of simplicity, robustness, flexibility, performance, scalability, and compatibility. However the emergence of the cloud centric application poses a set of challenges to the existing RDBMS Vendors. The RDBMS are not so suitable to cater to some of the critical requirement of these new generation applications such as handling large set of unstructured data or providing elastic scalability. This results in emergence of a new set of document centric or resource centric databases which are non-relational in nature. Promising non-relational solutions include CouchDB, SimpleDB etc. We have explored and conducted few experiments with some of such databases. In the current paper we would like to highlight the salient features of these databases. With the help of examples we would describe how these databases differ from the conventional relational databases. We would also discuss how they cater to the requirement of today’s modern enterprise applications
Histopathological effects of cisplatin, doxorubicin and 5-flurouracil (5-FU) on the liver of male albino rats

Cisplatin, doxorubicin and fluorouracil (5-FU), drugs belonging to different chemical classes, have been extensively used for chemotherapy of various cancers. Despite extensive investigations into their hepatotoxicity, there is very limited information on their effects on the structure and ultra-structure of liver cells in vivo. Here, we demonstrate for the first time, the effects of these three anticancer drugs on rat liver toxicity using both light and electron microscopy. Light microscopic observations revealed that higher doses of cisplatin and doxorubicin caused massive hepatotoxicity compared to 5-FU treatment, including dissolution of hepatic cords, focal inflammation and necrotic tissues. Interestingly, low doses also exhibited abnormal changes, including periportal fibrosis, degeneration of hepatic cords and increased apoptosis. These changes were confirmed at ultrastructural level, including vesiculated rough endoplasmic reticulum and atrophied mitochondria with ill-differentiated cisternae, dense collection of macrophages and lymphocytes as well as fibrocytes with collagenous fibrils manifesting early sign of fibrosis, especially in response to cisplatin and doxorubicin -treatment. Our results provide in vivo evidence, at ultrastructural level, of direct hepatotoxicity caused by cisplatin, doxorubicin and 5-FU at both light and electron microscopi. These results can guide the design of appropriate treatment regimen to reduce the hepatotoxic effects of these anticancer drugs.
Distribution of Mnemiopsis Leidyi And Zooplankton In the South-western Caspian Sea, 2008

The study was conducted from January 2008 to December 2008, focused on spatial and temporal distribution of Mnemiopsis leidyi and zooplankton populations in the south-western area of the Caspian Sea. In summer and winter M. leidyi abundance and biomass values were between 1900 ± 1400 ind/m , 110 ± 220 ind/m and 370 ± 250 g/m, 1.0 ± 1.3 g/m , respectively. The most individuals of a ctenophore (about 90%) were < 5 mm in length. A total of 19 zooplankton species were identified. Among them seven species were merozooplankton and 12 species were holozooplankton. The annual mean zooplankton abundance was recorded 5300 ± 1400 ind/m which were lower than the previous years. The mass occurrence of M. leidyi appears to be one of the most important factors that reduce the zooplankton species and abundance, hence degrade the Caspian Sea natural ecosystem. KEY WORD: Caspian Sea; distribution; Mnemiopsis leidyi; zooplankton;