Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Less-Expensive Pricing and Hedging of Extreme-Maturity Interest Rate Derivatives and Equity Index Options Under the Real-World Measure

This thesis is practically oriented towards the pricing and hedging of long-dated interest rate derivatives and equity index options under Platen’s benchmark approach. It aims to be self-contained for convenience of the reader, including all proofs. Among leading banks and insurance companies there does not appear to exist a generally accepted methodology of accurately pricing and hedging such over-the-counter derivatives. This remains the case, despite significant efforts by academics and market practitioners since the early 1990s. This thesis revisits this problem in the light of empirical evidence in a much wider modelling framework than that provided by the classical risk neutral approach. The models considered in this thesis are specified by stochastic differential equations that describe the real-world dynamics of two market variables, namely the short rate and the volatility of the growth optimal portfolio (GOP). The latter is essentially a diversified equity index. This thesis assesses for these models their ability to generate reasonably accurate prices and hedges of typical interest rate term structure derivatives and equity index options. When the discounted GOP is modelled as a time-transformed squared Bessel process, fair prices differ from classical risk neutral prices, resulting in lower prices and lower values-at-risk of long-dated derivatives. Also, such models reflect well empirical market features, such as leptokurtic returns, the leverage effect and a stochastic, yet stationary, volatility structure of the equity index. The results of this analysis, which are contained in this thesis, have been supplemented by the publications of Fergusson and Platen [2006], Fergusson and Platen [2014a], Fergusson and Platen [2015b], Fergusson [2017a] and Fergusson [2017b] and the research reports of Fergusson and Platen [2013], Fergusson and Platen [2014b] and Fergusson and Platen [2015a]. In addition, as by-products of the work done in this thesis, the following papers have been published: Thompson et al. [2017], Calderin et al. [2017] and the following have been submitted to journals for publication: Fergusson and Platen [2014c], Fergusson and Platen [2017]. Finally, the following working papers are to be submitted to journals shortly: Fergusson [2017c], Fergusson [2017d], Fergusson [2017e].
Public tax credits and the film industry: an analysis of the Italian system

Abstract This paper examines the evolution and effects of the tax credits systems introduced in the Italian film industry. We have studied the economic and juridical roots of State subsidies, enabling the readers to understand their legitimacy and providing them with the main international best practices. An empirical analysis is performed, assessing whether recent measures introduced in Italy have influenced the domestic theatrical distribution of a sample of 399 Italian films released in the last 4 years. Tax incentives are found to have a positive relation to the number of prints distributed. However, direct contributions do not have a statistical influence on theatrical distribution, supporting the recent wave of reforms aimed at shifting the mix of resources from direct to indirect public support.
Finite Element Analysis of Cage Subsidence in Cervical Interbody Fusion

Cages were used frequently in cervical spine interbody fusion to get better fusion rate. However, the fusion cage would subside in adjacent vertebral body. Three dimensional cervical spine model of C4-C6 was constructed referring to our previous model procedure (FEM). The suitable location of fusion cage had discussed with experienced surgeons and then cervical interbody fusions were simulated by finite element analysis. Factors caused subsidence, including (1) different moment loadings; (2) cage geometry; (3) cage material and (4) bone mineral density were also simulated. The results showed that extension of cervical spine caused remarkable subsidence than average value about 31.8%, next were flexion (13.8%), lateral bending (10.8%), and torsion. Cylindrical shape cage (BAK) appeared a higher risk of subsidence (6.6%) and von-Mises stresses (10.1%) than ring-liked shape cage (SOLIS). Comparing the cage material, the BAK cage made the settlement higher to 11% and the stress increased to 33.8%. The subsidence increased to 21.2% related to intact model in both cages while osteopenia of bony density were simulated. h conclusion, in the ROMs, extension motion caused remarkable subsidence after cages fusion. The geometry of the cage should keep from the cylinder or sharp angle, and the composed material of the cage is suggested to be closed to bone density for avoiding stress shielding. Patients with osteopenia will increase subsidence in cage interbody fusion
Online retail experience and customer satisfaction: the mediating role of last mile delivery

ABSTRACT For various industries worldwide, recent years have been defined by the remarkable growth of e-commerce. Enabled by the Internet, retailers can reach more customers, spread much further in the distribution chain, and optimize their resources. In the new market environment, customer experience has become a source of competitive advantage. This study investigates the role of last mile delivery in the customer’s e-retail experience. A quantitative methodology was used, which incorporated a survey that was conducted in Sweden and measured participants’ most recent e-retail experience. The results indicate that the last mile delivery experience mediates the relationship between the customer’s perception of the online shopping experience and customer satisfaction. These conclusions provide ground for further thorough investigations of the role of last mile delivery in the e-retail context and support e-retailers in increasing their customers’ satisfaction.
Use of a Telerehabilitation Delivery System for Fall Risk Screening

Problem: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that falls are the “leading cause of injury death and the most common cause of nonfatal injuries and hospital admission for trauma among people ages 65 and older. ” Falls can have significant economic consequences to the individual and payer sources. To address these consequences, telerehabilitation was hypothesized to be a suitable supplement for fall screening efforts. Several sources concluded that support for synchronous telerehab was underdeveloped in the literature. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the acceptability, feasibility, reliability, and validity of telehealth-delivered fall screening among community-dwelling older adults. Procedures: This investigation implemented an experimental, quantitative, cross-sectional design employing both pretest-posttest control group and quasi-experimental static group comparisons using nonprobability sampling. This study assembled a panel of experts to provide content validation for a survey tool developed to quantify an older adult’s behavioral intension to use and attitudes towards a telerehabilitation delivery system. Seven fall screening tools were investigated for agreement among remote and face-to-face raters, and for comparison with the face-to-face reference standard (Mini-BEST). Results: All three null hypotheses were rejected. Results indicate that a telerehabilitation delivery system is a reliable and valid method of screening and determining fall risk in community-dwelling older adults. This study produced a content validated, internally consistent survey instrument designed to determine attitudes and beliefs about telerehabilitation. An experimental design was able to demonstrate a positive significant change in 4 of 7 survey constructs among the intervention group after exposure to telerehabilitation as compared to post-test controls. Overall, no significant difference was calculated between face-to-face or telerehab raters, and both environments produced equivalency with scoring, fall risk classification, and ability to discern fallers from non-fallers. Results from the telerehab STEADI fall risk conclusions were calculated to be concurrently valid with the face-to-face reference standard screening tool, the Mini-BEST. Conclusions: This investigation expanded the array of remote healthcare delivery options for clinicians and clients. Further investigation in residential and community settings are recommended.
TEACHER MOBILIZATION: A CASE STUDY ON ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS & THE MOVEMENT OF TEACHERS WITHIN AN URBAN DISTRICT

Professional educators are known to have one of the highest attrition rates among the American professions. As a result, administrative personal face financial hardships in the effort to attract, develop, and often replace large numbers of educators on a yearly basis. The National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), in a 2016 report, found that over 15% of the national education workforce either left or mobilized within the profession between 2011 and 2013. Another report from the Alliance for Excellent Education in 2014 indicated that school and district administrators spend on average 2.2 billion dollars annually to replace teachers. These expenses account for both attrition (48.7%) and mobilization (51.3%). This dissertation was conducted in an urban school district with a high enrollment of high-poverty minority students. For this study nine teachers were chosen from the K-12 grade levels with varying teaching experience. This case study examined the perceptions of full-time teachers who left one school yet remained teaching within the same district. Using organizational theory based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the perceptions of teachers were explored in order to identify the possible factors that contributed to their decision to leave. A case study was necessary to determine why the decision to leave was made, given the specific context of the organization. Data was collected through surveys, interviews, and artifact collection. The interview protocol presented the interview process, the questions, and notes related to the interview experience (Creswell, 2002). Personal notes and digital voice recorders were used to capture participant testimony. Data analysis included a six-step process developed by Braun, Clark, and Terry (2012) to capture and code the data. Qualitative data analysis software, NVivo, was used to maintain a chain of evidence that recognized emergent themes from participant testimony. The key themes that emerged from the data were (a) perceived leadership support, (b) standardized testing pressures, and (c) quality and meaningful parental involvement. The findings aligned with current and historical research that the absence of teacher support, stressors related to standardized testing, and feelings of isolation contributed to teacher dissatisfaction. INDEX WORDS: Attrition, Retention, Mobilization, Organizational Theory, Motivation, Urban School District, Full-Time Teacher TEACHER MOBILIZATION: A CASE STUDY ON ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS & THE MOVEMENT OF TEACHERS WITHIN AN URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT
Repurchase Agreements and the De(con)struction of Financial Markets

The safety of repurchase agreements (repos) depends on the neoclassical premise that markets are reliable sources of liquidity; repos in practice disprove the theory by generating collateral calls, collateral sales, liquidity events and liquidity-driven losses for repo-borrowing funds and their end investors. As repo-type lending now dominates money markets, borrowers’ self-protective preference for ‘safe assets’ as collateral has distorted financial markets, disrupting private investment, and economic performance. Using a balance sheet approach this paper explains the liquidity-supporting role of the traditional banking system and contrasts it with the liquidity-demanding repo-based financial system. The paper also argues that contractual structure determines the balance of power in private sector loans, that no private loan is ‘safe’ for both borrower and lender, and that repo has shifted the balance of safety decisively in favor of lenders.
Measurement Error Without the Proxy Exclusion Restriction

Abstract–This article studies the identification of the coefficients in a linear equation when data on the outcome, covariates, and an error-laden proxy for a latent variable are available. We maintain that the measurement error in the proxy is classical and relax the assumption that the proxy is excluded from the outcome equation. This enables the proxy to directly affect the outcome and allows for differential measurement error. Without the proxy exclusion restriction, we first show that the effects of the latent variable, the proxy, and the covariates are not identified. We then derive the sharp identification regions for these effects under any configuration of three auxiliary assumptions. The first weakens the assumption of no measurement error by imposing an upper bound on the noise-to-signal ratio. The second imposes an upper bound on the outcome equation coefficient of determination that would obtain had there been no measurement error. The third weakens the proxy exclusion restriction by specifying whether the latent variable and its proxy affect the outcome in the same or the opposite direction, if at all. Using the College Scorecard aggregate data, we illustrate our framework by studying the financial returns to college selectivity and characteristics and student characteristics when the average SAT score at an institution may directly affect earnings and serves as a proxy for the average ability of the student cohort.
How Parental Attachment Influences College Students’ Social Domains

We investigated how parental continued attachment was related to college students’ social provision areas during the early phases of college to better understand student persistence factors. Using a sample of undergraduate students (N = 419), we applied structural equation modeling and found that mother and father continued attachment affects the social provisions of students in different ways. Mother attachment was related to nurturance and emotional connection, whereas father attachment was related to worth, guidance, alliance, and emotional connection. These relational and social provision areas may serve as influence factors related to college student persistence. Limitations and implications for student persistence, development, researchers, and educators are discussed.
Towards An Efficient Cloud Computing System: Data Management, Resource Allocation and Job Scheduling

Cloud computing is an emerging technology in distributed computing, and it has proved to be an effective infrastructure to provide services to users. Cloud is developing day by day and faces many challenges. One of challenges is to build cost-effective data management system that can ensure high data availability while maintaining consistency. Another challenge in cloud is efficient resource allocation which ensures high resource utilization and high SLO availability. Scheduling, referring to a set of policies to control the order of the work to be performed by a computer system, for high throughput is another challenge. In this dissertation, we study how to manage data and improve data availability while reducing cost (i.e., consistency maintenance cost and storage cost); how to efficiently manage the resource for processing jobs and increase the resource utilization with high SLO availability; how to design an efficient scheduling algorithm which provides high throughput, low overhead while satisfying the demands on completion time of jobs. Replication is a common approach to enhance data availability in cloud storage systems. Previously proposed replication schemes cannot effectively handle both correlated and non-correlated machine failures while increasing the data availability with the limited resource. The schemes for correlated machine failures must create a constant number of replicas for each data object, which neglects diverse data popularities and cannot utilize the resource to maximize the expected data availability. Also, the previous schemes neglect the consistency maintenance cost and the storage cost caused by replication. It is critical for cloud providers to maximize data availability hence minimize SLA (Service Level Agreement) violations while minimize cost caused by replication in order to maximize the revenue. In this dissertation, we build a nonlinear programming model to maximize data availability in both types of failures and minimize the cost caused by replication. Based on the model’s solution for the replication degree of each data object, we propose a low-cost multi-failure resilient replication scheme (MRR). MRR can effectively handle both correlated and
Deep Learning-based Human Pose Estimation: A Survey

Human pose estimation aims to locate the human body parts and build human body representation (e.g., body skeleton) from input data such as images and videos. It has drawn increasing attention during the past decade and has been utilized in a wide range of applications including human-computer interaction, motion analysis, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Although the recently developed deep learning-based solutions have achieved high performance in human pose estimation, there still remain challenges due to insufficient training data, depth ambiguities, and occlusion. The goal of this survey article is to provide a comprehensive review of recent deep learning-based solutions for both 2D and 3D pose estimation via a systematic analysis and comparison of these solutions based on their input data and inference procedures. More than 260 research papers since 2014 are covered in this survey. Furthermore, 2D and 3D human pose estimation datasets and evaluation metrics are included. Quantitative performance comparisons of the reviewed methods on popular datasets are summarized and discussed. Finally, the challenges involved, applications, and future research directions are concluded. A regularly updated project page is provided: https://github.com/zczcwh/DL-HPE.
Knowledge and Practices Toward Routine Medical Checkup Among Middle-Aged and Elderly People of Riyadh

Introduction: Routine checkup is a form of preventive medicine, it’s a helpful practice to promote health in the community. Studying the prevalence of routine checkup, awareness, influencing, and preventing factors for it in our community will be a helpful tool for the health authorities to promote among individuals. Methodology: This cross-sectional study was conducted in different locations of Riyadh using a convenience sampling technique, with sample size of 414 Saudi participants of both genders aged 36 years old and above. The data were collected through self-administered structured questionnaire with demographic variables, frequency of routine medical checkup, knowledge questions, factors that enhance or prevent individual to do routine checkup and best way to spread the awareness. Results: Two hundred eighty-eight (69.57%) participants knew well about routine checkup and 142 (34.3%) of them do routine medical checkup. “Lack of time” and “Laziness” were reported as the 2 most common preventing factors (46% and 45.2%), respectively, and most common reason that influenced their practice was “health concern” (77.5%) followed by “worry about chronic or serious illness” (32.4%). Participants believed that social networks (eg, twitter, Facebook, etc) and media (eg, TV, radio) are most effective ways to spread awareness of it in the community (53.86% and 52.89%, respectively). Conclusion: There was high level of knowledge on routine health checkup, but a low prevalence was observed in practice. Hence, more health initiatives should be taken for routine medical screening in the Saudi community.
Rethinking Liability Rules for Online Hosting Platforms

With the growing economic and societal importance of online platforms, the question of their liability for illegal content or products they host becomes more important. Based on an analysis of platforms’ incentives, we address the appropriate liability rule for hosting service providers and derive policy recommendations for an efficient liability regime in the European Union. Online hosting platforms may take monitoring efforts on their own initiative that are suboptimal due to the presence of externalities and asymmetric information problems, warranting some form of liability rules. However, for more fundamental reasons of free speech and preventing censorship, policy makers may want to be cautious in entrusting—and burdening—private parties which such an extensive ‘policing’ role. Additionally, higher monitoring requirements may disproportionally burden small entrants. As we argue, since several actors participate to the diffusion of illegal material online, the responsibility of a safe Internet should be shared among all these actors. Concrete regulatory improvements may encourage online hosting platforms to do their part in monitoring proactively and diligently.
The Influence of Task and Time on Object-Based Attention

Object-based attention theory proposes that attention can be directed to the content (e.g., objects) of a scene regardless of spatial restrictions. The current experiments examined if the spatial extent of object-based attentional representations are also modulated by task. In three experiments, the presence of costs to switch attention between objects was found to be modulated by task difficulty, preview time for the objects, and the cue-to-target SOA. In general, simpler tasks and more time (object preview or cue-to-target SOA) allow for object switching costs at more distant locations on an object. The attentional resources available at task time appear to limit the distance along an object at which object-based effects occur.
IX.—Stamnostoma huttonense gen. et sp. nov.—a Pteridosperm seed and cupule from the Calciferous Sandstone Series of Berwickshire

Synopsis Stamnostoma huttonense is a petrified seed assigned to the Lagenostomales. The open upper part of its integument shows no lobes or chambers. The short wide salpinx is inserted within a relatively wide “micropyle” and is partly invaginated into the top of the lagenostome which usually contains pollen. The female gametophyte is known, it has a domed “tent-pole” and three archegonia. The paired cupules had sixteen or more terminal segments. Abscission scars indicate that four seeds were borne in each cupule though some were abortive. The cupules if preserved as compressions would resemble the genus Calathiops Göpp.
An Extended Metric for the Analysis of Power-Network Vulnerability: the Line Electrical Centrality

Power networks are highly vulnerable to deliberate attacks. Whilst power-network design usually considers the protection of the system against network-component failure, it does not consider the protection against deliberated attacks. The inclusion of deliberated-attack analyses with traditional power-system methods may results in computational-intensive models. However, the introduction of complex-network methods in the analysis of power systems will support vulnerability studies by reducing their computational burden. Extended topological metrics, which endows topological metrics with electrical considerations, have resulted to give satisfactory results with lower computational requirements. This paper proposes a new extended metric to rank lines according to the impact that line failures have on power networks. The proposed metric is based on the idea of betweenness centrality and it considers parameters related to demand, generation and transmission lines. This paper confirms the accuracy of the proposed metric with two test cases.