Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Money and Credit: Theory and Applications

We develop a theory of money and credit as competing payment instruments, then put it to work in applications. Buyers can use cash or credit, with the former (latter) subject to the inflation tax (transaction costs). Frictions that make the choice of payment method interesting also imply equilibrium price dispersion. We deliver closed-form solutions for money demand. We then show the model can simultaneously account for the price-change facts, cash-credit shares in micro payment data, and money-interest correlations in macro data. We analyze the effects of inflation on welfare, price dispersion and markups. We also describe nonstationary equilibria as self-fulfilling prophecies, which is standard, except here it entails dynamics in the price distribution.
Increasing minimum operating voltage (VDDmin) with number of CMOS logic gates and experimental verification with up to 1Mega-stage ring oscillators

In order to explore the feasibility of the large scale subthreshold logic circuits and to clarify the lower limit of supply voltage (VDD) for logic circuits, the dependence of minimum operating voltage (VDDmin) of CMOS logic gates on the number of stages, gate types and gate width is systematically measured with 90-nm CMOS ring oscillators (RO's). The measured average VDDmin of inverter RO's increased from 90 mV to 343 mV when the number of RO stages increased from 11 to 1 Mega, which indicates the difficulty of the VDD scaling in the large scale subthreshold logic circuits. The dependence of VDDmin on the number of stages is calculated with the subthreshold current model with random threshold voltage (VTH) variations and compared with the measured results, which confirm the tendency of the measurement.
Comparative Effectiveness of Personalized Lifestyle Management Strategies for Cardiovascular Disease Risk Reduction

Background Evidence shows that healthy diet, exercise, smoking interventions, and stress reduction reduce cardiovascular disease risk. We aimed to compare the effectiveness of these lifestyle interventions for individual risk profiles and determine their rank order in reducing 10‐year cardiovascular disease risk. Methods and Results We computed risks using the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Pooled Cohort Equations for a variety of individual profiles. Using published literature on risk factor reductions through diverse lifestyle interventions—group therapy for stopping smoking, Mediterranean diet, aerobic exercise (walking), and yoga—we calculated the risk reduction through each of these interventions to determine the strategy associated with the maximum benefit for each profile. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to test the robustness of the results. In the base‐case analysis, yoga was associated with the largest 10‐year cardiovascular disease risk reductions (maximum absolute reduction 16.7% for the highest‐risk individuals). Walking generally ranked second (max 11.4%), followed by Mediterranean diet (max 9.2%), and group therapy for smoking (max 1.6%). If the individual was a current smoker and successfully quit smoking (ie, achieved complete smoking cessation), then stopping smoking yielded the largest reduction. Probabilistic and 1‐way sensitivity analysis confirmed the demonstrated trend. Conclusions This study reports the comparative effectiveness of several forms of lifestyle modifications and found smoking cessation and yoga to be the most effective forms of cardiovascular disease prevention. Future research should focus on patient adherence to personalized therapies, cost‐effectiveness of these strategies, and the potential for enhanced benefit when interventions are performed simultaneously rather than as single measures.
The individualized choice of embryo transfer timing for patients with elevated serum progesterone level on the HCG day in IVF/ICSI cycles: a prospective randomized clinical study

Abstract This study analyzed the clinical outcomes of patients with elevated progesterone level on the HCG day in IVF/ICSI cycles, with different timing of embryo transfer. A total of 123 patients were involved in this prospective randomized clinical study. Group 1: blastocyst transfer group, 38 cases; Group 2: frozen–thawed embryo transfer group (first FET cycle), 42 cases; Group 3: fresh embryo transfer group, 43 cases. The basal FSH level was comparable among three groups (6.7 ± 3 versus 7.0 ± 2 versus 6.9 ± 2.4, p = 0.897). The clinical pregnancy rate was highest in group 2, lowest in group 3, with significantly difference (31.6% versus 38.1% versus 13.9%, p = 0.037). The implantation rate and live birth rate were still lowest in group 3 (21.9% versus 19.8% versus 6.7%, p = 0.016 and 18.4% versus 31% versus 11.6%, p = 0.081). In conclusion, the elevated progesterone level will affect clinical pregnancy rate in fresh embryo transfer cycles. We suggest frozen-thawed embryo transfer for these patients. However, for those patients who expressed the wish to have fresh embryo transfer, they should be suggested fresh blastocyst transfer, if they have more than five good quality embryos.
Improving the quality of tags using state transition on progressive image search and recommendation system

In recent years, tagging methods have been widely used on the Web for multimedia search and recommendation systems. Social tags are the keywords annotated by users to the multimedia objects. These tags contain the information which allows multimedia objects to be located and classified. Unfortunately, irrelevant information and noise are frequently included in such tags, especially when we use social tagging systems. Imperfect as they may be, social tags are still a significant source of human-generated contextual knowledge. We present the Waking And Sleeping (WAS) algorithm to overcome the obstacle of noisy tags. WAS refines social tags of each image and assigns each tag into either the waking state or the sleeping state. With WAS, the recommendation system not only enhances the accuracy of the recommendation results based on tags with higher quality but also reduces the consumption of computational resources. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to compared methods.
The California Collaboration

Summary This article documents the Title IV-E child welfare social work project of the California Social Work Education Center (CalS WEC): The establishment and ongoing support of collaborative arrangements among 58 California counties, the California State Department of Social Services, and all of the California graduate social work schools. The primary goal of this collaboration is to produce MS Ws who will commit to helping disadvantaged children and families in publicly supported child welfare services. The project model contains five interdependent components: a competency-based curriculum, financial support for students, development of instructional materials, active participation among public child welfare agencies and the universities, and evaluation. This paper focuses on the collaborative curriculum development process. Evolving arrangements among stakeholders are described here in terms of the reciprocal adjustment of curriculum development and field and classroom instruction to prepare MSWs for public child welfare careers.
Larval, pre-juvenile and juvenile development of Diapterus peruvianus (Perciformes: Gerreidae).

The development of Diapterus peruvianus (Sauvage 1879) is based on 60 larvae collected in superficial tows made in Bahía Concepción, and on 16 pre-juvenile and juvenile organisms collected in Bahía de La Paz, B. C. S. , México, using a standard plankton net and a rectangular epibenthonic net, respectively. Larvae of D. peruvianus show three large blotches on the dorsum of the gut that can fuse together and give the appearance of one large continuous blotch. There are two to three pre-anal pigments and 16 post-anal pigments in the ventral midline; cephalic pigments are present from the postflexion stage, as well as a serrated preoperculum. The pre-juvenile and juvenile organisms are distinguished by their body depth, the anal-fin formula, the serrated pre-operculum and the base pigments in the dorsal and anal fins.
Intestinal dendritic cells in the regulation of mucosal immunity

The intestine presents a huge surface area to the outside environment, a property that is of critical importance for its key functions in nutrient digestion, absorption, and waste disposal. As such, the intestine is constantly exposed to dietary and microbial‐derived foreign antigens, to which immune cells within the mucosa must suitably respond to maintain intestinal integrity, while also providing the ability to mount effective immune responses to potential pathogens. Dendritic cells (DCs) are sentinel immune cells that play a central role in the initiation and differentiation of adaptive immune responses. In the intestinal mucosa, DCs are located diffusely throughout the intestinal lamina propria, within gut‐associated lymphoid tissues, including Peyer's patches and smaller lymphoid aggregates, as well as in intestinal‐draining lymph nodes, including mesenteric lymph nodes. The recognition that dietary nutrients and microbial communities in the intestine influence both mucosal and systemic immune cell development and function as well as immune‐mediated disease has led to an explosion of literature in mucosal immunology in recent years and a growing interest in the functionality of intestinal DCs. In the current review, we discuss recent findings from our group and others that have provided important insights regarding murine and human intestinal lamina propria DCs and highlighted marked developmental and functional heterogeneity within this compartment. A thorough understanding of the role these subsets play in the regulation of intestinal immune homeostasis and inflammation will help to define novel strategies for the treatment of intestinal pathologies and contribute to improved rational design of mucosal vaccines.
The Determinants of trade credit: Evidence from Indian manufacturing firms

Trade credit (accounts receivable and accounts payable) is both an important source and use of funds for manufacturing firms in India. This paper empirically investigates the determinants of trade credit in the Indian context. The empirical evidence presented suggests that strong evidence exists in support of an inventory management motive for the existence of trade credit. Highly profitable firms both give and receive less trade credit. Firms with greater access to bank credit offer less trade credit to their customers. On the other hand, firms with higher bank loans receive more trade credit. Holdings of liquid assets have a positive influence on both accounts receivable and accounts payable.
RAPİD MAKSİLLER EKSPANSİYONUN TRANSVERSAL ETKİLERİNİN FRONTAL SEFALOMETRİK İNCELEMESİ

OZET: Rapid maksiller ekspansiyon uygulamasi 9'u kiz 5'i erkek toplam 14 birey uzerinde yurutuldu. Arastirma grubunun yas ortalamasi 11.6, bireylerin yaslarinin dagilimi 10.2 ile 13.6 arasindaydi. RME baslangici ve altinci ayinda alinan anteroposterior rontgenler uzerinde frontal sefalometrik olcumler yapildi. Sonuc olarak RME etkisinin tum yuz iskelet yapilarini icerdigini fakat bu etkinin yuzun orta ve alt bolgesinde en ust duzeyde bulundugu goruldu.
Anomaly Detection in Extreme Regions via Empirical MV-sets on the Sphere

Extreme regions in the feature space are of particular concern for anomaly detection: anomalies are likely to be located in the tails, whereas data scarcity in such regions makes it difficult to distinguish between large normal instances and anomalies. This paper presents an unsupervised algorithm for anomaly detection in extreme regions. We propose a Minimum Volume set (MV-set) approach relying on multivariate extreme value theory. This framework includes a canonical pre-processing step, which addresses the issue of output sensitivity to standardization choices. The resulting data representation on the sphere highlights the dependence structure of the extremal observations. Anomaly detection is then cast as a MV-set estimation problem on the sphere, where volume is measured by the spherical measure and mass refers to the angular measure. An anomaly then corresponds to an unusual observation given that one of its variables is large. A preliminary rate bound analysis is carried out for the learning method we introduce and its computational advantages are discussed and illustrated by numerical experiments.
Managing White‐Collar Work: An Operations‐Oriented Survey

Although white‐collar work is of vast importance to the economy, the operations management (OM) literature has focused largely on traditional blue‐collar work. In an effort to stimulate more OM research into the design, control, and management of white‐collar work systems, this paper provides a systematic review of disparate streams of research relevant to understanding white‐collar work from an operations perspective. Our review classifies research according to its relevance to white‐collar work at individual, team, and organizational levels. By examining the literature in the context of this framework, we identify gaps in our understanding of white‐collar work that suggest promising research directions.
Chemical Abundances in the Secondary Star of the Black Hole Binary V4641 Sagittarii (SAX J1819.3−2525)

We report on detailed spectroscopic studies performed for the secondary star in the black hole binary (microquasar) V4641 Sgr in order to examine its surface chemical composition and to see if its surface shows any signature of pollution by ejecta from a supernova explosion. High-resolution spectra of V4641 Sgr observed in the quiescent state in the blue-visual region are compared with those of the two bright well-studied B9 stars (14 Cyg and ν Cap) observed with the same instrument. The effective temperature of V4641 Sgr (10500 ±200K) is estimated from the strengths of He I lines, while its rotational velocity, vsin i (95 ±10kms −1 ), is estimated from the profile of the Mg II line at 4481 u A. We obtain abundances of 10 elements and find definite over-abundances of N (by 0.8dex or more) and Na (by 0.8dex) in V4641 Sgr. From line-by-line comparisons of eight other elements (C, O, Mg, Al, Si, Ti, Cr, and Fe) between V4641 Sgr and the two reference stars, we conclude that there is no apparent difference in the abundances of these elements between V4641 Sgr and the two normal late B-type stars, which have been reported to have solar abundances. An evolutionary model of a massive close binary system has been constructed to explain the abundances observed in V4641 Sgr. The model suggests that the progenitor of the black hole forming supernova was
Multi-source far-distance microphone selection and combination for automatic transcription of lectures

In this work, we present our progress in multi-source far field automatic speech-to-text transcription for lecture speech. In particular, we show how the best of several far field channels can be selected based on a signal-to-noise ratio criterion, and how the signals from multiple channels can be combined at either the waveform level using blind channel combination or at the hypothesis level using confusion network techniques to improve the accuracy of a far field lecture transcription system. Using the techniques described here, we ran a series of experiments on the test set used by the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies for the RT-05S evaluation. For the multiple distant microphones (MDM) task of RT-05S, our system achieved a word error rate of 38.5% which represents an improvement of over 13% absolute compared to the best reported results in the RT-05S evaluation. Index Terms: far-distance, automatic speech recognition
Individual influenza A virus mRNAs show differential dependence on cellular NXF1/TAP for their nuclear export

The influenza A virus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase produces capped and polyadenylated mRNAs in the nucleus of infected cells that resemble mature cellular mRNAs, but are made by very different mechanisms. Furthermore, only two of the 10 viral protein-coding mRNAs are spliced: most are intronless, while two contain unremoved introns. The mechanism(s) by which any of these mRNAs are exported from the nucleus is uncertain. To probe the involvement of the primary cellular mRNA export pathway, we treated cells with siRNAs against NXF1, Aly or UAP56, or with the drug 5,6-dichloro-1-β-d-ribofuranosyl-benzimidazole (DRB), an inhibitor of RNA polymerase II phosphorylation previously shown to inhibit nuclear export of cellular mRNA as well as influenza virus segment 7 mRNAs. Depletion of NXF1 or DRB treatment had similar effects, inhibiting the nuclear export of several of the viral mRNAs. However, differing degrees of sensitivity were seen, depending on the particular segment examined. Intronless HA mRNA and spliced M2 or unspliced M1 transcripts (all encoding late proteins) showed a strong requirement for NXF1, while intronless early gene mRNAs, especially NP mRNA, showed the least dependency. Depletion of Aly had little effect on viral mRNA export, but reduction of UAP56 levels strongly inhibited trafficking and/or translation of the M1, M2 and NS1 mRNAs. Synthesis of NS2 from the spliced segment 8 transcript was, however, resistant. We conclude that influenza A virus co-opts the main cellular mRNA export pathway for a subset of its mRNAs, including most but not all late gene transcripts.
Weight of Evidence: A Review of Concept and Methods

“Weight of evidence” (WOE) is a common term in the published scientific and policy‐making literature, most often seen in the context of risk assessment (RA). Its definition, however, is unclear. A systematic review of the scientific literature was undertaken to characterize the concept. For the years 1994 through 2004, PubMed was searched for publications in which “weight of evidence” appeared in the abstract and/or title. Of the 276 papers that met these criteria, 92 were selected for review: 71 papers published in 2003 and 2004 (WOE appeared in abstract/title) and 21 from 1994 through 2002 (WOE appeared in title). WOE has three characteristic uses in this literature: (1) metaphorical, where WOE refers to a collection of studies or to an unspecified methodological approach; (2) methodological, where WOE points to established interpretative methodologies (e.g., systematic narrative review, meta‐analysis, causal criteria, and/or quality criteria for toxicological studies) or where WOE means that “all” rather than some subset of the evidence is examined, or rarely, where WOE points to methods using quantitative weights for evidence; and (3) theoretical, where WOE serves as a label for a conceptual framework. Several problems are identified: the frequent lack of definition of the term “weight of evidence,” multiple uses of the term and a lack of consensus about its meaning, and the many different kinds of weights, both qualitative and quantitative, which can be used in RA. A practical recommendation emerges: the WOE concept and its associated methods should be fully described when used. A research agenda should examine the advantages of quantitative versus qualitative weighting schemes, how best to improve existing methods, and how best to combine those methods (e.g., epidemiology's causal criteria with toxicology's quality criteria).
Reproductive Behavior and Fitness Components in Male Drosophila melaogaster are Non-Linearly Affected by the Number of Male Co-Inhabitants Early in Adult Life

Abstract Although multiple lines of evidence suggest that early adult life is very important in shaping the reproductive behavior of males, few studies have looked at the fitness consequences of the variation in reproductive behavior induced by differences in early life experience of males. Using a long term laboratory adapted population of Drosophila melanogaster Meigen (Diptera: Drosophilidae), early life experience, in terms of co-inhabitant numbers, was found to affect male mating behavior and at least one fitness component. However, in contrast to previous studies, a non-linear relationship was found between early life experience and fitness components and a significant effect of co-inhabitant number on copulation duration and sperm defense. Both these traits showed a sharp increase as the co-inhabitant numbers changed from 1 to 16. However, there was a decline in the trait values as the co-inhabitant number increased further. The probable causes for the observed non-linear pattern of responses are discussed.
The Topological Asymptotic Expansion for the Dirichlet Problem

The topological sensitivity analysis provides an asymptotic expansion of a shape function when creating a small hole inside a domain. This expansion yields a descent direction which can be used for shape optimization if one wishes to keep a classical domain throughout the optimization process. In this paper, such an expansion is obtained for the Poisson equation for a large class of cost functions and arbitrarily shaped holes. In the three-dimensional case, this expansion depends on the shape of the hole but not on its orientation if the cost function involves only the solution u to the underlying partial differential equation, whereas it may also depend on its orientation if the cost function involves the gradient $\nabla u$. In contrast, the asymptotic expansion is independent of the shape in the two-dimensional case. A numerical example illustrates the use of the asymptotic expansion, which yields a minimizing sequence of classical domains in a case where no classical solution exists.
Pedestrian Detection and Tracking Using a Mixture of View-Based Shape–Texture Models

This paper presents a robust multicue approach to the integrated detection and tracking of pedestrians in a cluttered urban environment. A novel spatiotemporal object representation is proposed, which combines a generative shape model and a discriminative texture classifier, both of which are composed of a mixture of pose-specific submodels. Shape is represented by a set of linear subspace models, which is an extension of point distribution models, with shape transitions being modeled by a first-order Markov process. Texture, i.e., the shape-normalized intensity pattern, is represented by a manifold that is implicitly delimited by a set of pattern classifiers, whereas texture transition is modeled by a random walk. Direct 3-D measurements that are provided by a stereo system are further incorporated into the observation density function. We employ a Bayesian framework based on particle filtering to achieve integrated object detection and tracking. Large-scale experiments that involve pedestrian detection and tracking from a moving vehicle demonstrate the benefit of the proposed approach.
Effects of channel aging in massive MIMO systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication may provide high spectral efficiency through the deployment of a very large number of antenna elements at the base stations. The gains from massive MIMO communication come from the use of multiuser MIMO on the uplink and downlink, but with a large excess of antennas at the base station compared to the number of served users. Initial work on massive MIMO did not fully address several practical issues associated with its deployment. This paper considers the impact of channel aging on the performance of massive MIMO systems. The effects of channel variation are characterized as a function of different system parameters assuming a simple model for the channel time variations at the transmitter. Channel prediction is proposed to overcome channel aging effects. The analytical results on aging show how capacity is lost due to time variation in the channel. Numerical results in a multiceli network show that massive MIMO works even with some channel variation and that channel prediction could partially overcome channel aging effects.