Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Information Value of Bond Ratings

We test whether bond ratings contain pricing-relevant information by examining security price reactions to Moody's refinement of its rating system, which was not accompanied by any fundamental change in issuers' risks, was not preceded by any announcement, and was carried simultaneously for all bonds. We find that rating information does not affect firm value, but that debt value increases (decreases) and equity value falls (rises) when Moody's announces better- (worse-) than-expected ratings. We also find that when Moody's announces better- (worse-) than-expected ratings, the volatilities implied by prices of options on the fine-rated issuers' shares decline (rise). Copyright The American Finance Association 2000.
Secret linear congruential generators are not cryptographically secure

This paper discusses the predictability of the sequence given by outputing a constant proportion α of the leading bits of the numbers produced by a linear congruential generator. First, we make the assumption that the modulus of the generator is the only known parameter and we prove that, almost surely, a significant proportion of the bits can be predicted from the previous ones, once the generator has been used K times successively where K is O(√log m). Next, we assume that all parameters of the generator are secret and we show how repeated observations of sequences of outputs of length K will probably allow an opponent to cryptanalyze the full sequence.
Prevalence of Virulence Factors and Vancomycin-resistant Genes among Enterococcus faecalis and E. faecium Isolated from Clinical Specimens

Background: The aim of this study was to determine the occurrence of virulence determinants and vancomycin-resistant genes among Enterococcus faecalis and E. faecium obtained from various clinical sources. Methods: The study was performed on the 280 enterococcal isolated from clinical specimens in Hamadan hospitals, western Iran in 2012–14. Antibiotic susceptibility testing was performed using disk diffusion and Minimal Inhibitory Concentration (MIC) methods. The presence of vancomycin-resistant genes and virulence genes was investigated using PCR. Results: Totally 280 enterococcal isolates were identified as follows: E. faecalis (62.5%), E. faecium (24%) and Enterococcus spp (13.5%). The results of antibiotic susceptibility testing showed that resistance rates to vancomycin and teicoplanin in E. faecalis and E. faecium isolates were 5% and 73%, respectively. Of Sixty vancomycin-resistant Enterococci strains, fifty-one isolates were identified as E. faecium (VREfm) and nine as E. faecalis (VREfs). Prevalence of esp, hyl, and asa1 genes were determined as 82%, 71.6%, and 100%, respectively in E. faecium strains; and 78%, 56/6%, and 97%, respectively in E. faecalis strains. Conclusion: The increased frequency of VREF, as seen with rapid rise in the number of vanA isolates should be considered in infection control practices.
Ulcerative colitis in a Southern European country: A national perspective

Background:The incidence, prevalence, and even the clinical behavior of ulcerative colitis (UC) are highly variable in different world regions. In previous studies, Portugal was reported as having a milder clinical behavior. The aim of this study was to apply the Montreal Classification in a large group of UC Portuguese patients in order to describe their clinical characteristics and evaluate variables potentially useful for outcome prediction. Methods:A cross‐sectional study based on data collected from a nationwide online registry was undertaken. Results:In all, 2863 patients with UC were included. Twenty‐one percent had ulcerative proctitis, 52% left‐sided colitis, and 28% extensive colitis. Sixty percent of patients had taken steroids, 14% immunosuppressors, 1% biologicals, and 4.5% were submitted to surgery. Patients with extensive colitis had more severe activity, needing more steroids, immunosuppressors, and surgery. At the time of diagnosis 61% were less than 40 years old and 5% less than 16. Younger patients also had a more aggressive initial course. Thirty‐eight percent of patients had only taken salicylates during the disease course and were characterized by a lower incidence of systemic symptoms at presentation (3.8% versus 8.8%, P < 0.001), fewer extraintestinal manifestations (7.7% versus 24.0%, P < 0.001), and a higher prevalence of proctitis (32.1% versus 10.0%). Conclusions:A more aggressive phenotype was found in extensive colitis and in the initial course of younger patients, with an increased need for steroids and immunosuppressors. In addition, a significant percentage of patients, particularly with proctitis, showed a milder clinical evolution and were maintained in remission only with salicylates. (Inflamm Bowel Dis 2009)
Unique continuation for the system of elasticity in the plane

We prove the strong unique continuation property for the Lame system of elastostatics in the plane, V ·(μ (Vu + ∇u t )) + V (AV. u) = 0, with variable Lame coefficients μ, λ, when μ is Lipschitz and λ is measurable.
Compositional Boosting for Computing Hierarchical Image Structures

In this paper, we present a compositional boosting algorithm for detecting and recognizing 17 common image structures in low-middle level vision tasks. These structures, called "graphlets", are the most frequently occurring primitives, junctions and composite junctions in natural images, and are arranged in a 3-layer And-Or graph representation. In this hierarchic model, larger graphlets are decomposed (in And-nodes) into smaller graphlets in multiple alternative ways (at Or-nodes), and parts are shared and re-used between graphlets. Then we present a compositional boosting algorithm for computing the 17 graphlets categories collectively in the Bayesian framework. The algorithm runs recursively for each node A in the And-Or graph and iterates between two steps -bottom-up proposal and top-down validation. The bottom-up step includes two types of boosting methods, (i) Detecting instances of A (often in low resolutions) using Adaboosting method through a sequence of tests (weak classifiers) image feature, (ii) Proposing instances of A (often in high resolution) by binding existing children nodes of A through a sequence of compatibility tests on their attributes (e.g angles, relative size etc). The Adaboosting and binding methods generate a number of candidates for node A which are verified by a top-down process in a way similar to Data-Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo [18]. Both the Adaboosting and binding methods are trained off-line for each graphlet category, and the compositional nature of the model means the algorithm is recursive and can be learned from a small training set. We apply this algorithm to a wide range of indoor and outdoor images with satisfactory results.
The Effect Of Communicative Language Teaching And Audio-Lingual Method On English Speaking Skill Across Different Learning Styles

This study aims to determine whether there is an interactive effect between learning methods (Communicative Language Teaching/CLT and Audio-Lingual Method/ALM) and learning styles (Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic) on English speaking skill. The researchers used a quasi-experimental research design with a population of 383 students and samples of 70, assigned into two groups: experimental and control. The data were collected using three instruments (i.e., a pretest, a posttest, and a questionnaire) and then descriptively analyzed. A 2x3 factorial of Two-Way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with parametric statistical method was utilized because the data were normally distributed as well as homogeneous. The results of the analysis of the pretest scores show that the English speaking skills of the two groups of students applying the two different methods are the same at the significance level of 0.080. The analysis of the posttest scores show that there was no interactive effect between the learning methods and the learning styles on the English speaking skill at the significance level of 0.138. This implies that no matter what learning styles they have, students in CLT class performed better in speaking English than those in ALM. Keywords: CLT, ALM, learning styles, English speaking skill
PHYSICAL MORBIDITY WITH UNMODIFIED ECT - A DECADE OF EXPERIENCE

SUMMARY Recent recommendations for the routine use of modified ECT prompted an audit to be undertaken to determine the incidence of musculoskeletal complications occurring in patients who received ECT at our centre from 1980 to 1990. Of the 13,597 treatments given, 98% were unmodified, due to the lack of availability of anesthetists. Musculoskeletal complications occurred in less than 1% of treatments and were of little clinical significance. However, modified ECT was associated with significantly greater frequency of potentially fatal complications such as cardiac arrest. The findings of this audit indicate that unmodified ECT administered by a trained team does not result in significant musculoskeletal morbidity and may be preferable to modified ECT in the absence of trained anaesthetic personnel. The decision to routinely recommend modified ECT in developing countries should await scientific debate with due consideration of the complications, resources, ethics, practicality and cost as well as the consequences of such a recommendation on clinical practice.
South Korean Students' Responses to English-Medium Instruction Courses

We explored the underlying mechanism for South Korean university students’ negative responses to English-medium instruction (EMI) courses. Specifically, English language anxiety and confidence, and EMI course attitudes and avoidance were analyzed using survey data from 187 Korean university students. Results showed that English language anxiety played a key role in both EMI course attitudes and avoidance, and also affected student achievement in EMI courses. Students’ English language confidence and their perceptions of their instructors’ English language competence were found to be unrelated to EMI course attitudes and avoidance, but were negatively related to English language anxiety. In addition, students’ EMI course content understanding and grades did not directly influence EMI course avoidance, but did indirectly influence course avoidance through EMI course attitudes. Our results highlight the importance of addressing students’ emotional challenges and attitudes to improve their motivation to take EMI courses.
Resolving File Conflicts in the Ficus File System

Ficus is a flexible replication facility with optimistic concurrency control designed to span a wide range of scales and network environments. Optimistic concurrency control provides rapid local access and high availability of files for update in the face of disconnection, at the cost of occasional conflicts that are only discovered when the system is reconnected. Ficus reliably detects all possible conflicts. Many conflicts can be automatically resolved by recognizing the file type and understanding the file's semantics. This paper describes experiences with conflicts and automatic conflict resolution in Ficus. It presents data on the frequency and character of conflicts in our environment. This paper also describes how semantically knowledgeable resolvers are designed and implemented, and discusses our experiences with their strengths and limitations. We conclude from our experience that optimistic concurrency works well in at least one realistic environment, conflicts are rare, and a large proportion of those conflicts that do occur can be automatically solved without human intervention.
Gender-based Differential Item Functioning in the Application of the Theory of Planned Behavior for the Study of Entrepreneurial Intentions

Over the past years the percentage of female entrepreneurs has increased, yet it is still far below of that for males. Although various attempts have been made to explain differences in mens’ and women’s entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions, the extent to which those differences are due to self-report biases has not been yet considered. The present study utilized Differential Item Functioning (DIF) to compare men and women’s reporting on entrepreneurial intentions. DIF occurs in situations where members of different groups show differing probabilities of endorsing an item despite possessing the same level of the ability that the item is intended to measure. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), the present study investigated whether constructs such as entrepreneurial attitudes, perceived behavioral control, subjective norms and intention would show gender differences and whether these gender differences could be explained by DIF. Using DIF methods on a dataset of 1800 Greek participants (50.4% female) indicated that differences at the item-level are almost non-existent. Moreover, the differential test functioning (DTF) analysis, which allows assessing the overall impact of DIF effects with all items being taken into account simultaneously, suggested that the effect of DIF across all the items for each scale was negligible. Future research should consider that measurement invariance can be assumed when using TPB constructs for the study of entrepreneurial motivation independent of gender.
Imageability effects, phonological errors, and the relationship between auditory repetition and picture naming: Implications for models of auditory repetition

Hanley and Kay (1997) reported the case of a patient (PS) who showed effects of imageability on tests of auditory repetition, but whose errors were phonological rather than semantic. They argued that this pattern of performance could be explained in terms of a partial impairment to both lexical and nonlexical repetition routes so long as some interaction between the two routes was allowed, consistent with Hillis and Caramazza's (1991) "summation" hypothesis. The present paper investigates the performance of a new patient (MF) who also makes a large number of phonological errors when repeating words of low imageability. MF performs at a similar level to PS on tests of picture naming, but is less impaired than PS when repeating words and nonwords. It is argued that the pattern of performance that MF demonstrates on these and on a wide range of other tests of word production and comprehension can be readily accommodated in terms of the dual-route account of impaired auditory repetition that Hanley and Kay (1997) put forward. However, we argue that it is difficult to explain these patients' performance in terms of models of auditory word repetition that do not incorporate a separate nonlexical repetition route (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997; Foygel & Dell, 2000).
Global quadratic optimization via conic relaxation

We present a convex conic relaxation for a problem of maximizing an indefinite quadratic form over a set of convex constraints on the squared variables. We show that for all these problems we get at least 12/37-relative accuracy of the approximation. In the second part of the paper we derive the conic relaxation by another approach based on the second order optimality conditions. We show that for lp-balls, p>=2, intersected by a linear subspace, it is possible to guarantee (1- 2/p)-relative accuracy of the solution. As a consequence, we prove (1 - 1/eln-n)-relative accuracy of the conic relaxation for an indefinite quadratic maximization problem over an n-dimensional unit box with homogeneous linear equality constraints. We discuss the implications of the results for the discussion around the question P = NP.
Seasonal and diurnal characteristics of water soluble inorganic compounds in the gas and aerosol phase in the Zurich area

Gas and aerosol samples were taken using a wet effluent diffusion denuder/aerosol collector (WEDD/AC) coupled to ion chromatography (IC) in the city of Zurich, Switzerland from August to September 2002 and in March 2003. Major water soluble inorganic ions; nitrate, sulfate, and nitrite were analyzed online with a time resolution of two hours for the gas and aerosol phase. The fraction of water soluble inorganic anions in PM10 varied from 15% in August to about 38% in March. Seasonal and diurnal variations of nitrate in the gas and aerosol phase were observed with more than 50% of the total nitrate in the gas phase during August and more than 80% of nitrate in the aerosol phase during March exceeding the concentration of sulfate by a factor of 2. Aerosol sulfate, on the other hand, did not show significant variability with season. However, in the gas phase, the SO 2 concentration was 6.5 times higher in winter than in summer. Nitrous acid (HONO) also showed a diurnal variation in both the gas and aerosol phase with the lowest concentration (0.2–0.6 µg/m 3 ) in the afternoon. The primary pollutants, NO, CO and SO 2 mixing ratios were often at their highest between 04:00–10:00 local time due to the build up of fresh vehicle emission under a nocturnal inversion.
Non-determinism in Byzantine Fault-Tolerant Replication

Service replication distributes an application over many processes for tolerating faults, attacks, and misbehavior among a subset of the processes. The established state-machine replication paradigm inherently requires the application to be deterministic. This paper distinguishes three models for dealing with non-determinism in replicated services, where some processes are subject to faults and arbitrary behavior (so-called Byzantine faults): first, a modular approach that does not require any changes to the potentially non-deterministic application (and neither access to its internal data); second, a master-slave approach, in which ties are broken by a leader and the other processes validate the choices of the leader; and finally, a treatment of applications that use cryptography and secret keys. Cryptographic operations and secrets must be treated specially because they require strong randomness to satisfy their goals. The paper also introduces two new protocols. The first uses the modular approach for filtering out non-de\-ter\-min\-istic operations in an application. It ensures that all correct processes produce the same outputs and that their internal states do not diverge. The second protocol implements cryptographically secure randomness generation with a verifiable random function and is appropriate for certain security models. All protocols are described in a generic way and do not assume a particular implementation of the underlying consensus primitive.
A Log-Ratio Information Measure for Stochastic Sensor Management

In distributed sensor networks, computational and energy resources are in general limited. Therefore, an intelligent selection of sensors for measurements is of great importance to ensure both high estimation quality and an extended lifetime of the network. Methods from the theory of model predictive control together with information theoretic measures have been employed to pick sensors yielding measurements with high information value. We present a novel information measure that originates from a scalar product on a class of continuous probability densities and apply it to the field of sensor management. Aside from its mathematical justifications for quantifying the information content of probability densities, the most remarkable property of the measure, an analog on of the triangle inequality under Bayesian information fusion, is deduced. This allows for deriving computationally cheap upper bounds for the model predictive sensor selection algorithm and for comparing the performance of planning over different lengths of time horizons.
Family Activity Model: Crossroads of Activity Environment and Family Interactions in Family Leisure

ABSTRACT This article proposes the Family Activity Model (FAM) that integrates the previous work of Orthner's theoretical constructs of joint and parallel activities with Zabriskie and McCormick's constructs of core and balance experiences. FAM includes two dimensions of family experiences: activity environment and family interaction. Activity environment refers to the degree of novelty in the environment, while family interaction refers to the degree of social interaction among family members. These dimensions include objective and subjective elements of experiences. As a result of these orthogonal dimensions, four categories were developed providing a more nuanced understanding of family experiences: core-joint, core-parallel, balance-joint, and balance-parallel. The broader implications of using the FAM are discussed for researchers and practitioners.
Presence and learning in a community of inquiry

Abstract The community of inquiry (CoI) framework suggests social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence are essential elements to foster successful educational experiences in computer-mediated distance learning environments. Although thousands of CoI-based articles have been published, those critical of the framework and related research suggest a lack of empirical evidence to support the framework’s central claim that a CoI fostering learners’ social, teaching, and cognitive presence leads to deep and meaningful learning outcomes. The current study conducted with 51 graduate students in five distance education courses compared student responses to a CoI perception survey with three instructor-assessed learning achievement measures. No relationship was found between the students’ perceptions of their participation within the CoI and any of the three instructor-assessed learning achievement measures, suggesting the value of the CoI framework as an educational process model remains challenged.
Opacity in Tundra Nenets

The analysis of opaque relations presents a problem to classic Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1993), inherently a surface-oriented theory. Many different proposals have been made to integrate the analysis of opacity into OT. In this paper, we address the problem of opacity in Tundra Nenets (TN), a Uralic (Samoyedic) language spoken in Arctic Russia and Northern Siberia. TN has a complex system of alternations, many of which interact opaquely, and provides a good test case for the current theories of opacity. In this paper, we are concerned with the categorical metrical vowel deletion that represents a case of self-counterfeeding opacity, and its interaction with vowel deletion in final syllables. We show that among OT approaches to opacity, there are some that cannot handle metrical vowel deletion in TN in principle (Targeted Constraints, OT-CC), some that can but are undesirable on theoretical grounds (Local Constraint Conjunction, in particular, selfconjunction), and the full analysis of the data still requires combining two different theories (Stratal OT and Comparative Markedness).