Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thick points for intersections of planar sample paths

Let L X n (x) denote the number of visits to x ∈ Z 2 of the simple planar random walk X, up to step n. Let X' be another simple planar random walk independent of X. We show that for any 0 < b < 1/(2π), there are n 1-2πb+o(1) points x E Z 2 for which L X n (x)L X' n (x) ≥ b 2 (logn) 4 . This is the discrete counterpart of our main result, that for any a < 1, the Hausdorff dimension of the set of thick intersection points x for which limsup r→0 I(x,r)/(r 2 |log r| 4 ) = a 2 , is almost surely 2 - 2a. Here I(x,r) is the projected intersection local time measure of the disc of radius r centered at x for two independent planar Brownian motions run until time 1. The proofs rely on a multi-scale refinement of the second moment method. In addition, we also consider analogous problems where we replace one of the Brownian motions by a transient stable process, or replace the disc of radius r centered at x by x + rK for general sets K.
Immigration in High-Skill Labor Markets: The Impact of Foreign Students on the Earnings of Doctorates

The rapid growth in the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities has transformed the higher education system, particularly at the graduate level. Many of these newly minted doctorates remain in the United States after receiving their doctoral degrees, so that the foreign student influx can have a significant impact in the labor market for high-skill workers. Using data drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctoral Recipients, the study shows that a foreign student influx into a particular doctoral field at a particular time had a significant and adverse effect on the earnings of doctorates in that field who graduated at roughly the same time. A 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the wage of competing workers by about 3 to 4 percent. About half of this adverse wage effect can be attributed to the increased prevalence of low-pay postdoctoral appointments in fields that have softer labor market conditions because of large-scale immigration.
Disk eccentricity and embedded planets

Aims. We investigate the response of an accretion disk to the presence of a perturbing protoplanet embedded in the disk through time dependent hydrodynamical simulations. Methods. The disk is treated as a two-dimensional viscous fluid and the planet is kept on a fixed orbit. We run a set of simulations varying the planet mass, and the viscosity and temperature of the disk. All runs are followed until they reach a quasi-equilibrium state. Results. We find that for planetary masses above a certain minimum mass, already 3 M Jup for a viscosity of v = 10 -5 , the disk makes a transition from a nearly circular state into an eccentric state. Increasing the planetary mass leads to a saturation of disk eccentricity with a maximum value of around 0.25. The transition to the eccentric state is driven by the excitation of an m = 2 spiral wave at the outer 1:3 Lindblad resonance. The effect occurs only if the planetary mass is large enough to clear a sufficiently wide and deep gap to reduce the damping effect of the outer 1:2 Lindblad resonance. An increase in viscosity or temperature in the disk, which both tend to close the gap, have an adverse influence on the disk eccentricity. Conclusions. In the eccentric state the mass accretion rate onto the planet is greatly enhanced, an effect that may ease the formation of massive planets beyond about 5 M Jup that are otherwise difficult to reach.
Temporal context as cortical spatial codes

It is largely unknown how the brain deals with time. The new field of research on autonomous development must enable machines to develop intelligent behaviors that respond not only to spatial features, but also temporal features. Hidden Markov Model (HMM) has a probability based mechanism to deal with time warping, but no effective online method exists that can deal with general temporal structure and temporal abstraction. By online, we mean that the agent must respond to spatial and temporal context immediately while the sensory stream flows in. By general temporal context, we mean various desirable temporal subsets, such as deletion (e.g., stop words) and variable temporal lengths (e.g., beyond bigrams and trigrams). By temporal abstraction, we mean using abstract meaning of context, instead of concrete forms. This paper proposes a brain inspired online scheme for making sequential decisions based on general temporal context. By sequential decisions, the action from the network depends on not only inputs and outputs but also emergent internal context states. In our neuromorphic scheme, the internal states are not predefined symbols, but distributed context depending on the internal attention. Our complexity analysis shows how this scheme greatly reduces the exponential time complexity O(2t) of all the possible number of contexts of length t down to linear time complexity O(cnt), where n is the number of neurons in the network and c is the average number of synapses of each neuron. In this paper, we concentrate on processing sequential text inputs by an online agent network under motor-supervised learning.
Behavior and performance of the deep belief networks on image classification

We apply deep belief networks of restricted Boltzmann machines to bags of words of sift features obtained from databases of 13 Scenes, 15 Scenes and Caltech 256 and study experimentally their behavior and performance. We find that the final performance in the supervised phase is reached much faster if the system is pre-trained. Pre-training the system on a larger dataset keeping the supervised dataset fixed improves the performance (for the 13 Scenes case). After the unsupervised pre-training, neurons arise that form approximate explicit representations for several categories (meaning they are mostly active for this category). The last three facts suggest that unsupervised training really discovers structure in these data. Pre-training can be done on a completely different dataset (we use Corel dataset) and we find that the supervised phase performs just as good (on the 15 Scenes dataset). This leads us to conjecture that one can pre-train the system once (e.g. in a factory) and subsequently apply it to many supervised problems which then learn much faster. The best performance is obtained with single hidden layer system suggesting that the histogram of sift features doesn't have much high level structure. The overall performance is almost equal, but slightly worse then that of the support vector machine and the spatial pyramidal matching.
Immunologically nonspecific mechanisms of tissue destruction in the rejection of skin grafts

When mice are lethally irradiated and reconstituted with allogeneic bone marrow cells, their skin is repopulated over a period of several months with Langerhans cells (LC) of marrow donor origin. Skin from such mice, when transplanted to unirradiated syngeneic recipients, became in many cases the sites of intense inflammatory responses that led to varying degrees of destruction of the transplanted skin and in some instances, to rejection of the entire graft. The frequency and intensity of these responses were influenced by the nature of the immunogenetic disparity between the donors and recipients of the marrow cells. Chimeric skin placed on hybrid mice derived from crosses between the marrow donors and recipients behaved in all respects as syngeneic grafts or autografts. When the recipients of the chimeric skin were presensitized to the antigens of the marrow donor, the responses were especially intense, and resulted in all cases in complete rejection. Thus the immunologically mediated attack on the allogeneic LCs was accompanied by widespread and nonspecific destruction of bystander cells. In all cases, the inflammation and tissue damage were confined sharply to the grafted skin, showing clearly that nonspecific or indirect tissue destruction is entirely consistent with highly selective destruction of grafted tissues. This finding removes a major objection to postulated mechanisms of rejection that involve indirect destruction of grafted tissues.
[Adaptation of Eupatorium adenophorum photosynthetic characteristics to light intensity].

As an invasive species, Eupatorium adenophorum threatens the biodiversity security in Southwest China. To explore its light adaptation characteristics and related eco-physiological mechanism, this paper studied the physiological and morphological properties, e. g. , gas exchange, fluorescence kinetics, chlorophyll content and specific leaf weight (SLW), of E. adenophorum grown in Xishuangbanna, China, during the dry season under four light regimes (100%, 36%, 12.5% and 4.5% full sunshine). Under full sunshine, the Fv/Fm and phiPS II decreased with increasing diurnal light intensity, but quickly re-increased when light intensity decreased, indicating that photoinhibition was occurred but not serious. E. adenophorum under full sunshine could increase excessive light energy dissipation through the enhancement of diurnal thermal dissipation and anti-oxidation and the reversible inactivation of PS II reaction center, increase light energy utilization, and decrease light absorption by increasing SLW and decreasing chlorophyll concentration. All these processes enabled E. adenophorum to avoid the photodamage of photosynthetic apparatus. Under low light intensities (36%, 12.5% and 4.5% of full sunshine), E. adenophorum had a higher light absorption and utilization efficiency through decreasing SLW and diurnal thermal dissipation, increasing chlorophyll concentration, and keeping high photosynthetic capacity. The effective dissipation of excessive light energy under high light and the sufficient absorption of light energy under low light allowed E. adenophorum to utilize light energy effectively and grow healthily in a wide range of light intensity, which might be one of the reasons that made E. adenophorum a vigorous invader.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES PRIVATE EQUITY AND LONG-RUN INVESTMENT: THE CASE OF INNOVATION

A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures from public shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495 transactions with a focus on one form of long-term activities, namely investments in innovation as measured by patenting activity. We find no evidence that LBOs are associated with a decrease in these activities. Relying on standard measures of patent quality, we find that patents granted to firms involved in private equity transactions are more cited (a proxy for economic importance), show no significant shifts in the fundamental nature of the research, and are more concentrated in the most important and prominent areas of companies' innovative portfolios. Josh Lerner Harvard Business School Rock Center 214 Boston, MA 02163 and NBER jlerner@hbs.edu Morten Sørensen Columbia University Columbia Business School Uris Hall 802 3022 Broadway New York, NY 10027 and NBER ms3814@columbia.edu Per Strömberg Institute for Financial Research (SIFR) Drottninggatan 89 SE-113 60 Stockholm Sweden and NBER per.stromberg@sifr.org
Comparison between hybrid and standard centre-based cardiac rehabilitation in female patients after myocardial infarction: a pilot study.

BACKGROUND Despite the known benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR) for patients with stable coronary artery disease, it is neglected, especially in women. Home-based programmes may increase adherence to CR. AIM To compare the effectiveness of centre-based CR with a hybrid model of training, partly out-patient and partly home-based and tele-monitored, in terms of physical capacity and adherence in post-myocardial infarction (MI) women with preserved left ventricular function. METHODS 53 post-MI female patients, aged 51.3 ± 7.6 years underwent an eight-week training programme (TP) consisting of 24 interval trainings. The first ten trainings were performed in a hospital, then 33 patients (Gruop A) continued them in the centre, the remaining 20 (Group B) did tele-monitored walking training at home (hybrid model). Before and after completing CR, all patients underwent a symptom-limited treadmill exercise stress test during which the analysis included: workload (METs), duration (min), heart rate (HR, bpm), double product (mm Hg/min) at rest and during effort, and HR recovery in the first minute after test. Adherence was reported as the number of trainings completed and the number of dropouts in two CR models. RESULTS After CR, only workload (Group A: 6.5 ± 1.1 vs. 7.0 ± 1.4, p < 0.05; Group B: 7.4 ± 1.1 vs. 8.3 ± 1.4, p < 0.01) and duration (Group A: 4.7 ± 1.1 vs. 5.1 ± 1.2, p < 0.01; Group B: 8.1 ± 3.9 vs. 9.3 ± 4.2, p < 0.01) improved significantly in both groups. Comparing CR effects between both groups, no significant differences were observed. All patients completed TP. CONCLUSIONS In post-MI women, a hybrid model of training improved physical capacity and was a similarly effective form of CR as a centre-based approach. A home-based tele-monitored programme facilitated our patients' adherence to CR.
Virologic and immunologic response to HAART, by age and regimen class

Objective:To determine the impact of age and initial HAART regimen class on virologic and immunologic response within 24 months after initiation. Design:Pooled analysis of data from 19 prospective cohort studies in the North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design (NA-ACCORD). Methods:Twelve thousand, one hundred and ninety-six antiretroviral-naive adults who initiated HAART between 1998 and 2008 using a boosted protease inhibitor-based regimen or a nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI)-based regimen were included in our study. Discrete time-to-event models estimated adjusted hazard odds ratios (aHOR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for suppressed viral load (≤500 copies/ml) and, separately, at least 100 cells/μl increase in CD4 cell count. Truncated, stabilized inverse probability weights accounted for selection biases from discontinuation of initial regimen class. Results:Among 12 196 eligible participants (mean age = 42 years), 50% changed regimen classes after initiation (57 and 48% of whom initiated protease inhibitor and NNRTI-based regimens, respectively). Mean CD4 cell count at initiation was similar by age. Virologic response to treatment was less likely in those initiating using a boosted protease inhibitor [aHOR = 0.77 (0.73, 0.82)], regardless of age. Immunologic response decreased with increasing age [18–<30: ref; 30–<40: aHOR = 0.92 (0.85, 1.00); 40–<50: aHOR = 0.85 (0.78, 0.92); 50–<60: aHOR = 0.82 (0.74, 0.90); ≥60: aHOR = 0.74 (0.65, 0.85)], regardless of initial regimen. Conclusion:We found no evidence of an interaction between age and initial antiretroviral regimen on virologic or immunologic response to HAART; however, decreased immunologic response with increasing age may have implications for age-specific when-to-start guidelines.
Asymptotically Optimal Model Estimation for Quantization

Using high-rate theory approximations we introduce flexible practical quantizers based on possibly non-Gaussian models in both the constrained resolution (CR) and the constrained entropy cases. We derive model estimation criteria optimizing asymptotic (with increasing rate) quantizer performance. We show that in the CR case the optimal criterion is different from the maximum likelihood criterion commonly used for that purpose and introduce a new criterion that we call constrained resolution minimum description length (CR-MDL). We apply these principles to the generalized Gaussian scaled mixture model, which is accurate for many real-world signals. We provide an explanation of the reason why the CR-MDL improves quantization performance in the CR case and show that CR-MDL can compensate for a possible mismatch between model and data distribution. Thus, this criterion is of a great interest for practical applications. Our experiments apply the new quantization method to controllable artificial data and to the commonly used modulated lapped transform representation of audio signals. We show that both the CR-MDL criterion and a non-Gaussian modeling have significant advantages.
Portrait of the ‘Absent’ Father: The Impact of Non-Residency on Developing and Maintaining a Fathering Role

This paper reports on an exploratory study conducted with non-resident fathers, to elucidate the key issues affecting the development and maintenance of a fathering role after a relationship has ended. In particular, the paper focuses on the contingent nature of fatherhood for young marginalised men in Dublin. The extent to which fathers identify with a fathering role is explored and comparisons are drawn between the experiences of estranged, committed and activist fathers. Key factors that militate against fathers maintaining an active role in their children's lives are identified. The paper concludes that while the experiences of fatherhood vary across different categories of fathers, the majority of them aspire toward and value their fathering role. However, their capacity to adopt a positive fathering role is affected by a range of institutional, economic and social barriers.
Abnormal response of motor cortex to photic stimulation in idiopathic generalized epilepsy

Background: Intermittent photic stimulation (IPS) shortens the cortical silent period (CSP) elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the primary motor hand area (M1HAND). This response is absent in healthy individuals with a photoparoxysmal response (PPR). Here we combined TMS of the M1HAND with IPS to examine whether patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) exhibit an abnormal cortical response pattern to IPS.
The ADMM algorithm for distributed averaging: Convergence rates and optimal parameter selection

We derive the optimal step-size and over-relaxation parameter that minimizes the convergence time of two ADMM-based algorithms for distributed averaging. Our study shows that the convergence times for given step-size and over-relaxation parameters depend on the spectral properties of the normalized Laplacian of the underlying communication graph. Motivated by this, we optimize the edge-weights of the communication graph to improve the convergence speed even further. The performance of the ADMM algorithms with our parameter selection are compared with alternatives from the literature in extensive numerical simulations on random graphs.
Generalized Mass Action Systems: Complex Balancing Equilibria and Sign Vectors of the Stoichiometric and Kinetic-Order Subspaces

Mass action systems capture chemical reaction networks in homogeneous and dilute solutions. We suggest a notion of generalized mass action systems that admits arbitrary power-law rate functions and serves as a more realistic model for reaction networks in intracellular environments. In addition to the complexes of a network and the related stoichiometric subspace, we introduce corresponding kinetic complexes, which represent the exponents in the rate functions and determine the kinetic-order subspace. We show that several results of chemical reaction network theory carry over to the case of generalized mass action kinetics. Our main result essentially states that if the sign vectors of the stoichiometric and kinetic-order subspace coincide, there exists a unique complex balancing equilibrium in every stoichiometric compatibility class. However, in contrast to classical mass action systems, multiple complex balancing equilibria in one stoichiometric compatibility class are possible in general.
Electrochemical oxidation of textile industry wastewater by graphite electrodes

In the present article, studies have been performed on the electrochemical (EC) oxidation of actual textile industry wastewater by graphite electrodes. Multi‐response optimization of four independent parameters namely initial pH (pHo): 4–10, current density (j): 27.78–138.89 A/m2, NaCl concentration (w): 0–2 g/L and electrolysis time (t): 10–130 min have been performed using Box‐Behnken (BB) experimental design. It was aimed to simultaneously maximize the chemical oxygen demand (COD) and color removal efficiencies and minimize specific energy consumption using desirability function approach. Pareto analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed a high coefficient of determination value for COD (R2 = 0.8418), color (R2 = 0.7010) and specific energy (R2 = 0.9125) between the experimental values and the predicted values by a second‐order regression model. Maximum COD and color removal and minimum specific energy consumed was 90.78%, 96.27% and 23.58 kWh/kg COD removed, respectively, were observed at optimum conditions. The wastewater, sludge and scum obtained after treatment at optimum condition have been characterized by various techniques. UV‐visible study showed that all azo bonds of the dyes present in the wastewater were totally broken and most of the aromatic rings were mineralized during EC oxidation with graphite electrode. Carbon balance showed that out of the total carbon eroded from the graphite electrodes, 27–29.2% goes to the scum, 71.1–73.3% goes into the sludge and rest goes to the treated wastewater. Thermogravimetric analysis showed that the generated sludge and scum can be dried and used as a fuel in the boilers/incinerators.
The Reasoning and Rehabilitation Program

Abstract Background: Rehabilitation programs for criminal offenders target primary outcomes such as effects on criminogenic needs and secondary outcomes of reducing recidivism. Most evaluation studies focus only on one type of outcome. This study evaluated outcomes on both primary and secondary targets of the Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R) program for 372 male Swedish prisoners. Method: Short-term changes were measured by the Sense of Coherence scale, Eysenck's Impulsiveness, Venturesomeness and Empathy Questionnaire and the Criminal Sentiments Scale. Long-term changes were measured by reconviction outcomes compared to matched controls. Results: The total program completion rate was 77% over a five-year period. Primary target evaluation showed significant pro-social short-term improvements among program completers in sense of coherence, impulsiveness, venturesomeness, attitudes towards the law, courts and police, tolerance of law violation and criminal identification. Secondary target evaluation by survival analysis showed that program completers had a 25% lower risk of reconviction up to 36 months following prison release, compared to matched controls. Dropouts, who were younger and more criminally active, had a 38% higher comparative risk of reconviction. Significant differences occurred in overall 36-month reconviction rates: 48.1% for program completers (n = 212), 60.3% for controls (n = 451) and 73.4% for dropouts (n = 64). Conclusions: The R&R program was associated with positive short-and long-term results. Future research should expand test batteries to assessment of cognitive and social skill acquisition and measurement of motivation for change, as well as randomizing study participants to investigate a possible selection bias in the present results.