Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Dividend Payout, Stability, and Smoothing on Firm Value

Dividend policy relevance has been researched extensively, but little consensus can be built from the findings. Researchers have examined the influence of short-run dividend announcements on stock prices and have tested the relationship between dividend yield and risk-adjusted returns. The implicit assumption in these studies has been that dividend announcements or dividend yield measure the relevant aspects of a firm’s dividend policy. Unlike previous studies, this study tests the relationship between multiple dividend “policy” measures and a market-value-based measure of firm performance, everything else equal. Policy variables measuring the level as well as the stability and smoothing of dividends relative to earnings are employed as measures of a firm’s commitment to dividends over time. Capital market premiums, unexplained by other sources of rents to the firm, are examined for a wide cross-section of firms in multiple regression models to test for statistically significant relationships with dividend policy measures.
Understanding and treating "pusher syndrome".

"Pusher syndrome" is a clinical disorder following left or right brain damage in which patients actively push away from the nonhemiparetic side, leading to a loss of postural balance. The mechanism underlying this disorder and its related anatomy have only recently been identified. Investigation of patients with severe pushing behavior has shown that perception of body posture in relation to gravity is altered. The patients experience their body as oriented "upright" when the body actually is tilted to the side of the brain lesion (to the ipsilesional side). In contrast, patients with pusher syndrome show no disturbed processing of visual and vestibular inputs determining visual vertical. These new insights have allowed the authors to suggest a new physical therapy approach for patients with pusher syndrome where the visual control of vertical upright orientation, which is undisturbed in these patients, is the central element of intervention.
Modeling and understanding TCP incast in data center networks

Recently, TCP incast problem attracts increasing attention since the receiver suffers drastic goodput drop when it simultaneously strips data over multiple servers. Lots of attempts have been made to address the problem through experiments and simulations. However, to the best of our knowledge, few solutions can solve it fundamentally at low cost. In this paper, a goodput model of TCP incast is built to understand why goodput collapse occurs. We conclude that TCP incast goodput deterioration is mainly caused by two types of timeouts, one happens at the tail of a data block and dominates the goodput when the number of senders is small, while the other one at the head of a data block and governs the goodput when the number of senders is large. The proposed model describes the causes of these two types of timeouts which are related to the incast communication pattern, block size, bottleneck buffer and so on. We validate the proposed model by comparing with simulation data, finding that it can well characterize the features of TCP incast. We also discuss the impact of most parameters on the goodput of TCP incast.
Fighting microbial drug resistance: a primer on the role of evolutionary biology in public health

Although microbes have been evolving resistance to antimicrobials for millennia, the spread of resistance in pathogen populations calls for the development of new drugs and treatment strategies. We propose that successful, long‐term resistance management requires a better understanding of how resistance evolves in the first place. This is an opportunity for evolutionary biologists to engage in public health, a collaboration that has substantial precedent. Resistance evolution has been an important tool for developing and testing evolutionary theory, especially theory related to the genetic basis of new traits and constraints on adaptation. The present era is no exception. The articles in this issue highlight the breadth of current research on resistance evolution and also its challenges. In this introduction, we review the conceptual advances that have been achieved from studying resistance evolution and describe a path forward.
Using Single-Case Participatory Action Research as a Methodology to Explore Appalachian Summer Camp Communities

Community educators have long known the value of direct experience in the learning process. Participatory action research extends this philosophy to the realm of research. This article examines the value of involving front line camp staff, members of the camp community in Appalachia as practitioner researchers with university scientists in studying the type and conditions of transformative learning in young adult camp staff. A young adult who was a camp community member assisted the researchers with methodology, data analysis, data interpretation, and dissemination of findings. This resulted in a more accurate, richer, and thicker description of the camp community memberâ€TMs transformative learning experience. The benefits of involving practitioner researchers are examined, as well as promising practices for conducting participatory action research in community education environments.
Attraction Effects in Honorific Agreement in Korean

Previous studies have suggested that sentence processing is mediated by content-addressable direct retrieval processes (McElree, 2000; McElree et al., 2003). However, the memory retrieval processes may differ as a function of the type of dependency. For example, while many studies have reported facilitatory intrusion effects associated with a structurally illicit antecedent during the processing of subject-verb number or person agreement and negative polarity items (Pearlmutter et al., 1999; Xiang et al., 2009; Dillon et al., 2013), studies investigating reflexives have not found consistent evidence of intrusion effects (Parker et al., 2015; Sturt and Kwon, 2015; cf. Nicol and Swinney, 1989; Sturt, 2003). Similarly, the memory retrieval processes could be also sensitive to cross-linguistic differences (cf. Lago et al., 2015). We report one self-paced reading experiment and one eye-tracking experiment that examine the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement, a dependency that is different from those that have been studied to date, in Korean, a typologically different language from those previously studied. The overall results suggest that the retrieval processes underlying the processing of subject-verb honorific agreement in Korean are susceptible to facilitatory intrusion effects from a structurally illicit but feature-matching subject, with a pattern that is similar to subject-verb agreement in English. In addition, the attraction effect was not limited to the ungrammatical sentences but was also found in grammatical sentences. The clear attraction effect in the grammatical sentences suggest that the attraction effect does not solely arise as the result of an error-driven process (cf. Wagers et al., 2009), but is likely also to result from general mechanisms of retrieval processes of activating of potential items in memory (Vasishth et al., 2008).
REPRODUCIBILITY OF TRIAL-BASED FUNCTIONAL MRI ON MOTOR IMAGERY

The investigation of the reproducibility in functional MRI (fMRI) is an important step in the quantification and analysis of paradigm-related brain activation. This article reports on reproducibility of cortical activation characterized by repeated fMRI runs (10 times) during the performance of a motor imagery and a passive auditory stimulation as a control task. Two parameters, the size of activation and BOLD signal contrast, were measured from regions-of-interest for 10 subjects across different threshold conditions. The variability of these parameters was normalized with respect to the mean obtained from 10 runs, and represented as the intrasession variability. It was found that the variability was significantly lower in the measurement of BOLD signal contrast as compared to the measurement of the size of activation. The variability of the activation volume measurement was greater in the motor imagery task than in the auditory tasks across all thresholds. This task-dependent difference was not apparent from the measurement of the BOLD signal contrast. The presence of threshold dependence in the variability measurement was also examined, but no such dependency was found. The results suggest that a measurement of BOLD signal itself is a more reliable indicator of paradigm-related brain activation during repeated fMRI scans.
Wild Pedagogies: touchstones for re-negotiating education and the environment in the Anthropocene

Wild Pedagogies is an unusual book. It traces the course of discussions that unfolded between the participants on a bespoke gathering of academics and educators. The gathering took place on the Lady of Avenel, a 102-foot square rigged sailing ship as it explored the coastal waters of Scotland, as well as on the wild and remote landscapes that the ship gave the participants access to. The book is woven with anecdotes and observations of the participants as they grapple with the subject matter they had assigned themselves, their experiences on the ship, the vagaries of Scottish weather, the wild life and the many histories that were encountered. The fifteen international authors behind Wild Pedagogies have not individually been responsible for any sections of the book but rather have participated in discussions that inform the whole of the book. The Crex Crex Collective, as the authors call themselves (named after a local bird) is credited in each chapter. Each of the authors that comprise the collective is actively engaged in education for the planet. The foundation of Wild Pedagogies lies upon two premises. The first is that human lifestyles in the developed world are placing an unprecedented strain on the natural systems of the planet with potentially catastrophic results, and the second is that education is necessary in any transformational activity of the scale required to reverse this trend. Much work is then undertaken to envisage and then unpack what such an education endeavour might look like. Central to this discussion lies the challenge for educators to move from human-centred and human exclusive understandings of wilderness to positions ‘that honour the voice and presence of nature and more-than-beings’ (p. 34). There are strong threads running through the book that are systematically unpacked. Wild pedagogies are explored in terms of needing to ‘attend to the voice of more-than-human others’ (p. 38) and that ‘strong ideas are needed to rattle human hubris, and to create openings for different possibilities’. (p. 38). Educating in the Anthropocene forms a central thread and is a timely conversation. The collective observe:
Gauging the OpenSourceMark Benchmark in Measuring CPU Performance

We analyze COSBI's open source mark (OSMark) benchmark in measuring CPU performance in desktop personal computers. We select and focus on selected tests of the benchmark targeting the CPU which we also profile. We run the benchmark on two personal computers with single and dual cores. We then collect performance event counts for the selected tests to characterize the benchmark's workload and we correlate the performance event counts with the CPI. The results reveal that although this benchmark provides a nice and convenient alternative to existing commercial benchmarks, it falls behind in total instruction coverage and application coverage, and does not stress enough multi-core processors as well as competing benchmarks.
Experimental Research about the Impact of IEEE 802.1P on Real-time Behavior of Switched Industrial Ethernet

Based on the test-bed which had been built, a series of practical experiments have been carried out to study the impact of IEEE 802.1P on Real-time behavior of Switched Industrial Ethernet. Comparing the experimental results with the theoretical analysis, the differences between experiment and theory analysis were found. The experiments expose many problems when IEEE 802.1P is applied to the Switched Industrial Ethernet such as the interference between the different priority levels message and the misbehavior of the switch which would happen when the port is overloaded. The experiments carried out can direct the theory and practical improvement about real-time property of industrial Ethernet for process control.
The Impact of QE on the UK Economy – Some Supportive Monetarist Arithmetic

This paper uses a simple money demand and supply framework to estimate the impact of quantitative easing (QE) on asset prices and nominal spending. We use standard money accounting to try to establish the impact of asset purchases on broad money holdings. We show that the initial impact of £200 billion of asset purchases on the money supply was partially offset by other ‘shocks’ to the money supply. Some of these offsets may have been the indirect result of QE. Our central case estimate is that QE boosted the broad money supply by £122 billion or 8%. We apply our estimates of the impact of QE on the money supply to a set of ‘monetarist’ econometric models that articulate the extent to which asset prices and spending need to adjust to make the demand for money consistent with the increased broad money supply associated with QE. Our preferred, central case estimate is that an 8% increase in money holdings may have pushed down on yields by an average of around 150 basis points in 2010 and increased asset values by approximately 20%. This in turn would have had a peak impact on output of 2% by the start of 2011, with an impact on inflation of 1 percentage point around a year later. These estimates are necessarily uncertain and we show the sensitivity of our results to different assumptions about the size of the shock to the money supply and the nature of the transmission mechanism.
The ground state energy of the mean field spin glass model

From the study of a functional equation of Gibbs measures we calculate the limiting free energy of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick spin glass model at a particular value of (low) temperature. This implies the following lower bound for the ground state energy $\epsilon_0$ \[\epsilon_0\geq -0.7833\cdots,\] close to the replica symmetry breaking and numerical simulations values.
Membrane deformable mirror for adaptive optics: performance limits in visual optics.

The performance of a membrane deformable mirror with 37 electrodes (OKO Technologies) is studied in order to characterize its utility as an adaptive optics element. The control procedure is based on knowledge of the membrane's response under the action of each isolate electrode, i.e., the influence functions. The analysis of the mathematical techniques to obtain the control matrix gives useful information about the surfaces that are within the device's range of production, thus predicting the best performance of the mirror. We used a straightforward iterative algorithm to control the deformable membrane that permits the induction of surfaces in approximately four iterations, with an acceptable level of stability. The mirror and the control procedure are tested by means of generating Zernike polynomials and other surfaces. The mirror was incorporated in an adaptive optics prototype to compensate the eye's aberration in real time and in a closed loop. Double-pass retinal images with and without aberration correction were directly recorded in a real eye in order to evaluate the actual performance of the adaptive optics prototype.
Far Above Rubies: The Association between Bride Price and Extramarital Sexual Relations in Uganda

The custom of bride price involves the payment of goods or cash from the groom’s family to the bride’s family at the time of marriage. We present a theory that views bride price as a payment in hedonic markets for marital fidelity. Data from a household survey in Uganda are used to test the theoretical prediction that payment of bride price will be associated with fewer non-marital sexual relationships for women. The data show a robust association between bride price payment and lower rates of non-marital sexual relationships for women but not for men.
Administrative Censoring in Ecological Analyses of Autism and a Bayesian Solution

Widely cited ecological analyses of autism have reported associations with mercury emissions, with precipitation, and race at the level of counties or school districts. However, state educational agencies often suppress any low numerical autism counts before releasing data—a phenomenon known as “administrative censoring. ” Previous analyses did not describe appropriate methods for censored data analysis; common substitution or exclusion methods are known to introduce bias and produce artificially narrow confidence intervals. We apply a Bayesian censored random effects Poisson model to reanalyze associations between 2001 Toxic Release Inventory reported mercury emissions and 2000-2001 autism counts in Texas. Relative risk estimates for autism decreased from 4.44 (95% CI: 4.16, 4.74) per thousand lbs. of air mercury emissions using a naive zero-substitution approach to 1.42 (95% CI: 1.09, 1.78) using the Bayesian approach. Inadequate attention to censoring poses a serious threat to the validity of ecological analyses of autism and other health outcomes.
Out of the Past: Railroads & Sovereign Debt Restructuring

Long before the enactment of the first corporate reorganization statutes in the 1930s, the federal courts developed a method of reorganizing financially distressed corporations, especially railroads, within the existing architecture of the equity receivership. From 1850 to 1932 these receiverships were the only form of relief available to financially distressed railroads, as they were prohibited from liquidating or filing under the Bankruptcy Act. Several leading scholars have begun to ask if railroad receiverships might hold important insights into the issue of sovereign debt restructuring, or at least inform the analysis. This paper takes a closer look at the analogy between railroads and countries to see if it holds beyond its superficial appeal. In particular, I examine how railroad receiverships addressed the problems of holdouts and individual creditor action, the key stumbling blocks for most of today's approaches to sovereign debt restructuring. I conclude that receiverships overcame these problems in ways that could be useful with respect to today's sovereign borrowers, although the utility of receiverships should not be overstated. Plainly there are historical lessons awaiting application, but I argue that only selective and considered reference to the early days of corporate bankruptcy will translate into meaningful improvement of sovereign debt restructuring.
The governance threshold in international trade flows

This paper studies the flows of international trade from an institutional comparative advantage perspective. It establishes a good governance threshold necessary for the well-functioning of commerce. The paper incorporates institutional quality into the gravity equation of trade through an iceberg transaction cost. Then, it replicates accessibility to foreign markets based on bilateral distance and geographical characteristics as suggested by Redding and Venables (2004) in order to estimate the GDP equation incorporating the World Bank Governance Matters indicators. The results show that only when a country enjoys high enough government effectiveness can it effectively benefit from accessibility to markets. Attributing good governance to a country that has not could imply an increase in GDP of around 20 percent.
Classifying sentiments in Nepali subjective texts

With the advent of the online social media such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs, the way people perceive things around them has dramatically changed. One simple example could be how people today buy a mobile phone. If in the past, shopping involved moving from one store to the other, these days one cares more about the opinions expressed by people in product reviews rather. There is an increasing tendency to leave one's opinion(s) on a product, service or any entity on the web thus opening doors for an interesting yet challenging field of Sentiment Analysis. Much work has been done in the last decade on Sentiment Analysis not surprisingly for English because of the availability of a large number of resources but other languages are also gradually taking pace, some of them already in advanced stages and already developing competing resources and applications compared to English. Nepali opinionated content is also increasing rapidly in the last few years. Nepal fares as one of the countries with the highest number of Facebook subscribers. Online presence and voicing one's opinion in the Internet through different social media platforms has become a norm both for individuals or businesses. Nepali is a morphologically rich, under-resourced and a free word order language. Although some works related to the language and technology have been done in the past by institutions like Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya1 and Language Technology Kendra2, Nepali still remains an under-resourced language as it has very few tools and annotated corpus available for the language. This makes it challenging and difficult to do any linguistic computational works in the language including Sentiment Analysis. In this work, we look into applying three Machine Learning classifiers, namely Support Vector Machine, Multinomial Naive Bayes and Logistic Regression for developing a model to classify book and movie reviews written in Nepali into “Positive” and “Negative”. We evaluate and validate our model using 5-fold cross-validation techniques. Experimental results show that the Multinomial Naive Bayes classifier performs with a higher accuracy than the other two classifiers.
Does Educational Achievement Help To Explain Income Inequality? Working Papers No. 208.

In this paper we propose to measure inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Giniindex on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationshi between inequality in incomes and educational achievements (in terms of both the average attainments and its concentration). Even if theoretical considerations suggest a non-linear relationship between these two measures of inequality, actual data indicate that average years of education have a stronger negative impact on measured income inequality. Multivariate regressions also prove that, once we take into account the negative correlation between average educational achievement and its dispersion, the relationship between income inequality and average years of schooling is U-shaped, with a lower turning point at 6. 5 years. Income inequality is also negatively related to per capita income and positively related to capital/output ratio and government expenditure in education. Looking at relative contribution of education to income inequality, we find that it contributes to explain a portion of variance enclosed between 3% and 16%, but this fraction is higher in developed countries and shows a rising trend.