Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Income Variables and the Measures of Gains from Crime

The empirical literature on the economic analysis of crime suffers from the lack of theoretical underpinnings in using various income variables to proxy expected net gains from crime. As a result, the empirical findings are often mixed or contradictory to one another. This note provides a theoretical argument that relates the net expected gains from crime to a measure of income inequality (Gini coefficient) and the mean income of a society, thereby clarifying the confusions which exist in current criminometric studies.CRLF 1998.16. html: abstract Testing for linearity in time series models has been an active area of research [see Granger and Terasvirta (1993), Tong (1991)]. The authors consider a test for linearity against a particular regime switching model known as the smooth transition autoregressive (STAR) model.
Evaluating A Multithreaded Superscalar Microprocessor Versus A Multiprocessor Chip

While the wide superscalar approach(cid:4) which issues (cid:5) and more in(cid:2) structions per cycle from a single thread(cid:4) fails to yield a satisfying performance(cid:4) its combination with techniques that utilize more coarse(cid:2)grained parallelism is very promising(cid:3) These techniques are multithreading and multiprocessing(cid:3) Multi(cid:2) threaded superscalar permits several threads to issue instructions to the execution units of a wide superscalar processor in a single cycle(cid:3) Multiprocessing integrates two or more superscalar processors on a single chip(cid:3) Our results show that the (cid:5)(cid:2)threaded (cid:5)(cid:2)issue superscalar processor reaches a performance of (cid:6)(cid:3)(cid:7)(cid:8) executed instructions per cycle(cid:3) Using the same number of threads(cid:4) the multiprocessor chip reaches a higher throughput than the multithreaded superscalar approach(cid:3) How(cid:2) ever(cid:4) if chip costs are taken into consideration(cid:4) a (cid:6)(cid:2)threaded (cid:6)(cid:2)issue superscalar processor outperforms a multiprocessor chip built from single(cid:2)threaded processors by a factor of (cid:7)(cid:3)(cid:5) in performance(cid:9)cost relation(cid:3) (cid:2)
Foreign Exchange Market and Equity Risk Premium Forecasting

Numerous academic studies examine equity risk premium predictability based on various macroeconomic variables and price and volume based variables from stock market. In this article, we extend the frontier of the set of predictors from macroeconomic variables and stock market variables to foreign exchange market variables due to various reasons. Firstly, foreign exchange market reflects various economic fundamentals potentially useful for predicting equity risk premium, though may not be fully reflected by available macroeconomic variables used in the literature for forecasting equity risk premium. Moreover, given that technical rules have been documented to work well in offering predicting power at foreign exchange market, price-based variables from foreign exchange market may provide useful information on predicting equity risk premium as well through the connections between foreign exchange market and stock market. We find that on top of using price and volume based variables from stock market and macroeconomic variables, incorporating price-based variables from foreign exchange market as well can not only improve the overall forecasting performance but also produce significant certainty equivalent return gain from an investment perspective. JEL classifications: C53, C58, G11, G12, G17
The syndrome of progressive posterior cortical dysfunction: A multiple case study and review

Dementia presenting with prominent higher order visual symptoms may be observed in a range of neurodegenerative conditions and is often challenging to diagnose. Objectives To describe cases of progressive dementia presenting with prominent visual cortical symptoms. Methods We conducted a retrospective search of cases of progressive dementia with predominant visual symptoms, seen at our dementia unit from 1996 to 2006. Results Twelve patients (5 men, 7 women) were identified, with ages ranging from 49 to 67 years. At the first examination, the duration of the symptoms ranged from one to ten years and the Mini-Mental State Examination scores from 7 to 27. Eleven patients presented with predominant visuospatial symptoms (partial or complete Balint syndrome) and one with visuoperceptive impairment. Other reported manifestations were: constructional apraxia in 11 patients, partial or complete Gerstmann syndrome in ten, ideomotor apraxia in nine, hemineglect or extinction in four patients, alien hand phenomenon in three, and prosopagnosia in one patient. Memory loss was reported by ten patients, but was not the main complaint in any of these cases. Insight was relatively preserved in five patients even after a long period following the onset of symptoms. Six patients developed parkinsonism during evolution. Clinical diagnoses were possible or probable AD in seven patients, cortico-basal degeneration in four, and dementia with Lewy body in one. Conclusions Clinicians should consider this condition especially in presenile patients with slowly progressive higher-order visual symptoms. Although described in association with different conditions, it may also occur in Alzheimer disease.
Youth Civic Engagement: Sociopolitical Development in Schools with Lessons from and for Multicultural Education.

concepts, such as institutional discrimination, structural racism, and xenophobia. Finally, another challenge posed by student’s maturity level was the lack of developmentally appropriate course materials. Indeed, many teachers often feel unprepared and unsupported in their efforts to integrate more social justice education curriculum into their teaching (Bell et al., 1997). This finding also supports results from previous work that demonstrates that teachers often feel unprepared and unsupported when engaging in social
Area efficient system-on-programmable-chip design for a wireless touch-triggered machining probe

In this paper, we present the design and implementation details of a System-on-Programmable-Chip (SoPC), which replaces the circuitry that controls the operation of a touch-triggered machining probe with radio transmission capability. The probe is used to get precise measurements of three dimensional geometric parts. The goal is to achieve size reduction of an existing circuitry inside the probe, that consists of two microcontrollers and a reconfigurable hardware device such as a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), that implements some custom functions. In order to reduce the printed circuit board (PCB) area occupied by these three chips and the associated routing area, we combine them on a single SoPC. An overall 6 fold reduction in PCB area occupied, corresponding to nearly 15cm2 is achieved.
Physical mechanisms limiting the manufacturing uniformity of millimeter-wave power InP HEMT's

We have developed a methodology to diagnose the physical mechanisms limiting the manufacturing uniformity of millimeter-wave power InAlAs/InGaAs HEMT's on InP. A statistical analysis was carried out on dc figures of merit obtained from a large number of actual devices on an experimental wafer. correlation studies and principal component analysis of the results indicated that variations in Si delta-doping concentration introduced during molecular-beam epitaxy accounted for more than half of the manufacturing variance. Variations in the gate-source distance that is determined by the electron-beam alignment in the gate formation process were found to be the second leading source of manufacturing variance. The statistical methodology used in this work is suitable for continuous process yield diagnostics and improvement in a manufacturing environment.
Bmc Infectious Diseases Lack of Association between Serological Evidence of past Coxiella Burnetii Infection and Incident Ischaemic Heart Disease: Nested Case-control Study

Background: Coxiella burnetii causes the common worldwide zoonotic infection, Q fever. It has been previously suggested that patients who had recovered from acute Q fever (whether symptomatic or otherwise) may be at increased risk of ischaemic heart disease. We undertook this study to determine if past infection with Coxiella burnetii, the aetiological agent of Q fever, is a risk factor for the subsequent development of ischaemic heart disease.
New event detection based on indexing-tree and named entity

New Event Detection (NED) aims at detecting from one or multiple streams of news stories that which one is reported on a new event (i.e. not reported previously). With the overwhelming volume of news available today, there is an increasing need for a NED system which is able to detect new events more efficiently and accurately. In this paper we propose a new NED model to speed up the NED task by using news indexing-tree dynamically. Moreover, based on the observation that terms of different types have different effects for NED task, two term reweighting approaches are proposed to improve NED accuracy. In the first approach, we propose to adjust term weights dynamically based on previous story clusters and in the second approach, we propose to employ statistics on training data to learn the named entity reweighting model for each class of stories. Experimental results on two Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) datasets TDT2 and TDT3 show that the proposed model can improve both efficiency and accuracy of NED task significantly, compared to the baseline system and other existing systems.
A Critical Investigation into the Information Communication Technology (ICT) Architecture Supporting Virtual Universities

A critical investigation into the information communication technology (ICT) architecture supporting virtual universities confirmed that service oriented architecture (SOA) is the ICT architecture supporting virtual universities. The study was motivated by the desire to have an in-depth understanding of the ICT architecture supporting virtual universities after considering an upwards trend in a large number of organizations interacting in real time over real, large geographic distances creating a virtual world. Using published work, the study established that different technologies and protocols, such as Service Oriented Architecture SOA, Remote Procedure Call RPC, Transport Protocol TP, Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SMTP and Extensible Markup Language XML , are being used and can be used to support a third generation virtual university. The study established strengths and weaknesses of SOA and virtual universities who offer all services in an integrated way such as e-learning, specialized virtual centres for developmental educational courses, libraries and administrative functions, interactive environments for asynchronous and synchronous communications and collaboration.
THE OPTIMAL QUANTIZATION MATRICES FOR JPEG IMAGE COMPRESSION FROM PSYCHOVISUAL THRESHOLD

The JPEG image compression method has been widely implemented in digital camera devices. The quantization process plays a primary role in JPEG image compression. The quantization process is used to determine the visibility threshold of the human visual system. The quantization tables are generated from a series psychovisual experiments from several angle points of experimental views. This paper proposes psychovisual threshold through quantitative experiments for JPEG image compression. This experiment investigates the psychovisual threshold based on the contribution of DCT coefficients on each frequency order to the reconstruction error. The average reconstruction error from incrementing DCT coefficient is investigated to produce a primitive psychovisual threshold. The psychovisual threshold is designed to give an optimal balance between quality of image reconstruction and compression rates. A psychovisual threshold is obtained to generate new quantization tables for JPEG image compression. The performance of new quantization tables from the psychovisual threshold are analyzed and compared to the existing default JPEG quantization tables. The experimental results show that the new quantization tables from the psychovisual threshold produce higher quality of image reconstruction at lower average bit-length of Huffman code than default JPEG quantization tables.
Impact of working memory training on memory performance in old-old adults.

Memory impairments constitute an increasing objective and subjective problem with advancing age. The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of working memory training on memory performance. The authors trained a sample of 80-year-old adults twice weekly over a time period of 3 months. Participants were tested on 4 different memory measures before, immediately after, and 1 year after training completion. The authors found overall increased memory performance in the experimental group compared to an active control group immediately after training completion. This increase was especially pronounced in visual working memory performance and, to a smaller degree, also in visual episodic memory. No group differences were found 1 year after training completion. The results indicate that even in old? old adults, brain plasticity is strong enough to result in transfer effects, that is, performance increases in tasks that were not trained during the intervention.
A Study on Growth, Inflation and Inequality

The thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on growth, inflation and income inequality. The first essay examines the relationship between inflation level, inflation volatility and economic growth for 92 countries for the period 1982 2007 using the system GMM estimator. By this approach I am able to deal with the problems of endogeneity and collinearity among the variables. The results suggest that both inflation level and volatility negatively affect economic growth. Surprisingly, their effect on economic growth is very small. Panel VAR approach further certifies these findings. The results also confirm that even in the absence of inflation volatility, inflation level reduces economic growth. The second essay investigates whether political instability leads to volatile inflation using a panel of 49 African countries and 35 countries from the rest of the world for the period 1985-2009. This study uses novel measures of political instability, particularly the state failure index and state fragility index, and a novel measure of inflation volatility constructed as the conditional variance of inflation estimated from the GARCH (1,1) model. Adopting the system-GMM estimator the study documents a significant positive effect of political instability on inflation volatility. This effect is more pronounced and robust in Africa than in the rest of the world. Chapter 4 examines the moderating effect of inflation on the financial developmentincome inequality nexus. Using a panel data of 60 countries over the period 1980-2009 and applying a two-step GMM estimator the study finds that financial development reduces income inequality. Nevertheless, the gains from financial development are offset by inflation. The results are robust to different measures of financial development, different estimators and sample sizes.
Comovements among European equity sectors: Selected evidence from the consumer discretionary, consumer staples, financial, industrial and materials sectors

This paper examines comovements between equity sectors across European markets during the post-euro adoption period 1999-2002. The markets comprise six selected Member States of the European Union (EU): namely, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland and Italy. The five sectors selected are classified according to the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). They include the consumer discretionary, consumer staples, financial, industrials and materials sectors. Multivariate cointegration procedures, Granger-causality tests and generalised variance decomposition analyses based on error-correction and vector autoregressive models are conducted to examine long and short-run relationships among these markets. The results indicate that there are few stationary long-run relationships between sectors in different markets, but many significant short-run causal linkages between these sectors. Variance decomposition indicates that the consumer discretionary, financial and materials sectors in the EU are relatively more integrated than the consumer staples and industrials sectors. However, irrespective of the sector examined the large equity markets of France, Germany and Italy remain the most influential in terms of causality and the proportion of variance accounted for by innovations in these same markets.
Sample Attrition in the RLMS, 2001–10

The data of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) – Higher School of Economics represents one of the few nationally representative sources of household and individual data for Russia. These data have been collected since 1992 and in recent years, thanks to more secure financial and logistical support, have become a resource increasingly drawn upon by scholars and students for national and cross-national studies. In this paper, we examine the extent of non-random attrition in the RLMS and discuss the circumstances under which this might give rise to biases in econometric analysis. We illustrate this with an example drawn from the health sphere.
News or Noise ? Internet Message Board Activity and Stock Prices *

This paper examines the relationships between Internet message-board activity and abnormal stock returns and trading volume. The study focuses specifically on the RagingBull.com discussion forum, an extremely popular site whose format permits the construction of an objective measure of investor opinion. For stocks in the Internet service sector, we find that, on days with abnormally high message activity, changes in investor opinion correlate with abnormal industry-adjusted returns. These events days also coincide with abnormally high trading volume, which persists for a second day. However, we find that, in general, message-board activity does not predict industry-adjusted returns or abnormal trading volume. In contrast to the anecdotal evidence of investors using Internet forums to manipulate stock prices, the evidence in our sample is consistent with market efficiency.
Generating Employment in Poor and Fragile States: Evidence from Labor Market and Entrepreneurship Programs

The world's poor -- and programs to raise their incomes -- are increasingly concentrated in fragile states. We review the evidence on what interventions work, and whether stimulating employment promotes social stability. Skills training and microfinance have shown little impact on poverty or stability, especially relative to program cost. In contrast, injections of capital -- cash, capital goods, or livestock -- seem to stimulate self-employment and raise long term earning potential, often when partnered with low-cost complementary interventions. Such capital-centric programs, alongside cash-for-work, may be the most effective tools for putting people to work and boosting incomes in poor and fragile states. We argue that policymakers should shift the balance of programs in this direction. If targeted to the highest risk men, we should expect such programs to reduce crime and other materially-motivated violence modestly. Policymakers, however, should not expect dramatic effects of employment on crime and violence, in part because some forms of violence do not respond to incomes or employment. Finally, this review finds that more investigation is needed in several areas. First, are skills training and other interventions cost-effective complements to capital injections? Second, what non-employment strategies reduce crime and violence among the highest risk men, and are they complementary to employment programs? Third, policymakers can reduce the high failure rate of employment programs by using small-scale pilots before launching large programs; investing in labor market panel data; and investing in multi-country studies to test and fine tune the most promising interventions.
Aqueous Extract of Flacourtia indica Prevents Carbon Tetrachloride Induced Hepatotoxicity in Rat

Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) is a well-known hepatotoxin and exposure to this chemical is known to induce oxidative stress and causes liver injury by the formation of free radicals. Flacourtia indica commonly known as 'Baichi' has been reported as an effective remedy for the treatment of a variety of diseases. The objective of this study was to investigate the hepatoprotective activity of aqueous extract of leaves of Flacourtia indica against CCl4 induced hepatotoxicity. Animals were pretreated with the aqueous extract of Flacourtia indica (250 & 500 mg/kg body weight) for one week and then challenged with CCl4 (1.5 ml/kg bw) in olive oil (1:1, v/v) on 7th day. Serum marker enzymes (ALP, AST, ALT, Total Protein & Total Bilirubin) and TBARS level (Marker for oxidative stress) were estimated in all the study groups. Alteration in the levels of biochemical markers of hepatic damage like AST, ALT, ALP, Total Protein, Total Bilirubin and lipid peroxides (TBARS) were tested in both CCl4 treated and extract treated groups. CCl4 has enhanced the AST, ALT, ALP and the Lipid peroxides (TBARS) in liver. Treatment of aqueous extract of Flacourtia indica leaves (250 & 500 mg/kg) exhibited a significant protective effect by altering the serum levels of AST, ALT, ALP, Total Protein, Total Bilirubin and liver TBARS. These biochemical observations were supported by histopathological study of liver sections. From this preliminary study it has been concluded that the aqueous extract of the leaves of Flacourtia indica protects liver against oxidative damages and could be used as an effective protector against CCl4 induced hepatic damage. Our findings suggested that Flacourtia indica possessed good hepatoprotective activity. Keywords—Carbon Tetrachloride, Flacourtia indica, Hepatoprotective activity, Oxidative stress I. INTRODUCTION IVER - a major metabolic organ affected by various chemicals and toxins daily and identification of a successful hepatoprotective agent will provide a useful tool for the treatment of hepatic diseases. In absence of reliable liver-protective drugs in modern medicine, a large number of medicinal preparations are recommended for the treatment of