Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The use of derivatives by US insurers

Purpose – Derivatives are important risk management tools widely used by financial institutions, including insurers. Insurers rely on derivatives for managing actuarial, market, credit as well as liquidity risks. There is lack of knowledge and publication about the recent use of derivatives by insurers. This paper attempts to fill the gap in the literature.Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyses data based on statutory company filings with state regulators in the USA.Findings – The analysis suggests that derivatives are used by larger companies, especially in the life insurance industry. This could be explained by the significant economies of scale that are possible when using derivatives. Smaller firms do not have the resources to invest in the latest risk management technologies, and management may be uncomfortable using such new tools. Surveys and anecdotal evidence also suggest that, for insurance companies, the lack of familiarity with the regulatory and accounting treatment of derivatives i.
Supporting Collaborative Task Management in E-mail

E-mail is one of the most successful computer applications ever developed. Despite its success, it is now dogged by numerous problems. Users complain about feeling overwhelmed by the volume of messages they receive, they have difficulties too in organizing and managing their e-mail data but, most importantly, they have problems in using e-mail to manage collaborative tasks (Bellotti, Ducheneaut, Howard, & Smith, 2003; Balter, 1998, 2000; Mackay, 1988; Whittaker, Jones, & Terveen, 2002a; Whittaker & Sidner, 1996). These require extended interaction with others for their definition and execution (Bellotti et al., 2003; Venolia, Gupta, Cadiz, & Dabbish, 2001; Whittaker & Sidner, 1996). As a result, users are often concurrently working on multiple outstanding tasks as they await responses from others concerning these tasks. This requires users to (a) create reminders, (b) identify messages that relate to the same task, and (c) combine information from these related messages. Currently, people try to use the e-mail inbox to do this but our data indicate it is ineffective for these purposes. Other recent approaches attempt to tackle Collaborative Task Management but we show that these offer at best only partial solutions. In contrast, we present two systems, TeleNotes and ContactMap, that directly address Collaborative Task Management. These are motivated by empirical research into paper-based and people-based task management strategies. We describe how our systems implement these different strategies and present evaluation data for each system in use. We contrast the success of these two approaches with earlier work and discuss outstanding design and theory problems arising from our research.
LOXL1 expression in lens capsule tissue specimens from individuals with pseudoexfoliation syndrome and glaucoma

Purpose To study lysyl oxidase-like 1 (LOXL1) expression in freshly collected lens capsules from pseudoexfoliation syndrome (XFS), pseudoexfoliation glaucoma (XFG), and normal cataract control individuals. We also investigated the effects of four glaucoma drug medications on LOXL1 expression in primary human lens epithelial cell cultures to see if they could affect LOXL1 expression. Methods Lens capsules were collected at the time of cataract surgery. Controls were matched to age, sex, and ethnicity. Total RNA was isolated from individual lens capsule samples and real-time PCR was performed on each sample using primers flanking the sixth exon of the LOXL1 gene. Cell cultures were grown to confluence in four separate six-well plates at 37 °C in 5% CO2. Each plate was then treated with one of four different glaucoma drugs (brinzolamide 1%, brimonidine tartrate 0.1%, timolol maleate 0.5%, and latanoprost 0.005%) once daily for seven days (at both 1:1,000 and 1:100 concentrations relative to media). Controls were not treated with any drug but media was changed in the same manner. After one week of treatment, cells were harvested and total RNA isolated. Real-time PCR was performed on each group of cells. Results Seven XFS, seven XFG, and ten cataract control specimens were analyzed. LOXL1 expression was detected in the lens capsule specimens from each of the four groups. Significant expression differences were found between the control and XFG groups and XFS and XFG groups. No significant difference was observed between the control and XFS group. No significant decrease in LOXL1 expression was seen with drug incubation of the four medications (Brinzolamide, Timolol, Latanoprost, and Brimonidine) at the 1:1,000 drug:media concentrations versus controls. At 10-fold higher concentrations (1:100 drug:media), brinzolamide, timolol maleate, and latanoprost showed small increases in LOXL1 expression relative to controls. This effect was not observed with brimonidine tartrate. Conclusions These results establish that LOXL1 expression is reduced in lens capsule specimens from XFG individuals but not XFS. The drug treatment incubation studies suggest that the change in LOXL1 expression observed in XFG is not attributable to glaucoma drug therapy. If a causative functional relationship can be validated, modification of LOXL1 expression in affected tissues may represent a novel treatment strategy for this disorder.
Both Hands Tied: Welfare Reform and the Race to the Bottom in the Low-Wage Labor Market

"Both Hands Tied" studies the working poor in the United States, focusing in particular on the relation between welfare and low-wage earnings among working mothers. Grounded in the experience of thirty-three women living in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, it tells the story of their struggle to balance child care and wage-earning in poorly paying and often state-funded jobs with inflexible schedules - and the moments when these jobs failed them and they turned to the state for additional aid. Jane L. Collins and Victoria Mayer here examine the situations of these women in light of the 1996 national Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and other like-minded reforms - laws that ended the entitlement to welfare for those in need and provided an incentive for them to return to work. Arguing that this reform came at a time of gendered change in the labor force and profound shifts in the responsibilities of family, firms, and the state, "Both Hands Tied" provides a stark but poignant portrait of how welfare reform afflicted poor, single-parent families, ultimately eroding the participants' economic rights and affecting their ability to care for themselves and their children.
Technological imperatives in the internationalization process

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine how a firm's leading-edge technology affects the way international business is conducted. Design/methodology/approach - The paper presents the issues faced by high-tech, small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from New Zealand in the internationalization process. Since the research is anchored within a realism framework, case studies and semi-structured in-depth interviews were applied. Findings - The research suggests that current foreign activities result in a stream of indicators closely related to the firm's technology, which are instrumental in shaping and driving future international activities. The paper demonstrates that firms tend to be influenced by the entry decisions made by other firms in the same/similar industry targeting the same market; and that a firm's technological capabilities and the advantages of specialized knowledge act as the constraints in the development of the firm's future international strategy. Practical implications - The paper helps to increase the understanding of how lack of foreign market knowledge can be perceived as an obstacle to carrying out international business. Originality/value - The paper presents the internationalization process as a dynamic process in an approach which is an extension of past thinking. However, past research has been motivated by generalizing findings across firms, to understand shared patterns in the process of internationalization. This approach overlooks the unique distinctiveness of firms in different sectors and contexts where idiosyncratic behavior is the norm rather than the exception to the rule.
A CCI-Feedback-Aided Scheduling Technique for MU-MIMO

Imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter is one of the major challenges that the downlink multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology faces in real applications. It will lead to increased co- channel interference (CCI) among users and deteriorate the capacity of MU-MIMO seriously, especially at high signal-to- noise-ratios (SNRs). In this paper, we propose an advanced MU-MIMO scheduling technique to improve the capacity of MU-MIMO in the case of imperfect CSI at the transmitter (CSIT). The rational behind the proposed scheme is the observation that the CCI level increases with the number of users simultaneously supported in MU-MIMO transmission. Thus, decreasing the number of simultaneous users can reduce CCI and sometimes even increase the sum capacity. Motivated by this observation, we design a CCI-feedback-aided scheduling technique, which adaptively adjusts the number of simultaneous users based on the CCI measurement at the user side. Simulation results have shown that considerable capacity gain can be achieved by the proposed scheduling technique at the cost of only one bit additional feedback per user and marginal complexity increase at both the transmitter and user side.
Do people with traditional values suffer more from job insecurity? The moderating effects of traditionality

This study aimed to explore the consequences of job insecurity in the Chinese context, and focused on the moderating effect of traditionality, an individual-level cultural value. A series of regression analyses of data from 388 subordinate–supervisor dyads in China revealed that job insecurity was negatively related to employees’ well-being, and its negative relation with organizational citizenship behaviours (OCB) was nonsignificant. Furthermore, it was found that traditionality significantly exacerbated the negative relationships between job insecurity and employees’ well-being, and OCB. Specifically, the employees with high traditional values suffered more health consequences and OCB performances from job insecurity. These results suggested that traditionality played an important role in the dynamics of job insecurity in the transitional society.
Efficient Gender Classification Using a Deep LDA-Pruned Net

Many real-time tasks, such as human-computer interaction, require fast and efficient facial gender classification. Although deep CNN nets have been very effective for a multitude of classification tasks, their high space and time demands make them impractical for personal computers and mobile devices without a powerful GPU. In this paper, we develop a 16-layer, yet lightweight, neural network which boosts efficiency while maintaining high accuracy. Our net is pruned from the VGG-16 model starting from the last convolutional (conv) layer where we find neuron activations are highly uncorrelated given the gender. Through Fisher's Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), we show that this high decorrelation makes it safe to discard directly last conv layer neurons with high within-class variance and low between-class variance. Combined with either Support Vector Machines (SVM) or Bayesian classification, the reduced CNNs are capable of achieving comparable (or even higher) accuracies on the LFW and CelebA datasets than the original net with fully connected layers. On LFW, only four Conv5_3 neurons are able to maintain a comparably high recognition accuracy, which results in a reduction of total network size by a factor of 70X with a 11 fold speedup. Comparisons with a state-of-the-art pruning method as well as two smaller nets in terms of accuracy loss and convolutional layers pruning rate are also provided.
Interactions between Voluntary and Stimulus-driven Spatial Attention Mechanisms across Sensory Modalities

In everyday life, the allocation of spatial attention typically entails the interplay between voluntary (endogenous) and stimulus-driven (exogenous) attention. Furthermore, stimuli in different sensory modalities can jointly influence the direction of spatial attention, due to the existence of cross-sensory links in attentional control. Using fMRI, we examined the physiological basis of these interactions. We induced exogenous shifts of auditory spatial attention while participants engaged in an endogenous visuospatial cueing task. Participants discriminated visual targets in the left or right hemifield. A central visual cue preceded the visual targets, predicting the target location on 75% of the trials (endogenous visual attention). In the interval between the endogenous cue and the visual target, task-irrelevant nonpredictive auditory stimuli were briefly presented either in the left or right hemifield (exogenous auditory attention). Consistent with previous unisensory visual studies, activation of the ventral fronto-parietal attentional network was observed when the visual targets were presented at the uncued side (endogenous invalid trials, requiring visuospatial reorienting), as compared with validly cued targets. Critically, we found that the side of the task-irrelevant auditory stimulus modulated these activations, reducing spatial reorienting effects when the auditory stimulus was presented on the same side as the upcoming (invalid) visual target. These results demonstrate that multisensory mechanisms of attentional control can integrate endogenous and exogenous spatial information, jointly determining attentional orienting toward the most relevant spatial location.
Positive Law and Objective Values

1. Constitutive Conventions 2. Conventions and The Normativity of Law 3. Exclusive Legal Positivism 4. The Separation Thesis and The Limits of Interpretation 5. Authority and Authorship 6. Three Concepts of Objectivity 7. Four Questions about The Objectivity of Law 8. The Objectivity of Values Bibliography
Reddening, Absorption, and Decline Rate Corrections for a Complete Sample of Type Ia Supernovae Leading to a Fully Corrected Hubble Diagram to v < 30,000 km s–1

Photometric (BVI) and redshift data corrected for streaming motions are compiled for 111 "Branch-normal," four 1991T-like, seven 1991bg-like, and two unusual supernovae of Type Ia (SNe Ia). Color excesses E(B - V)host of normal SNe Ia, due to the absorption of the host galaxy, are derived by three independent methods, giving excellent agreement leading to the intrinsic colors at maximum of (B - V)00 = -0.024 ± 0.010 and (V - I)00 = -0.265 ± 0.016 if normalized to a common decline rate of Δm15 = 1.1. The strong correlation between redshift absolute magnitudes (based on an arbitrary Hubble constant of H0 = 60 km s-1 Mpc-1), corrected only for the extrinsic Galactic absorption, and the derived E(B - V)host color excesses leads to the well-determined yet abnormal absorption-to-reddening ratios of ℛBVI = 3.65 ± 0.16, 2.65 ± 0.15, and 1.35 ± 0.21. Comparison with the canonical Galactic values of 4.1, 3.1, and 1.8 forces the conclusion that the law of interstellar absorption in the path length to the SN in the host galaxy is different from the local Galactic law, a result consistent with earlier conclusions by others. Improved correlations of the fully corrected absolute magnitudes (on the same arbitrary Hubble constant zero point) with host galaxy morphological type, decline rate, and intrinsic color are derived. We recover the result that SNe Ia in E/S0 galaxies are ~0.3 mag fainter than in spiral galaxies for possible reasons discussed in the text. The new decline rate corrections to absolute magnitudes are smaller than those by some authors for reasons explained in the text. The four spectroscopically peculiar 1991T-type SNe are significantly overluminous as compared to Branch-normal SNe Ia. The overluminosity of the seven 1999aa-like SNe is less pronounced. The seven 1991bg types in the sample constitute a separate class of SNe Ia, averaging in B 2 mag fainter than the normal Ia. New Hubble diagrams in B, V, and I are derived out to ~30,000 km s-1 using the fully corrected magnitudes and velocities, corrected for streaming motions. Nine solutions for the intercept magnitudes in these diagrams show extreme stability at the 0.02 mag level using various subsamples of the data for both low and high extinctions in the sample, proving the validity of the corrections for host galaxy absorption. We shall use the same precepts for fully correcting SN magnitudes for the luminosity recalibration of SNe Ia in the forthcoming final review of our Hubble Space Telescope Cepheid-SN experiment for the Hubble constant.
Investigations of Synonym Replacement for Swedish

We present results from an investigation on automatic synonym replacement for Swedish. Three different methods for choosing alternative synonyms were evaluated: (1) based on word frequency, (2) based on word length, and (3) based on level of synonymy. These three strategies were evaluated in terms of standardized readability metrics for Swedish, average word length, proportion of long words, and in relation to the ratio of errors in relation to replacements. The results show an improvement in readability for most strategies, but also show that erroneous substitutions are frequent.
Structure of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Populations Analyzed by Single Nucleotide Polymorphism and Pulsed-Field Gel Electrophoresis Genotyping

ABSTRACT Pseudomonas aeruginosa has a wide ecological distribution that includes natural habitats and clinical settings. To analyze the population structure and distribution of P. aeruginosa, a collection of 111 isolates of diverse habitats and geographical origin, most of which contained a genome with a different SpeI macrorestriction profile, was typed by restriction fragment length polymorphism based on 14 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) located at seven conserved loci of the core genome (oriC, oprL, fliC, alkB2, citS, oprI, and ampC). The combination of these SNPs plus the type of fliC present (a or b) allowed the assignment of a genetic fingerprint to each strain, thus providing a simple tool for the discrimination of P. aeruginosa strains. Thirteen of the 91 identified SNP genotypes were found in two or more strains. In several cases, strains sharing their SNP genotype had different SpeI macrorestriction profiles. The highly virulent CHA strain shared its SNP genotype with other strains that had different SpeI genotypes and which had been isolated from nonclinical habitats. The reference strain PAO1 also shared its SNP genotype with other strains that had different SpeI genotypes. The P. aeruginosa chromosome contains a conserved core genome and variable amounts of accessory DNA segments (genomic islands and islets) that can be horizontally transferred among strains. The fact that some SNP genotypes were overrepresented in the P. aeruginosa population studied and that several strains sharing an SNP genotype had different SpeI macrorestriction profiles supports the idea that changes occur at a higher rate in the accessory DNA segments than in the conserved core genome.
Coalition formation games for femtocell interference management: A recursive core approach

Overlaying low-power, low-cost, femtocells, over existing wireless networks has recently emerged as a means to significantly improve the coverage and performance of next-generation wireless networks. While most existing literature focuses on spectrum sharing and interference management among non-cooperative femtocells, in this paper, we propose a novel cooperative model that enables the femtocells to improve their performance by sharing spectral resources, minimizing the number of collisions, and maximizing the spatial reuse. We model the femtocell spectrum sharing problem as a coalitional game in partition form and we propose a distributed algorithm for coalition formation. Using the proposed algorithm, the femtocells can take autonomous decisions to cooperate and self-organize into a network partition composed of disjoint femtocell coalitions and that constitutes a stable partition which lies in the recursive core of the considered game. Whenever a coalition forms, the femtocells inside this coalition can cooperatively pool the occupied spectral resources. Additionally, the members of any given coalition jointly schedule their transmissions in order to avoid collisions, in a distributed way. Simulation results show that the proposed coalition formation algorithm yields a performance advantage, in terms of the average payoff (rate) per femtocell reaching up to 380% relative to the non-cooperative case.
Scattered Data Interpolation Using an Alternate Differential Equation Interpolant

Scattered Data Interpolation Using an Alternate Differential Equation Interpolant Gonzalo A. Ramos Master of Science Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2001 We investigate the performance of DEI, an approach [9] that computes off-mesh approximations of PDE solutions, and can also be used as a technique for scattered data interpolation. We compare the new approach with two methods from the collection of ACM algorithms: Algorithms 752, and 790. For the general case of unstructured meshes, we found it necessary to modify the original DEI. The resulting method, ADEI, adjusts the parameter of the interpolant, obtaining better performance. Finally, we measure ADEI’s performance using different sets of scattered data and test functions. The results show that ADEI is better if not comparable to the best of the available scattered data interpolation techniques.
Momentum Investment Strategies of Mutual Funds , Performance Persistence , and Survivorship Bias

We show that the persistent use of momentum investment strategies by mutual funds has important implications for the performance persistence and survivorship bias controversies. Using mutual fund portfolio holdings from a database free of survivorship bias, we ̄nd that the best performing funds during one year are the best performers during the following year, with the exception of 1981, 1983, 1988, and 1989. This pattern corresponds exactly to the pattern exhibited by the momentum e®ect in stock returns, ̄rst documented by Jegadeesh and Titman (1993) and recently studied by Chan, Jegadeesh, and Lakonishok (1996). Our evidence points not only to the momentum e®ect in stock returns, but to the persistent, active use of momentum strategies by mutual funds as the reasons for performance persistence. Moreover, essentially no persistence remains after controlling for the one-year momentum e®ect in stock returns. We also explain why most recent studies have found that survivorship bias is a relatively small concern. Funds that were the best performers during one year are the worst performers during the following year whenever the momentum e®ect in stock returns is absent, and these funds tend to disappear with a frequency not appreciably lower than that of consistently poor performers. Therefore, the pool of non-surviving funds is more representative of the cross-section of all funds than previously thought. Speci ̄cally, we ̄nd a di®erence of only 20 basis points per year in risk-adjusted pre-expense returns between the average fund and the average surviving fund.