Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
2 9 N ov 2 01 4 Learning graphical models from the Glauber dynamics

In this paper we consider the problem of learning undirected graphical models from data generated according to the Glauber dynamics. The Glauber dynamics is a Markov chain that sequentially updates individual nodes (variables) in a graphical model and it is frequently used to sample from the stationary distribution (to which it converges given sufficient time). Additionally, the Glauber dynamics is a natural dynamical model in a variety of settings. This work deviates from the standard formulation of graphical model learning in the literature, where one assumes access to i.i. d. samples from the distribution. Much of the research on graphical model learning has been directed towards finding algorithms with low computational cost. As the main result of this work, we establish that the problem of reconstructing binary pairwise graphical models is computationally tractable when we observe the Glauber dynamics. Specifically, we show that a binary pairwise graphical model on p nodes with maximum degree d can be learned in time f(d)p log p, for a function f(d), using nearly the information-theoretic minimum number of samples.
A Divisible Search Model of Fiat Money

This paper extends the Kiyotaki-Wright search model of fiat money to allow for divisible money and goods. The extension allows me to examine the standard issues in monetary economics, such as the neutrality and super-neutrality of money, by severing the artificial link in the Kiyotaki-Wright model between the money supply and the number of money holders. It is shown that money is neutral, but not super-neutral. Money growth generates a trading opportunity effect: it changes the fraction of different agents in the economy and hence changes the probability with which agents have a successful match. In addition, money growth has a negative effect on the real money balance that is familiar in Walrasian monetary models. The balance of the two effects can imply a positive optimal money growth rate.
Stated preferences for imported and hormone-treated beef: application of a mixed logit model

Norwegian consumer preferences for country of origin and hormone status of beef were investigated and socio-economic segmentation variables identified. On average, after domestic beef, consumers preferred beef from neighbouring Sweden to beef from more distant countries, and beef from developed countries to beef from less developed countries. US hormone-free beef was perceived as being as good as Irish beef, whereas US hormone-treated beef was perceived as being inferior to Irish and Botswanan beef. In a series of market simulations based on an estimated mixed logit model, it is shown that non-Scandinavian alternatives are close substitutes competing over the import-friendly market segment. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.
The Gap between the Theory and Practice of Corporate Valuation: Survey of European Experts

type="main"> The valuation of companies or their assets is at the heart of most financing and investment decisions. Over the last five decades, academics have developed several simple and sophisticated models for corporate valuation. Yet valuation estimates of a firm or its assets appear to vary widely among practitioners. It is unclear whether these differences arise from practitioners' use of different valuation models or from differences in their assumptions about the inputs used in those models. To provide some insights into this issue, the authors recently surveyed 365 European finance practitioners with CFAs or equivalent professional degrees. They find that almost all survey respondents use the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model (along with some version of Relative Valuation that relies on the use of “comparables”). But the estimation methods of such practitioners for almost all inputs in the DCF model, including beta, the equity market risk premium, leverage, cost of debt, and terminal value, vary widely. This can be a serious problem because even small differences in inputs can cause huge variations in valuations. Such differences arise primarily because theory provides little guidance on how to estimate parameters, leaving practitioners to make their own assumptions and judgments. In sum, the authors' findings suggest that the process of estimating valuation parameters can be as important as the choice of the valuation model itself, and requires the serious attention of academics and practitioners. The authors recommend that key valuation parameter estimates be disclosed in financial and valuation reports. Their findings are also relevant to policy makers because the concept of “fair value” plays such a central role in post-crisis regulation.
How sensitive is the association between ozone and daily deaths to control for temperature?

RATIONALE Air pollution has been associated with changes in daily mortality. OBJECTIVES Generally, studies use Poisson regression, with complicated modeling strategies, to control for season and weather, raising concerns that the results may be sensitive to these modeling protocols. For studies of ozone, weather control is a particular problem because high ozone days are generally quite hot. METHODS The case-crossover approach converts this problem into a case-control study, where the control for each person is the same person on a day near in time, when he or she did not die. This method controls for season and individual risk factors by matching. One can also choose the control day to have the same temperature as the event day. MEASUREMENTS I have applied this approach to a study of more than 1 million deaths in 14 U.S. cities. MAIN RESULTS I found that, with matching on temperature, a 10-ppb increase in maximum hourly ozone concentrations was associated with a 0.23% (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01%, 0.44%) increase in the risk of dying. This finding was indistinguishable from the risk when only matching on season and controlling for temperature with regression splines (0.19%; 95% CI 03%, 0.35%). Control for suspended particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter of 10 mum or less (PM(10)) did not change this risk. However, the association was restricted to the warm months (0.37% increase; 95% CI 0.11%, 0.62%), with no effect in the cold months. CONCLUSIONS The association between ozone and mortality risk is unlikely to be caused by confounding by temperature.
ERMAO: An Enhanced Intradomain Traffic Engineering Approach in LISP-Capable Networks

LISP (Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol) is proposed to address the routing scalability problem of current Internet, and a mapping system is required to support the LISP EID-to-RLOC (Endpoint Identifier to Routing Locator) mapping services. In this paper we suggest ERMA (EID-to-RLOC Mapping Assignment) of local network could be tuned to specify the ingress points of inbound traffic, which is helpful for improving the network resource utilization in stub domains. One Mixed Integer Linear Programming model is proposed for ERMA-only optimization in the network with given link weights; another model is formulated for the joint optimization of ERMA and link weights. To make the joint optimization problem tractable, one local search algorithm, Optimized Stepsize Algorithm, is proposed. Our numerical results show that the maximum link utilization decreased by tuning ERMA in both cases.
Fractal structure in currency futures price dynamics

Financial economists always strive for better understanding of the market dynamics of financial prices and seek improvement in modeling them. Although there have been many studies devoted to analyze high frequency dynamics of financial prices, only recently have low frequency dynamics received attention. An issue of concern is the behavior of financial prices over long versus short horizons-whether the seemingly random movements in financial prices over short horizons contain detectable structures over long horizons. In this study a specific form of dynamics called “fractal” [Mandelbrot (1977a, b)] is explored. A time series having fractal structure is characterized by long-term dependence and nonperiodic cycles. Several studies have examined the cyclic long-term dependence property of financial prices, including stock prices [Aydogan and Booth
Updatable Key Management Scheme with Intrusion Tolerance for Unattended Wireless Sensor Network

An Unattended Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) collects the sensing data by using mobile sinks (MSs). It differs from the traditional multi-hop wireless sensor networks in which unbalanced traffic makes the sensors close to the base station deplete their power earlier than others. An UWSN can save the battery power and prolong the network lifetime. Unfortunately, MSs would be given too much privilege when acting as the collecting base station, which will cause security concern if compromised. Besides, UWSNs are usually deployed in unreachable and hostile environments, where sensors can be easily compromised. Thus, their security issues should be carefully addressed to deal with node compromise. In this paper, we present a novel key management scheme to secure UWSNs. We employ the Blundo symmetric polynomial mechanism to guard against the newly compromised nodes in a period while utilizing the periodic key updating based on the reverse hash chain to block the compromised nodes and revoke the compromised MSs if failing the authentication. We show that our scheme is robust against node compromised attacks and carry out comparison analysis on the intrusion-tolerance ratio, communication and computing overhead.
Pedagogical documentation and collaborative dialogue as tools of inquiry for pre-service teachers in early childhood education: An exploratory narrative

The purpose of this paper was to examine how pedagogical documentation and collaborative dialogue served as tools of inquiry for a group of undergraduate Early Childhood Education pre-service teachers at a Midwestern university. The research was a collaborative effort of several faculty members who formed a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning group. A reflective, inquiry approach to this research uncovered several potential themes. This article, specifically, examined the relationships that occurred with collaborative dialogue and pedagogical documentation and how it enabled the pre-service teachers to understand the learning processes more fully, the benefits to utilizing collaborative dialogue and pedagogical documentation, and the misconceptions that emerged.
Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) and harmonisation of nuclear liability law within the European Union

Recent events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants have demonstrated the importance of having strong and effective nuclear liability regimes in effect at the national and global levels to assure the availability of prompt and equitable compensation for nuclear damage in the event of a nuclear incident. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, the international community came together under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (OECD/NEA) to review the nuclear liability principles in the 1963 Vienna Convention 1 and the 1960 Paris Convention,2 consider enhancements to improve the effectiveness of those principles and develop the basis for establishing a worldwide liability regime to supplement and enhance those principles with a view to increasing the amount of compensation available for nuclear damage.3 After an extensive and thorough review of the then existing liability regimes and numerous proposals for improvements, the international community adopted the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC)to be the basis for a worldwide liability regime. With the recent ratification of the CSC by the United States, the CSC is poised to come into effect. Now is the time for the international community, and especially those countries that use and promote the use of nuclear power, to act to bring the CSC into effect. Such action will establish a global regime
Flow of funds and the impact of financial controls on bank portfolio behaviour: a study of India

This paper studies the flow of funds and portfolio behaviour of Indian banks from 1951 to 1994. In this period, financial controls such as variable reserve ratios were important constraints on bank behaviour, especially before liberalization took place in the early 1990s. We estimate a system of demand functions which uses as framework the Almost Ideal Demand System and which incorporates the reserve ratio regulations. Attention is paid to cointegration and to structural breaks. The estimated model provides coherent and plausible parameter estimates for prices and other variables. We find that a standard portfolio model can usefully be applied to the study of financial behaviour in a developing economy such as India, and some interesting policy implications can be drawn.
Assessing the Impact of Indonesian Social Safety Net Programmes on Household Welfare and Poverty Dynamics

In early 1998 the government of Indonesia established several social safety net programmes to help the poor and the newly poor cope with the impact of the impending economic crisis, covering food security, employment creation, education, health, and community empowerment. This article evaluates the impact of these programmes on household welfare and poverty, utilising a panel data set of over 10,000 households which were visited four times in a 14-month period. The impact of participation in the social safety net programmes on household consumption is found to be generally positive. However, only the subsidised rice programme appears to have significantly reduced the risk of poverty among participating households.Au début de l'année 1998, le gouvernement indonésien établit plusieurs programmes de protection sociale pour aider les pauvres et les nouveaux pauvres à faire face aux conséquences de la crise imminente, programmes qui couvrent la sécurité alimentaire, la création d'emplois, l'éducation, la santé et le renforcement des capacités communautaires. Cet article évalue l'impact de ces programmes sur le bien-étre des ménages et la pauvreté, a´ partir d'un panel de données couvrant plus de 10 000 foyers qui ont été visités à quatre reprises sur une période de 14 mois. La portée de ces programmes sociaux sur la consommation des ménages s'avère positive dans l'ensemble. Cependant, seul le programme de subvention du riz semble avoir réduit significativement le risque de pauvreté parmi les ménages participants.
[Risk stratified in the National Registry of Acute Coronary Syndromes at the IMSS].

OBJECTIVE to identify prognostic factors in the National Registry of Acute Coronary Syndromes. METHODS patients in medical care units with acute ischemic coronary syndrome (AICS) according to the criteria of the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology/European Society of Cardiology, considering the GRACE score (GS) were studied. RESULTS there were 2389 patients, 28.9 % women and 71.1 % men, mean age 63 ± 11.7 years; with AICS with ST-segment elevation (69.11 %) and 30.89 % with AICS without ST elevation. The average of GS was 168. A GS > 150 points in patients with AICS without ST elevation was associated with recurrent ischemia or angina (RR = 1.4, p = 0.05), left ventricular failure (RR = 3.1, p < 0.0001), stroke (RR = 2.9, p = 0.004) and arrhythmias (RR = 2.7, p < 0.0001). The patients with AICS with ST-segment elevation were associated with death (RR = 1.6, p = 0.01), reinfarction (RR = 1.7, p = 0.001), recurrent ischemia (RR = 1.2, p = 0.04), left ventricular failure (RR = 3.4, p < 0.001), stroke (RR = 3.9, p < 0.001) and arrhythmias (RR = 2.3, p < 0.001). Fibrinolytic therapy was used in 40.2 %. There was a negative correlation between GS and fibrinolytic therapy (r -0.04, p = 0.04). CONCLUSIONS the AICS with ST-segment elevation is more frequent and have a high GS.
THE BEHAVIORAL LIFE‐CYCLE HYPOTHESIS

Self-control, mental accounting, and framing are incorporated in a behavioral enrichment of the life-cycle theory of saving called the Behavioral Life-Cycle (BLC) hypothesis. The key assumption of the BLC theory is that households treat components of their wealth as nonfungible, even in the absence of credit rationing. Specifically, wealth is assumed to be divided into three mental accounts: current income, current assets, and future income. The temptation to spend is assumed to be greatest for current income and least for future income. Considerable empirical support for the BLC theory is presented, primarily drawn from published econometric studies.
Futures trading, spot market volatility, and market efficiency: The case of the Korean index futures markets

We examine the effect of the introduction of index futures trading in the Korean markets on spot price volatility and market efficiency of the underlying KOSPI 200 stocks, relative to the carefully matched non‐KOSPI 200 stocks. Employing both an event study approach and a matching‐sample approach for the market data during the period of January 1990–December 1998, we find that the introduction of KOSPI 200 index futures trading is associated with greater market efficiency but, at the same time, greater spot price volatility in the underlying stock market. We also find that KOSPI 200 stocks experience lower spot price volatility and higher trading efficiency than non‐KOSPI 200 stocks after the introduction of futures trading. The trading efficiency gap between the two groups of stocks, however, declines over time and vanishes following the addition of options trading. Overall, our results suggest that while futures trading in Korea increases spot price volatility and market efficiency, there exists volatility spillover to stocks against which futures are not traded. We provide several factors unique in the Korean markets including circuit breakers, sidercar system, restrictions on foreign ownership, and inactive program trading as potential factors to explain some of our puzzling evidence. We further consider the potential effect of changes in daily price limits utilized by the Korea Stock Exchange during the testing period on our empirical findings. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 24:1195–1228, 2004
The Effects of Total Quality Management on Corporate Performance: An Empirical Investigation

This article examines the impact of total quality management (TQM) on the performance of 108 firms that began TQM implementation between 1981 and 1991. The impact of TQM is measured by comparing each firm's performance to a control benchmark designed to capture what the performance would have been without TQM. The findings indicate that performance, measured by both accounting variables and stock returns, is improved for the firms adopting TQM. The improvement is consistently stronger for firms with more advanced TQM systems. The possibility that downsizing could explain the improvement is also examined. The data do not support this hypothesis. Copyright 1998 by University of Chicago Press.
Second Thoughts on the Exporter Productivity Premium (Second Regard Sur La Prime De Productivité Des Firmes Exportatrices) 

Contrary to the prevailing interpretation, this paper shows that the central models of trade with heterogeneous firms ( Melitz 2003 ; Bernard et al. 2003 ) exhibit ambiguous predictions for the exporter productivity premium. This prospect arises because of differences between theoretical and empirical representations of firm productivity. Instead of marginal productivity, we examine in both models the theoretical equivalent of empirically observable productivity (value-added per employee). Given the presence of fixed export costs or heterogeneous mark-ups and trade costs, the observable productivity of exporters in proximity to the export-indifferent firm turns out to be lower than that of non-exporters; that is, the productivity distributions overlap. The paper reviews empirical literature that reports non-positive exporter productivity premia in firm-level data and discusses implications for empirical research on exporter performance, including learning and the role of non-parametric regressions (stochastic dominance, quantile regressions), fixed costs, and productivity distributions.
Prevalence of Cryptosporidium infection among livestock and humans in contact with livestock in Hamadan district, Iran, 2012.

BACKGROUND Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite causes cryptosporidial diarrhea, which is typically a short-lasting benign infection, but can become severe and non-resolving in immunocompromised individuals. The aim of the present study was to determinate the prevalence of Cryptosporidium infection in livestock and humans that were in contact with livestock in Hamadan district, Iran. METHODS In this cross sectional study a total of 660 fecal specimens were collected; 228, 195 and 237 from humans, whom raising livestock, their calves and lambs/goats, respectively in spring 2012. Samples were concentrated by formalin-ether concentration technique and examined using cold modified Ziehl-Neelsen staining method. RESULTS Two (0.87%) out of 228, 25 (12.8%) out of 195 and 6 (2.5%) out of 237 fecal samples of humans, calves and lambs/goats were positive for Cryptosporidium oocysts, respectively. There was no significant relationship between the infection to Cryptosporidium and demographic variables of humans. However, Cryptosporidium infection rate was higher in diarrheic calves (OR=3.81; 95% CI: 1.30, 11.21; P=0.010). CONCLUSION Despite studies conducted in some regions of Iran that resulted in a relatively high rate of infection in humans in contact with livestock, our results showed low prevalence and low carrier status in the asymptomatic persons in Hamadan region. Because the infection in calves and lambs/goats was relatively high, these animals could be probable reservoir of infection for humans in this area.
Entrepreneurship, Knowledge, and Economic Growth

Knowledge plays a critical role in economic development, still our understanding of how knowledge is created, diffused and converted into growth, is fragmented and partial. The neoclassical growth models disregarded the entrepreneur and viewed knowledge as an exogenous factor. Contemporary current knowledge-based growth models have re-introduced the notion of the entrepreneur, however stripped of its most typical characteristics, and the diffusion of knowledge is kept exogenous. It implies that the predictions and policy conclusions derived from these models may be flawed. This paper reviews the literature that addresses the issues of knowledge creation, knowledge diffusion and growth, and the role attributed the entrepreneur in such dynamic processes. I will explore how these insights can be integrated into existing growth models and suggest a more thorough microeconomic foundations from which empirically testable hypotheses can be derived.
Private Ecotourism Operations in Manitoba, Canada

A questionnaire was administered to licensed private sector tourism site operators in Manitoba identified by an expert government official as offering at least some ecotourism component. Of these, 18 were deemed to accommodate a significant level of ecotourism activity, and were included in this paper. An analysis of the relevant questionnaires depicted a 'typical' operation as small-scale and located within a forested wilderness area, offering a diverse array of activities including both consumptive and non-consumptive pursuits to a mainly foreign and non-local Manitoban clientele. The sector appeared to be unorganised and diffuse, based on linkages, marketing strategies and the amount of ecotourism training, and it is recommended that an operator consortia and a formal ecotourism association should be established to facilitate the appropriate development of the industry in Manitoba.