Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Liquidity Stress-Tester: A Model for Stress-testing Banks’ Liquidity Risk

This article presents a stress-testing model for liquidity risks of banks. It takes into account the first- and second-round (feedback) effects of shocks, induced by reactions of heterogeneous banks, and reputation effects. The impact on liquidity buffers and the probability of a liquidity shortfall is simulated by a Monte Carlo approach. An application to Dutch banks illustrates that the second-round effects in specific scenarios could have more impact than the first-round effects and hit all types of banks, indicative of systemic risk. This lends support policy initiatives to enhance banks' liquidity buffers and liquidity risk management, which could also contribute to prevent financial stability risks. (JEL Codes: C15, E44, G21, G32) Copyright , Oxford University Press.
Sharing bad practices in design to improve the use of patterns

To ensure the use of good analysis and design practices and an easier maintenance of software, analysts and designers may use patterns. To help them, we propose models inspection in order to detect instantiations of "spoiled pattern" and models reworking through the use of the design patterns. As a design pattern allows the instantiation of the best known solution for a given problem, a "spoiled pattern" allows the instantiation of alternative solutions for the same problem: requirements are respected, but architecture is improvable. We have collected a set of alternative solutions and deduced the corresponding spoiled patterns. We have defined a first catalog of these improvable practices from several experiments with students. To overcome the limits imposed by this method (restricted public, limited problems and tiresome validation process), we would like to open this problematic to the expert community. Therefore, we propose a collaborative website sharing bad practices in object oriented design to improve the use of patterns.
Green Liquor Chip Pretreatment as a Feasible Method for the Enhancement of Softwood Pulp Chemical Properties

The influence of green liquor pretreatment of softwood (SW) chips on the efficiency of extended kraft delignification processes has been studied. Pretreatment of SW chips with hydrosulfide ion-rich industrial green liquor (GL) increases delignification selectivity, giving a statistically significant, higher pulp yield and lower lignin level (kappa number). It has been also observed that the kappa number drop is a direct function of pretreatment temperatures. In addition, an increase in pretreatment time from 40 to 120 minutes does not significantly impact the yield. In general, one of the most interesting results of this work is that the GL pretreated chips tend to have a lower active alkali requirement in post kraft cooking and provide an approximately 5% yield increase over conventional kraft. Neutralization of sodium hydroxide in green liquor does not give any improvement in delignification or yield compared to a conventional kraft cook. In an attempt to improve yield gain through lower pretreatment temperatures, it was found that pretreatment at room temperature does not provide any benefit in yield. The optimum concentration of green liquor for pretreatment is approximately 1 m 3 /adt of wood.
Microwave characterization of ferroelectric thin-film materials

Computer-aided-design models are developed and used for the characterization of ferroelectric materials at microwave frequencies, which aim at measuring the dielectric properties of BST-0.5 thin films on alumina substrates. Complex dielectric constant, voltage tunability, and K-factor are determined for the ferroelectric materials with a series of BST/alumina coplanar waveguides (CPWs) and interdigital capacitors (IDCs) of different BST film thicknesses. Propagation constants are extracted through measurements for CPWs using a multiline thru-reflect-line calibration technique from 1 to 16 GHz. IDC capacitance is measured at different bias points ranging from 0 to 35 V over the frequency range of 1-10 GHz. Conformal mapping models are deployed to interrelate circuit measurements with the BST film intrinsic properties. Dielectric constants of approximately 500-700 and loss tangents of approximately 0.07 are typically obtained at low frequencies for the BST films investigated in this study. BST voltage tunability is typically 15% at 35 V and 6 GHz.
Processing method, variety and roasting effect on cup quality of Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.).

Coffee is cornerstone in the Ethiopian economy. Coffee quality is affected by pre and post harvest practices. Among these practices, processing method and roasting duration are the main ones. This experiment was conducted to evaluate impact of processing method and roast duration on cup quality of Arabica coffee during 2011/12 cropping. Ten years old coffee berry disease resistant three varieties (744, 7440 and 74110) were used. The highest aromatic intensity (3.89) was achieved from dry processed coffee roasted for six minutes. Moderately pointed (3.86) acidity was registered from washed coffee roasted for eight minutes. Medium to moderately full (3.47) body was recorded for variety 74110 roasted for eight minutes. Flavor was significantly affected by the interaction of processing method with variety and processing method with roasting duration. Maximum value (3.75) was recorded for washed coffee roasted for eight minutes. The interaction between processing method and roasting duration was highly significant (P< 0.01) on overall quality where washed coffee roasted for eight minutes had the highest (3.64). Hence, cup quality of coffee affected by processing method, variety and roast duration. At fixed temperature (200 o C) and moisture content (11%) roasting dry and wet
Intraday Trading Activity on Financial Markets: the Swiss evidence

Fribourg, (Switzerland) 2000 «La Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales de l'université de Fribourg (Suisse) n'entend ni approuver, ni désapprouver les opinions émises dans une thèse: elles doivent être considérées comme propres à l'auteur (Décision du Conseil de Faculté du 23 janvier 1990». A. Vukic. I was very fortunate to be part of this team for two main reasons: first, because of the stimulating collaboration from which I learnt enormously and, secondly, because the team created an environment in which human aspects always took first place. In particular, I owe a debt to Prof. Pasquier-Dorthe who always showed immense sensitivity and understanding. He gave me the opportunity to attend the full Ph.D. program in Gerzensee (1997-8), he provided helpful feedback on my work and, more important, he always gave importance to our human relationship. I am also very grateful to Sophie Gay Robin for her friendship and her useful advice. I also thank all the people who made helpful suggestions related to my Ph.D. thesis. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Prof. N. Khoury who undertook to supervise my dissertation. I also thank Prof. I want also to express my gratitude to my family and to all those who gave me moral support. First of all I want to thank my partner, Karin, who is the main source of my sentiments and commitments. I will never thank her enough for her love for me. I am also especially indebted to my mother who provided continuous and generous attention. When I think of these two and of all my good friends I recognize my boundless fortune. As regards my friends I would not forget the " bohemian clan " , A final thought is reserved for the memory of my grandfather Rocco to whom this work is dedicated.
Releasing the national economic potential of provincial city-regions : the rationale for and implications of a ‘ Northern Way ’ growth strategy

1 Contents Acknowledgements 2 Executive Summary 3 1. Context and key questions 7 2. Cities, regions and interregional disparities 14 3. Cross-district and interregional development 38 in theory and practice 4. The Northern Way area: performance and prospects 53 5. Implications for city-regional thinking, investment 69 and governance 6. Next steps 79 Appendices A. Bibliography 83 Northern Way New Horizons study Final report.
An internal process evaluation of the storytime project: a parental dialogic story-reading programme

An Internal Process Evaluation of The Storytime Project: A parental dialogic story-reading programme This thesis is an internal process evaluation of a parental dialogic story-reading programme called The Storytime Project. The aim of the empirical study was to evaluate the significance of the project to the participants and to gain insight into how it might be improved by engaging in depth with the processes involved in running the project. The views of all the project’s stakeholders – children, parents, early childhood practitioners, home school liaison teachers, classroom teachers, school principals, and project administrators – were gathered for the evaluation study using a mixed methods research approach. The Storytime Project is a collaborative initiative between Marino Institute of Education and Dublin’s Northside Partnership. It runs twice yearly for a five week period. The project evaluation targeted parents and children from areas that are socio-economically marginalised. The project aims to support children’s oral language development and to enable parents and children to become users of their local public library. The project also focuses on parental empowerment. Relevant research demonstrates the following: Positive family-school relationships and family-child relationships benefit children’s learning; parents are interested and able to carry out learning activities at home with their children; parental storybook reading has a positive impact on children’s overall literacy development; brief instruction in interactive reading has an enduring effect on parents’ reading style and the best method of helping parents to support their children’s learning is through focused, specific coaching. Findings indicated that relationships between parents and children and between parents and educational settings improved as a result of engagement with The Storytime Project. Strategies designed to improve children’s oral language, and shared with parents during the project, were practised and continue to be used. Parents reported increased confidence and knowledge of literacy practices and as a result began to get involved in school-based activities and use their local library.
Cytochrome P450 2E1 RsaI/PstI polymorphism and risk of esophageal cancer: A meta-analysis of 17 case-control studies

The aim of this study was to explore the cytochrome P450 2E1 (CYP2E1) RsaI/PstI polymorphism and risk of esophageal cancer (EC) in mainland Chinese populations. A systematic search of PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, CBM, CNKI and VIP databases for publications on the CYP2E1 RsaI/PstI polymorphism and risk of EC was performed. and the genotype data were analyzed in a meta-analysis. Odds ratios (ORs) with relevant 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated to assess the association. Sensitivity analysis, test of heterogeneity and assessment of publication bias were performed. The search yielded 17 studies including 18 trails involving 1,663 cases and 2,603 controls. The meta-analyses showed a significant association between the CYP2E1 RsaI/PstI polymorphism and risk of EC in the mainland Chinese population (c2 vs. c1: OR=0.64; 95% CI, 0.50–0.81; P<0.001; c2/c2 vs. c1/c1: OR=0.73; 95% CI, 0.57–0.93; c2/c2 vs. c1/c1+c1/c2: OR=0.76; 95% CI, 0.60–0.96; P=0.02; c1/c2 vs. c1/c1: OR=0.54; 95% CI, 0.38–0.75; P<0.001; c1/c2+c2/c2 vs. c1/c1: OR=0.48; 95% CI, 0.34–0.70; P<0.001). An increased cancer risk in all genetic models was identified following stratification by ethnicity, source of controls and tumor type. In conclusion, in all genetic models, the association between the CYP2E1 RsaI/PstI polymorphism and risk of EC in the mainland Chinese population was significant. This meta-analysis suggests that the CYP2E1 RsaI/PstI polymorphism is a risk factor for EC, and the c2 allele is a factor that lowers the possibility of EC in the mainland Chinese population and this association did not change due to ethnic differences in genetic backgrounds and the environment.
Milkweed loss in agricultural fields because of herbicide use: effect on the monarch butterfly population

Abstract. 1. The size of the Mexican overwintering population of monarch butterflies has decreased over the last decade. Approximately half of these butterflies come from the U.S. Midwest where larvae feed on common milkweed. There has been a large decline in milkweed in agricultural fields in the Midwest over the last decade. This loss is coincident with the increased use of glyphosate herbicide in conjunction with increased planting of genetically modified (GM) glyphosate‐tolerant corn (maize) and soybeans (soya).
Signal Protein-Derived Peptides as Functional Probes and Regulators of Intracellular Signaling

The functionally important regions of signal proteins participating in their specific interaction and responsible for transduction of hormonal signal into cell are rather short in length, having, as a rule, 8 to 20 amino acid residues. Synthetic peptides corresponding to these regions are able to mimic the activated form of full-size signal protein and to trigger signaling cascades in the absence of hormonal stimulus. They modulate protein-protein interaction and influence the activity of signal proteins followed by changes in their regulatory and catalytic sites. The present review is devoted to the achievements and perspectives of the study of signal protein-derived peptides and to their application as selective and effective regulators of hormonal signaling systems in vitro and in vivo. Attention is focused on the structure, biological activity, and molecular mechanisms of action of peptides, derivatives of the receptors, G protein α subunits, and the enzymes generating second messengers.
Understanding Campus Culture and Student Coping Strategies for Mental Health Issues in Five Canadian Colleges and Universities.

This study aimed to better understand campus mental health culture and student mental health coping strategies, and to identify the mental health needs of students as well as gaps in mental health services within postsecondary education. A videovoice method was used to identify and document health-related issues and advocate for change. Forty-one interviews were conducted with campus stakeholders at five universities. Five themes involving mental health emerged from the campus interviews: the stigma of mental illness; campus culture related to mental health; mental health services available and barriers to mental health services on campus; accommodations for students’ mental health needs; and student mental health coping strategies. A documentary was developed to advocate for better mental health. We conclude that although Canadian campuses are raising awareness about mental health issues, there is not enough mental health infrastructure support on campuses; in particular, accessibility to campus mental health resources needs improvement.
Dark matter substructure and dwarf galactic satellites

A decade ago cosmological simulations of increasingly higher resolution were used to demonstrate that virialized regions of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos are filled with a multitude of dense, gravitationally-bound clumps. These dark matter subhalos are central regions of halos that survived strong gravitational tidal forces and dynamical friction during the hierarchical sequence of merging and accretion via which the CDM halos form. Comparisons with observations revealed that there is a glaring discrepancy between abundance of subhalos and luminous satellites of the Milky Way and Andromeda as a function of their circular velocity or bound mass within a fixed aperture. This large discrepancy, which became known as the ``substructure'' or the ``missing satellites'' problem, begs for an explanation. In this paper I review the progress made during the last several years both in quantifying the problem and in exploring possible scenarios in which it could be accommodated and explained in the context of galaxy formation in the framework of the CDM paradigm of structure formation. In particular, I show that the observed luminosity function, radial distribution, and the remarkable similarity of the inner density profiles of luminous satellites can be understood within hierarchical CDM framework using a simple model in which efficiency of star formation monotonically decreases with decreasing virial mass satellites had before their accretion without any actual sharp galaxy formation threshold.
Using LIDO to handle 3D cultural heritage documentation data provenance

It is important for Digital Libraries (DL) to be flexible in exposing their content. Typically a DL provides a search/browse interface which allows resources to be found and a service to make the data available for harvesting from/to other DLs. This kind of communication is possible because the structures of different DLs are expressed following formal specifications. In particular in Cultural Heritage, where we need to describe an extremely heterogeneous environment, some metadata standards are emerging and mappings are proposed to allow metadata exchange and enrichment. CIDOC-CRM is an ontology designed to mediate contents in the area of tangible cultural heritage and was published as ISO 21127 : 2006 standard. Lately an extension of CIDOC-CRM, known as CRMdig, enables to document information about data provenance and digital surrogates in a very precise way. Another metadata schema suitable for handling museum-related data is LIDO. In this paper we propose a case study where we show how CIDOC-CRMdig and LIDO handle the digital information of an object and specially the data provenance.
Knowing Where Things Are: Parahippocampal Involvement in Encoding Object Locations in Virtual Large-Scale Space

The involvement of the medial temporal-lobe region in allocentric mapping of the environment has been observed in human lesion and functional imaging work. Cognitive models of environmental learning ascribe a key role to salient landmarks in representing large-scale space. In the present experiments we examined the neural substrates of the topographical memory acquisition process when environmental landmarks were more specifically identifiable. Using positron emission tomography (PET), we measured regional cerebral blood flow changes while normal subjects explored and learned in a virtual reality environment. One experiment involved an environment containing salient objects and textures that could be used to discriminate different rooms. Another experiment involved a plain empty environment in which rooms were distinguishable only by their shape. Learning in both cases activated a network of bilateral occipital, medial parietal, and occipito-temporal regions. The presence of salient objects and textures in an environment additionally resulted in increased activity in the right parahippocampal gyrus. This region was not activated during exploration of the empty environment. These findings suggest that encoding of salient objects into a representation of large-scale space is a critical factor in instigating parahippocampal involvement in topographical memory formation in humans and accords with previous studies implicating parahippocampal areas in the encoding of object location.
Robust Estimation of Inverse Probability Weights for Marginal Structural Models

Marginal structural models (MSMs) are becoming increasingly popular as a tool for causal inference from longitudinal data. Unlike standard regression models, MSMs can adjust for time-dependent observed confounders while avoiding the bias due to the direct adjustment for covariates affected by the treatment. Despite their theoretical appeal, a main practical difficulty of MSMs is the required estimation of inverse probability weights. Previous studies have found that MSMs can be highly sensitive to misspecification of treatment assignment model even when the number of time periods is moderate. To address this problem, we generalize the covariate balancing propensity score (CBPS) methodology of Imai and Ratkovic to longitudinal analysis settings. The CBPS estimates the inverse probability weights such that the resulting covariate balance is improved. Unlike the standard approach, the proposed methodology incorporates all covariate balancing conditions across multiple time periods. Since the number of these conditions grows exponentially as the number of time period increases, we also propose a low-rank approximation to ease the computational burden. Our simulation and empirical studies suggest that the CBPS significantly improves the empirical performance of MSMs by making the treatment assignment model more robust to misspecification. Open-source software is available for implementing the proposed methods.
Can you compute the operator norm

In this note we address various algorithmic problems that arise in the computation of the operator norm in unitary representations of a group on Hilbert space. We show that the operator norm in the universal unitary representation is computable if the group is residually finite-dimensional or amenable with decidable word problem. Moreover, we relate the computability of the operator norm on the product of non-abelian free groups to Kirchberg's QWEP Conjecture, a fundamental open problem in the theory of operator algebras.
Automated Synthesis of a 96 Product-Sized Library of Triazole Derivatives Using a Solid Phase Supported Copper Catalyst

This article deal with the parallel synthesis of a 96 product-sized library using a polymer-based copper catalyst that we developed which can be easily separated from the products by simple filtration. This gave us the opportunity to use this catalyst in an automated chemical synthesis station (Chemspeed ASW-2000). Studies and results about the preparation of the catalyst, its use in different solvent systems, its recycling capabilities and its scope and limitations in the synthesis of this library will be addressed. The synthesis of the triazole library and the very good results obtained will finally be discussed.
Impact of Social Determinants on Parent Sense of Competence in Mothers Who are Homeless or Poor Housed

ABSTRACT Unfavorable social determinants can impact mothering of young children who are homeless or poor housed and parent sense of competence. Social determinants influence on mothers’ parent sense of competence parent self-efficacy and satisfaction was investigated. Homeless mothers reported worse scores than poor housed mothers on 5 of 10 social determinants including: mother moves, abuse, un/underemployment, less stable partner relationships and student roles. Homeless mothers scored lower than poor housed mothers on parent sense of competence satisfaction and parent sense of competence total, but not on parent sense of competence efficacy. No one social determinant predicted parent sense of competence. Results underscore the need to address social determinants of health in occupational therapy community-based practice.