Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nonparametric Density Estimation and Tests of Continuous Time Interest Rate Models

Nonparametric kernel density estimation has recently been used to estimate and test short-term interest rate models, but inference has been based on asymptotics. We derive finite sample properties of kernel density estimates of the ergodic distribution of the short-rate when it follows a continuous time AR(1) as in Vasicek. We find that the asymptotic distribution substantially understates finite sample bias, variance, and correlation. Also, estimator quality and bandwidth choice depend strongly on the persistence of the interest rate process and on the span of the data, but not on sampling frequency. We also examine the size and power of one of Ait-Sahalia's nonparametric tests of continuous time interest rate models. The test rejects too often. This is probably because the quality of the nonparametric density estimate depends on persistence, but the asymptotic distribution of the test does not. After critical values are adjusted for size, the test has low power in distinguishing between the Vasicek and Cox-Ingersoll-Ross models relative to a conditional moment-based specification test.
Stellar Populations in the Large Magellanic Cloud from 2MASS

We present a morphological analysis of the feature-rich 2MASS LMC color-magnitude diagram, identifying Galactic and LMC populations and estimating the density of LMC populations alone. We also present the projected spatial distributions of various stellar populations. The conditions that prevailed when 2MASS observed the LMC provided 10 σ limiting sensitivity for J ≲ 16.3, H ≲ 15.3, and Ks ≲ 14.7. Major populations are identified based on matching morphological features of the color-magnitude diagram with expected positions of known populations, isochrone fits, and analysis of the projected spatial distributions. 2MASS has detected a significant population of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars (≳104 sources) and obscured AGB stars (≳2 × 103 sources). The LMC populations along the first-ascent red giant branch (RGB) and AGB are quantified. Comparison of the giant luminosity functions in the bar and the outer regions of the LMC shows that both luminosity functions appear consistent with each other. The luminosity function in the central (bar) field has well-defined drop-off near Ks = 12.3 mag corresponding to the location of the RGB tip; the same feature is seen in the luminosity function of the entire LMC field. Isochrone fits for the corresponding giant branches reveal no significant differences in metallicities and ages between central and outer regions of the LMC. This may be evidence for strong dynamical evolution in the last several gigayears. In particular, the observed LMC giant branch is well fit by published tracks in the CIT/CTIO system with a distance modulus of μ = 18.5 ± 0.1, reddening EB-V = 0.15-0.20, metallicity Z = 0.004, and age 3-13 Gyr. Analysis of deep 2MASS engineering data with 6 times the standard exposure produces similar estimates.
An accelerated proximal gradient algorithm for nuclear norm regularized linear least squares problems

The a‐ne rank minimization problem, which consists of flnding a matrix of minimum rank subject to linear equality constraints, has been proposed in many areas of engineering and science. A speciflc rank minimization problem is the matrix completion problem, in which we wish to recover a (low-rank) data matrix from incomplete samples of its entries. A recent convex relaxation of the rank minimization problem minimizes the nuclear norm instead of the rank of the matrix. Another possible model for the rank minimization problem is the nuclear norm regularized linear least squares problem. This regularized problem is a special case of an unconstrained nonsmooth convex optimization problem, in which the objective function is the sum of a convex smooth function with Lipschitz continuous gradient and a convex function on a set of matrices. In this paper, we propose an accelerated proximal gradient algorithm, which terminates in O(1= p †) iterations with an †-optimal solution, to solve this unconstrained nonsmooth convex optimization problem, and in particular, the nuclear norm regularized linear least squares problem. We report numerical results for solving large-scale randomly generated matrix completion problems. The numerical results suggest that our algorithm is e‐cient and robust in solving large-scale random matrix completion problems. In particular, we are able to solve random matrix completion problems with matrix dimensions up to 10 5 each in less than 10 minutes on a modest PC.
Beyond cognitive and metacognitive tools: the use of the Internet as an 'epistemological' tool for instruction

This paper argues that Internet-based instruction should not be only perceived as a cognitive tool or a metacognitive tool; rather, it can be perceived and used as an epistemological tool. When the Internet is used as an epistemological tool for instruction, learners are encouraged to evaluate the merits of information and knowledge acquired from Internet-based environments, and to explore the nature of learning and knowledge construction. This paper further asserts that Internet-based instruction is perceived as a way to help learners develop advanced epistemologies. On the other hand, developmentally advanced epistemological beliefs can facilitate the practice of Internet-based instruction.
Bicycle guidelines and crash rates on cycle tracks in the United States.

OBJECTIVES We studied state-adopted bicycle guidelines to determine whether cycle tracks (physically separated, bicycle-exclusive paths adjacent to sidewalks) were recommended, whether they were built, and their crash rate. METHODS We analyzed and compared US bicycle facility guidelines published between 1972 and 1999. We identified 19 cycle tracks in the United States and collected extensive data on cycle track design, usage, and crash history from local communities. We used bicycle counts and crash data to estimate crash rates. RESULTS A bicycle facility guideline written in 1972 endorsed cycle tracks but American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) guidelines (1974-1999) discouraged or did not include cycle tracks and did not cite research about crash rates on cycle tracks. For the 19 US cycle tracks we examined, the overall crash rate was 2.3 (95% confidence interval = 1.7, 3.0) per 1 million bicycle kilometers. CONCLUSIONS AASHTO bicycle guidelines are not explicitly based on rigorous or up-to-date research. Our results show that the risk of bicycle-vehicle crashes is lower on US cycle tracks than published crashes rates on roadways. This study and previous investigations support building cycle tracks.
Religious young adults recounting the past: narrating sexual and religious cultures in school

Schooling can be a pivotal time in young people’s formative experience when identities are negotiated and forged. However, contradictory dominant cultures can operate within the school context, making it very challenging for individuals to negotiate their religious and sexual identities within a sexualised and heteronormative space. This essay draws on interview data relating to 18- to 25-year-olds of diverse religious faiths in the UK, who recounted their secondary schooling experiences, and focuses on the formal and informal ways in which the school was constituted in relation to religion and sexuality.
Phase noise analysis and design of a 3-GHz bipolar differential colpitts VCO

This paper presents a low-phase-noise differential bipolar Colpitts VCO, implemented in a 0.35/spl mu/m BiCMOS process. A time-variant phase noise analysis yields closed- form symbolic expressions for the dominant noise sources in the 1/f/sup 2/ phase-noise region. Measurements show a phase noise of -123 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from a 2.8-3.1 GHz carrier, for a figure-of-merit of 183 dBc/Hz. A very good agreement between the derived theoretical formulas, spectreRF simulations, and measurements is observed.
Mood-congruent judgment is a general effect.

Mood congruency refers to a match in affective content between a person's mood and his or her thoughts. The mood-congruent judgment effect states in part that attributes will be judged more characteristic, and events more likely, under conditions of mood congruence. Thus, the happy person will believe good weather is more likely than bad weather (relative to such a judgment in a state of mood incongruence). Three studies showed that the effect generalizes to non-self-relevant judgments with natural mood
Reversal of pathology in CHMP2B‐mediated frontotemporal dementia patient cells using RNA interference

Frontotemporal dementia is the second most common form of young‐onset dementia after Alzheimer's disease, and several genetic forms of frontotemporal dementia are known. A rare genetic variant is caused by a point mutation in the CHMP2B gene. CHMP2B is a component of the ESCRT‐III complex, which is involved in endosomal trafficking of proteins targeted for degradation in lysosomes. Mutations in CHMP2B result in abnormal endosomal structures in patient fibroblasts and patient brains, probably through a gain‐of‐function mechanism, suggesting that the endosomal pathway plays a central role in the pathogenesis of the disease.
Vital dyes for chromovitrectomy

Purpose of review The aim of this article is to present the current state-of-the-art in regard to the application of vital dyes during vitreoretinal surgery, ‘chromovitrectomy’, as well as to overview the current literature regarding the properties of dyes, techniques of application, indications, and complications in chromovitrectomy. Recent findings A large body of published research has recently addressed the toxicity profile of indocyanine green for chromovitrectomy. Experimental data demonstrate dose-dependent toxicity of indocyanine green to various retinal cells. Newer generation vital dyes for chromovitrectomy include trypan blue, patent blue, triamcinolone acetonide, infracyanine green, sodium fluorescein, bromophenol blue, fluorometholone acetate and brilliant blue. Novel instruments may enable a selective painting of preretinal tissues during chromovitrectomy. Summary This review suggests that the field of chromovitrectomy represents an expanding area of research. The first line agents for internal limiting membrane staining in chromovitrectomy are indocyanine green, infracyanine green, and brilliant blue. Patent blue, bromophenol blue and trypan blue arose as outstanding biostains for visualization of epiretinal membranes. Novel dyes available for chromovitrectomy deserve further investigation.
Facework & Politeness: Multiple Goals in Courtroom Discourse

This paper places recent work on politeness and facework into a broader framework concerned with the analysis of multiple goals in courtroom discourse. Problems with Brown & Levinson's (1978) theory as applied to ongoing discourse are addressed. A schema is developed that can be used to interpret major strategic options available for the conducting of facework. A methodology for employing this interpretative approach is described and illustrated with case studies of courtroom discourse. Preliminary analyses provide support for the approach: it is applicable to ongoing discourse and has a coherent internal logic. Directions for future research are indicated.
Detecting Misuse of Google Cloud Messaging in Android Badware

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a widely-used and reliable mechanism that helps developers to build more efficient Android applications; in particular, it enables sending push notifications to an application only when new information is available for it on its servers. For this reason, GCM is now used by more than 60\% among the most popular Android applications. On the other hand, such a mechanism is also exploited by attackers to facilitate their malicious activities; e.g., to abuse functionality of advertisement libraries in adware, or to command and control bot clients. However, to our knowledge, the extent to which GCM is used in malicious Android applications (badware, for short) has never been evaluated before. In this paper, we do not only aim to investigate the aforementioned issue, but also to show how traces of GCM flows in Android applications can be exploited to improve Android badware detection. To this end, we first extend Flowdroid to extract GCM flows from Android applications. Then, we embed those flows in a vector space, and train different machine-learning algorithms to detect badware that use GCM to perform malicious activities. We demonstrate that combining different classifiers trained on the flows originated from GCM services allows us to improve the detection rate up to 2.4%, while decreasing the false positive rate by 1.9%, and, more interestingly, to correctly detect 14 never-before-seen badware applications.
Gonorrhea infection in women: prevalence, effects, screening, and management

Gonorrhea is a set of clinical conditions resulting from infection with the sexually-acquired bacterial pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Acquisition may involve multiple mucosal sites in the lower female genital tract, including the urethra, cervix, Bartholin’s and Skene’s glands, as well as the anorectal canal, pharynx, and conjunctivae. It may spread to the upper genital tract, uterine tubes, abdominal cavity, and other systemic sites. Gonorrhea is the second most commonly reported sexually-transmitted infection in the US and rates are higher among women than men. Women and infants are affected disproportionately by gonorrhea, because early infection may be asymptomatic and also because extension of infection is often associated with serious sequelae. Screening is critical for infection identification and the prevention or limitation of upper genital tract spread, and horizontal and vertical transmission. Routine genital screening is recommended annually for all sexually active women at risk for infection, including women aged < 25 years and older women with one or more of the following risks: a previous gonorrhea infection, the presence of other sexually transmitted diseases, new or multiple sex partners, inconsistent condom use, commercial sex work, drug use, or human immunodeficiency virus infection with sexual activity or pregnancy. Pharyngeal gonococcal infections are common in adolescents, and direct culture screening is necessary to identify affected individuals. Nucleic acid amplification tests (NAATs) are considered the standard for screening and diagnosis. Although urine NAAT testing is most commonly used, there is growing support for vaginal swabs collected by providers or patients themselves. Resistance to all antibiotics currently recommended for the treatment of gonorrhea has been documented and complicates therapeutic strategies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend treatment of gonorrhea with a single class of drugs, ie, the cephalosporins.
An Extensible Technique for High-Precision Testing of Recovery Code

Thorough testing of software systems requires ways to productively employ fault injection. We describe a technique for automatically identifying the errors exposed by shared libraries, finding good injection targets in program binaries, and producing corresponding injection scenarios. We present a framework for writing precise custom triggers that inject the desired faults--in the form of error return codes and corresponding side effects--at the boundary between shared libraries and applications. We incorporated these ideas in the LFI tool chain [18]. With no developer assistance and no access to source code, this new version of LFI found 11 serious, previously unreported bugs in the BIND name server, the Git version control system, the MySQL database server, and the PBFT replication system. LFI achieved entirely automatically 35%-60% improvement in recovery-code coverage, without requiring any new tests. LFI can be downloaded from http://lfi.epfl. ch.
Reliability and Validity of a Measure of Preschool Teachers' Attributions for Disruptive Behavior

Research Findings: This study examined the quality of teacher attributions for child disruptive behavior using a new measure, the Preschool Teaching Attributions measure. A sample of 153 early childhood teachers and 432 children participated. All teachers completed the behavior attributions measure, as well as measures regarding demographics, beliefs, self-efficacy, child behavior, and the quality of the teacher–child relationship with selected children. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the hypothesized 2-factor model fit significantly better than a 1-factor model, with the 2 factors being Causal and Responsibility. The resulting Causal and Responsibility subscale scores had solid internal consistency as measured by Cronbach's alpha coefficients. Significant bivariate and partial correlations with teacher practices and beliefs provided preliminary support for the measure's construct validity. Practice or Policy: Findings from this study suggest the importance of including a measure of teacher attributions in studies that explore teachers' beliefs, practices, and relationships with children.
STEREOTYPE THREAT, THE TEST‐CENTER ENVIRONMENT, AND PERFORMANCE ON THE GRE GENERAL TEST

The study investigated the applicability of previous experimental research on stereotype threat to operational Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) General Test testing centers. The goal was to document any relationships between features of the testing environment that might cue stereotype threat as well as any impact on GRE test scores among African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and female test-takers. Among such features were the gender and ethnicity of test proctors and more general factors, such as the size, activity level, and social atmosphere of test centers. Our analyses revealed several relationships among environmental factors and several variations in test performance for all groups. However, we found no direct support for stereotype threat and, in fact, found some effects for proctor ethnicity that ran counter to a stereotype-threat explanation.
Language Development in Context a

IN THIS PAPER I consider the ways in which the contexts of language use that the child experiences may affect what the child learns about language. The key terms in this proposition are context, learning, and use, and each needs to be examined before we can make sense of the relationships among them. The context of language use has commonly been invoked in discussions of child language to explain a number of different phenomena, including the following: 1. Other people’s interpretation of the child’s meaning. This has become known as the method of rich interpretation and is exemplified in the famous example from Bloom (1970) of the child’s use of a single noun-noun construction (“mommy sock”) in three different contexts, leading to three different interpretations of its meaning and thus of its underlying syntactic form. 2. The child’s interpretation of another speaker’s meaning. In this case we identify context-dependent strategies. A familiar example of this is the child’s interpretation of the preposition “on” as meaning either “in” or “on” depending upon whether the stable object is concave or not. (Clark 1973). 3. Variations in performance on a cognitive task depending upon whether the instructions and props are familiar and easily interpretable by the child. Donaldson (1978) has provided many examples of this kind. 4. Context-conditioned variations in the use of certain constructions. These do not reflect limitations on the child’s competence but rather facility in understanding subtle conditions on the use of terms. An example of this is Gee and Savasir’s (1985) analysis of preschool children’s use of “will’’ and “gonna” to express different intentional states. 5. On a different level, Dore (1983) has proposed that mothers and children co-construct context through their discourse, thus establishing a mutually understandable domain of interaction. 6. Perhaps most common is the claim that language is first context-bound and becomes de-contexted with development, a claim that has been applied
Improving Color Constancy by Discounting the Variation of Camera Spectral Sensitivity

It is an ill-posed problem to recover the true scene colors from a color biased image by discounting the effects of scene illuminant and camera spectral sensitivity (CSS) at the same time. Most color constancy (CC) models have been designed to first estimate the illuminant color, which is then removed from the color biased image to obtain an image taken under white light, without the explicit consideration of CSS effect on CC. This paper first studies the CSS effect on illuminant estimation arising in the inter-dataset-based CC (inter-CC), i.e., training a CC model on one dataset and then testing on another dataset captured by a distinct CSS. We show the clear degradation of existing CC models for inter-CC application. Then a simple way is proposed to overcome such degradation by first learning quickly a transform matrix between the two distinct CSSs (CSS-1 and CSS-2). The learned matrix is then used to convert the data (including the illuminant ground truth and the color-biased images) rendered under CSS-1 into CSS-2, and then train and apply the CC model on the color-biased images under CSS-2 without the need of burdensome acquiring of the training set under CSS-2. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real images show that our method can clearly improve the inter-CC performance for traditional CC algorithms. We suggest that, by taking the CSS effect into account, it is more likely to obtain the truly color constant images invariant to the changes of both illuminant and camera sensors.
Comparison of novice and expert evaluations of apparel design illustrations using the consensual assessment technique

Creativity assessment in apparel design is limited in scope and application. The purpose of this investigation is (1) the procedural use of the consensual assessment technique (CAT) when evaluating fashion design illustrations, (2) the internal consistency reliability of creativity and technical quality scales with expert and novice raters, and (3) the differences between expert and novice ratings on creativity and technical quality. The CAT provided a valid and reliable creativity assessment instrument for apparel design evaluation. Results indicate significant relationships between the ratings for both creativity measures (r (30) = . 83, p < . 001) and technical quality measures (r (30) = . 78, p < . 001). Yet, domain experience of raters was not significant in comparison. Therefore, apparel design evaluation can be completed by a combination of experts and novice raters effectively; however, the number of raters used is a critical methodological need. Educators integrating evaluation procedures of creative thinking into current courses and curricula can use assessment strategies for creativity evaluation.