Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
For how long will the current grand maximum of solar activity persist?

Understanding the Sun's magnetic activity is important because of its impact on the Earth's environment. The sunspot record since 1610 shows irregular 11‐year cycles of activity; they are modulated on longer timescales and were interrupted by the Maunder minimum in the 17th century. Future behavior cannot easily be predicted – even in the short‐term. Recent activity has been abnormally high for at least 8 cycles: is this grand maximum likely to terminate soon or even to be followed by another (Maunder‐like) grand minimum? To answer these questions we use, as a measure of the Sun's open magnetic field, a composite record of the solar modulation function Φ, reconstructed principally from the proxy record of cosmogenic 10Be abundances in the GRIP icecore from Greenland. This Φ record extends back for almost 10,000 years, showing many grand maxima and grand minima (defined as intervals when Φ is within the top or bottom 20% of a Gaussian distribution). We carry out a statistical analysis of this record and calculate the life expectancy of the current grand maximum. We find that it is only expected to last for a further 15–36 years, with the more reliable methods yielding shorter expectancies, and we therefore predict a decline in solar activity within the next two or three cycles. We are not able, however, to predict the level of the ensuing minimum.
International Journal of Hospitality Management the Impact of Tier Level on Attitudinal and Behavioral Loyalty of Hotel Reward Program Members

The purpose of hotel reward programs is to cultivate customer loyalty, yet most studies on hotel loyalty do not consider reward programs, and even fewer evaluate reward tier. The current study investigated the influence of reward tier on attributes that have been established as key loyalty indicators in the hospitality and marketing literature. A sample of 800 hotel loyalty program members completed an online survey on which they rated their preferred brand on measures of attitudinal loyalty, behavioral intentions , and loyalty behaviors. There were significant differences between tiers on all measures, with the highest scores for elite members, followed by middle and base/entry level members. Effect size measures revealed that emotional commitment and program evaluation were core attributes differentiating tier levels. Behavioral loyalty increased as a function of tier level, with base, middle and elite members spending 53%, 66% and 78% of their hotel nights at a preferred program brand.
Differential in Pattern and Risk Factors of Marital Dissolution Among Better Developed and the Poorly Developed States in India

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to determine the differentials in the prevalence and risk factors of marital dissolution in poorly developed (i.e., empowered action group [EAG]) and better developed (i.e., non-empowered action group [non-EAG]) states in India. Data from the India Human Development Surveys (IHDS) Round 2, conducted in 2011 and 2012 in India, are used for the study. Multiple logistic regression analysis has been carried out. Higher education is related to elevated risks of marital dissolution in EAG states, whereas an inverse relationship is observed in non-EAG states. For EAG and non-EAG states, staying with one’s parents and staying alone without a parent after marriage, working, and residing in urban areas significantly increase the risk of marital disruption for women. Lower marital dissolution risk is observed among women who have at least 1 child in both EAG and non-EAG states.
Essays on asset pricing using option-implied information

The forward-looking nature of the options market makes it an ideal environment for investigating the determinants and the information content of investors' expectations about the future. Therefore, this thesis explores the interrelations arising between the macroeconomic and stock market environment, and the S&P 500 index options market. First, we examine how investors' sentiment driven by macroeconomic fundamentals and investors' erroneous beliefs impact the risk-neutral skewness. Our findings reveal that the macroeconomic fundamentals component of investor sentiment is the main driving force of risk neutral skewness throughout the whole sample period, while the error in investors' beliefs has limited explanatory power and only during the earlier years examined. Moreover, we show that the fundamentals component of investor sentiment affects differently the prices of call and put options. Second, we extend the concept of risk-neutral skewness by creating measures of forward skewness and gauge their predictive ability for a wide range of macroeconomic variables, asset prices, as well as systemic risk, crash risk, and uncertainty variables. Overall, we document that forward skewness encapsulates important information about future macroeconomic and financial market conditions for horizons up to one year ahead over and above forward variance. Third, we propose a novel measure of dispersion in expectations that is derived from the dispersion of options' trading volume across strike prices. We show that dispersion consistently forecasts negative excess market returns, for horizons up to two years ahead, exhibiting a predictive ability comparable to that of the variance risk premium and outperforming all other variables considered. This thesis contributes to the asset pricing and macro-finance literature by unravelling the determinants of the pricing kernel, showing that the call and put options markets are segmented and revealing that option prices and trading volume have significant forecasting ability for many aspects of the macroeconomic and financial environment. In that respect our findings are of particular interest not only to academics but also to investors and policy makers.
The Use of Monetary Incentives to Increase the Reliability of the IAT Measure of Racial Bias

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has emerged as the most common procedure to measure implicit attitudes, and in particular stereotypes towards members of an out-group. An important reason behind the popularity of the IAT is that it displays relatively high reliability when compared to other measures of implicit attitudes. Still, despite its relative merits when compared to available alternative implicit measures, an important literature in psychometrics underscores the IAT’s susceptibility to measurement error. By using such a small unit of measurement (i.e. milliseconds), changes of a tenth of second can have a highly consequential effect on a person’s IAT score. Such sensitivity can bring about substantial measurement error. Moreover, there is also a concern that the IAT may be too demanding for subjects in terms of effort, focus, and engagement. This can lead to substantial heterogeneity in subjects’ effort level which can compound measurement problems in IAT data. This paper attempts to reduce these measurement issues in IAT scores by introducing a performance-based monetary incentive. In our experiment, all subjects take a standard race IAT (where, as is always the case in IAT studies, participants are asked to “quickly and accurately” perform the “sorting tasks” that comprise the IAT). Only some subjects, however, are randomly assigned to a treatment condition, which informs them that they are eligible to earn extra money depending on how “quickly and accurately” they perform the “sorting tasks” in the IAT. By incentivizing subjects to maintain high effort level throughout the length of the sorting tasks, our design provides a simple method for reducing measurement error and generating a more reliable IAT. We then show, via a simple empirical exercise, how these measurement gains improve the predictive validity of the IAT in that they allow researchers to more easily recover potential associations between IAT scores and other constructs of interest, such as explicit racial attitudes.
Lyman-Continuum Emission from Galaxies at z ≃ 3.4

We report the detection of significant Lyman-continuum flux in the composite spectrum of 29 Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) with redshifts ⟨z⟩ = 3.40 ± 0.09. After correction for opacity due to intervening absorption using a new composite QSO spectrum evaluated at the same redshift, the ratio of emergent flux density at 1500 Å in the rest frame to that in the Lyman continuum is L(1500 )/L(900 ) = 4.6 ± 1.0. If the relative intensity of the inferred escaping Lyman-continuum radiation is typical of LBGs at z ~ 3 (the galaxies in this sample are drawn from the bluest quartile of LBG spectral energy distributions due to known selection effects), then observed LBGs produce about 5 times more H-ionizing photons per unit comoving volume than QSOs at z ~ 3. The associated contribution to the metagalactic ionizing radiation field is Jν(912 Å) ≈ 1.2 ± 0.3 × 10-21 ergs s-1 cm-2 Hz-1 sr-1 at z ~ 3, very close to most estimates of the radiation field background based on the "proximity effect. " A preliminary analysis of the density of faint QSOs in our Lyman-break galaxy survey indicates that the standard extrapolated QSO luminosity function may slightly overpredict the QSO contribution to Jν(912 ) at z ~ 3. We briefly discuss the implications of a galaxy-dominated UV background at high redshifts.
What Is IQ? Life Beyond “General Intelligence”

For more than a century, the standard view in the field of human intelligence has been that there is a “general intelligence” that permeates all human cognitive activity. This general cognitive ability is supposed to explain the positive manifold, the finding that intelligence tests with different content all correlate. Yet there is a lack of consensus regarding the psychological or neural basis of such an ability. A recent account, process-overlap theory, explains the positive manifold without proposing general intelligence. As a consequence of the theory, IQ is redefined as an emergent formative construct rather than a reflective latent trait. This implies that IQ should be interpreted as an index of specific cognitive abilities rather than the reflection of an underlying general cognitive ability.
Rapid social perception is flexible: approach and avoidance motivational states shape P100 responses to other-race faces

Research on person categorization suggests that people automatically and inflexibly categorize others according to group memberships, such as race. Consistent with this view, research using electroencephalography (EEG) has found that White participants tend to show an early difference in processing Black versus White faces. Yet, new research has shown that these ostensibly automatic biases may not be as inevitable as once thought and that motivational influences may be able to eliminate these biases. It is unclear, however, whether motivational influences shape the initial biases or whether these biases can only be modulated by later, controlled processes. Using EEG to examine the time course of biased processing, we manipulated approach and avoidance motivational states by having participants pull or push a joystick, respectively, while viewing White or Black faces. Consistent with previous work on own-race bias, we observed a greater P100 response to White than Black faces; however, this racial bias was attenuated in the approach condition. These data suggest that rapid social perception may be flexible and can be modulated by motivational states.
Invariant coupling of determinantal measures on sofic groups

To any positive contraction $Q$ on $\ell ^{2}(W)$, there is associated a determinantal probability measure $\mathbf{P}^{Q}$ on $2^{W}$, where $W$ is a denumerable set. Let ${\rm\Gamma}$ be a countable sofic finitely generated group and $G=({\rm\Gamma},\mathsf{E})$ be a Cayley graph of ${\rm\Gamma}$. We show that if $Q_{1}$ and $Q_{2}$ are two ${\rm\Gamma}$-equivariant positive contractions on $\ell ^{2}({\rm\Gamma})$ or on $\ell ^{2}(\mathsf{E})$ with $Q_{1}\leq Q_{2}$, then there exists a ${\rm\Gamma}$-invariant monotone coupling of the corresponding determinantal probability measures witnessing the stochastic domination $\mathbf{P}^{Q_{1}}\preccurlyeq \mathbf{P}^{Q_{2}}$. In particular, this applies to the wired and free uniform spanning forests, which was known before only when ${\rm\Gamma}$ is residually amenable. In the case of spanning forests, we also give a second more explicit proof, which has the advantage of showing an explicit way to create the free uniform spanning forest as a limit over a sofic approximation. Another consequence of our main result is to prove that all determinantal probability measures $\mathbf{P}^{Q}$ as above are $\bar{d}$-limits of finitely dependent processes. Thus, when ${\rm\Gamma}$ is amenable, $\mathbf{P}^{Q}$ is isomorphic to a Bernoulli shift, which was known before only when ${\rm\Gamma}$ is abelian. We also prove analogous results for sofic unimodular random rooted graphs.
An assessment of supply chain managers' trust in online auctions

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to empirically test the levels of trust supply chain managers exhibit regarding online auctions. The study seeks to test the hypotheses that supply chain managers with higher levels of trust in online auctions would exhibit more familiarity with online auctions, more positive relationships with suppliers, stronger focus on cost management, a stronger focus on revenue enhancement, and greater levels of participation.Design/methodology/approach – A review of the extant literature provided the basis for the development of an online pilot study that was e‐mailed to 100 supply chain managers. The results of the pilot study were used to develop an online survey instrument that was e‐mailed to 2,313 current members of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) and the Institute of Supply Management. A total of 213 usable questionnaires were returned, resulting in a 9.2 percent response rate.Findings – The data were analyzed via t‐test, MANOVA and ANOVA. Th.
Determinants of age at first motherhood in Bangladesh

Female‟s age at first motherhood is an important determinant of fertility process, which also indicates the status of female in a society. In this research, an attempt has been made to evaluate the female‟s age to give their first birth as well as its significant covariates by utilizing the data extracted from 2011 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS). Univariate, bivariate, and multivariate Cox proportional hazard model have been used to identify the association between age at first motherhood and selected background variables. The average age at first motherhood of this study is found to be only 17.92 years. Median age at first motherhood is close to the mean age at 17 years. The study shows that age at first cohabitation is significantly negatively correlated with the timing of first motherhood, while the age at first cohabitation is positively correlated with age at first motherhood. In bivariate analysis, all independent variables are strongly associated with age at first motherhood. The findings of multivariate analysis indicate that age at first cohabitation, spousal age difference, ever use of any method, respondents‟ current age, and respondents‟ education are found to be the significant covariates of age at first motherhood in Bangladesh.
Occupational Identity, Competence, and Environments Among Adults With and Without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Abstract Exploring occupational adaptation among adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is essential due to associated occupational difficulties. Occupational Performance History Interview scales—identity, competence, and environments—were compared between 51 adults with and 50 without ADHD who participated in occupations. Internal and external resources supporting occupational participations were represented by the competence and environment scales, respectively. The group with ADHD reported fewer internal and external occupational resources compared to the group without ADHD, despite occupational identity similarities. Study findings suggest that occupational interventions aimed at increasing internal and external occupational resources may support occupational adaptation among adults with ADHD.
The impact of informal care-giving networks on adult children's care-giver burden

ABSTRACT Previous research on the care-giver burden experienced by adult children has typically focused on the adult child and parent dyad. This study uses information on multiple informal care-givers and examines how characteristics of the informal care-giving network affect the adult child's care-giver burden. In 2007, 602 Dutch care-givers who were assisting their older parents reported on parental and personal characteristics, care activities, experienced burden and characteristics of other informal care-givers. A path model was applied to assess the relative impact of the informal care-giving network characteristics on the care-giver burden. An adult child experienced lower care-giver burden when the informal care-giving network size was larger, when more types of tasks were shared across the network, when care was shared for a longer period, and when the adult child had no disagreements with the other members of the network. Considering that the need for care of older parents is growing, being in an informal care-giving network will be of increasing benefit for adult children involved in long-term care. More care-givers will turn into managers of care, as they increasingly have to organise the sharing of care among informal helpers and cope with disagreements among the members of the network.
What is a "Man from Greece"? — The Micro-dialectics of Ethnicity in 1920s and 1930s British Malaya

Abstract:Scholars such as G. William Skinner and Charles Hirschman have produced trenchant analyses of ethnicity in Malaya based on aggregated demographic data. Yet subjective attitudes towards ethnic identification within and among different social groups remain inadequately examined. The 1937 Chinese-language short story "Xila Ren" (The Man from Greece) serves as an example of what O.W. Wolters calls "local cultural statements". Analysis of that statement makes it possible to expound "micro-dialectics" of Chinese ethnic self-understandings in British Malaya in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These micro-dialectics elicit the finer stratifications of a creolized Chinese society beyond the Straits Settlements by analysing a meeting between a newcomer from China and an elderly Chinese migrant who has adopted the Islamic faith. In the literary text studied here, the Chinese Muslim says that Malays call him "the man from Greece". Evoking discordant views about the anomalous ethno-social status of Chinese Muslims in the locality, the conversation uncovers a grass-roots archive of lexical terms for ethnic classification that strays from colonial census categories. Arguably, the appellation "the man from Greece" arises from undepicted quotidian Sino-Malay encounters that involve a strategic equivalence of place-names. The word play implies a folk taxonomy of places mobilized by Malays to differentiate between Chinese who were Muslim from birth and those who later converted to Islam. In turn, the Chinese Muslim convert appropriates the "Greek" affiliation to counter the newcomer's didactic enframing of him as a "man from China". Highlighting situational performances of identity within inter-ethnic as well as intra-ethnic contexts, "The Man from Greece" offers insights into historical circumstances that complicate the entanglement of Chineseness and Muslimness in Malaya, and foregrounds place-based expressions of social belonging.
Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network?

Social networks, such as Facebook and Myspace have witnessed a rapid growth in their membership. Some of these businesses have tried an advertising-based model with very limited success. However, these businesses have not fully explored the power of their members to influence each other’s behavior. This potential viral or social effect can have significant impact on the success of these companies as well as provide a unique new marketing opportunity for traditional companies. However, this potential is predicated on the assumption that friends influence user’s behavior. In this study we empirically examine this issue. Specifically we address three questions - do friends influence purchases of users in an online social network; which users are more influenced by this social pressure; and can we quantify this social influence in terms of increase in sales and revenue. To address these questions we use data from Cyworld, an online social networking site in Korea. Cyworld users create mini-homepages to interact with their friends. These mini-homepages, which become a way of self-expression for members, are decorated with items (e.g., wallpaper, music), many of which are sold by Cyworld. Using 10 weeks of purchase and non-purchase data from 208 users, we build an individual level model of choice (buy - no-buy) and quantity (how much money to spend). We estimate this model using Bayesian approach and MCMC method. Our results show that there are three distinct groups of users with very different behavior. The low-status group (48% of users) are not well connected, show limited interaction with other members and are unaffected by social pressure. The middle-status group (40% users) is moderately connected, show reasonable non-purchase activity on the site and have a strong and positive effect due to friends’ purchases. In other words, this group exhibits “keeping up with the Joneses” behavior. On average, their revenue increases by 5% due to this social influence. The high-status group (12% users) is well connected and very active on the site, and shows a significant negative effect due to friends’ purchases. In other words, this group differentiates itself from others by lowering their purchase and strongly pursuing non-purchase related activities. This social influence leads to almost 14% drop in the revenue of this group. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our results.
Urban Expansion and Its Impact on the Land Use Pattern in Xishuangbanna since the Reform and Opening up of China

Since the Chinese government carried out the reform and opening up policy, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture has experienced rapid urbanization and dramatic land use change. This research aims at analyzing urban expansion in Xishuangbanna and its impact on the land use pattern using combined methods, including radar graph, the gradient-direction method and landscape metrics. Seven land use maps from 1976 to 2015 were generated and analyzed, respectively. The results showed that urban and rubber expanded rapidly, while forest decreased during the last 40 years. The city proper, the county town of Menghai and the county town of Mengla showed the most significant and fastest urban expansion rates. In response to rapid urban expansion, land use types outside urban areas changed dramatically. In Jinghong and Mengla, urban areas were usually surrounded by paddy, shrub, rubber and forest in 1976, while most areas were dominated by rubber by 2015. With the development of Xishuangbanna, landscape diversity increased along urban-rural gradients, but decreased in some key urban areas. Urban expansion slightly reduced the connectivity of forest and increased agglomeration of rubber at the same time. Based on the analyses above, we moved forward to discuss the consequences of urban expansion, rubber plantations and land fragmentation.