Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hard X‐ray states and radio emission in GRS 1915+105

We compare simultaneous Ryle Telescope radio and Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer X-ray observations of the galactic microquasar GRS 1915+105, using the classification of the X-ray behaviour in terms of three states as previously established. We find a strong (one-to-one) relation between radio oscillation events and series of spectrally hard states in the X-ray light curves, if the hard states are longer than ∼100 s and are 'well separated' from each other. In all other cases the source shows either low-level or high-level radio emission, but no radio oscillation events. During intervals when the source stays in the hard spectral state for periods of days to months, the radio behaviour is quite different; during some of these intervals a quasi-continuous jet is formed with an almost flat synchrotron spectrum extending to at least the near-infrared. Based on the similarities between the oscillation profiles at different wavelengths, we suggest a scenario which can explain most of the complex X-ray:radio behaviour of GRS 1915+105. We compare this behaviour with that of other black hole sources, and challenge previous reports of a relation between spectrally soft X-ray states and the radio emission.
Chemical Evolution of the Juvenile Universe

Abstract Models of average Galactic chemical abundances are in good general agreement with observations for [Fe/H] > –1.5, but there are gross discrepancies at lower metallicities. Only massive stars contribute to the chemical evolution of the ‘juvenile universe’ corresponding to [Fe/H] ≲ –1.5. If Type II supernovae (SNe II) are the only relevant sources, then the abundances in the interstellar medium of the juvenile epoch are simply the sum of different SN II contributions. Both low-mass (∼8–11 M⊙) and normal (∼12–25 M⊙) SNe II produce neutron stars, which have intense neutrino-driven winds in their nascent stages. These winds produce elements such as Sr, Y and Zr through charged-particle reactions (CPR). Such elements are often called the ‘light r-process elements’, but are considered here as products of CPR and not the r process. The observed absence of production of the low-A elements (Na through Zn including Fe) when the true r-process elements (Ba and above) are produced requires that only low-mass SNe II be the site if the r process occurs in SNe II. Normal SNe II produce the CPR elements in addition to the low-A elements. This results in a two-component model that is quantitatively successful in explaining the abundances of all elements relative to hydrogen for –3 ≲ [Fe/H] ≲ –1.5. This model explicitly predicts that [Sr/Fe] ≥ –0.32. Recent observations show that there are stars with [Sr/Fe] ≲ –2 and [Fe/H] < –3. This proves that the two-component model is not correct and that a third component is necessary to explain the observations. The production of CPR elements associated with the formation of neutron stars requires that the third component must be massive stars ending as black holes. It is concluded that stars of ∼25–50 M⊙ (possibly up to ∼100 M⊙) are the appropriate candidates. These produce hypernovae (HNe) that have very high Fe yields and are observed today. Stars of ∼140–260 M⊙ are completely disrupted upon explosion. However, they produce an abundance pattern greatly deficient in elements of odd atomic numbers, which is not observed, and therefore they are not considered as a source here. Using a Salpeter initial mass function, it is shown that HNe are a source of Fe that far outweighs normal SNe II, with the former and the latter contributing ∼24% and ∼9% of the solar Fe abundance, respectively. It follows that the usual assignment of ∼⅓ of the solar Fe abundance to normal SNe II is not correct. This leads to a simple three-component model including low-mass and normal SNe II and HNe, which gives a good description of essentially all the data for stars with [Fe/H] ≲ –1.5. We conclude that HNe are more important than normal SNe II in the chemical evolution of the low-A elements from Na through Zn (including Fe), in sharp distinction to earlier models.
The Language of Diversity in the USA

У статті йдеться про мовний такт та мовну толерантність як необхідну складову функціонування такого унікально полі культурного суспільства, яким є США. Крім фактів з історії розвитку мовної толерантності, у статті розмежовують такі основні поняття, як політична коректність, мовний такт, коректна мова та ін.
On the Conditional Conservatism Measure: A Robust Estimation Approach

Recent research, due to Patatoukas and Thomas (2011) and Ball et al. (2013), focuses on Basu’s (1997) conditional conservatism measure and the existence of a denominator effect — whether the difference between the earnings-return coefficients of bad and good news firms (“the Basu coefficient”) is only due to the beginning-of-year price deflator. We address this issue head-on by applying the Theil-Sen (TS) estimation method which does not depend on the scaling of variables; the same coefficient estimates are obtained whether or not the regression equation is scaled by beginning-of-year price. Moreover, the TS estimates are intrinsically insensitive to outliers. Results show the following: (i) the Basu coefficient remains positive using TS; (ii) the Basu coefficient using TS are similar to those using OLS without scaling but much smaller than what scaled OLS show; (iii) the scaled OLS estimates appear to be influenced by a few outlier firms with negative returns and material losses; and (iv) OLS estimates are more volatile due to estimation error. Also, placebo tests suggested in Patatoukas and Thomas (2011) do not falsify our findings. In sum, the denominator effect does not overturn Basu’s hypothesis but the magnitude and variation of the Basu coefficient is much smaller than what traditional results show.
How do Institutional Investors Trade when Firms are Buying Back Shares

We study how institutional investors trade when firms buy back shares. We find that aggregate institutional ownership decline following share repurchase announcements. While some institutions sell shares passively to meet the firm demand for the market to clear, the overall institutional sell-off only accounts for 27% of shares bought back contemporaneously by firms. Many firms experience a net inflow of institutional investment. The decrease in institutional shareholding is greater in firms that experience weaker recent stock performance, display more information uncertainty, have higher institutional ownership, and conduct ill-timed/motivated repurchases that are not endorsed by institutions. And most of the sell-off comes from institutions active in trading. Institutional buying is more informative of the future returns than institutional sell-off, especially in firms with greater information asymmetry. But this return predictability decays over time. Our findings have important implications for firms’ cash payout policy and shed light on institutional trading behavior around voluntary corporate events.
The Effect of Exchange Rates on Economic Growth: Empirical Testing on Nominal Versus Real

This study attempts to investigate the effects of the exchange rates on economic growth in Malaysia using time series data spanning from 1971 to 2009. Both exchange rates, nominal and real, are considered to have similar effects on economic growth. The results of ARDL bounds test suggest that long-run cointegration exists between both nominal and real exchange rates and economic growth with a significant positive coefficient recorded for real exchange rate. In addition, the results of ECM-based ARDL also reveal that both exchange rates have a similar causal effect towards economic growth. Considering the importance of exchange rate variables, especially the real term, these findings eventually suggest that a systematic exchange rate via monetary policy should be properly developed to promote the stability and sustainability of economic growth in Malaysia.
Limitations of TCP-ELFN for Ad hoc Networks

Research on congestion control in ad hoc networks has mostly been limited to enhancing TCP based mechanisms [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Explicit Link Failure No-tiﬁcation (ELFN [1, 2]), a solution for ad hoc TCP, has been shown to outperform TCP in mobile scenarios. Studies of TCP+ELFN on static networks show throughput degradation of about 5% in several cases over TCP, however, the improvements in dynamic cases can be as large as 7 times, as shown in presented simulations. We further describe and study various limitations of TCP based approaches in general, and TCP+ELFN in particular, for congestion control on ad hoc networks. Based on our studies on queue sizes and the progression of TCP sequence numbers for various scenarios, we observe that for congestion control in ad hoc networks, hop-by-hop rate control based mechanisms along with ELFN will be better suited than TCP based mechanisms.
Computing an Optimal Contract in Simple Technologies

We study an economic setting in which a principal motivates a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort toward the success of a joint project. The action taken by each agent is hidden and affects the (binary) outcome of the agent's individual task stochastically. A Boolean function, called technology, maps the individual tasks' outcomes into the outcome of the whole project. The principal induces a Nash equilibrium on the agents' actions through payments that are conditioned on the project's outcome (rather than the agents' actual actions) and the main challenge is that of determining the Nash equilibrium that maximizes the principal's net utility, referred to as the optimal contract. Babaioff, Feldman and Nisan [1] suggest and study a basic combinatorial agency model for this setting. Here, we concentrate mainly on two extreme cases: the AND and OR technologies. Our analysis of the OR technology resolves an open question and disproves a conjecture raised in [1]. In particular, we show that while the AND case admits a polynomial-time algorithm, computing the optimal contract in the OR case is NP-hard. On the positive side, we devise an FPTAS for the OR case, which also sheds some light on optimal contract approximation of general technologies.
Intra-Industry Spillovers from Inward FDI: A Meta-Regression Analysis

The present paper conducts a meta-analysis of literature on intra-industry spillovers from foreign direct investment, using 97 different outcomes from 67 empirical studies. Apart from the traditional approach, robust meta-regression, random-effects model, and normal probability regression are employed. Results of combined significance analysis are mixed but it is evident that studies published in leading academic journals tend to report rather insignificant results. Our findings suggest that the outcome of an empirical work is, in general, dependent on its design, although this pattern seems to weaken over time. Contrary to previous studies, evidence for publication bias was not detected.
An information-theoretic analysis of deduplication

Deduplication finds and removes long-range data duplicates. It is commonly used in cloud and enterprise server settings and has been successfully applied to primary, backup, and archival storage. Despite its practical importance as a source-coding technique, its analysis from the point of view of information theory is missing. This paper provides such an information-theoretic analysis of data deduplication. It introduces a new source model adapted to the deduplication setting. It formalizes both fixed and variable-length deduplication schemes, and it introduces a novel, multi-chunk deduplication scheme. It then provides an analysis of these three deduplication variants, emphasizing the importance of boundary synchronization between source blocks and deduplication chunks. The proposed multi-chunk deduplication scheme is shown to be order optimal under fairly mild assumptions.
rBridge: User Reputation based Tor Bridge Distribution with Privacy Preservation

Tor is one of the most popular censorship circumvention systems; it uses bridges run by volunteers as proxies to evade censorship. A key challenge to the Tor circumvention system is to distribute bridges to a large number of users while avoiding having the bridges fall into the hands of corrupt users. We propose rBridge—a user reputation system for bridge distribution; it assigns bridges according to the past history of users to limit corrupt users from repeatedly blocking bridges, and employs an introduction-based mechanism to invite new users while resisting Sybil attacks. Our evaluation results show that rBridge provides much stronger protection for bridges than any existing scheme. We also address another important challenge to the bridge distribution—preserving the privacy of users’ bridge assignment information, which can be exploited by malicious parties to degrade users’ anonymity in anonymous communication.
Nber Working Paper Series Bayesian Persuasion

We thank Richard Holden for many important contributions to this paper. We would also like to thank Eric Budish, Navin Kartik, Canice Prendergast, Maxwell Stinchcombe, Lars Stole and participants at seminars at University of Mannheim, Duke/Northwestern/Texas IO Theory Conference, Stanford GSB, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, and University of Chicago. This work is supported by the Initiative on Global Markets, the George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, the James S. Kemper Foundation Faculty Research Fund, the Centel Foundation / Robert P. Reuss Faculty Research Fund, and the Neubauer Family Foundation, all at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Privacy Preserving in Association Rule Mining

Association rule mining is one of the most important techniques of data mining that are used to extract the association patterns from large databases. Association rules are one of the most important assets of any organization that can be used for business development and profitability increase. Association rules contain sensitive information that threatens the privacy of its publication and they should be hidden before publishing the database. The aim of hiding association rules is to delete sensitive association rules from the published database so that possible side effects are reduced. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm DCR to hide sensitive association rules. In the proposed algorithm, two clustering operations are performed on the sensitive association rules and finally, a bunch of smaller clusters is chosen to hide. A selection of a smaller bunch of clusters reduces the changes in the database and side effects. The results of performing experiments on real databases, shows the impact of the proposed algorithm on missing rules reduction.
Do Middle Classes Bring Institutional Reforms?

The paper examines the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a new cross-country panel dataset on the distribution of income and expenditure. It uses an econometric methodology to gauge whether a larger middle class has a causal effect on policy and institutional outcomes in three areas: social policy in health and education, market-oriented economic structure and quality of governance. The analysis find that when the middle class becomes larger (measured as the proportion of people earning more than US$10 a day), social policy on health and education becomes more progressive, and the quality of governance (democratic participation and official corruption) also improves. This trend does not occur at the expense of economic freedom, as a larger middle class also leads to more market-oriented economic policy on trade and finance. These beneficial effects of a larger middle class appear to be more robust than the impact of lower poverty, lower inequality or higher gross domestic product per capita. That may be linked to the evolution of the middle class: they are more enlightened, more likely to take political actions and have a stronger voice. They also share preferences and values for policy and institutional reforms, as well as higher stakes in property rights and wealth accumulation.
Secreted uPAR isoform 2 (uPAR7b) is a novel direct target of miR-221

miR-221/-222 and components of the urokinase-type plasminogen activator system (uPAS) are associated with metastasis and poor prognosis in breast cancer, including the triple-negative subtype (TNBC). Modification of components of uPAS and involved miRNAs may contribute to targeted therapy for breast cancer patients. miR-221−/−222-overexpressing or miR-221-depleted cells were employed for qRT-PCR and Western blots to show associations of uPAR with miR-221/-222. To substantiate direct targeting of miR-221/-222 within 3′ UTR of the uPAR isoform 2, in silico analysesand in vitro assays were conducted. Significant associations between miR-221 and uPAR isoform 2 expressions were observed at the mRNA and protein levels in breast cancer cells representing TNBC. For the first time, the uPAR isoform 2 was demonstrated as direct target for miR-221/-222. Inhibition of miR-221 reduced uPAR protein expression and expression of the tumor cell invasion markers vimentin and RHOC. These results demonstrate a direct and positive regulation of the secreted uPAR isoform 2 by miR-221, increasing its protein expression, a prerequisite for malignancy, while the other uPAR isoforms (1, 3 and 4) are indirectly regulated through miR-10b and miR-221/-222. By targeting uPAR isoforms and/or miRNA-221/-222, the diagnosis and therapy of breast cancer, in particular in TNBC, could be significantly improved.
Multiple Clicks Model for Web Search of Multi-clickable Documents

This paper presents a novel document relevance model based on clickthrough information. Compared to the models from the literature we consider the case when documents can be clicked several times in a given search session. This case occurs more and more frequently, specifically for multi-clickable documents such as maps in location search enginess. Considering a real system query log, we evaluate our model and show that SVM can learn with fewer errors and with better MAP when the various types of clicks are considered in the model.
New Industries from New Places: The Emergence of the Hardware and Software Industries in China and India

China and India have grown rapidly in importance in the global economy over the past two decades the same period in which hardware and software have become important tradable products in the global economy. China has reached global scale in the hardware industry but not in software; India has achieved the reverse. These recent developments offer new insights into the ways in which new industries can take root and flourish within the broader context of developing economies. This progress has attracted widespread comment, most of it anecdotal or based on partial explanations of industrial growth. This study seeks to provide a fuller explanation based on an empirical analysis of the macro and micro underpinnings of these contrasting growth stories. In doing so, the study sheds a broader light on the economic development paths that China and India have taken since 1990, and also on the process by which developing economies can enter and succeed in new markets.
Gadd153 and NF-κB Crosstalk Regulates 27-Hydroxycholesterol-Induced Increase in BACE1 and β-Amyloid Production in Human Neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y Cells

β-amyloid (Aβ) peptide, accumulation of which is a culprit for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), is derived from the initial cleavage of amyloid precursor protein by the aspartyl protease BACE1. Identification of cellular mechanisms that regulate BACE1 production is of high relevance to the search for potential disease-modifying therapies that inhibit BACE1 to reduce Aβ accumulation and AD progression. In the present study, we show that the cholesterol oxidation product 27-hydroxycholesterol (27-OHC) increases BACE1 and Aβ levels in human neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cells. This increase in BACE1 involves a crosstalk between the two transcription factors NF-κB and the endoplasmic reticulum stress marker, the growth arrest and DNA damage induced gene-153 (gadd153, also called CHOP). We specifically show that 27-OHC induces a substantial increase in NF-κB binding to the BACE1 promoter and subsequent increase in BACE1 transcription and Aβ production. The NF-κB inhibitor, sc514, significantly attenuated the 27-OHC-induced increase in NF-κB-mediated BACE1 expression and Aβ genesis. We further show that the 27-OHC-induced NF-κB activation and increased NF-κB-mediated BACE1 expression is contingent on the increased activation of gadd153. Silencing gadd153 expression with siRNA alleviated the 27-OHC-induced increase in NF-κB activation, NF-κB binding to the BACE1 promoter, and subsequent increase in BACE1 transcription and Aβ production. We also show that increased levels of BACE1 in the triple transgenic mouse model for AD is preceded by gadd153 and NF-κB activation. In summary, our study demonstrates that gadd153 and NF-κB work in concert to regulate BACE1 expression. Agents that inhibit gadd153 activation and subsequent interaction with NF-κB might be promising targets to reduce BACE1 and Aβ overproduction and may ultimately serve as disease-modifying treatments for AD.
Analysis of Sparse and Noisy Ocean Current Data Using Flow Decomposition. Part II: Applications to Eulerian and Lagrangian Data

Abstract The capability of the reconstruction scheme developed in Part I is demonstrated here through three practical applications. First, the nonlinear regression model is used to reproduce the upper-layer three-dimensional circulation of the eastern Black Sea from model data distorted by white and red noises. Second, the quasigeostrophic approximation is used to reconstruct the shallow water circulation pattern in an open domain with various sampling strategies. Third, the large-scale circulation in the Southern Ocean is reproduced from the First Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP) Global Experiment (FGGE) drifter data with noncontrollable noise statistics. All three cases confirm that the theoretical approach is robust to various noise-to-signal ratios, number of observations, and station disposition. Using the simplified open boundary condition for analyzing long-term observational data is recommended because the nonlinear regression procedure requires considerable computer resources.
AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

This study investigates how firms compensate IT professionals in an emerging market. Using data on compensation of more than 8000 Indian IT professionals, the study finds evidence that returns on MBA grow or stay constant with overall work experience for IT professionals, a finding consistent with the human capital view, than with the sorting view. We also find evidence for segmentation of labor markets based on firm origin because foreign firms pay significantly more to IT professionals than Indian firms. Finally, we find high returns on technical education but significant heterogeneity in returns on business education at master’s level in India. On the whole, returns on business education at master’s level are not significantly higher than that on experience suggesting a lack of financial incentive to pursue business education at master’s level in India. The returns to IT experience and non-IT experience are significantly higher in India than in the U.S.