Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
8.7 ANALYZING AND UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE VARIABILITY IN THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS

Study of the interannual variability of Caribbean climate has been conducted extensively since the late 1900s. Hastenrath (1976) investigated anomalous characteristics of the general circulation in the tropical Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans that were associated with precipitation in Central America and the Caribbean. He proposed that the equatorial Pacific was warm during a deficient mean rainy season in the region, but cold in the winter preceding it. Enfield (1996) confirms this relationship for a mean rainfall season, bolstering the idea of tropical Pacific modulation of Caribbean rainfall. Enfield and Mayer (1997) investigated the spatial and seasonal nature of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) connection with the tropical Atlantic, and deduced that Pacific ENSO is strongly correlated with boreal spring SST anomalies in the tropical North Atlantic (TNA) along 10o-20oN and just north of ITCZ. They showed that winter equatorial Pacific warmings preceded those of the TNA by four to five months. Chen et al. (1997) and Giannini et al (2000) point out a relationship between the increased spring TNA SSTs and heightened early season (May-July) rainfall amounts throughout the Caribbean and Central American region, implying that the tropical Atlantic is also a significant influence on Caribbean rainfall. It is therefore not surprising that Chen et al. (2001) found a relation between the leading PCA mode of May-June-July (MJJ) precipitation and both the wintertime Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) and concurrent Caribbean SSTA south of 20oN. A similar link between Caribbean rainfall and SST anomalies in both oceanic basins was also observed by Enfield and Alfaro (1999). Our investigation seeks to identify the dominant modes of Caribbean precipitation variability on an interannual timescale that are related to SST anomalies in both the tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The aim then is to confirm some of the relationships found above. As opposed to the above papers however, we divide the year into two-month periods prior to conducting our analysis, in an attempt to also investigate how the strength of the SSTprecipitation associations changes as the year evolves. Section 2 describes the datasets and the methodologies used. Some results and conclusions follow in sections 3 and 4 respectively.
Influence of mulching on growth and yield of potato ( Solanum tuberosum L . ) in South West Punjab

A field experiment was conducted at Research Farm, Guru Kashi University during rabi 2017-2018, to evaluate the effect of mulching on growth and yield of potato. The experiment was conducted in randomized complete block design with five treatments of mulching i.e. mulching with white polythene sheet (T1), mulching with black polythene sheet (T2), mulching with perforated black polythene sheet (T3), mulching with grasses (T4) and control no mulching (T5), replicated with four times. Mulching had positive effect on the growth and yield of potato. Mulching with white polythene sheet recorded significantly higher emergence (%) and plant height than other treatments. Similarly, no. of leaves plant-1 in all treatments where mulching was applied, were found significantly higher than control. Mulching significantly increase tuber yield in potato. Mulching with white plastic sheet treatment resulted in 42.1% higher tuber yield than control.
Traffic noise and its impact on sleep depth measured by the odds ratio product

Traffic noise can lead to cortical and autonomic activation, disrupt sleep and impair physical and mental restoration. We used the odds ratio product (ORP), a validated continuous measure of sleep depth based on automatic analysis of physiologic sleep data in 3-second epochs, to investigate temporal changes of sleep in response to nocturnal noise events. Seventy-two healthy participants slept for 10 nights in a laboratory, during which we measured sleep with polysomnography. In 8 nights, participants were exposed to 40, 80 or 120 road, rail and/or aircraft noise events at 45-65 dB LAS,max. Event-related change of ORP relative to pre-event baseline was analysed with linear mixed models. ORP increased during aircraft, road and rail noise, reflecting reduced sleep depth and quality, and there was a greater response to road and rail noise than to aircraft noise. The clinical relevance of event-related elevations of ORP is currently unknown, and warrants further investigation.
Empirical Likelihood Estimators for Stochastic Discount Factors March

Hansen and Jagannathan (HJ, 1991) provided bounds on the volatility of Stochastic Discount Factors (SDF) that proved extremely useful to diagnose and test asset pricing models. This nonparametric bound reflects a duality between the meanstandard deviation frontier for SDFs and the mean-variance frontier for portfolios of asset returns. We extend this fundamental contribution by proposing information bounds that minimize general convex functions of SDFs directly taking into account higher moments of returns. These Minimum Discrepancy bounds reflect a duality with finding the optimal portfolio of asset returns with a general HARA utility function. The maximum utility portfolio implies SDF estimators that are based on implied probabilities associated with the class of Generalized Empirical Likelihood estimators. We analyze the implications of these information bounds for the pricing of size portfolios and the performance evaluation of hedge funds.
Measuring Systemic Risk and Identifying SIFIs in Chinese Financial Sector ∗ Preliminary Version XiangpengChen †

Chinese regulators pay very close attention to the systemic risk of the financial sector after entering into the tough development phase of “the New Normal”. During the period of stock market “abnormal fluctuation” last year, systemic risk even became an overarching problem for Chinese central government. To monitor the systemic risk in Chinese market, we construct quite a few measures at the macro and micro levels. On the macro level, we find that, both CATFIN (tail risk measure) and DCI (comovement index) have strong predictive power for future economic downside in China, the former one effectively forecast the macroeconomic downside (indexed by Macro-economic Climate Index, MCI) from one month up to twelve months, and the latter one plays a complementary role in predicting MCI from twelve months to twenty months. On the micro level, we employ several widely used measures in a unified framework to measure the systemic contribution of individual firms and identify the first two groups of systemically important institutions, moreover, we show that it is reasonable for Chinese regulators to bring the top 20 firms which are ranked by the relative systemic measures into the Systemic risk regulatory system because there is a big gap between the top 20 firms and the 21th one. Keyword: Systemic risk in China, CATFIN, DCI, MES, SES, CES, SRISK, CoVaR,Tail Risk. ∗This is the preliminary version and quite a few empirical results are not represented here as a matter of time †Phd Candidate at Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance ‡Unigroup Chair Professor at Tsinghua University PBC School of Finance. Phone: +86-10-62790655
NUTRITIONAL VALUE OF MARANDÚ PALISADE GRASS ACCORDING TO INCREASING COEXISTENCE PERIODS WITH WEEDS Valor Nutricional de Braquiarão em Função de Períodos Crescentes de Convivência com

ABSTRACT This research aimed at evaluating the effect of increasing coexistence periods with weeds on the nutritional components of the forage grass Brachiaria brizantha cv. Marandú under pasture renewal conditions. The experiment was arranged in randomized blocks with four replications, and treatments were represented by eight coexistence periods, namely: 0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90 and 120 days after seedling emergence. A phytosociologic evaluation was performed on the weed community at the end of the coexistence periods; later, weeds were eliminated by an herbicide formulated with aminopyralid+2,4-D (40+320 g L-1) at 2.5 L ha-1, applied in post-emergence. The fodder plants were evaluated at the end of the experimental period as for leaf-stem ratio, volumetric density of green leaf, volumetric density of total dry matter and main nutritional components, including: crude protein, neutral detergent fiber, ether extract, organic matter and mineral matter, and from this, the total carbohydrate content was calculated. The presence of weeds altered the pasture structure, since it affected negatively the leaf/stem ratio and the volumetric leaf density of B. brizantha. The coexistence also reduced the nutritional components of B. brizantha and determined that control measures should be adopted before reaching 30 days of coexistence between fodder plants and weeds.
Walk the Talk: Creating a Collaborative Culture in an Activity-Based Workplace

Creating organisational change by moving in to new premises has recently gained increased interest and attention. Business driven and process oriented relocation strategies – continuing after the relocation – enable organisations to re-design both space, current business practices and corporate cultures. The question, however, is whether such projects succeed in the end of the day. This paper explores how the process of moving in to a new workplace concept strategically may be used to change an organisation’s collaboration culture. This is studied from the perspective of cultural artefacts, change management as well as physical and structural change. The discussion builds on semi-structured interviews with 65 employees from a Norwegian organisation. The findings indicate that the physical change, supported by process activities and change management actions, paved way for a cultural change towards more collaboration amongst employees as well as increased collaboration across hierarchical levels. However, misalignment in some areas between the new concept and existing cultural assumptions, values and norms, also restricted the organisation in fully achieving the intended ends. Therefore, the study highlights challenges and issues to overcome in order to use facilities as a tool for strategic change. The findings further underline the importance of creating a continuous change process, extending beyond the moving process itself.
Creating Information-maximizing Natural Language Messages Through Image Captioning-Retrieval

In this work, we propose the Image Captioning-Retrieval (ICR) problem that states the objective of language generation as information exchange. To solve the ICR problem, we design and implement an end-to-end neural network architecture that describes the content of images in natural language, and retrieves them solely based on these generated descriptions. The main goal is to be able to generate information-maximizing natural language messages. We experimentally show a strong increase in message information content while losing some grammatical correctness in the generated descriptions in a semi-supervised setting where caption generation is trained towards retrieval quality.
Genetic Diversity of the Karayaka Sheep Breed in Samsun, Turkey

DOI: 10.21276/sb.2017. 3.12. 8 Abstract: The Karayaka sheep is the most populous sheep breed in the Black Sea region of Turkey and a significant portion of the breed (30-35%) has been raised for centuries in Samsun province. For this reason, we aimed to investigate the genetic diversity of Karayaka sheep raised in Samsun, Turkey. The blood samples used in this study were collected from unrelated animals and were analysed using nine microsatellite markers. A total of 72 alleles were determined with an average of eight alleles per locus. The highest number of alleles (12) was observed for locus BM1314, while the lowest (4) was observed for locus CSSM47. The expected heterozygosity value (He) ranged from 0.654 at locus BM757 to 0.867 at locus BM1314, with an average of 0.757, whereas the observed heterozygosity (Ho) ranged from 0.125 at locus CSSM47 to 0.438 at locus BM757 and HUJ616, with an average of 0.329. The Wright’s fixation index (FIS) values ranged from 0.360 at locus BM757 to 0.833 at locus OARFCB304, with an average of 0.572. The results obtained from this study showed that Karayaka sheep population has a high level of genetic diversity and the studied markers were highly informative.
Corporate Governance and the Voluntary Disclosure of Intellectual Capital in a Period of Financial Crisis: Case of Selected Listed Companies in Zimbabwe

: This research paper focused on corporate governance and voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital in a period of financial crisis. It explores the cross- sectional effect of the industry, company size, gearing, listing status and corporate governance mechanisms on the extent of voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital reporting in 64 companies listed at the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange for the period from 2017-2018. The aim was to determine the extent of IC reporting in corporate reports in the context of Zimbabwe in a period of financial crisis and assess if there is a relationship between capital employed, company turnover, multiple listing, gearing, profit before taxation, proportion of non-executive directors and the extent of intellectual capital reporting in corporate reports. The extent of intellectual capital reporting was measured by a disclosure index based on the intellectual capital attributes included in the narratives and illustrations of the annual reports. The results indicate that voluntary disclosure mainly occurs within the confines of Relational Capital attributes. Company turnover, multiple listing, gearing and committee financial expertise are relevant factors in explaining the differences in reporting behavior amongst Zimbabwean companies. This was based on the prediction that the agency costs can be reduced through the voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital which may also mean that the benefits of signaling outweighs the competitive costs that are prevalent in some industries.This research study also involves panel regression analysis with Random and Fixed effect for the years 2016 to 2018 and the empirical findings on the relationship between capital employed, company turnover, multiple listing, gearing, profit before taxation, proportion of non-executive directors and the extent of intellectual capital reporting in corporate reports of Zimbabwe Stock.VDIC is significantly and positively contributing towards the success of the firms under study for about 0.39% in the case of common effect model and 0.13% both in the cases of RE and FE
Adaptability Performances of Some Bread Wheat ( Triticum aestivum L . ) Genotypes in The Eastern Region of Turkey

With the trials conducted in two locations and over two years, the adaptation and stability statistics of 20 bread wheat genotypes were estimated for yield performances. Regression coefficient, mean squares of deviation from regression and determination coefficients were estimated. All the genotypes were found stable for their traits of plant densitity and days to heading. There were differences in stability performances among the genotypes for the traits of plant height, grain numbers spike, grain weight spike, 1000 kernels weight and grain yield. The unstability for plant height and grain weight spike among the genotypes were originated from the mean squares of deviation from regression; for the other traits it was resulted from not only the mean squares of deviation from regression but also from the differences among regression coefficients of genotypes.
The Dynamics of Inter-Firm Skill Transmission among Kenyan Microenterprises ∗

We provide empirical evidence in favor of inter-firm productivity transmission using a randomized controlled trial with Kenyan microenterprises. We do so by randomly matching young firms owners with older, successful local firms and use a seven-round survey over the course of a year to study the dynamic response of matched firms. Profit is on average 20 percent higher among treated firms than in the control, though the effect fades as matches dissolve. These young firms are 40 percent more likely to switch suppliers and spend 16 percent more on inventory, highlighting the importance cost and supplier information. We exploit our selection procedure with a regression discontinuity design to show that none of these benefits extend to the more successful firm in the match, consistent with models of diffusion. To compare our results, we also include a second treatment arm in which firms are given access to a free business training program. Training generates changes in business practices covered in the classes but no change in profit, consistent with previous work. ∗Thanks to conference and seminar participants at Arizona State, Notre Dame, York University, Development Day (Michigan) and the M&M Development Workshop at the Chicago Fed for comments and insights, especially Nick Bloom, Paco Buera, Joe Kaboski, and Ezra Oberfield. We thank the Ford Family Program and the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies for financial support, including Bob Dowd and Dennis Haraszko for their help coordinating the project, and Lawrence Itela, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, and Maurice Sikenyi for their excellent work managing the project in Dandora. Contact Info: 434 Flanner Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556. Brooks: wbrooks@nd.edu; Donovan: kdonova6@nd.edu; Johnson: tjohns20@nd.edu
Influence of cutting wedge treatment on cutting power, machined surface quality, and cutting edge wear when plane milling oak wood

The cutting power value, the surface quality of the machined surfaces, and the cutting edge wear were determined in the planar milling of oak wood (Quercus robur L.). The experimental tool was a milling head with two interchangeable blades. The basic material of the three milling cutters was HS 18-0-2-5 high-speed steel (ISO 4957 2018). Two milling blades were treated with different coatings: a multilayer AlTiCrN coating of thickness 1 μm to 4 μm (knife B) and a multilayer MoC coating of thickness 1 μm (knife C). Parameters for the experiment were as follows: tool angular geometry: α = 30°, β = 45°, γ = 15°, and δ = 75°; spindle speed: 3000 min-1, 4000 min-1, and 5000 min-1; feed rate: 6 m/min, 8 m/min, 10 m/min, 12 m/min, and 14 m/min; cutting depth: 1 mm and 2 mm. The results showed that the cutting power for face milling increased with milling length for all three blades. The greatest power was measured at milling using the knife C (mean value of 209.3 W). The wedge wear parameter WBW increased with milling length; knife C reached the greatest value (WBW = 54.0 μm at length of 270 m). The surface quality parameter (Ra) of the machined surfaces was almost unchanged with increasing milling length beyond 90 m for all knives.
Semantic coherence and speech production in adverse listening conditions

According to the Framework for Understanding Effortful Listening (FUEL), multiple factors determine listening effort, including bottom-up factors such as the quality of the speech signal and top-down factors such as knowledge. Listening effort can be understood as the cognitive resources deliberately applied to a listening task. Poor sound quality may make a listening task more difficult to perform, consuming more cognitive resources and making it more effortful. Knowledge, on the other hand, may make the task easier to perform and reduce effort. Both of these factors may affect the ability to hear an interlocutor correctly and also the ability to make an appropriate response. We investigated this as follows: Twenty young adults listened to prerecorded spoken sentences with semantic coherence that was high e.g. “Her daughter was too young for the disco” or low. “Her hockey was too tight for the cotton”. Then, they either repeated the sentences or recast them as questions, e.g. “Was her daughter too young for the disco? ”. The repeat and recast tasks were presented in two separate blocks each comprising equal numbers of sentences with high and low coherence. Sound quality was either clear or degraded (6-band noise-vocoding). Results showed that high semantic coherence was more beneficial during the more cognitively demanding recast task, and when speech was degraded. Better cognitive abilities were associated with the ability to make use of semantic coherence when speech was degraded, as well the ability to cope with speech degradation when semantic coherence was low. This pattern of results extends the FUEL by suggesting that semantic coherence alleviates listening effort at both perceptual and cognitive levels and is in line with the ELU model by showing that cognitive skill is important under challenging listening conditions.
O C ] 9 O ct 2 01 9 Robust Convergence Analysis of Three-Operator Splitting

Operator splitting methods solve composite optimization problems by breaking them into smaller sub-problems that can be solved sequentially or in parallel. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for certifying both linear and sublinear convergence rates for three-operator splitting (TOS) method under a variety of assumptions about the objective function. By viewing the algorithm as a dynamical system with feedback uncertainty (the oracle model), we leverage robust control theory to analyze the worst-case performance of the algorithm using matrix inequalities. We then show how these matrix inequalities can be used to guide the search for selecting the parameters of the algorithm (both symbolically and numerically) for optimal worst-case performance. Our framework yields tighter bounds relative to competing bounds in the literature. We illustrate our results numerically by solving an input-constrained optimal control problem.
Arterial hypertension in adrenal incidentalomas

1Department of Endocrinology, Medical Centre of Postgraduate Education, Warsaw Head of Department: prof. Wojciech Zgliczyński, MD, PhD 2Department of General, Vascular and Transplant Surgery, Warsaw Medical University Head of Department: prof. Jacek Szmidt, MD, PhD 3Department of Oncological Surgery, M. Skłodowskiej-Curie Memorial Center of Oncology, Warsaw Head of Department: dr Andrzej Cichocki, MD, PhD
Tax Competition and Employment

We examine how exposure to international tax competition affects domestic firms’ employment. Consistent with prior work, we find evidence that reductions in foreign tax rates affect the domestic competitive environment via increases in import competition and investment in foreign-owned subsidiaries. We posit that these changes in the domestic competitive environment can cause managers to reduce their firms’ employment levels. Consistent with our expectation, we find that relative decreases in foreign tax rates negatively affect total labor compensation at domestic firms ex ante exposed to import competition and competition from foreign-owned peers. The effect of exposure to tax competition is greater for firms more exposed to product-market competition and those that are less able to expand investment without also increasing employment levels. Taken together, our results suggest that foreign tax rate changes can affect managers’ domestic employment decisions by changing the domestic competitive environment. JEL Classifications: E24; F14; F16; H23; H35.