Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Utilization of Market Forecasts and the Evaluation of Investment Performance

The purpose of this paper is to examine the problem faced by the portfolio manager attempting to optimally incorporate forecasts of future market returns into his portfolio. Given the solution to this problem we then shall focus our attention on the problem involved in measuring a portfolio manager's ability when he is explicitly engaged in forecasting the prices on individual securities (i.e., security analysis) and in forecasting the future course of market prices (i.e., timing activities). We shall consider these problems here in the context of the Sharpe-Lintner mean-variance general equilibrium model of the pricing of capital assets, and in the context of the expanded two factor version of the Sharpe model suggested by Black, Jensen and Scholes (1972) In addition we shall concentrate our attention here on an investigation of just what can and cannot be said about portfolio performance solely on the basis of data on the time series of portfolio and market returns. In section 2 we outline the foundations of the analysis and its relationship to the general equilibrium structure of security prices given by the Sharpe-Lintner model. In section 3 we briefly summarize the measure of security selection ability suggested by Jensen (1968). Section 4 contains a solution to the problem of the optimal incorporation of market forecasts into portfolio policy and provides the structure for the analysis in section 5 of the measurement problems introduced into the evaluation of portfolio performance by market forecasting activities by the portfolio manager. Section 6 presents the complete development of the model within the two factor equilibrium model of the pricing of capital assets suggested by Black (1970) and Black, Jensen and Scholes (1972). Section 7 contains a brief summary of the conclusions of the analysis.
ACE: An Automatic Color Equalization Algorithm

In this work we present a new algorithm for digital images unsupervised enhancement, called ACE for Automatic Color Equalization. It is based on a new computational approach that merges the "Gray World" and "White Patch" equalization mechanisms, while taking into account the spatial distribution of color information. Inspired by some adaptation mechanisms of the human visual system, ACE is able to adapt to widely varying lighting conditions, and to extract visual information from the environment efficaciously. ACE has shown promising results in solving the color constancy problem and performing an image dynamic data driven stretching. Tests and results are presented.
Effects of experimentally-induced diabetes on sperm parameters and chromatin quality in mice

Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM), primary or idiopathic is a chronic disorder of the carbohydrate, lipid and protein metabolism. DM may impact male reproductive function at several levels. It is shown that DM has detrimental effects on sperm parameters in human and experimental animals. Objective: The aim of this study was to observe the effects of diabetes on sperm parameters (viability, count, morphology and motility) and evaluation of sperm chromatin quality in mice. Materials and Methods: Totally twenty adult male Syrian mice were divided randomly into 2 groups (n=10). The animals of group A were considered as controls while group B mice were diabetic that received a single dose (200 mg/kg) streptozotocin (STZ) intra peritoneally. After 35 days, the cauda epididymis of each diabetic mouse was dissected and placed in culture medium for 30 min. The swim-out spermatozoa were analyzed for count, motility, morphology and viability. The sperm chromatin quality and DNA integrity, was evaluated with Aniline Blue (AB), Toluidine blue (TB), Acridine orange (AO) and Chromomycin A3 (CMA3) staining. Results: In sperm analysis, the diabetic mice had poor parameters in comparison with control animals (p=0.000). Regarding sperm chromatin quality, the results of TB and AO tests showed statically significant differences between two groups, but in AB and CMA3 staining, we didn’t see any differences between them. Conclusion: The results showed that STZ-induced diabetes mellitus may influence the male fertility potential via affecting sperm parameters and DNA integrity in mice. However, according to our data, the diabetes doesn’t have any detrimental effects on histone-protamines replacement during the testicular phase of sperm chromatin packaging.
The Moderating Effects Of Stress On The Relationship Between Self-Control, and Desire For Control, On Impulsive Purchasing

The current study examined the effect of self-control and desire for control on impulsive purchasing with stress as a moderator. Self-control has been found to be lower in individuals who engage in impulsive purchasing (Baumeister, 2002b), whereas little to no research on the effect of desire for control on impulsive purchasing has been completed. Stress has been found to relate with self-control and desire for control (Galla & Wood 2015; Leotti, Iyengar, & Ochsner, 2003). This study hopes to fill the research gap by exploring if stress moderates self-control and desire for control’s effect on impulsive purchasing. Participants were recruited from general psychology classes from a small Midwestern college. Price assignment, product switching and willingness to pay to get shipping the next day (expedited shipping) were used to assess impulsive purchasing. It was hypothesized that stress would have a moderating effect for both self-control and desire for control’s effect on impulsive purchasing. Though no moderation was found for stress on self-control and desire for control’s effect on impulsive purchasing items; it was found that those with lower self-control engaged more in impulsive purchasing, which fit with the literature. This research is important to show the relationship of stress and self-control on impulsive purchasing to help guide individuals into making smarter decisions when purchasing items.
What Do Data on Millions of U.S. Workers Reveal About Life-Cycle Earnings Risk?

We study individual earnings dynamics over the life cycle using panel data on millions of U.S. workers. Using nonparametric methods, we first show that the distribution of earnings changes exhibits substantial deviations from lognormality, such as negative skewness and very high kurtosis. Further, the extent of these nonnormalities varies significantly with age and earnings level, peaking around age 50 and between the 70th and 90th percentiles of the earnings distribution. Second, we estimate nonparametric impulse response functions and find important asymmetries: positive changes for high-income individuals are quite transitory, whereas negative ones are very persistent; the opposite is true for low-income individuals. Third, we turn to long-run outcomes and find substantial heterogeneity in the cumulative growth rates of earnings and total years individuals spend nonemployed between ages 25 and 55. Finally, by targeting these rich sets of moments, we estimate stochastic processes for earnings that range from the simple to the complex. Our preferred specification features normal mixture innovations to both persistent and transitory components and includes long-term nonemployment shocks with a realization probability that varies with age and earnings.
A Rapid In-Clinic Test Detects Acute Leptospirosis in Dogs with High Sensitivity and Specificity

A rapid IgM-detection immunochromatographic test (WITNESS® Lepto, Zoetis) has recently become available to identify acute canine leptospirosis at the point of care. Diagnostic sensitivity and specificity of the test were evaluated by comparison with the microscopic agglutination assay (MAT), using a positive cut-off titer of ≥800. Banked serum samples from dogs exhibiting clinical signs and suspected leptospirosis were selected to form three groups based on MAT titer: (1) positive (n = 50); (2) borderline (n = 35); and (3) negative (n = 50). Using an analysis to weight group sizes to reflect French prevalence, the sensitivity and specificity were 98% and 93.5% (88.2% unweighted), respectively. This test rapidly identifies cases of acute canine leptospirosis with high levels of sensitivity and specificity with no interference from previous vaccination.
The Effect of Professional Development on Indonesian EFL Teachers’ Self-Efficacy

This study aims to find out the relationship between teachers’ participation in professional development (PD) and changes in perceived levels of their self-efficacy in the areas of instructional strategy, classroom management, and student engagement. A mixed methods research was used in this study. The findings from this study revealed that there is a relationship between teachers’ participation in PD and changes in perceived levels of their self-efficacy. The findings also revealed that PD was perceived to bring about the greatest change in levels of all participants’ self-efficacy in the area of instructional strategy compared to classroom management and student engagement. The study suggests that one of the characteristics of good quality PD for junior secondary EFL teachers in Indonesia is the content should be based on teachers’ classroom practical needs.
FairJudge: Trustworthy User Prediction in Rating Platforms

Rating platforms enable large-scale collection of user opinion about items (products, other users, etc.). However, many untrustworthy users give fraudulent ratings for excessive monetary gains. In the paper, we present FairJudge, a system to identify such fraudulent users. We propose three metrics: (i) the fairness of a user that quantifies how trustworthy the user is in rating the products, (ii) the reliability of a rating that measures how reliable the rating is, and (iii) the goodness of a product that measures the quality of the product. Intuitively, a user is fair if it provides reliable ratings that are close to the goodness of the product. We formulate a mutually recursive definition of these metrics, and further address cold start problems and incorporate behavioral properties of users and products in the formulation. We propose an iterative algorithm, FairJudge, to predict the values of the three metrics. We prove that FairJudge is guaranteed to converge in a bounded number of iterations, with linear time complexity. By conducting five different experiments on five rating platforms, we show that FairJudge significantly outperforms nine existing algorithms in predicting fair and unfair users. We reported the 100 most unfair users in the Flipkart network to their review fraud investigators, and 80 users were correctly identified (80% accuracy). The FairJudge algorithm is already being deployed at Flipkart.
Understanding the relationship between celebrity endorsement on social media and consumer purchasing intention

Article history: Received 21 October 2018 Received in revised form 10 February 2019 Accepted 19 March 2019 The main purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between the use of celebrity endorsement on social media advertising and consumer purchasing intention. The overflow of advertising on social media is making customers increasingly indifferent to the effects of advertising. There is a research interest to find out how to get consumers attention to social media advertising. Celebrity endorsement has been a strategy long used on traditional media advertising. There is currently, also a need to understand the effect of celebrity endorsement on social media advertising and on online purchasing intention. This paper studies the effect of celebrity endorsement on purchase intention online amongst university students. A conceptual model was constructed with celebrity attractiveness, gender, credibility, celebrity versus non-celebrity, single versus multiple endorsements as independent variables and purchase intention as the dependent variable. A sample of 200 university students was approached to complete a questionnaire designed from the literature as part of a descriptive, crosssectional survey. Statistical reasoning was used to test for correlations and regression. The results supported the notion that celebrity endorsement is a useful method in stimulating consumers’ purchase intention on social media advertisements. However, in comparison with similar research in the field, the notions that the credibility and the attractiveness of the celebrities as being effective on online consumer purchasing intention were not supported. An explanation was offered based on the concept that online trust is mainly derived from peer’s reviews which allows consumer involvement in the effect of social media advertising on purchasing intent unlike like it was in the traditional media.
Do the Characteristics of Board of Directors Constrain Real Earnings Management in Emerging Markets? – Evidence from the Tunisian Context

This study examines the effects of the characteristics of board of directors (independence, size, frequency of meetings and CEO/Chair duality) on the reduction of the extent of Real Earnings Management (REM) before and after the adoption of the Financial Security Law No. 2005-96 in Tunisia by analyzing the financial data of 29 non-financial companies listed on the Tunis Stock Exchange during the period 2001-2009. The paper tests whether the characteristics of board of directors are significant determinants of REM. It estimates REM proxy using the model of Roychowdhury (2006). The results suggest that a board comprising majority of independent directors reduces the extent of REM. Furthermore, it is observed that there is a significant association between size of the board of directors and discretionary expenses and overproduction, but not sales manipulation. Further, board duality is found to be positively associated with the discretionary expenses in the post-law period, while a negative association is observed between the number of board meetings and sales manipulation and overproduction. Finally, the findings suggest that adoption of the Financial Security Law, 2005 has a negative and significant effect on REM. In addition, the discretionary accruals are positively associated with REM in both pre- and post-law periods.
Adherence to antiretroviral drug therapy in adult patients who are HIV-positive in Northwest Ethiopia: a study protocol

Introduction Achievement of optimal medication adherence and management of antiretroviral toxicity pose great challenges among Ethiopian patients with HIV/AIDS. There is currently a lack of long-term follow-up studies that identify the barriers to, and facilitators of, adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) in the Ethiopian setting. Therefore, we aim to investigate the level of adherence to ART and a wide range of potential influencing factors, including adverse drug reactions occurring with ART. Methods and analysis We are conducting a 1-year prospective cohort study involving adult patients with HIV/AIDS starting on ART between December 2012 and March 2013. Data are being collected on patients’ appointment dates in the ART clinics. Adherence to ART is being measured using pill count, medication possession ratio and patient's self-report. The primary outcome of the study will be the proportion of patients who are adherent to their ART regimen at 3, 6 and 12 months using pill count. Taking 95% or more of the dispensed ART regimen using pill count at given points of time will be considered the optimal level of adherence in this study. Data will be analysed using descriptive and inferential statistical procedures. Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval was obtained from the Tasmania Health and Medical Human Research Ethics Committee and Bahir-Dar University's Ethics Committee. The results of the study will be reported in peer-reviewed scientific journals, conferences and seminar presentations.
SNR Estimation Over SIMO Channels From Linearly Modulated Signals

In this paper, we address the problem of data-aided (DA) and nondata-aided (NDA) per-antenna signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation over wireless single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channels from linearly modulated signals. Under constant channels and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), we first derive the DA maximum-likelihood (ML) SNR estimator in closed-form expression. The performance of the DA ML estimator is analytically carried out by deriving the closed-form expression of its bias and variance. Besides, in order to compare its performance with the fundamental limit, we derive the DA Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) in closed-form expression. In the NDA case, the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is derived to iteratively maximize the log-likelihood function. The performance of the NDA ML estimator is empirically assessed using Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, we introduce an efficient algorithm, which applies to any one/two-dimensional M-ary constellation, to numerically compute the NDA CRLBs. In this paper, the noise components are assumed to be spatially uncorrelated over all the antenna elements and temporally white. In both cases, we show that our new inphase and quadrature I/Q-based estimators offer substantial performance improvements over the single-input single-output (SISO) ML SNR estimator due to the optimal usage of the statistical dependence between the antenna branches, and that it reaches the corresponding CRLB over a wide SNR range. We also show that the use of the I/Q-based ML estimators can lead to remarkable performance improvements over the moment-based estimators for the same antenna-array size. Moreover, it is shown that SIMO configurations can contribute to decreasing the required number of iterations of the EM algorithm.
End-To-End Delay Modeling for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Quasi-Birth-and-Death Approach

Understanding the fundamental end-to-end delay performance in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is of great importance for supporting Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed applications in such networks. While upper bounds and approximations for end-to-end delay in MANETs have been developed in literature, which usually introduce significant errors in delay analysis, the modeling of exact end-to-end delay in MANETs remains a technical challenge. This is partially due to the highly dynamical behaviors of MANETs, but also due to the lack of an efficient theoretical framework to capture such dynamics. This paper demonstrates the potential application of the powerful Quasi-Birth-and-Death (QBD) theory in tackling the challenging issue of exact end-to-end delay modeling in MANETs. We first apply the QBD theory to develop an efficient theoretical framework for capturing the complex dynamics in MANETs. We then show that with the help of this framework, closed form models can be derived for the analysis of exact end-to-end delay and also per node throughput capacity in MANETs. Simulation and numerical results are further provided to illustrate the efficiency of these QBD theory-based models as well as our theoretical findings.
Return of Frustratingly Easy Domain Adaptation

Unlike human learning, machine learning often fails to handle changes between training (source) and test (target) input distributions. Such domain shifts, common in practical scenarios, severely damage the performance of conventional machine learning methods. Supervised domain adaptation methods have been proposed for the case when the target data have labels, including some that perform very well despite being ``frustratingly easy'' to implement. However, in practice, the target domain is often unlabeled, requiring unsupervised adaptation. We propose a simple, effective, and efficient method for unsupervised domain adaptation called CORrelation ALignment (CORAL). CORAL minimizes domain shift by aligning the second-order statistics of source and target distributions, without requiring any target labels. Even though it is extraordinarily simple--it can be implemented in four lines of Matlab code--CORAL performs remarkably well in extensive evaluations on standard benchmark datasets.
International Equity Diversification Between the United States and Brics Countries

This study uses an enhanced powerful nonparametric cointegration test developed by Bierens (1997) to re-investigate whether there are long-run benefits from international equity diversification between the United States and BRICS countries (i.e., Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), over the period July 1997 to March 2012. The results of this test suggest that the United States markets (for both Dow Jones 30 and S&P 500) are pairwise cointegrated with the stock markets of the BRICS countries. These findings should prove valuable to individual investors and financial institutions.
Why Inflation Targeting is not Enough: Monetary Policy in the Presence of Financial Exuberance Abstract

The paper argues that inflation targeting is an insufficient framework for monetary policy in the presence of financial exuberance. It also argues that current theoretical rationalizations of inflation targeting are flawed, being unable to explain why central banks should aim for “low” inflation. A low inflation target can be justified if monetary policy is placed in a backward bending Phillips curve model, in which case policy should target the minimum unemployment rate of inflation (MURI). However, inflation targeting cannot address the problem of debt bubbles. This suggests that it should be paired with private sector balance sheet regulations that give central banks additional instruments to tackle asset market instabilities.
Simplified fuzzy-logic-based MTPA speed control of IPMSM drive

This paper presents a simplified fuzzy-logic-based speed controller of an interior permanent-magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) drive for maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) of stator current with inherent nonlinearities of the motor. The fundamentals of fuzzy logic algorithms as related to motor control applications are illustrated. A simplified fuzzy speed controller for the IPMSM drive has been found to maintain high performance standards with a much simpler and less computation-intensive implementation than a nonsimplified fuzzy-based algorithm. Contrary to the conventional control of IPMSM with d-axis current equal to zero, a nonlinear expression of d-axis current has been derived and subsequently incorporated in the control algorithm for maximum torque operation. The efficacy of the proposed simplified fuzzy-logic-controller (FLC)-based IPMSM drive with MTPA is verified by simulation as well as experimentally at dynamic operating conditions. The simplified FLC with MTPA is found to be robust for applications in IPMSM drives. The complete vector control scheme is implemented in real-time using a digital signal processor (DSP) controller board DS 1102 in a laboratory 1-hp IPM synchronous motor.
The influence of cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, and personality on job performance: proposing a model for personnel selection

SUMMARY . iii CONTENTS . ix LIST OF FIGURES . xxi LIST OF TABLES . xxii LIST OF APPENDICES . xxv CHAPTER 1: SCIENTIFIC OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH . 1 1.1 BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION FOR THE RESEARCH . 1 1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT . 10 1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS . 13 1.3. 1 General research questions . 13 1.3. 2 Research questions about the literature review . 13 1.3. 3 Research questions about the empirical study . 14 1.4 RESEARCH AIMS . 15 1.4. 1 General aim of the research . 15 1.4. 2 Specific aims of the research . 15 1.4. 2.1 Literature review. 15 1.4. 2.2 Empirical study. 16 1.5 STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE . 17 1.5. 1 Theoretical significance . 17 1.5. 2 Empirical significance . 18 1.5. 3 Practical significance . 19 1.6 THE RESEARCH MODEL . 21 1.7 PARADIGM PERSPECTIVE OF THE RESEARCH . 21 1.7. 1 Paradigm perspective for the literature review . 21 1.7. 1.1 The cognitive-social learning paradigm: cognitive and emotional intelligence . 21 1.7. 1.2 The cognitive social learning paradigm: personality . 24