Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implications of Model Choice in Lévy-driven Financial Markets

Merton’s classical portfolio optimisation problem for an investor, who can trade in a risk-free bond and a stock, can be extended to the case where the driving noise of the log-returns is a pure jump process instead of a Brownian motion. Benth et al. [13], [14] solved the problem and found in the HARA-utility case the optimal control implicitly given by an integral equation. There are several ways to approximate a Levy process with infinite activity: by neglecting the small jumps or approximating them with a Brownian motion, as discussed in Asmussen and Rosinski [5]. In this setting, we study stability of the corresponding optimal investment problems. The optimal controls are solutions of integral equations, for which we study convergence. We are able to characterize the rate of convergence in terms of the variance of the small jumps. Additionally, we prove convergence of the corresponding wealth processes and indirect utilities (value functions). 1
Industrial location, market access and economic development: regional patterns in post-unification Italy

What accounts for the differences in the economic performance across Italian regions in the post-Unification period? This thesis seeks to explain the regional patterns of economic development and industrialization in Italy in the period 1871-1911 by applying various Economic Geography models. The first part follows Overman and Puga (2002) and studies the distribution of industrial employment across regions. The aim is to test the effect of regional borders on the distribution of industrial employment. The existence of this border effect, tested through the use of provincial data, suggests that the Italian regions in this period represented meaningful economic entities. By testing the effect of pre-1861 borders we link this result to the persistence of pre-Unification institutional arrangements. The second part follows the methodology by Head and Mayer (2011) and investigates the relationship between economic performance and market access. Here market access is captured through market potential, a measure of the centrality of a region based on GDP and transport costs. The main result is that domestic market potential is a strong determinant of GDP per capita while all the formulations of market potential that include trading partners give more mixed results. The last part seeks to explain the location of industries in Italy in the period 1871–1911. The analytical framework takes into account both the Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) theory on factor endowment and the New Economic Geography (NEG) theory on access to markets. The methodology used here is based on Midelfart-Knarvik et al. (2000). The location of industries, measured through employment per region per sector, is explained with interactions between characteristics of the regions and characteristics of the sectors, of both H-O and NEG-type. The main findings of this chapter are that endowments, and in particular human capital, were the driving force behind the first Italian industrialization while access to markets had a more limited effect. (Less)
A Three-dimensional Diagnostic Diagram for Seyfert 2 Galaxies: Probing X-Ray Absorption and Compton Thickness

We present and discuss a three-dimensional diagnostic diagram for Seyfert 2 galaxies obtained using X-ray and [O III] data on a large sample of objects (reported in the Appendix). The diagram shows the Kα iron line equivalent width as a function of both the column density derived from the photoelectric cutoff and the 2-10 keV flux normalized to the [O III] optical-line flux (the latter corrected for extinction and assumed to be a true indicator of the source intrinsic luminosity). We find that the hard X-ray properties of type 2 objects depend on a single parameter, the absorbing column density along the line of sight, in accordance with the unified model. The diagram can be used to identify Compton-thick sources and to isolate and study peculiar objects. From this analysis we have obtained a column density distribution of Seyfert 2 galaxies that is thought to be a good approximation of the real distribution. A large population of heavily absorbed objects is discovered, including many Compton-thick candidates. Our results indicate that the mean log NH cm-2 in type 2 Seyfert galaxies is 23.5 and that as many as 23%-30% of sources have NH ≥ 1024 cm-2.
Monocular Enucleation Induces Nuclear Localization of Calcium/Calmodulin-Dependent Protein Kinase IV in Cortical Interneurons of Adult Monkey Area V1

Elevation of intracellular Ca2+ levels activates calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase (CaMK) IV, which in turn plays an important role in neuroprotection and neuroplasticity. The possibility that CaMKIV is similarly involved in neocortical tissue has not been examined previously, especially with regard to the plastic nature of ocular dominance features in the primary visual cortex (area V1). We addressed this question by way of monocular enucleation (ME) to disrupt sensory input and examine CaMKIV expression changes in monkey area V1. Immunohistochemical staining of area V1 in normal infants showed a nuclear presence of CaMKIV, which did not changed after ME. However, a striking set of layer- and time-dependent changes in nuclear CaMKIV expression was observed in adult area V1 after ME. A strong increase in nuclear CaMKIV levels was evident in cortical layers II/III and VI after 1 d of ME and in layer IVC after 5 d of ME. These specific laminar changes persisted after 30 d of ME and, most notably, showed a columnar profile in which CaMKIV expression was linked to open-eye columns. Real-time quantitative reverse transcription-PCR and Western blot analysis showed that total amounts of CaMKIV mRNA and protein remained unchanged after ME, suggesting that a nuclear translocation may occur from the cytoplasm. Finally, double-label immunohistochemical staining with a pyramidal cell marker (SMI-32) showed that CaMKIV was absent in this subtype, whereas coincidental expression with GABA, parvalbumin, and calretinin, but not calbindin, showed its clear presence in a subset of interneurons. We propose that CaMKIV activity within diverse groups of cortical interneurons may play an important role in adaptive plastic reorganization of adult neocortical tissue.
TGF-β1 induces proteinase-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) expression in endometriotic stromal cells and stimulates PAR2 activation-induced secretion of IL-6.

BACKGROUND Proteinase-activated receptor 2 (PAR2) is a G-protein-coupled receptor that is activated by several serine proteases. PAR2 activation in endometriotic stromal cells (ESCs) has been implicated in the development of endometriosis but the regulatory mechanism of PAR2 expression in ESC is unknown. Our objective was to study the mechanism by which PAR2 expression may be regulated in endometriotic lesions. METHODS Primary cultures of ESCs were treated with transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) 1, tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and interleukin-1β (IL-1β), and the expression of PAR2 was examined by real-time quantitative PCR. ESCs pretreated with or without TGF-β1 were treated with PAR2 agonist peptide (PAR2AP) and the secretion of the pro-endometriotic cytokine, IL-6, was measured using a specific enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Effects of TGF-β type 1 inhibitor, SB431542, and PAR2 small interfering RNA (siRNA) on the TGF-β1 stimulation of PAR2 gene expression and PAR2AP-induced IL-6 secretion were also evaluated. To study intracellular signaling, effects of inhibitors of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) and phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) and of Smad4 siRNA on the TGF-β1-induced PAR2 gene expression were studied. RESULTS Only TGF-β1, but neither TNF-α nor IL-1β, increased gene expression of PAR2. Activation of PAR2 with PAR2AP increased the secretion of IL-6 from ESCs. As expected, TGF-β1 pretreatment dose-dependently enhanced the PAR2AP-induced increase in IL-6 secretion from ESCs. Treatment of ESCs with the TGF-β type 1 inhibitor, SB431542, inhibited both TGF-β1-stimulation of PAR2 gene expression and PAR2AP-induced IL-6 secretion. Transfection of ESCs with PAR2 siRNA produced a similar inhibition of IL-6 secretion. The TGF-β1-induced increase in PAR2 gene expression was repressed by inhibition of p38 MAPK, p42/44 MAPK or PI3K, but not by knockdown of Smad4 expression. CONCLUSIONS In view of significant roles of PAR2 and IL-6 in endometriosis, the TGF-β1-induced increase in PAR2 expression may be an elaborate mechanism that augments the progression of the disease.
Interplay between Facilitation, Depression, and Residual Calcium at Three Presynaptic Terminals

Synapses display remarkable alterations in strength during repetitive use. Different types of synapses exhibit distinctive synaptic plasticity, but the factors giving rise to such diversity are not fully understood. To provide the experimental basis for a general model of short-term plasticity, we studied three synapses in rat brain slices at 34°C: the climbing fiber to Purkinje cell synapse, the parallel fiber to Purkinje cell synapse, and the Schaffer collateral to CA1 pyramidal cell synapse. These synapses exhibited a broad range of responses to regular and Poisson stimulus trains. Depression dominated at the climbing fiber synapse, facilitation was prominent at the parallel fiber synapse, and both depression and facilitation were apparent in the Schaffer collateral synapse. These synapses were modeled by incorporating mechanisms of short-term plasticity that are known to be driven by residual presynaptic calcium (Cares). In our model, release is the product of two factors: facilitation and refractory depression. Facilitation is caused by a calcium-dependent increase in the probability of release. Refractory depression is a consequence of release sites becoming transiently ineffective after release. These sites recover with a time course that is accelerated by elevations of Cares. Facilitation and refractory depression are coupled by their common dependence on Cares and because increased transmitter release leads to greater synaptic depression. This model captures the behavior of three different synapses for various stimulus conditions. The interplay of facilitation and depression dictates synaptic strength and variability during repetitive activation. The resulting synaptic plasticity transforms the timing of presynaptic spikes into varying postsynaptic response amplitudes.
Politikrelevante Folgerungen aus Analysen mit Firmendaten der Amtlichen Statistik

The newly created Research Data Centres (or Forschungsdatenzentren) much improved the access of researchers to micro data from official statistics in Germany. This paper surveys selected earlier studies using firm level data with a view on the policy conclusions. We focus on job turnover, exports, and technical efficiency. The bottom line is that any policy measure should not be based on the fact that a firm belongs to a certain industry or size class – categories of this kind do not discriminate between units that are more or less successful as regards job creation, exports, or efficiency. Establishments and enterprises are heterogeneous even in narrowly defined industries and size classes – there is no such thing as a representative firm.
The Search-Transfer Problem: The Role of Weak Ties in Sharing Knowledge across Organization Subunits

This paper combines the concept of weak ties from social network research and the notion of complex knowledge to explain the role of weak ties in sharing knowledge across organization subunits in a multiunit organization. I use a network study of 120 new-product development projects undertaken by 41 divisions in a large electronics company to examine the task of developing new products in the least amount of time. Findings show that weak interunit ties help a project team search for useful knowledge in other subunits but impede the transfer of complex knowledge, which tends to require a strong tie between the two parties to a transfer. Having weak interunit ties speeds up projects when knowledge is not complex but slows them down when the knowledge to be transferred is highly complex. I discuss the implications of these findings for research on social networks and product innovation.
Redistribution Policy and Inequality Reduction in OECD Countries: What Has Changed in Two Decades?

We use a range of data sources to assess if, and to what extent, government redistribution policies have slowed or accelerated the trend towards greater income disparities in the past 20-25 years. In most countries, inequality among "non-elderly" households has widened during most phases of the economic cycle and any episodes of narrowing income differentials have usually not lasted long enough to close the gap between high and low incomes that had opened up previously. With progressive redistribution systems in place, greater inequality automatically leads to more redistribution, even if no policy action is taken. We find that, in the context of rising market-income inequality, tax-benefit systems have indeed become more redistributive since the 1980s but that this did not stop income inequality from rising: market-income inequality grew by twice as much as redistribution. Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, the redistributive strength of tax-benefit systems then weakened in many countries. While growing market-income disparities were the main driver of inequality trends between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, reduced redistribution was often the main reason why inequality rose in the ten years that followed. Benefits had a much stronger impact on inequality than social contributions or taxes, despite the much bigger aggregate size of direct taxes. As a result, redistribution policies were often less successful at counteracting growing income gaps in the upper parts of the income distribution.
Algebraic Laws for Weak Consistency

Modern distributed systems often rely on so called weakly-consistent databases, which achieve scalability by sacrificing the consistency guarantee of distributed transaction processing. Such databases have been formalised in two different styles, one based on abstract executions and the other based on dependency graphs. The choice between these styles has been made according to intended applications: the former has been used to specify and verify the implementation of these databases, and the latter to prove properties of programs running on top of the databases. In this paper, we present a set of novel algebraic laws (i.e. inequations) that connect these two styles of specifications; the laws relate binary relations used in a specification based on abstract executions, to those used in a specification based on dependency graphs. We then show that this algebraic connection gives rise to so called robustness criteria, conditions which ensures that a program running on top of a weakly-consistent database does not exhibit anomalous behaviours due to this weak consistency. These criteria make it easy to reason about programs running on top of these databases, and may become a basis for dynamic or static program analyses. For a certain class of consistency models, we prove that the converse of this implication holds, i.e. our criteria are complete.
N-best Rescoring for Parsing Based on Dependency-Based Word Embeddings

Rescoring approaches for parsing aims to re-rank and change the order of parse trees produced by a general parser for a given sentence. The re-ranking performance depends on whether or not the rescoring function is able to precisely estimate the quality of parse trees by using more complex features from the whole parse tree. However it is a challenge to design an appropriate rescoring function since complex features usually face the severe problem of data sparseness. And it is also difficult to obtain sufficient information requisite in re-estimatation of tree structures because existing annotated Treebanks are generally small-sized. To address the issue, in this paper, we utilize a large amount of auto-parsed trees to learn the syntactic and sememtic information. And we propose a simple but effective score function in order to integrate the scores provided by the baseline parser and dependency association scores based on dependency-based word embeddings, learned from auto-parsed trees. The dependency association scores can relieve the problem of data sparseness, since they can be still calculated by word embeddings even without occurrence of a dependency word pair in a corpus. Moreover, semantic role labels are also considered to distinct semantic relation of word pairs. Experimental results show that our proposed model improves the base Chinese parser significantly.
Geometric Understanding of Indoor Scenes

Finding and recognizing objects are basic functions in computer vision which can play fundamental roles in various applications. As indoor scenes have high degree of rigid structures, we study the problem of understanding indoor scenes in terms of geometric clues inherent in each image. Since traditional 2D detectors are highly sensitive to changing of viewpoints and partial occlusion, we argue how 3D approaches can be utilized to improve the performance of object localization and detection. Starting from an assumption that all objects are standing on the floor, we first recover 3D structures to assign a reasonable three dimensional coordinates over the 2D images, and then slide 3D windows having different scales over each spatial area to localize their positions. We next evaluate their visible faces by using Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Self-Similarity Descriptor features, and then learn the classifier to detect sofa, table, and bed. Finally, we report the performance of our classifier and discuss how these efforts can contribute to the problem of holistic scene understanding. For the future works, we will hire richer information considering spatial context and interactions between objects.
A review of quantitative genetic components of fitness in salmonids: implications for adaptation to future change

Salmonine fishes are commonly subjected to strong, novel selective pressures due to anthropogenic activities and global climate change, often resulting in population extinction. Consequently, there is considerable interest in predicting the long‐term evolutionary trajectories of extant populations. Knowledge of the genetic architecture of fitness traits is integral to making these predictions. We reviewed the published, peer‐reviewed literature for estimates of heritability and genetic correlation for fitness traits in salmonine fishes with two broad goals in mind: summarization of published data and testing for differences among categorical variables (e.g., species, life history type, experimental conditions). Balanced coverage of variables was lacking and estimates for wild populations and behavioral traits were nearly absent. Distributions of heritability estimates were skewed toward low values and distributions of genetic correlations toward large, positive values, suggesting that significant potential for evolution of traits exists. Furthermore, experimental conditions had a direct effect on h2 estimates, and other variables had more complex effects on h2 and rG estimates, suggesting that available estimates may be insufficient for use in models to predict evolutionary change in wild populations. Given this and other inherent complicating factors, making accurate predictions of the evolutionary trajectories of salmonine fishes will be a difficult task.
Does Filtering Preclude Us from Studying ERP Time-Courses?

Filtering can distort signals (Lyons, 2004), a problem well documented for ERP data (see, e.g., Luck, 2005; Kappenman and Luck, 2010; May and Tiitinen, 2010). It is thus recommended to filter ERPs as little as possible (Luck, 2005). Recently, VanRullen (2011) provided a healthy reminder of filtering dangers. Using simulated data, VanRullen demonstrated that an effect occurring randomly between 150 and 180 ms post-stimulus can be smeared back in time by a 30-Hz low-pass filter, and appears to start at 100 ms. From this result, VanRullen concluded that if researchers filter their data, they cannot interpret the onsets of ERP effects and should limit their conclusions to peak amplitudes and latencies, without interpreting precise ERP time-courses. However, as we are going to see, we can study ERP onsets by using causal filters.
The Role of the Spanish Imperial State in the Mining-Led Growth of Bourbon Mexico's Economy

Colonial Mexico's economy experienced a long phase of growth during the eighteenth century. Around 18'08 silver exports and fiscal surplus remittances from the colony rose to unprecedented levels. We study the contribution of the Spanish imperial state's policy to the expansion of silver production and the leading role of mining in economic growth and its fiscal implications. We find evidence to support a more favourable view of both the mining sector and the imperial state than that commonly presented in the literature. The interruption of colonial ‘mining‐led growth’ helps to explain the ‘lost decades’ for the economic development of Mexico after independence.
Cengage Learning at TREC 2011 Medical Track

This paper details Cengage Learning’s submissions for this year’s TREC medical track. The techniques we used fall roughly into two categories: information extraction and query expansion. From both the queries and the medical reports, we extracted limiting attributes, such as age, race, and gender, and labeled terms appearing in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We also used three different techniques of query expansion: UMLS related terms, terms from a network built from UMLS, and terms from our medical reference encyclopedias. We submitted four different runs varying only in their methods of query expansion.
A Meiosis-Specific Form of the APC/C Promotes the Oocyte-to-Embryo Transition by Decreasing Levels of the Polo Kinase Inhibitor Matrimony

During the oocyte-to-embryo transition in Drosophila, degradation of the Polo kinase inhibitor, Matrimony, depends on Cortex, a meiosis-specific form of the Anaphase Promoting Complex/Cyclosome that is required for the oocyte's normal transition from meiosis to mitosis.
Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya

Acknowledgements A note on the transliteration Introduction Chapter 1. From the Ottomans to the Italians: A Political Economy Approach to State Formation in 19th Century Libya Chapter 2. The Re-Discovery of the State of Awlad Muhammed: Sources and Significance, 1550-1813 Chapter 3. From Tribe to Class: The Origins and Politics of Class Formation in Colonial Libya, 1911-1943 Chapter 4. Italian Fascism - 'Benign? ' Collective Amnesia Concerning Libya Chapter 5.Identity and Alienation in Postcolonial Libyan Literature: The Trilogy of Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih Chapter 6. The Jamahiriya: Historical and Social Origins of a Populist State Notes Glossary Index
CEO Risk Incentives and Corporate Cash Holdings

This paper studies the implications of risk-related agency theory on corporate cash holdings. Cash holdings are less risky but negative NPV projects from the investment perspective. Agency theory predicts that a risk-averse CEO keeps more cash holdings to reduce firm risk at the expense of shareholder value. We use a measure of CEO risk incentives based on executive stock options, and study its relation with corporate cash holdings. We find that firms with higher CEO risk incentives have less cash holdings. We find that the value of cash holdings is higher in firms with higher CEO risk incentives. These findings are consistent with risk-related agency theory.