Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Capacity flexibility premium under different demand uncertainties

In this paper, we study the effect of different demand shocks on flexibility premium in capacity investment. We find that capacity flexibility premium is significantly higher under additive demand uncertainty than that under multiplicative demand shock. The result suggests that real options approach is more appropriate for investment decision in additive model, and when under multiplicative demand shock the simple net present value (NPV) rule is efficient enough for firm to make accurate decision. That may provide additional theoretical support to explain why many firms still prefer NPV approach in reality. Before using real options approach indiscriminately, first to analyze and identify the nature of demand should be necessary. We examine this problem by dynamic programming and extend the application of bi-variable tree approach for jump diffusion stochastic processes.
DEVELOPING A GUIDING PROTOCOL FOR THE MODERATION OF SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENTS

According to literature, assessment moderation is a process for assuring ‘valid, fair and reliable’ assessment outcomes but also consistency of applied marking criteria. While being an important area in assessment, moderation is often referred as an ‘under researched area of higher education’. The School of Education in the University of Glasgow, like many other academic units in the UK and internationally, adopts a range of approaches to moderating assessment within any one programme and across programmes. By drawing on a small-scale study carried out in academic year 2014/2015, this article introduces the ways course leaders and markers from the School of Education experience moderation practices and their own roles within this process. The paper argues that both groups experience assessment moderation as being a diverse and often problematic part of assessment that requires time and collegial support. Furthermore, their detailed suggestions for institutional and practice level improvements will be highlighted. When exploring and analysing the research findings, the paper draws on recent scholarly work on social moderation and the development of communities of practice in assessment.
Experience with the use of pronase to eliminate interference factors in the latex agglutination test for cryptococcal antigen

Cryptococcal antigen titers of 70 cerebrospinal fluid and 57 serum specimens from patients suspected of having cryptococcosis were determined both before and after treatment with pronase. Median titers of cerebrospinal fluid specimens before and after treatment were 128 and 128, respectively; mean geometric titers of these specimens before and after treatment were 102 and 204, respectively. Median titers of the serum specimens before and after treatment were 16 and 512, respectively; mean geometric titers of these specimens before and after treatment were 19 and 631, respectively. The modified latex agglutination test did not detect antigen in any of 50 cerebrospinal fluid and 51 serum specimens from patients not suspected of having cryptococcosis. These results suggest that the pronase modification increases the sensitivity of the latex agglutination test and that the modification be routinely incorporated into it.
Natural evolution of moderate sleep apnoea syndrome: significant progression over a mean of 17 months.

BACKGROUND: Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. It has remained unclear whether or not it is progressive. The evolution of OSA was examined in a retrospective case note study of 55 unselected patients of mean (SD) age 55.8 (10) years with mild to moderate disease untreated by interventional methods such as continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) or surgery. Correlations between clinical and functional variables, upper airway anatomy, and change in disease severity were also investigated. METHODS: Patients underwent full polysomnography on two occasions (T0 and Tx) at a mean interval of 77 (50) weeks (range 17-229). In addition, upper airway imaging with computed tomographic scanning or cephalometry had been performed in 43 patients at T0. Morbidity before, during, and after the study period was assessed by questionnaire, as was smoking history and alcohol and sedative intake. RESULTS: The apnoea hypopnoea index (AHI) for the group as a whole increased from 21.8 (11.5) to 33.4 (21.3) (p = 0.0001). Using a 25% change in AHI to divide patients into worsened, stable, and improved groups showed that, although most of the patients deteriorated, 25 patients improved or remained stable. The change in AHI was not correlated with body mass index which remained stable at 29.7 (5.4) kg/m2 versus 29.7 (5.6) kg/m2. There was a trend for apnoea duration to increase. No patient reported increased alcohol consumption and only one patient reported increased use of sedatives between T0 and Tx. No correlation was found between change in AHI and age, time between recordings, anatomical measurements of the upper airway, respiratory function, oximetry, or arterial blood gas tensions. Total cardiovascular and cerebrovascular morbidity was high: hypertension (26 patients, 46%), cardiac arrhythmia (17 patients, 33%), angina (12 patients, 23%), myocardial infarction (10 patients, 19%), and stroke (10 patients, 19%). Twenty nine patients (52%) were prescribed CPAP after Tx, two of whom went on to have maxillofacial surgery. These 29 treated patients had significantly higher values of AHI at T0 and Tx and greater change in AHI than the untreated patients. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that mild to moderate OSA has a tendency to worsen in the absence of significant weight gain and that upper airway anatomy and clinical variables do not appear to be useful in predicting progression. It follows that mild to moderate OSA justifies systematic follow up. Deterioration in AHI over a mean of 17 months led to interventional treatment in over 50% of patients in the study.
A Stochastic HMM-Based Forecasting Model for Fuzzy Time Series

Recently, fuzzy time series have attracted more academic attention than traditional time series due to their capability of dealing with the uncertainty and vagueness inherent in the data collected. The formulation of fuzzy relations is one of the key issues affecting forecasting results. Most of the present works adopt IF-THEN rules for relationship representation, which leads to higher computational overhead and rule redundancy. Sullivan and Woodall proposed a Markov-based formulation and a forecasting model to reduce computational overhead; however, its applicability is limited to handling one-factor problems. In this paper, we propose a novel forecasting model based on the hidden Markov model by enhancing Sullivan and Woodall's work to allow handling of two-factor forecasting problems. Moreover, in order to make the nature of conjecture and randomness of forecasting more realistic, the Monte Carlo method is adopted to estimate the outcome. To test the effectiveness of the resulting stochastic model, we conduct two experiments and compare the results with those from other models. The first experiment consists of forecasting the daily average temperature and cloud density in Taipei, Taiwan, and the second experiment is based on the Taiwan Weighted Stock Index by forecasting the exchange rate of the New Taiwan dollar against the U.S. dollar. In addition to improving forecasting accuracy, the proposed model adheres to the central limit theorem, and thus, the result statistically approximates to the real mean of the target value being forecast.
Joint Sub-Channel Assignment and Power Allocation in Heterogeneous Networks: An Efficient Optimization Method

This letter is concerned with joint sub-channel and power allocation in a heterogeneous network. We consider the uplink of a co-channel framework where a macrocell shares the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) sub-channels with a number of small cells (SCs). We maximize the weighted sum-rate of the OFDMA SC network, while a target constraint on the cross-tier interference and a minimum data rate requirement for the high data rate SC users are satisfied. The optimization problem is a highly non-convex mixed integer non-linear problem. We first reformulate the problem into a more mathematically tractable form. Then, we relax the integer variables by adding a penalty term to the objective function. Finally, we rewrite the objective function as the difference of two concave (D.C.) functions and solve this problem using the successive convex approximation method. We show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes.
Ferritin Is Required in Multiple Tissues during Drosophila melanogaster Development

In Drosophila melanogaster, iron is stored in the cellular endomembrane system inside a protein cage formed by 24 ferritin subunits of two types (Fer1HCH and Fer2LCH) in a 1:1 stoichiometry. In larvae, ferritin accumulates in the midgut, hemolymph, garland, pericardial cells and in the nervous system. Here we present analyses of embryonic phenotypes for mutations in Fer1HCH, Fer2LCH and in both genes simultaneously. Mutations in either gene or deletion of both genes results in a similar set of cuticular embryonic phenotypes, ranging from non-deposition of cuticle to defects associated with germ band retraction, dorsal closure and head involution. A fraction of ferritin mutants have embryonic nervous systems with ventral nerve cord disruptions, misguided axonal projections and brain malformations. Ferritin mutants die with ectopic apoptotic events. Furthermore, we show that ferritin maternal contribution, which varies reflecting the mother’s iron stores, is used in early development. We also evaluated phenotypes arising from the blockage of COPII transport from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi apparatus, feeding the secretory pathway, plus analysis of ectopically expressed and fluorescently marked Fer1HCH and Fer2LCH. Overall, our results are consistent with insect ferritin combining three functions: iron storage, intercellular iron transport, and protection from iron-induced oxidative stress. These functions are required in multiple tissues during Drosophila embryonic development.
Regression models for intrinsic constants of reconstituted clays

Abstract In this study, four models were developed to predict intrinsic constants based on some simple physical parameters as well as clay mineralogy of a reconstituted clay sample. The effect of each predictor on the response was evaluated for each individual clay mineralogy. According to the results, it appears that the void ratio at liquid limit has the greatest effect on clays with a considerable amount of smectite, while the effect of the initial void ratio of such clays is the least amongst other clay minerals. The accuracy of the predictive model increases with the inclusion of clay mineralogy as an input parameter. R2 increases from 0.978 to 0.99 and from 0.831 to 0.896 for intrinsic parameters of and , respectively. A simplified method is also presented to determine the virgin compression line of reconstituted clays using the initial void ratio, the void ratio at the liquid limit, and its clay mineralogy.
A parallel implementation of the cylindrical algebraic decomposition algorithm

In this paper, we describe a parallelization scheme for Collins' cylindrical algebraic decomposition algorithm for quantifier elimination in the theory of real closed fields. We first discuss a parallel implementation of the computer algebra system SAC2 in which a complete sequential implementation of Collins' algorithm already exists. We report some initial results on the speedup obtained, drawing on a suite of examples previously given by Arnon.
Inpainting and Zooming Using Sparse Representations

Representing the image to be inpainted in an appropriate sparse representation dictionary, and combining elements from Bayesian statistics and modern harmonic analysis, we introduce an expectation maximization (EM) algorithm for image inpainting and interpolation. From a statistical point of view, the inpainting/interpolation can be viewed as an estimation problem with missing data. Toward this goal, we propose the idea of using the EM mechanism in a Bayesian framework, where a sparsity promoting prior penalty is imposed on the reconstructed coefficients. The EM framework gives a principled way to establish formally the idea that missing samples can be recovered/interpolated based on sparse representations. We first introduce an easy and efficient sparse-representation-based iterative algorithm for image inpainting. Additionally, we derive its theoretical convergence properties. Compared to its competitors, this algorithm allows a high degree of flexibility to recover different structural components in the image (piecewise smooth, curvilinear, texture, etc.). We also suggest some guidelines to automatically tune the regularization parameter.
Understanding the Lessons and Limitations of Conservation and Development

Abstract: The lack of concrete instances in which conservation and development have been successfully merged has strengthened arguments for strict exclusionist conservation policies. Research has focused more on social cooperation and conflict of different management regimes and less on how these factors actually affect the natural environments they seek to conserve. Consequently, it is still unknown which strategies yield better conservation outcomes? We conducted a meta‐analysis of 116 published case studies on common resource management regimes from Africa, south and central America, and southern and Southeast Asia. Using ranked sociodemographic, political, and ecological data, we analyzed the effect of land tenure, population size, social heterogeneity, as well as internally devised resource‐management rules and regulations (institutions) on conservation outcome. Although land tenure, population size, and social heterogeneity did not significantly affect conservation outcome, institutions were positively associated with better conservation outcomes. There was also a significant interaction effect between population size and institutions, which implies complex relationships between population size and conservation outcome. Our results suggest that communities managing a common resource can play a significant role in conservation and that institutions lead to management regimes with lower environmental impacts.
Major taste loss in carnivorous mammals

Mammalian sweet taste is primarily mediated by the type 1 taste receptor Tas1r2/Tas1r3, whereas Tas1r1/Tas1r3 act as the principal umami taste receptor. Bitter taste is mediated by a different group of G protein-coupled receptors, the Tas2rs, numbering 3 to ∼66, depending on the species. We showed previously that the behavioral indifference of cats toward sweet-tasting compounds can be explained by the pseudogenization of the Tas1r2 gene, which encodes the Tas1r2 receptor. To examine the generality of this finding, we sequenced the entire coding region of Tas1r2 from 12 species in the order Carnivora. Seven of these nonfeline species, all of which are exclusive meat eaters, also have independently pseudogenized Tas1r2 caused by ORF-disrupting mutations. Fittingly, the purifying selection pressure is markedly relaxed in these species with a pseudogenized Tas1r2. In behavioral tests, the Asian otter (defective Tas1r2) showed no preference for sweet compounds, but the spectacled bear (intact Tas1r2) did. In addition to the inactivation of Tas1r2, we found that sea lion Tas1r1 and Tas1r3 are also pseudogenized, consistent with their unique feeding behavior, which entails swallowing food whole without chewing. The extensive loss of Tas1r receptor function is not restricted to the sea lion: the bottlenose dolphin, which evolved independently from the sea lion but displays similar feeding behavior, also has all three Tas1rs inactivated, and may also lack functional bitter receptors. These data provide strong support for the view that loss of taste receptor function in mammals is widespread and directly related to feeding specializations.
Numerical Modelling of a Solitary Wave Propagating over a Submerged Rectangular Breakwater

ABSTRACT Paik, J. and Shim, J.-S. , 2018. Numerical Modelling of a Solitary Wave Propagating over a submerged rectangular breakwater. In: Shim, J.-S. ; Chun, I. , and Lim, H.S. (eds.), Proceedings from the International Coastal Symposium (ICS) 2018 (Busan, Republic of Korea). Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 85, pp. 1026–1030. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Three-dimensional numerical simulation is carried out to reproduce the turbulent flow induced by the solitary wave passing a bottom-mounted, submerged, rectangular breakwater. The flow is characterized by the two counter-clockwise rotating vortices massively separated from the upstream edge and the downstream end of the top face of the submerged rectangular obstacle, respectively, and a clock-wise rotating vortex emerged at the junction of the channel bottom and the downstream face of the obstacle. It is crucial to accurately resolve the boundary layer separations at the obstacle surface and the channel bottom both upstream and downstream of the obstacle for elucidating the complex dynamics of resulting turbulent vortical structures. The turbulent flow is reproduced by the improved delayed detached-eddy simulation, a hybrid RANS-LES approach, and the twophase volume of fluid method is applied to model the wave propagation. The governing equations are solved by a second-order accurate finite volume method. Computed turbulent flow field around the submerged breakwater is compared with the particle image velocimetry measurements obtained in the experimental flume. The computed result is in good agreement with the experimental measurements in terms of distinct vortical structures shed from the sharp edges of the obstacle and developed at the downstream junction. The numerical result further shows the three-dimensional behavior of the turbulent vortices and their breakdown into smaller structures.
Technical Privacy Metrics

The goal of privacy metrics is to measure the degree of privacy enjoyed by users in a system and the amount of protection offered by privacy-enhancing technologies. In this way, privacy metrics contribute to improving user privacy in the digital world. The diversity and complexity of privacy metrics in the literature make an informed choice of metrics challenging. As a result, instead of using existing metrics, new metrics are proposed frequently, and privacy studies are often incomparable. In this survey, we alleviate these problems by structuring the landscape of privacy metrics. To this end, we explain and discuss a selection of over 80 privacy metrics and introduce categorizations based on the aspect of privacy they measure, their required inputs, and the type of data that needs protection. In addition, we present a method on how to choose privacy metrics based on nine questions that help identify the right privacy metrics for a given scenario, and highlight topics where additional work on privacy metrics is needed. Our survey spans multiple privacy domains and can be understood as a general framework for privacy measurement.
An early improvement threshold to predict response and remission in first-episode schizophrenia

Background Early improvement with treatment is thought to be important in patients with first-episode schizophrenia, yet a valid definition is still outstanding. Aims To develop a valid definition of early improvement and test its predictive validity regarding response and remission. Method We examined 188 in-patients with first-episode schizophrenia. Early improvement was defined as improvement in Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) total score at week 2, response as a 40% PANSS total score improvement at end-point, and remission according to consensus criteria. Results Reasonable predictive validity of early improvement was found for a 46% PANSS total score improvement at week 2 and a 50% improvement for remission (area under the curve: response 0.707, remission 0.692). Estimated confidence intervals ranged from 26 to 62% PANSS reduction for response and remission. Conclusions Patients with a first episode of schizophrenia should improve by at least 30% in PANSS total score at week 2 to achieve response and remission.
Diminished but not forgotten: effects of aging on magnitude of spacing effect benefits.

OBJECTIVES Age-related changes in memory performance are common in paired associate episodic memory tasks, although the deficit can be ameliorated with distributed practice. Benefits of learning episode spacing in older adults have been shown in single-session studies with spaced presentations of items followed by a test. This study examined the magnitude of the spacing effect benefit in older adults relative to younger adults when given a multiday spacing effect paradigm. METHOD We examined the impact of spacing gap (~15min vs. 24hr) in younger (N = 51, Mage = 19 years, SD = 0.6) and older (N = 54, Mage = 65 years, SD = 8.8) adults with a 10-day retention interval. RESULTS Spacing of learning episodes benefited both younger and older adults. There was an age-related difference in the magnitude of this benefit that has not been observed in earlier studies. DISCUSSION These results suggest that spacing benefited the long-term memory of older adults, however the effect was diminished and qualitatively different from that of younger adults.
Images reveal that atmospheric particles can undergo liquid–liquid phase separations

A large fraction of submicron atmospheric aerosol particles contains both organic material and inorganic salts. As the relative humidity cycles in the atmosphere and the water content of the particles correspondingly changes, these mixed particles can undergo a range of phase transitions, possibly including liquid–liquid phase separation. If liquid–liquid phase separation occurs, the gas-particle partitioning of atmospheric semivolatile organic compounds, the scattering and absorption of solar radiation, and the reactive uptake of gas species on atmospheric particles may be affected, with important implications for climate predictions. The actual occurrence of liquid–liquid phase separation within individual atmospheric particles has been considered uncertain, in large part because of the absence of observations for real-world samples. Here, using optical and fluorescence microscopy, we present images that show the coexistence of two noncrystalline phases for real-world samples collected on multiple days in Atlanta, GA as well as for laboratory-generated samples under simulated atmospheric conditions. These results reveal that atmospheric particles can undergo liquid–liquid phase separations. To explore the implications of these findings, we carried out simulations of the Atlanta urban environment and found that liquid–liquid phase separation can result in increased concentrations of gas-phase NO3 and N2O5 due to decreased particle uptake of N2O5.