Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Portfolio Diversification with Commodities in Times of Financialization

The study concentrates on the benefits of passive commodity investments in the context of the phenomenon of financialization. The research investigates the implications of increase in the correlation coefficients between equity and commodity investments for investors in financial markets. The paper is composed of several parts. First, the attributes of commodity investments and their benefits in the portfolio optimization are explored. Second, the phenomenon of the financialization is described and the research hypothesis is developed. Next, an empirical analysis is performed. I simulate the mean-variance spanning tests to examine the benefits of commodity investments before and after accounting for the impact of financialization. I proceed separate analysis for pre- and post-financialization period. The empirical research is based on asset classes’ returns and other related variables from years 1991-2012. The performed investigations indicate that the market financialization may have significant implications for commodity investors. Due to increase in correlation coefficients, the inclusion of the commodity futures in the traditional stockbond portfolio appears to be no longer reasonable.
137Cs activity concentration in the ground-level air in the Ignalina NPP region

Results of the Cs activity concentration measurements in the ground-level air in the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (Ignalina NPP) region in 1978–2006 are presented and discussed. The peculiarities of the trend of mean annual radiocaesium activity concentrations in the air during the studied period are explained and described empirically. The analysis of the radiocaesium concentration course after the Chernobyl accident shows that mean annual Cs activity concentrations in the air are decreasing slower than it is expected due to its radioactive decay and aerosol, as the Cs carrier, removal processes in the atmosphere. The Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory model of the global dispersion and deposition of the admixture in the air is used to study episodic increases in the Cs activity concentration in the ground-level air of more than 8 μBq m. Modelling results show the transport of resuspended radiocaesium with air mass from the Chernobyl NPP accident polluted regions to be an important source of the radionuclide to the environment of the Ignalina NPP. It is shown that Cs emissions from its generation sources (nuclear industry objects) and, probably, the depositional flux of the radiocaesium from the stratospheric reservoir, can contribute up to 10% to the mean annual Cs activity concentration value. Mean arithmetic and mean geometric Cs activity concentrations in the air during a year are calculated and compared.
Lost in translation? ECB's monetary impulses and financial intermediaries' responses

Non-bank (-balance sheet) based financial intermediation has become considerably more important over the last couple of decades. For the U.S., this trend has been discussed ever since the mid-1990s. As a consequence, traditional monetary transmission mechanisms, mainly operating through bank balance sheets, have apparently become less relevant. This in particular applies to the bank lending channel. Concurrently, recent theoretical and empirical work uncovered a "risk-taking channel" of monetary policy. This mechanism is not confined to traditional banks but has been found to operate also across the spectrum of financial intermediaries and intermediation devices, including securitization and collateralized lending/borrowing. In addition, recent empirical evidence suggests that the increasing importance of shadow-banking activities might have given rise to a so-called "waterbed effect". This is a mediating mechanisms, dampening or counteracting typically to be expected reactions to monetary policy impulses. Employing flow-of-funds data, we can document also for the Euro Area that a trend towards non-bank (not necessarily more 'market'-based) intermediation has occurred. This is, however, a fairly recent development, substantially weaker than in the U.S. Nonetheless, analyzing the response of Euro Area bank and nonbank financial intermediaries to monetary policy impulses, we find some notable behavioral differences between mainly deposit-funded and more 'market'-based financial intermediaries. We also detect, inter alia, the existence of a (still) fairly weak, but potentially policyrelevant, "waterbed" effect.
The Distributional Effect of Events on Rural and Urban Households in China

International tourism is considered an effective means of economic development. However, the effects of tourism are not evenly distributed between rural and urban households in China. In the wake of significant socioeconomic events, the uneven distribution of the economic effects has huge welfare implications for Chinese households. This study is the first attempt to evaluate the distributional effect of two large, recent, sequential events on China’s rural and urban households. It adopts an innovative approach that combines an econometric model and a two-household computable general equilibrium model. The results show that in terms of welfare, urban households were more adversely affected by the events than rural households. To mitigate the loss of welfare, measures should be taken to continually promote China as a destination and attract tourists after such events occur. Meanwhile, training and education should be made more accessible to rural households to increase their job opportunities.
The extended Görtler–Hämmerlin model for linear instability of three-dimensional incompressible swept attachment-line boundary layer flow

A simple extension of the classic Görtler–Hämmerlin (1955) (GH) model, essential for three-dimensional linear instability analysis, is presented. The extended Görtler–Hämmerlin model classifies all three-dimensional disturbances in this flow by means of symmetric and antisymmetric polynomials of the chordwise coordinate. It results in one-dimensional linear eigenvalue problems, a temporal or spatial solution of which, presented herein, is demonstrated to recover results otherwise only accessible to the temporal or spatial partial-derivative eigenvalue problem (the former also solved here) or to spatial direct numerical simulation (DNS). From a numerical point of view, the significance of the extended GH model is that it delivers the three-dimensional linear instability characteristics of this flow, discovered by solution of the partial-derivative eigenvalue problem by Lin & Malik (1996a), at a negligible fraction of the computing effort required by either of the aforementioned alternative numerical methodologies. More significant, however, is the physical insight which the model offers into the stability of this technologically interesting flow. On the one hand, the dependence of three-dimensional linear disturbances on the chordwise spatial direction is unravelled analytically. On the other hand, numerical results obtained demonstrate that all linear three-dimensional instability modes possess the same (scaled) dependence on the wall-normal coordinate, that of the well-known GH mode. The latter result may explain why the three-dimensional linear modes have not been detected in past experiments; criteria for experimental identification of three-dimensional disturbances are discussed. Asymptotic analysis based on a multiple-scales method confirms the results of the extended GH model and provides an alternative algorithm for the recovery of three-dimensional linear instability characteristics, also based on solution of one-dimensional eigenvalue problems. Finally, the polynomial structure of individual three-dimensional extended GH eigenmodes is demonstrated using three-dimensional DNS, performed here under linear conditions.
On the Relationship between the Implementation of Formative Assessment Strategies and Iranian EFL Teachers’ Self-Efficacy: Do Gender and Experience Make a Difference?

This study sought to examine the relationship between the use of formative assessment strategies and the Iranian EFL teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. Moreover, this study investigated the relationships and interactions between the EFL teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies, their gender, level of experience, and sense of self-efficacy. This is a descriptive ex post facto design study which employed a threepart questionnaire, including demographic information, teachers’ formative assessment strategies, and teachers’ sense of self-efficacy. In order to collect data, sixty-one EFL teachers, including thirty-one female and thirty male participants who were selected through convenience sampling, completed the questionnaire. Multiple statistical strategies were employed to analyze the research questions of the study. The findings of Pearson’s and Spearman Rho correlation indicated that the EFL teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies was positively correlated with their sense of self-efficacy. However, the results of eta correlation coefficients revealed that there was no statistically significant relationship between the teachers’ implementation of formative assessment strategies and two other variables of gender and level of experience. Finally, the results of a three way factorial Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) evinced that there was no statistically significant interaction between the teachers’ use of formative assessment strategies, teachers’ sense of self-efficacy, their gender, and level of experience. Therefore, when the teachers become more aware of the ways to implement formative assessment strategies to inform instruction, their sense of self-efficacy can increase. This study has some implications in language testing, English pedagogy, and syllabus design and materials development.
Dynamik des Zeckenbefalls bei Füchsen in Thüringen

This study aimed to provide up-to-date information on the dynamics of tick infestations on foxes in Thuringia, as the most recent information available was published in 1997. Fox carcasses that had been sent to the Thuringian State Authority for Food Safety and Consumer Protection (Thüringer Landesamt für Lebensmittelsicherheit und Verbraucherschutz – TLLV), between January 1st and December 31st, 2009, were examined for the presence of ticks. All ticks collected were stored at −20 ◦C before being identified and classified according to their developmental stage and sex. Out of a total of 1286 foxes examined, 989 (76.9%) were infested with ticks. A total of 13,227 ticks were collected from the foxes. The stage most frequently found was the larva (48.1%), followed by the adult (34.1%), and the nymphal stage (17.8%). Regarding the adult stage, Ixodes ricinus was the most frequent tick species detected (82.2%), followed by I. canisuga (10.8%) and I. hexagonus (6.7%). Dermacentor reticulatus ticks were very rare (0.3%). With regard to nymphs, I. canisuga and I. hexagonus were the most frequent tick species found, and this was also assumed for the larval stage. The results indicate the occurrence of tick infestations in foxes throughout the year, mainly by I. ricinus, I. canisuga, and I. hexagonus, with seasonal variations. Foxes were infested by I. ricinus ticks significantly more frequently from April to September. This applied to all tick developmental stages, but especially to adults. In contrast to I. ricinus, the infestation of foxes with I. canisuga and I. hexagonus was significantly higher from January to March and from October to December, especially with the immature developmental stages.
Using Early Goal Directed Therapy with MEDS Score

Objectives: To determine if an emergency department Early Goal Directed Therapy (EGDT) protocol differentially affects in-hospital mortality when controlling for severity of illness using Mortality in Emergency Department Sepsis (MEDS) score. Methods: This study is a retrospective chart review of 243 patients, conducted at an urban tertiary care center, after implementing an EGDT protocol on January 1, 2008. This study compares differences in in-hospital mortality and length of stay (LOS) in the ICU and the ED between the 126 septic patients who were hospitalized the year prior to implementation of an EGDT protocol (control group) and the postimplementation study group (117 septic patients from 7/2008-6/2009), using MEDS score as a risk stratification tool. In-hospital mortality was compared between our preand post EGDT groups and adjusted for MEDS score using logistic regression with accompanying odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals. Median ED and ICU LOS were also compared. Results: The mean age and comorbidities were similar between the two groups. (p=0.27 and p=0.87 respectively). Reduction in absolute mortality was 9.9% when EGDT is used (control = 30.4%, study = 20.5%, p=0.08). When controlling for illness severity using MEDS score, the relative risk (RR) of death with EGDT was about half that of the control group (RR=0.52, 95% CI [0.27-0.960]). Also, by applying MEDS to risk stratify patients into various groups of illness severity, we found no specific groups where EGDT was more efficacious at reducing the Predicted Probability of death. EGDT lead to a 39.1% reduction in the median LOS in ICU (control=124 hours, study = 75.5 hours, p=0.03), without increasing LOS in ED (control = 6 hours, study = 7 hours, p=0.69). Conclusions: EGDT is beneficial in septic patients regardless of their MEDS score. Our data suggests that risk stratification tools such as MEDS score should not be used to determine which patients should or should not receive EGDT.
Proposed Relationships between Trust of Business Social Responsibility (BSR) and Firms Performance in Nigeria.

In the context of Nigeria, the issue of Business social responsibility (BSR) has been highly relative issue to stakeholders. In this paper we present a proposed framework for examining the relationship between Trust of BSR and firms performance. However, virtually few studies have attempted to regards the relationship between trust of BSR and firms performance, even if any they consider it in the perspective of consumers/ individuals. Hence this study intends to make new contribution to literature by proposed causal relationships between trust of BSR and firms performance in the perspective of organization. Keywords: Business social responsibility (BSR), Trust of BSR, Firm performance, Nigeria.
Prosodic Correlates of Sentences in Signed Languages: A Literature Review and Suggestions for New Types of Studies

This article contains a literature review of evidence of large prosodic domains that correspond to syntactic units such as a clause or a sentence. In particular, different phonetic nonmanual cues that may relate to clause or sentence boundaries are discussed in detail. On the basis of various ideas and views in the literature, we also describe two types of studies that may further our understanding of prosodic domains and their relation to sentence boundaries. The first type is a refinement of a recent series of perception studies in which signers' intuitions are elicited on break points in stretches of discourse. The second type exploits new visual signal-processing techniques to detect salient events in a video recording of signing. The article concludes with a discussion of how knowledge of the prosody of signed languages can be employed for language technology.
Variability of Local Structure Parameters in the Convective Boundary Layer

Abstract The propagation of optical and acoustical waves is affected by the atmospheric turbulence through the local instantaneous refractive index structure parameter in a volume of characteristic size r, denoted Cn,r2. Often r is well within the inertial–convective range. In this study, a large-eddy simulation (LES) of spatial resolution Δ is used to analyze the distribution of Cn,Δ2 in the convective boundary layer. The local formulation used to calculate Cn,Δ2 is described and is found to back up the subgrid parameterization of atmospheric LES. The mean vertical profile behaves according to the mixed layer similarity theory. The spatial organization relates to the presence of buoyant ascending plumes. This structure is associated with some bimodal probability density functions of the inertial–convective range variables, in agreement with experimental results. The standard model of jointly lognormal statistics is challenged. The intermittency of these variables is characterized, and its inertial–convec.
Morphology of fruits, seeds, seedlings and saplings of three species of Macrolobium Schreb. (Leguminosae, Caesalpinioideae) in the Brazilian Amazon floodplain

The evaluation of the post-germination phases of plants allows the recognition of transitional structures that support the relationships among taxa and their establishment. Together with fruit and seeds, seedlings and saplings provide useful characters for identifying many species. This study aimed to describe and characterize the morphology of the fruits, seeds, seedlings and saplings of Macrolobium acaciifolium, M. bifolium and M. pendulum, as well as to evaluate the ecological, taxonomic and phylogenetic value of the structures identified. In this work, the seeds were sown in plastic trays with sterilized sand and sawdust, without pre-germination treatment. The fruits of the three species are woody legumes, dehiscent fruit or indehiscent fruit. The seeds have seed coats with or without venation and variable embryos, with plumules differing among the three species; this trait can be helpful in distinguishing among the species studied. The seedlings are of the cryptocotylar-hypogeal-reserve or phanerocotylar-epigeal-reserve type. Macrolobium bifolium and M. pendulum are similar species, differing in only a few characters. These characters have taxonomic value and aid species identification. The characteristics of M. pendulum are described here for the first time.
The Effect of Self Efficacy and Self-esteem Towards the Pt Garuda Food Indonesia Employee ’ s Job Satisfaction Mega

work satisfaction is really significant in increasing employee’s retention. Work satisfaction is usually built and developed by the individual characters of the workers. This study aims to know the effect of self efficacy and self esteem towards employee’s work satisfaction. The population of this study is permanent employees in HCS division of PT. GarudaFood Putra Putri Jaya, Gresik, East Java. From 81 population, 53 samples are taken using simple random sampling technique. By using multiple linear regression analyzing technique, the result shows that self-efficacy and self-esteem positively and significantly affect the work satisfaction.
Agronomic Performance of Soybean Genotypes in Low Latitude in Teresina-PI, Brazil

The soybean is one of the most important grain exports. In order to evaluate the agronomic traits and yield components of different soybean genotypes grown under low latitude conditions of Teresina-PI, developed in this research. It were evaluated the phenological and productive traits related to the development of soybean plants of 18 genotypes in the agricultural year 2009/10. Under the conditions studied, the genotypes showed significant differences for all traits analyzed, except plant height at maturity. Plant height at flowering, maturation and first pod showed variations from 42 to 57 cm, 42-63 cm and 6-11 cm, respectively. The genotypes 174 BCR1069X7RG and 169 BCR1069X7RG were considered the most precocious in flowering. In contrast, the genotypes 177 BCR1069X7RG and 176 BCR1069X7RG, with more than 57 days from germination to flowering, were considered the most late. In 1000 grain weight variation was from 15.02 to 20.72 g in values found. The genotypes showed satisfactory yield, especially 171 BCR1069X7RG (4.19 t ha -1 ) and 174 BCR1069X7RG (3.84 t ha -1 ) equivalent to 69.80 and 63.97 sacks of 60 kg, respectively. Overall, the genotypes showed good agronomic performance.
COVERING THE DISTAL THIRD OF THE LEG WITH PEDICLED PERFORATING VESSELS PATCHES

Perforating vessels patches represent an advancement in terms of skin failures treatment. On the distal third of the leg, the alternatives for skin covering are scarce, often requiring microsurgery. In this study, we aimed to make a prospective assessment of 20 patients submitted to treatment of bloody areas of leg’s distal third by means of pedicled patches in perforating arteries. The location of the perforating arteries was preoperatively found using the echodoppler test. The patches were planned to allow up to 180-degree rotation in the bloody area. In 6 cases, perforating vessels had the fibular artery as source; in 10, the posterior tibial artery, and; in 4, the anterior tibial artery. The accuracy rate of the echodoppler was 88.2%. For young patients presenting injuries caused by trauma, procedure failures were found in 15.4%, and for those with associated comorbidities, 33.3%. Based on our studies, we conclude that perforating vessels patches are a good alternative for skin failures on the distal segment of the leg.
Evaluating word-vector generation techniques for use in semantic role labeling with recurrent LSTM neural networks

This is an investigation of how the performance on a natural language task, semantic role labeling (SRL), is affected by how the input text is encoded. Four methods for encoding words as dense vectors of floating-point numbers are evaluated: Noisecontrastive estimation (NCE), Continuous bag-of-words (CBOW), Skip-grams and Global vectors for word representation (GloVe). Vectors are generated using a corpus of Wikipedia articles as the training set, with different values for various parameters, such as vector length, context length and training methods. In order to evaluate the generated vectors, they are then used as the input into a recurrent bi-directional neural network using LSTM neurons. This network is trained using the standard CoNLL-2005 shared task data set, and evaluated with the associated test sets. The results show that there is no large or consistent advantage to using word encodings from any of the tried methods or any of the tried parameter settings over any of the other methods or parameter settings. The SRL system that was used thus seems to be fairly robust in regard to the choice of input vectors. All methods generate vectors that outperform random vectors, however, indicating that pretraining vectors has a positive effect. The labeling accuracy is close to but slightly worse than previously published state-of-the-art performance results from the use of a similar network on the SRL task.
Economic Causes of Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon : An Empirical Analysis of the 2000 s 1

This study discusses the recent economic and policy drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It is based on a theoretical fram ework in which agents choose how much forest to clear based on their expectations about future p rofits from cattle ranching and soybean cropping. The empirical study is based on economic and policy variables that affect this expected profitability. Using newly launched and some neverb fore analyzed datasets, it provides empirical evidence by estimating a model using pane l data for 783 municipalities of the region from 2002 to 2007. Deforestation in the period is f ound to be driven by fluctuations in meat and soybean prices over time, as well as differences in prices paid to producers over space. Availability of rural credit, presence of protected areas and rural reform settlements also influence deforestation rates. Moreover this study shows that by impacting the risk perception of agents, higher presence of the Brazilian Environmental Poli ce (Ibama) was effective in reducing deforestation rates.