Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Crowdsourced Earnings Expectations and the Salience of Sell-Side Forecast Bias

Crowdsourced earnings forecasts provide incremental information in measuring market earnings expectations and are less pessimistically biased compared to sell-side forecasts. Given these attributes, we examine whether crowdsourced earnings forecasts help investors adjust their responses to earnings news by increasing the salience of sell-side forecast bias. Using crowdsourced forecasts from Estimize, we first find that the market's response to earnings news is substantially attenuated in situations in which crowdsourced and sell-side forecasts lead to contrasting earnings surprise signals (i.e., firms meet or beat one forecast but miss the other). Next, we find that the market premium to meeting sell-side expectations is eliminated when firms miss crowdsourced expectations, and that investors anticipate and price the predictive value of differences between crowdsourced and sell-side forecasts before earnings announcements. Overall, we conclude that crowdsourced earnings forecasts can increase the salience of sell-side forecast bias and help investors unravel bias in earnings expectations.
Coalescence preference dynamics for droplet growth during single-component fluid phase separation

When two unequal sized droplets coalesce to form a final product drop, the product forms closer to the larger of its two parents—a phenomenon known as the coalescence-preference dynamics. In this paper, using the state-of-the-art molecular dynamics simulations, we study the time-dependent properties of coalescence preference for phase segregating single-component fluids, over a broad range of fluid density and temperature. Hydrodynamics is fully taken into account. Coalescence time is observed to be shorter for parents with larger size ratio. Our simulation data also points towards an interesting power-law dependence of the coalescence time on the droplet size ratio, which is universal for both droplets and microbubbles.
Differences in health expectancy indicators in Belgium by region

Objective: The purpose of the paper is to compare the health status of the population of the Flemish and the Walloon Region of Belgium using a set of health expectancy indicators: the Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE), the Disability Free Life Expectancy (DFLE) and the Mental Life Expectancy (MLE). Methods: The Sullivan method was used to calculate the health expectancies combining data of the 1997 health interview survey with the National Mortality Database. The information on subjective health (WHO-Europe instrument) and mental well-being (GHQ-12) was obtained through the self-administrated questionnaire. The instrument to measure disability (WHO-Europe instrument) was part of the face-to-face interview of the 1997 health interview survey. The variance on the differences in the health expectancies was estimated in order to make statistical inference. Results: Among men at age 25 year, the difference observed between the two regions is more than two years in life expectancy (LE Flem : 50.4 year -vs- LE Wall : 48.1 year) and in disability free life expectancy (DFLE Flem : 39.1 year -vs- DfLE Wall : 37.0 year). The differences are even greater, respectively 4.4 years and 5.3 years, for the mental life expectancy (MLE Flem : 38. 6 year -vs- MLE wall : 34.2 year) and for the healthy life expectancy (HLE Flem : 39.5 year -vs- HLE Wall : 34.2 year). In women at age 25 years the life expectancy and all 3 health expectancy indicators are greater in the Flemish region. The differences are respectively 1.1 years (LE Flem : 56. 1 year -vs- LE Wall : 55.0 year) and 3.8 years (DFLE Flem : 40.4 year -vs- DFLE wall : 36.6 year), 6.3 years (MLE Flem : 39.1 year -vs- MLE Wall : 32.8 year); HLE Flem : 39.8 year -vs- HLE Wall : 33.5 year). All these differences were statistically significant. Conclusions: Overall, compared to the Walloon region, people living in the Flemish region not only live longer but also tend to be healthier while doing so: they live more years in good perceived health, more years without functional limitations and more years in good mental well-being. Not only socio-economic differences but especially differences in life style (among others smoking, leisure time physical activity, nutritional habits) may be potential factors causing the described differences.
Opinion leaders' influence and innovations adoption between risk-averse and risk-taking farmers

This research aims to study innovations adoption behaviour of farmers, especially when the opinion leaders are present and the others, who follow these opinion leaders, have different attitudes to risk. An agent-based model was constructed to simulate opinion leaders' influence and farmers' subjective risk level change on the number of adopters. From the results, the intervention by opinion leaders appeared to increase the number of adopters who are risk-averse farmers, retained the number of adopters from declining in the case of risk-taking farmers, and caused few farmers to have less cumulative income at the end of the simulation. This paper provides an alternative approach to analysing the effectiveness of opinion leaders on accelerating the diffusion of innovations. When agricultural policy-makers plan to increase innovations adoption through opinion leaders' intervention, the policy-makers should pay attention to farmers' risk attitudes and their learning processes during the experimentation with the innovations.
Digital literacy and subjective happiness of low-income groups: Evidence from rural China

Improvements of the happiness of the rural population are an essential sign of the effectiveness of relative poverty governance. In the context of today’s digital economy, assessing the relationship between digital literacy and the subjective happiness of rural low-income groups is of great practicality. Based on data from China Family Panel Studies, the effect of digital literacy on the subjective well-being of rural low-income groups was empirically tested. A significant happiness effect of digital literacy on rural low-income groups was found. Digital literacy promotes the subjective happiness of rural low-income groups through income increase and consumption growth effects. The observed happiness effect is heterogeneous among different characteristic groups, and digital literacy significantly positively impacts the subjective happiness of rural low-income groups. Decomposition of subjective happiness into life satisfaction and job satisfaction shows that digital literacy significantly positively affects the job and life satisfaction of rural low-income groups. This paper demonstrates that digital literacy induces a practical happiness effect. To further strengthen the subjective welfare effect of digital literacy in the construction of digital villages, the government should focus on cultivating digital literacy among low-income groups from the demand side. The construction of digital infrastructure should be actively promoted from the supply side.
Unravelling the Frontiers of Urban Growth: Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Land-Use Change and Urban Expansion in Greater Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana

This study analyzed and assessed spatio-temporal dynamics of land-use change (LUC) and urban expansion (UE) within the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) of Ghana. This region serves as a case to illustrate how a major economic hub and political core area is experiencing massive spatial transformations, resulting in uneven geographies of urban land expansion. Quickbird/Worldview-2 images for the years 2008 and 2017 were segmented and classified to produce LUC maps. LUC and UE were analyzed by post-classification change detection and spatial metrics, respectively. The results revealed an intensive decrease in open-space by 83.46 km2, brushland/farmland (194.29 km2) and waterbody/wetland (3.32 km2). Conversely, forestland and urban built-up area increased by 3.45 km2 and 277.62 km2. Urban extent expanded from 411.45 km2 (27%) in 2008 to 689.07 km2 (46%) in 2017 at a rate of 5.9% and an intensity of 2.06% with an expansion coefficient of 1.5%, indicating low-density urban sprawl. The spatial pattern turned out to be an uneven and spatially differentiated outward expansion, which materialized mainly in districts located within the urban peripheries but intensely towards eastern and western directions, being the frontier and the hotspots of urbanization. Overall, the findings bear important implications for regional spatial planning and development.
RENAL FUNCTION IN PATIENTS UNDERGOING SURGERY

Reduced kidney function around the time of surgery is an important risk factor for postoperative mortality. Despite this there is limited information on how reduced kidney function prior to surgery alters prognosis, what causes sudden decrements in kidney function after surgery (known as acute kidney injury), or how they might be avoided. The studies in this thesis inform these knowledge gaps. Chapter 2 describes the results of a post hoc analysis of the interaction between preoperative estimated glomerular filtration rate, a marker of kidney function, and postoperative cardiac troponin T, a marker of heart damage, for predicting 30-day mortality in a prospective cohort study of patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. Chapter 3 uses administrative and clinical data from a single centre to inform the risk of acute kidney injury after noncardiac surgery by concentrations of preoperative hemoglobin and change in postoperative hemoglobin. Chapter 4 uses the same data to determine a definition of intraoperative hypotension that is prognostic of acute kidney injury, myocardial injury and death. Chapter 5 describes a randomized controlled trial that compares a novel therapeutic procedure called remote ischemic preconditioning to a sham procedure in patients undergoing cardiac surgery.
Content-Based Geolocation Prediction of Canadian Twitter Users and Their Tweets

Last decade witnessed the rise of online social networks, especially Twitter. Today, Twitter is a giant social platform with over 250 million users —who produce massive amounts of data everyday. This creates many research opportunities, specifically for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in which text is utilized to extract information that could be used in many applications. One problem NLP might help solving is geolocation inference or geolocation detection from online social networks. Detecting the location of Twitter users based on the text of their tweets is useful since not many users publicly declare their locations or geotag their tweets. Location information is crucial for a variety of applications such as event detection, disease and illness tracking and user profiling. These tasks are not trivial, because online content is often noisy; it includes misspellings, incomplete words or phrases, idiomatic expressions, abbreviations, acronyms, and Twitter-specific literature. In this work, we attempted to detect the location of Canadian users —and tweets sent from Canada —at metropolitan areas and province level; this was not done before, to the best of our knowledge. In order to do this, we collected two different datasets, and applied a variety of machine learning, including deep learning methods. Besides, we also attempted to geolocate users based on their social graph (i.e., user’s friends and followers) as a novel approach.
Case report: Optimized ruxolitinib-based therapy in an infant with familial hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis type 3

Familial hemop3hagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (FHL) is a rare and fatal autosomal recessive immune disorder characterized by uncontrolled activation of T and NK cells, macrophages, and overproduction of inflammatory cytokines. Early hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) is required for long-term survival. Current therapy is based on the HLH-94/2004 protocol, but is insufficient to fully control disease activity. This case report describes an infant with FHL type 3 who, despite initial therapy with dexamethasone and etoposide, showed aberrant cytokine levels, including interleukin-18 (IL-18), chemokine ligand 9 (CXCL9), soluble interleukin-2 receptor (sIL-2R), and soluble tumor necrosis factor receptor type II (sTNF-RII). The Janus kinase inhibitor ruxolitinib was therefore coadministered. The patient was treated with dose-adjusted ruxolitinib guided by cytokine profiles, and was successfully prepared for HCT. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and safety of dose-adjusted ruxolitinib as a bridging therapy for FHL, and the value of monitoring cytokine levels, especially IL-18, CXCL9, sIL-2R, and sTNF-RII, as disease-activity markers for FHL.
Independent Lives?: Community Care and Disabled People

Acknowledgements - Introduction - SECTION I - Community Care - Independent Living - Independent Living and the Debate on Informal Care - SECTION II - The Experience of Residential Care - Receiving Help within Personal Relationships - Disabled People as Care-Givers - Personal Assistance and Statutory Services - Paying for Personal Assistance - SECTION III - Community Care or Independent Living? - Conclusion - Bibliography - Index
The moderating effects of information overload and academic procrastination on the information avoidance behavior among Filipino undergraduate thesis writers

Information avoidance is a behavior that could either prevent or delay consumption of information. While information avoidance has been documented in various fields of interest, its overall dynamics in the context of library and information science remains a research blankspot. The overall intent of this paper is to develop a model that examines the moderating effect of information overload and academic procrastination on the information avoidance behavior among Filipino undergraduate thesis writers. Capitalizing on Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) design, a total of 215 Filipino undergraduate thesis writers participated in the study. A multi-aspect questionnaire was used to measure the following variables: information overload, academic procrastination and information avoidance. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Results show that when students have a positive attitude towards reading, the more likely they are to employ better reading strategies and the less likely they are to exhibit information avoidance. On the other hand, the more reading strategies are used, the lower is information avoidance. Additionally, the tendency to procrastinate has less effect on the relationship between reading strategies and information avoidance and the tendency to procrastinate and acquire excessive information has less effect on the relationship between reading attitudes and information avoidance. Implications for university settings are also discussed in this paper.
Recovery optimization of interdependent infrastructure: A multi-scale approach

This work was supported in part by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) through the Center for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning under Award No. 70NANB15H044 and by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No. 1638346. Opinions and findings presented are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.
Tissue specific age acceleration patterns in the sperm of oligozoospermic men

To determine if disease can modify aging patterns in an affected tissue without altering the aging patterns of other tissues, blood and semen of individuals with oligozoospermia (n = 10) were compared to the blood and semen of individuals with normozoospermia (n = 24). DNA methylation data was obtained via Illumina's 850 K array. The Horvath and Jenkins age calculators were then utilized to predict the epigenetic age of blood and sperm. Epigenetic age of sperm was approximated using germ-line age differential (GLAD) values. Using nonpaired t-tests, it was found that sperm of oligozoospermic men (mean GLAD score of 0.078) were predicted to be significantly older than the sperm of normozoospermic men (mean GLAD score of −0.017), returning a p-value of 0.03. However, there was not a significant epigenetic age difference between the blood of those with oligozoospermia (mean GLAD equivalent score of −0.027) and normozoospermia (mean GLAD equivalent score of 0.048), producing a p-value of 0.20. These results lead to the conclusion that tissue specific aging is occurring in sperm of oligozoospermic individuals but not in unaffected somatic tissues (in this case, blood).
EXTERNAL THREATS, INTERNAL CHALLENGES, AND STATE BUILDING IN EAST ASIA

Abstract This paper empirically tests bellicist theories of state building in the East Asian context, paying attention to the interplay between external threats and internal challenges and their implications for these states’ extractive power. How much variation in state building in the region can be attributed to war and war preparation as a result of both external threats and internal challenges? In particular, it provides more fine-grained analysis on the different types of internal challenges and their impact on state capacity building. The article argues that in the East Asia region, both external threats and internal challenges are crucial to explaining the variation in state capacity across the region. However, we also find that different types of internal challenges have different effects. Particularly, communist insurgencies seem to have both an immediate and long-term positive effect in compelling the state to respond with more extraction to engage in state-building efforts.
Low back pain and sickness absence among sedentary workers: the influence of lumbar sagittal movement characteristics and psychosocial factors

Introduction: Low back pain remains a burden for society, since it can lead to sickness absence and work disability. Physical occupational risk factors can contribute to the development of back pain, yet little is known about any risks in sedentary jobs posed by sitting. The influence of psychosocial factors on back pain and sickness absence amongst sedentary workers is also unclear. The aim of this study was to measure work activities, lumbar movement characteristics, symptoms and psychosocial factors in order to determine associations with low back pain and sickness absence. Methods: Phase 1: involved validation of a fibre-optic goniometer system that attaches to the lumbar spine and hip to continuously measure: (1) activities (sitting, standing, walking); and (2) lumbar movement characteristics (notably sitting postures and kinematics). New questionnaires were also validated to measure aspects of low back discomfort. Phase 2: consisted of a cross-sectional survey of call centre workers (n=600) to collect data on: demographics, clinical and occupational psychosocial factors, and symptoms. An experimental sample (n=140) wore the goniometer system during work. Phase 3: involved a 6-month follow-up survey to collect back pain and sickness absence data (n=367). Logistic regression was used to determine associations (P<0.05) between data. Results: Workers spent 83% of work-time sitting, 26% of which was spent adopting a lordotic lumbar posture. Current back pain (>24hrs: yes/no) was associated with a kyphotic sitting posture (time spent with a lumbar curve ≥180°) (R2 0.05), although future back pain was not. Using multivariable models: limited variety of lumbar movement whilst sitting was associated with future (persistent) LBP, dominating other variables (R2 0.11); yet high levels of reported back discomfort, physical aggravating factors and psychological demand at work were stronger predictors of sickness absence, and dominated other variables (R2 0.24). Interpretation: Workers do not follow the advice from employers to maintain a lumbar lordosis whilst sitting, as recommended by statutory bodies. Furthermore, sitting with a kyphotic posture did not increase the risk of back pain, although a relative lack of lumbar movement did. Thus, ergonomic advice encouraging lumbar movement-in-sitting appears to be justified. Predictors of sickness absence were multi-factorial, and consideration of work-relevant biomedical and psychosocial factors would be more useful than adopting more narrow screening approaches.
A Deep Learning Method for Lane Changing Situation Assessment and Decision Making

Compared with the lane keeping maneuvers, lane changing maneuvers are much more complicated. Inappropriate ones may result in traffic accidents. Therefore, it is necessary to develop vehicular social networks(VSNs) and advanced driver assistance systems(ADAS), which can help to evaluate the traffic situation and provide additional warnings for drivers’ unsafe lane changing operations. This paper proposes a deep learning model to simulate the situation assessment and decision making process during lane changing events. Compared with the existing assessment models, our model has two significant advantages. First, except for the instantaneous states of the subject and the surrounding vehicles, the proposed model also takes drivers’ historical experience and the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) memory effect into consideration for the final lane changing maneuvers situation assessment. Second, our new assessment model is built based on Deep Neural Networks(DNNs), which is proved to outperform conventional machine learning classifiers. The empirical trajectory dataset NGSIM is used for evaluating the performance of the proposed model. Experiment results indicate that our model achieves high identification accuracy of both lane changing maneuvers and lane keeping maneuvers. It is verified to be an effective driverless technology in assisting vehicle warning systems.
A new approach to Color Edge Detection

Most edge detection algorithms deal only with grayscale images, and the way of adapting them to use with RGB images is an open problem. In this work, we explore different ways of aggregating the color information of a RGB image for edges extraction, and this is made by means of well-known edge detection algorithms. In this research, it is been used the set of images from Berkeley. In order to evaluate the algorithm’s performance, F measure is computed. The way that color information -the different channelsis aggregated is proved to be relevant for the edge detection task. Moreover, post-aggregation of channels performed significatively better than the classic approach (pre-aggregation of channels).
MASJID SEBAGAI PUSAT PERLAWANAN TERHADAP KOLONIALISME BELANDA (STUDI KASUS: MASJID KERAMAT PULAU TENGAH KERINCI)

Semenjak kedatangan Islam ke Kerinci, masjid sudah memiliki posisi penting, ia tidak hanya sebagai tempat ibadah saja, melainkan mempunyai multifungsi yang digunakan oleh para ulama dan umat Islam di Kerinci. Pada Awal Abad ke-20 merupakan puncak dari Kolonialisme Belanda di Indonesia, hampir disetiap penjuru wilayah Indonesia dijajah oleh Belanda termasuk wilayah Kerinci, untuk merespon kedatangan Belanda tersebut, ulama dan masyarakat Kerinci di sekitar Pulau Tengah menjadikan Masjid Keramat sebagai pusat perlawanan. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah library research dengan pendekatan metode penelitian sejarah, dengan ditemukan bahwa Masjid Keramat adalah pranata terpenting bagi masyarakat Kerinci, sehingga Masjid Keramat dijadikan pusat perlawanan yang berupa: tempat musyawarah, benteng pertahanan, tempat pembekalan para lasykar dan pembekalan ilmu agama.