Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring Equilibrating Forces of Financial Ratios

SYNOPSIS AND INTRODUCTION: We test several categories of ratiosshort-term liquidity, performance measures, earnings per share (EPS), capital structure, and the gross margin ratio-to determine if they have equilibrium values or follow a random walk. For ratios with an equilibrium value, the speed at which the ratio returns to equilibrium from out-ofequilibrium conditions is measured. Since equilibrating forces may differ with firm size, we also test for differences in adjustment speeds between small and large firms. An accounting ratio may have an equilibrium value if management targets a certain ratio so that any deviation from the target causes management to initiate actions that will return the ratio to target. Also, although management may not be targeting a ratio, the interaction of management's actions with external market industry forces may lead to an equilibrium value. We investigate the total adjustment over time and then assess both the relative adjustment speed and the relative weights of the two main equilibrating forces: industry and management. The statistical technique used allows each firm to have its own, unknown equilibrium value. In addition, we remove an important sampling bias in measuring the autocorrelation coefficient. The results show that when firms experience a liquidity shock, equilibrating forces counterbalance a little more than a third of the shock in the next period. This finding suggests that firms' liquidity ratios have a fast adjustment to equilibrium values. EPS ratios also have a high adjustment rate to equilibrium value; about one-third to one-half of the shock is adjusted within one period. For performance measures (net operating income over sales or assets), for the equity to debt and gross margin ratios,
Do Stock Market Investors Understand the Risk Sentiment of Corporate Annual Reports

I test the stock market efficiency with respect to the information in the texts of annual reports. More specifically, I examine the implications of corporate annual reports’ risk sentiment for future earnings and stock returns. I measure the risk sentiment of annual reports by counting the frequency of words related to risk or uncertainty in the 10-K filings. I find that an increase in risk sentiment is associated with lower future earnings: Firms with a larger increase in risk sentiment have more negative earnings changes in the next year. Risk sentiment of annual reports can predict future returns in a cross-sectional setting: Firms with a large increase in risk sentiment experience significantly negative returns relative to those firms with little increase in risk sentiment in the twelve months after the annual report filing date. A hedge portfolio based on buying firms with a minor increase in risk sentiment of annual reports and shorting firms with a large increase in risk sentiment generates an annual Alpha of more than 10% measured using the four-factor model including the Fama-French three factors and the momentum factor.
Use of Hypnosis in the Treatment of Pain

Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness that comprises of heightened absorption in focal attention, dissociation of peripheral awareness, and enhanced responsiveness to social cues. Hypnosis has a long tradition of effectiveness in controlling somatic symptoms, such as pain. Pain, the most common symptom in clinical practice, is a multi-dimensional experience, which includes sensory-discriminative, affective-emotional, cognitive and behavioral components. There is a growing recognition for hypnosis and related techniques in pain management. Psychological approaches to pain control, such as hypnosis, can be highly effective analgesics, but are underused in Korea. In this article, we would like to review the basic concepts of hypnosis, the mechanism, and the outcome data of the analgesic effects of hypnosis, and also, its limitations.
Supervised strategies for cracks detection in images of road pavement flexible surfaces

The detection of cracks and other degradations in road pavement surfaces is traditionally done by experts using visual inspection, while driving along the surveyed road. An automatic cracks detection system based on road pavement images, as proposed here, can speed up the process and reduce results' subjectivity. The paper confronts six supervised classification strategies, three parametric and three non-parametric. The analysis is done on data resulting from dividing the image into a set of non-overlapping windows. Dealing with supervised classification strategies, a technique for automatic selection of training images from an image database is proposed as the initial step, after which a human expert should select the image windows containing cracks. The selected classification strategies work with a 2D feature space. Classifiers are evaluated using a set of well-know metrics, indicating that a better performance can be achieved using parametric classification strategies.
Products of their Past? Cleavages and Intra-Party Dissent Over European Integration. IHS Political Science Series Paper No. 118. February 2009

What explains contemporary intra-party dissent on EU issues? This article develops a cleavage theory model of internal party dissent over European integration. Drawing on Lipset and Rokkan’s classic model of political cleavages and on its applications to party positioning on European integration, I argue that if one seeks to understand when, where, and to what extent internal divisions manifest themselves, one must look to the particular historical vulnerabilities of political parties. Using expert survey data, I demonstrate that the ease with which political parties are able to assimilate the issue of European integration is influenced by the legacy of past political tensions and the extent to which the economic and political aspects of the EU reactivate pre-existing cleavages.
A Novel Saliency Model for Stereoscopic Images

In this paper, we propose a novel saliency model for stereoscopic images. To improve depth information for stereo saliency analysis, this model exploits depth information from three aspects: 1) we extract the low-level features based on the color-depth contrast features in a local and global search range (local-global contrast); 2) to extract the topological structural from a depth map, a surrounding map based on a Boolean map is obtained as a weight value to enhance the local-global contrast features; and 3) based on the saliency probability distribution in depth information, we employ stereo center prior enhancement to compute the final saliency. Experimental results on two recent eye-tracking databases show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art saliency models.
The influence of ART on the treatment of Trichomonas vaginalis among HIV-infected women.

OBJECTIVE Among women who are human immunodeficiency virus positive (HIV+), both prevalent and persistent infections with Trichomonas vaginalis (TV) are common. TV has been shown to increase vaginal shedding of HIV, which may influence HIV sexual and perinatal transmission, making prevention important. In 1 cohort of HIV+ women in Kenya, antiretroviral therapy (ART) use, mostly nevirapine based, was associated with lower cure rates of TV for single-dose therapy. Our goal was to repeat this study in a US-based cohort of HIV+/TV+ women and compare outcomes to those with multidose therapy. METHODS A secondary data analysis was performed on a multicentered cohort of HIV+/TV+ women who were randomized to single-dose (2 grams) or 7-day (500 mg twice daily) multidose metronidazole (MTZ) treatment. Test of cure visit, via culture, occurred 6-12 days after treatment completion. Information was collected on sex partner treatment and sexual exposures. Persistent TV infection rates were compared for women on ART at baseline vs not on ART. RESULTS Of the 226 women included, those on ART had more treatment failures than women not on ART (24/146 [16.4%] vs 5/80 [6.3%]; P = .03). When stratified by treatment arm, more treatment failures were seen in the single-dose arm (17/73 [23.3%] vs 3/39 [7.7%]; P = .05) than in the multidose arm (7/73 [9.6%] vs 2/41 [4.8%]; P = .39). CONCLUSIONS ART usage was associated with a higher TV persistent infection rate among those receiving the single-dose treatment, but not the multidose, providing more evidence that multidose should be the preferred treatment for HIV+ women.
QSPR Studies on Vapor Pressure, Aqueous Solubility, and the Prediction of Water-Air Partition Coefficients

The vapor pressures and the aqueous solubilities of 411 compounds with a large structural diversity were investigated using a quantitative structure−property relationship (QSPR) approach. A five-descriptor equation with the squared correlation coefficient (R2) of 0.949 for vapor pressure and a six-descriptor equation with R2 of 0.879 for aqueous solubility were obtained. All descriptors were derived solely from the chemical structure of the compounds. The QSPR correlation equations for vapor pressure and aqueous solubility allow the reliable prediction of water−air partition coefficients.
Personality traits in resident and migratory warbler species.

Animals are often confronted with environmental challenges and the way in which they cope with these challenges can have important fitness consequences. There is increasing evidence that individuals differ consistently in their reaction to the environment (personality traits). However, little is known about whether different life-styles (e.g., resident or migratory) influence personality traits and if so, in what manner. We compared neophobic and exploratory behaviours, both of which play an important role in personality traits, between two closely related species, the resident Sardinian warblers and the migratory garden warblers, at two different times during the year. Neophobia was tested by placing a novel object, a mop, beside the feeding dish and measuring the latency to feed (neophobia score). Exploration was tested by offering another novel object, a tube, attached to a perch at a neutral location and measuring latency to approach and investigate the tube (exploration score). Both tests were carried out at the end of the breeding season and repeated ten months later in spring. The Sardinian warblers showed consistent behavioural reactions over time. Furthermore, neophobia and exploration scores were negatively related. The garden warblers neither behaved consistently over time nor was there a correlation between neophobia and exploration. Overall, Sardinian warblers were less neophobic and more explorative than garden warblers. The different reactivity may be due to a different frequency distribution of the individuals of the two species along a reactivity axis. It can be concluded that the Sardinian warblers have personality traits. The situation is less clear in the garden warblers. Possibly, different life-styles require different organisation of behaviours.
InnerCircle: A parallelizable decentralized privacy-preserving location proximity protocol

Location Based Services (LBS) are becoming increasingly popular. Users enjoy a wide range of services from tracking a lost phone to querying for nearby restaurants or nearby tweets. However, many users are concerned about sharing their location. A major challenge is achieving the privacy of LBS without hampering the utility. This paper focuses on the problem of location proximity, where principals are willing to reveal whether they are within a certain distance from each other. Yet the principals are privacy-sensitive, not willing to reveal any further information about their locations, nor the distance. We propose InnerCircle, a novel secure multi-party computation protocol for location privacy, based on partially homomorphic encryption. The protocol achieves precise fully privacy-preserving location proximity without a trusted third party in a single round trip. We prove that the protocol is secure in the semi-honest adversary model of Secure Multi-party Computation, and thus guarantees the desired privacy properties. We present the results of practical experiments of three instances of the protocol using different encryption schemes. We show that, thanks to its parallelizability, the protocol scales well to practical applications.
Transcriptional coactivator NT‐PGC‐1α promotes gluconeogenic gene expression and enhances hepatic gluconeogenesis

The transcriptional coactivator PGC‐1α plays a central role in hepatic gluconeogenesis. We previously reported that alternative splicing of the PGC‐1α gene produces an additional transcript encoding the truncated protein NT‐PGC‐1α. NT‐PGC‐1α is co‐expressed with PGC‐1α and highly induced by fasting in the liver. NT‐PGC‐1α regulates tissue‐specific metabolism, but its role in the liver has not been investigated. Thus, the objective of this study was to determine the role of hepatic NT‐PGC‐1α in the regulation of gluconeogenesis. Adenovirus‐mediated expression of NT‐PGC‐1α in primary hepatocytes strongly stimulated the expression of key gluconeogenic enzyme genes (PEPCK and G6Pase), leading to increased glucose production. To further understand NT‐PGC‐1α function in hepatic gluconeogenesis in vivo, we took advantage of a previously reported FL‐PGC‐1α−/− mouse line that lacks full‐length PGC‐1α (FL‐PGC‐1α) but retains a slightly shorter and functionally equivalent form of NT‐PGC‐1α (NT‐PGC‐1α254). In FL‐PGC‐1α−/− mice, NT‐PGC‐1α254 was induced by fasting in the liver and recruited to the promoters of PEPCK and G6Pase genes. The enrichment of NT‐PGC‐1α254 at the promoters was closely associated with fasting‐induced increase in PEPCK and G6Pase gene expression and efficient production of glucose from pyruvate during a pyruvate tolerance test in FL‐PGC‐1α−/− mice. Moreover, FL‐PGC‐1α−/− primary hepatocytes showed a significant increase in gluconeogenic gene expression and glucose production after treatment with dexamethasone and forskolin, suggesting that NT‐PGC‐1α254 is sufficient to stimulate the gluconeogenic program in the absence of FL‐PGC‐1α. Collectively, our findings highlight the role of hepatic NT‐PGC‐1α in stimulating gluconeogenic gene expression and glucose production.
B-cell-specific Moloney murine leukemia virus integration site 1: potential stratification factor and therapeutic target for epithelial ovarian cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer, a vexing challenge for clinical management, still lacks biomarkers for early diagnosis, precise stratification, and prognostic evaluation of patients. B-cell-specific Moloney murine leukemia virus integration site 1 (BMI1), a member of the polycomb group of proteins, engages in diverse cellular processes, including proliferation, differentiation, senescence, and stem cell renewal. In addition, BMI1, as a cancer stem-cell marker, participates in tumorigenesis through various pathways. Rewardingly, recent studies have also revealed a relationship between BMI1 expression and the clinical grade/stage, therapy response, and survival outcome in a majority of human malignancies, including epithelial ovarian cancer. Therefore, BMI1 might serve as a potential stratification factor and treatment target for epithelial ovarian cancer, pending evidence from further investigations.
Assessing the Adoption of e-Government Services by Teachers in Greece

Technological developments and governments’ understanding of what citizens need usually determine the design of public online services. For successful implementation of e-Government services, governments have to place the user in the center of future developments, understand what citizens need and measure what increases citizens’ willingness to adopt e-government services. The paper uses the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the extended TAM, the Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory and the important determinants of user acceptance perceived risk and trust, in order to describe teachers’ behavioral intensions to adopt e-Government services. A model containing trust and risk, along with cognitive, social and intrinsic factors is used to study the intentions of e-Government use by Greek primary and secondary education teachers. Two hundred and thirty teachers responded to an online survey. Findings reveal that cognitive and intrinsic factors have significant effects on intentions to use e-Government websites.
A Close-Separation Double Quasar Lensed by a Gas-rich Galaxy

In the course of a Cycle 8 snapshot imaging survey with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), we have discovered that the z = 1.565 quasar HE 0512-3329 is a double with image separation 0. ″644, differing in brightness by only 0.4 mag. This system is almost certainly gravitationally lensed. Although separate spectra for the two images have not yet been obtained, the possibility that either component is a Galactic star is ruled out by a high signal-to-noise composite ground-based spectrum and separate photometry for the two components: the spectrum shows no trace of any zero-redshift stellar absorption features belonging to a star with the temperature indicated by the broadband photometry. The optical spectrum shows strong absorption features of Mg II, Mg I, Fe II, Fe I, and Ca I, all at an identical intervening redshift of z = 0.9313, probably due to the lensing object. The strength of Mg II and the presence of the other low-ionization absorption features is strong evidence for a damped Lyα system, likely the disk of a spiral galaxy. Point-spread function fitting to remove the two quasar components from the STIS image leads to a tentative detection of a third object, which may be the nucleus of the lensing galaxy. The brighter component is significantly redder than the fainter, due to either differential extinction or microlensing.
The Dual Orexin/Hypocretin Receptor Antagonist, Almorexant, in the Ventral Tegmental Area Attenuates Ethanol Self-Administration

Recent studies have implicated the hypocretin/orexinergic system in reward-seeking behavior. Almorexant, a dual orexin/hypocretin R1 and R2 receptor antagonist, has proven effective in preclinical studies in promoting sleep in animal models and was in Phase III clinical trials for sleep disorders. The present study combines behavioral assays with in vitro biochemical and electrophysiological techniques to elucidate the role of almorexant in ethanol and sucrose intake. Using an operant self-administration paradigm, we demonstrate that systemic administration of almorexant decreased operant self-administration of both 20% ethanol and 5% sucrose. We further demonstrate that intra-ventral tegmental area (VTA) infusions, but not intra-substantia nigra infusions, of almorexant reduced ethanol self-administration. Extracellular recordings performed in VTA neurons revealed that orexin-A increased firing and this enhancement of firing was blocked by almorexant. The results demonstrate that orexin/hypocretin receptors in distinct brain regions regulate ethanol and sucrose mediated behaviors.
A Synthetic Human Kinase Can Control Cell Cycle Progression in Budding Yeast

The DDK kinase complex, composed of Cdc7 and Dbf4, is required for S-phase progression. The two component proteins show different degrees of sequence conservation between human and yeast. Here, we determine that Saccharomyces cerevisiae bearing human CDC7 and DBF4 grows comparably to cells with yeast DDK under standard growth conditions. HsDrf1 (a second human Dbf4-like protein) does not support growth, suggesting that HsDbf4 is the true ortholog of ScDbf4. Both human subunits are required to complement yeast cdc7Δ or dbf4Δ due to the inability of human Cdc7 or Dbf4 to interact with the corresponding yeast protein. Flow cytometry indicates normal cell cycle progression for yeast containing human DDK. However, yeast containing human DDK is sensitive to long-term exposure to hydroxyurea and fails to sporulate, suggesting that human DDK substitutes for some, but not all, of yeast DDK’s functions. We mapped the region of Cdc7 required for species-specific function of DDK to the C-terminus of Cdc7 by substituting the yeast C-terminal 55 amino acid residues in place of the equivalent human residues. The resulting hybrid protein supported growth of a cdc7Δ strain only in the presence of ScDBF4. The strain supported by the hybrid CDC7 was not sensitive to HU and formed tetrads. Together, our data indicate that DDK’s targeting of its essential substrate is conserved between species, whereas the interactions within DDK are species specific.
Codimension-Two Homoclinic Bifurcations Underlying Spike Adding in the Hindmarsh-Rose Burster

The Hindmarsh--Rose model of neural action potential is revisited from the point of view of global bifurcation analysis, with the singular perturbation parameter held fixed. Of particular concern is a parameter regime where lobe-shaped regions of irregular bursting undergo a transition to stripe-shaped regions of periodic bursting. The boundary of each stripe represents a fold bifurcation that causes a smooth spike adding transition where the number of spikes in each burst is increased by one. It is shown via numerical path-following that the lobe-to-stripe transition is organized by a sequence of codimension-one and -two homoclinic bifurcations. Specifically, each of a sequence of homoclinic bifurcation curves in the parameter plane is found to undergo a sharp turn, due to interaction between a two-dimensional unstable manifold and the one-dimensional slow manifold that persists from the singular limit. Local analysis using approximate Poincare maps shows that each turning point induces an inclination-fl.
A generic, mass conservative local grid refinement technique for lattice‐Boltzmann schemes

A generic, mass conservative local grid refinement technique for the lattice‐Boltzmann method (LBM) is proposed. As a volumetric description of the lattice‐Boltzmann equation is applied, mass conservation can be imposed by allowing the lattice‐Boltzmann particles to move from coarse grid cells to fine grid cells and vice versa in the propagation step. In contrast to most existing techniques, no spatial and temporal interpolation of particle densities is applied. Moreover, since the communication between the coarse and the fine grids is independent on the collision step, the method can be used for any LBM scheme.
Collected Works: Mathematical Logic (RO Gandy and CEM Yates Editors)

Many biologists would agree that, had it not been for lossless modalities, the synthesis of ﬂip-ﬂop gates might never have occurred. In fact, few end-users would disagree with the analysis of simulated annealing, which embodies the compelling principles of electrical engineering. TEENS, our new heuristic for scalable theory, is the solution to all of these grand challenges. We withhold these algorithms for anonymity.