Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating CCTV : Lessons from a Surveillance Culture Paper Prepared for the Final Conference of the European Forum for Urban Safety : Citizens , Cities and Video-Surveillance Programme and for the EFUS CCTV Charter launched in Rotterdam

The deployment of CCTV surveillance in the UK provides an invaluable learning opportunity for other societies. Even this claim might be a too controversial starting point for some, for as Gras (2004) has argued, while the UK may have led Europe in terms of the scale of its CCTV investment, other commentators are not so convinced that the UK’s mechanisms of legal and political oversight have kept pace or that the UK model is one to be followed anyway (Riches, 2006). Over two decades the UK government has been a world leader in CCTV investment. In the bold words of the UK Home Office ‘In many ways, we have led the world from its early introduction in the 1970s to the massive growth in CCTV installation and use in the 1990s’ (Home Office/ACPO, 2007). During the latter half of the 1990s almost four-fifths of the entire Home Office crime prevention budget was spent on CCTV (Armitage, 2002; Goold, 2004: 40). Furthermore, between 1999 and 2003 alone, a total of £170 million CCTV funding was made available to local authorities following a competitive bidding process. This led to over 680 CCTV schemes being installed in town centres and other public spaces (Home Office/ACPO, 2007: 7).
Effective equidistribution of translates of maximal horospherical measures in the space of lattices

Recently Mohammadi and Salehi-Golsefidy gave necessary and sufficient conditions under which certain translates of homogeneous measures converge, and they determined the limiting measures in the cases of convergence. The class of measures they considered includes the maximal horospherical measures. In this paper we prove the corresponding effective equidistribution results in the space of unimodular lattices. We also prove the corresponding results for probability measures with absolutely continuous densities in rank two and three. Then we address the problem of determining the error terms in two counting problems also considered by Mohammadi and Salehi-Golsefidy. In the first problem, we determine an error term for counting the number of lifts of a closed horosphere from an irreducible, finite-volume quotient of the space of positive definite $n\times n$ matrices of determinant one that intersect a ball with large radius. In the second problem, we determine a logarithmic error term for the Manin conjecture of a flag variety over $\mathbb{Q}$.
A Policy Decoupled from Practice: Children’s Participation in Swedish Social Assistance

In many countries, there are calls for children to be allowed to participate in social work decision-making. This article analyses child participation vis-à-vis social assistance (SA), which is a municipal cash benefit representing the last safety net. In Sweden, SA is part of the professional field of social work and national policy recommends that children are consulted. The aim is to analyse local policies and practices regarding child participation, and the data are based on case studies in six social service offices. Unlike most participation studies, children’s participation is conceived as an institutional pressure and the concept of decoupling is used to examine how local authorities relate to participation. The findings show that in local policies there is a general openness towards participation, but in practice no efforts are being made to promote participation. The absence of participation is analysed as deriving from organisational barriers (practices are adult-centred and child welfare units are seen as responsible for participation) and the scepticism of social workers (participation is an infringement on parental obligations and children should be protected from involvement in financial issues). The article ends with a discussion on the decoupling and adequacy of children’s participation in settings comparable with Swedish SA.
Periodic points of post-critically algebraic holomorphic endomorphisms

Abstract A holomorphic endomorphism of ${{\mathbb {CP}}}^n$ is post-critically algebraic if its critical hypersurfaces are periodic or preperiodic. This notion generalizes the notion of post-critically finite rational maps in dimension one. We will study the eigenvalues of the differential of such a map along a periodic cycle. When $n=1$ , a well-known fact is that the eigenvalue along a periodic cycle of a post-critically finite rational map is either superattracting or repelling. We prove that, when $n=2$ , the eigenvalues are still either superattracting or repelling. This is an improvement of a result by Mattias Jonsson [Some properties of 2-critically finite holomorphic maps of P2. Ergod. Th. & Dynam. Sys. 18(1) (1998), 171–187]. When $n\geq 2$ and the cycle is outside the post-critical set, we prove that the eigenvalues are repelling. This result improves one obtained by Fornæss and Sibony [Complex dynamics in higher dimension. II. Modern Methods in Complex Analysis (Princeton, NJ, 1992) (Annals of Mathematics Studies, 137). Ed. T. Bloom, D. W. Catlin, J. P. D’Angelo and Y. -T. Siu, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 135–182] under a hyperbolicity assumption on the complement of the post-critical set.
Peer Discrimination in the Classroom and Academic Achievement

ABSTRACT Perceived peer discrimination in the classroom reduces school performance. Considering the context of rural migrants in urban China, we find that migrant students’ test scores are lower when local classmates report more antimigrant discrimination. Our empirical strategy relies on isolating exogenous variation in locals’ discriminatory attitudes toward rural migrants across randomly assigned classrooms in the same school. We use whether locals had migrant friends outside school in their first year of middle school to instrument for discrimination in the classroom. The negative effects of perceived discrimination are largest for migrant students with less-educated parents, lower ability, and lower self-confidence.
Rural Cooling Needs Assessment towards Designing Community Cooling Hubs: Case Studies from Maharashtra, India

In a rapidly warming world, sustainable cooling is directly related to the protection of fresh and nutritious food, medicines, and the population from extreme heat for work conditions, the economic productivity of the working population, and income generation. This study aimed to understand how rural communities are meeting their nutrition, livelihood, health, living space, and mobility requirements regarding the role of cooling. We selected three villages as case studies in Maharashtra, India and conducted household surveys, in-depth interviews of key informants, focus group discussions (FGDs), and social mapping building typology study. The objective was to assess the rural community cooling to propose a community cooling hub (CCH) framework that could be economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable for the three villages. Our study showed that agriculture, dairy, buildings (domestic and commercial), and healthcare require cooling intervention in the studied communities. Based on the needs assessment for cooling, we proposed a CCH framework to provide cooling solutions in an integrated system for rural contexts.
Biological opportunities for personalized radiotherapy of nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is highly sensitive to ionizing radiation, and radiotherapy is the mainstay treatment modality for nonmetastatic disease. The advancement of radiation techniques has given radiotherapy the capability to deliver accurate radiation dose based on anatomical and geometrical information, which provides improved tumor target coverage with significantly better sparing of normal tissues, consequently leads to substantial improvement of locoregional tumor control and decreased radiation-induced toxicities. In the era of precision medicine, biology-driven personalized radiotherapy would be a promising approach to further widening of the therapeutic window of radiotherapy. In NPC, personalized radiotherapy is actually an under-researched area; however, the increasing number of basic and translational researches of radioresistance have provided opportunities for the development of novel biologydriven strategies for personalized radiotherapy of NPC. Different from previous reviews that detailed the mechanisms of radioresistance, current work placed emphasis on the clinical implications of these studies. Based on current preclinical experiments and pilot clinical studies, potential personalized strategies will include developing radiosensitizers targeting the mechanisms of radioresistance of NPC, biomarker-driven stratification for use of the radiosensitizers and radiation dose escalation or de-escalation, and personalized hypoxic dose painting intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) guided by hypoxia imaging. In the future, these personalized strategies should be verified in well-designed preclinical studies and prospective clinical trials for parallel investigation of biological mechanisms and patient outcomes.
Stock Price Reactions to Publications of Financial Statements: Evidence from the Moscow Stock Exchange

Journal of Corporate Finance Research, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 19-36 (2021) For citation: Njoroge, P., Baumann, M. , Baumann, M. и Shevchenko, D. (2021) «Stock Price Reactions to Publications of Financial Statements: Evidence from the Moscow Stock Exchange», Journal of Corporate Finance Research / Корпоративные Финансы | ISSN: 2073-0438, 15(1), сс. 19-36. doi: 10.17323/j.jcfr. 2073-0438.15. 1.2021. 19-36. Received 15 January 2021 | Peer-reviewed 13 February 2021 | Accepted 20 February 2021
The Relationship of BIST Sector Indices with Exchange Rate Volatility

Through globalization, the increased integration in financial markets has made the relationship between exchange rate and stocks important. The study aims to model the exchange rate volatility using daily data for the period 04.01. 2010-15.10. 2020 and investigate the causality relationship between sector returns and exchange rate return volatility. In order to model the volatility of the exchange rate return series, the GARCH model was used to reveal the possible asymmetry feature in the series. As a result of the model applications, GARCH (2,2) was determined as the most suitable model to measure volatility modelling. Then, the Granger causality test was used to see whether there is a relationship between BIST sector return indices and exchange rate return volatility. As a result of the study, one notes that there is a unidirectional causality from the exchange rate return volatility series to the service, technology, and industrial sector indices. There is a bidirectional causality relationship between the financial sector index and the exchange rate return volatility series. It is noteworthy that the causality relationship between the BIST100 index and the exchange rate is towards the volatility of the exchange rate return series from the BIST 100 index, unlike the sector indices. According to this result, it is seen that the changes in the dollar exchange rate affect the decisions of the investors who will invest in the relevant index. The results show that in the case of Turkey, mostly traditional theories are valid.
Livelihoods Effects of Zero Tillage among Small and Medium Holder Farmers in the Developing World

The biophysical benefits of conservation agriculture (CA) are well documented in the literature. However, the literature on the economic benefits of CA, especially in the context of small and medium-scale farmers is scanty. Using a case study of 621 Syrian wheat farmers and applying the propensity score matching and endogenous switching regression methods, this paper provides empirical evidence on the impacts of conservation tillage (CT) on farm income and wheat consumption. Model results show that after controlling for all confounding factors, adoption of the CT technology leads to US$187/ha (34%) increase in net crop income and 26.4 kg (52%) gain in per capita wheat consumption per year (adult equivalent) which represent a meaningful change in the livelihoods of small and medium-scale farmers in Syria. Besides the biophysical and environmental benefits documented elsewhere, our results suggest that CT can also be justified on economic and food security grounds. Therefore, CT can have sizeable impacts in transforming the agricultural sector in the developing world provided that the technology is well promoted and adopted.
The interdependence of ancestors and their descendants

ABSTRACT Ancestor worship, the communicated acceptance of the claim that dead ancestors influence and/or are influenced by their living descendants, has been documented in societies all over the world. Despite some researchers’ claims that ancestor worship was once universal, there have been relatively few attempts to explain how and why this behavior became so prominent in unrelated and geographically separated societies. A notable exception is the descendant-leaving strategy model that claims ancestor worship is a traditional strategy that had the effect of influencing the behavior of multiple generations of descendants of a common ancestor. This model describes the function of ancestor worship as promoting altruism and cooperation among descendants, even those who are only distantly related. Here we reframe the descendant-leaving strategy theory of ancestor worship in terms of fitness interdependence. In other words, ancestor worship is a descendant-leaving strategy that can explain interesting patterns of fitness interdependence, namely, ancestor-descendant and intergenerational cooperation, which led to the persistence of ancestor worship.
Impact of a Stochastic Nonorographic Gravity Wave Parameterization on the Stratospheric Dynamics of a General Circulation Model

The general circulation of the middle atmosphere, particularly of the mesosphere, is strongly dependent on the forcing arising from gravity wave processes. Their sources in the troposphere are both orographic and nonorographic, the latter being strongly intermittent. In climate models, the effects of gravity waves need to be parameterized, often assuming that their properties are constant. In this work we focus on the changes of the middle atmosphere due to the introduction of intermittency in a parameterization of nonorographic gravity waves, using a stochastic version of the Hines scheme. The stochastic approach is tailored to the diagnosed sensitivity of the model to this forcing, and peculiar changes emerge even if a relatively small amount of intermittency is prescribed. We analyze in detail the changes of the stratospheric dynamics in the tropical region and the global circulation of the middle atmosphere, when the stochastic parameterization is employed in place of the deterministic one. The mean state and variability of the model, realistic also in the default version, are preserved when stochasticity is added. Significant changes are observed in the mesosphere due to an enhanced poleward transport, leading to warming in the winter season. While there are some improvements of the mean state, the interannual variability is not significantly affected in the extratropics. The impacts on the simulated equatorial stratosphere are evident, as the stochasticity reduces the overall period of the quasi‐biennial oscillation but also leads to a net reduction of the variability between cycles.
On the Convergence of Block-Coordinate Maximization for Burer-Monteiro Method

Semidefinite programming (SDP) with equality constraints arise in many optimization and machine learning problems, such as Max-Cut, community detection and robust PCA. Since generic convex solvers do not scale well with the dimension of the problem, Burer and Monteiro (Burer & Monteiro, 2003) proposed to reduce the dimension of the problem by appealing to a lowrank factorization, and solve the subsequent nonconvex problem instead. It is well-understood that the resulting non-convex problem acts as a reliable surrogate to the original SDP, and can be efficiently solved using the block-coordinate maximization method. Despite its simplicity, remarkable success, and wide use in practice, the theoretical understanding of the convergence of this method is limited. We prove that the blockcoordinate maximization algorithm applied to the non-convex Burer-Monteiro approach enjoys a global sublinear rate without any assumptions on the problem, and a local linear convergence rate despite no local maxima is locally strongly concave.
Small shower CORSIKA simulations

Extensive Air Showers (EAS) induced by cosmic ray particles of very low energies, owing to the significantly steep cosmic ray energy spectrum, dominate the secondary particle flux measured by single detectors and small shower arrays. Such arrays connected in extended networks can be used to determine potentially interesting spatial correlations between showers, which may shed new light on the nature of ultra high-energy cosmic rays. The quantitative interpretation of showers recorded by small local arrays requires a methodology that differs from that used by ordinary large EAS arrays operating in the "knee" region and above. We present "small EAS generator," a semi-analytical method for integrating cosmic ray spectra over energies of interest and summing over the mass spectra of primary nuclei in arbitrary detector configurations. Furthermore, we provide results on the EAS electron and muon fluxes and particle density spectra.
“Because for us, as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again”: metapolitical whiteness and the normalization of white supremacist discourse in the wake of Trump

ABSTRACT The purported utopian multiculture of the Obama era has shown itself to be little more than a postracial fantasy with structural racism persisting and indeed intensifying. The short-lived illusion of harmony and “progress” experienced a significant rupture with the “white backlash” in 2010 and evolved into a pervasive social force with Trump’s election. This article analyses the resurgence of a mainstreaming white nationalism following the 2016 presidential election using data drawn from websites, interviews with and publications by the alt-right. Through the concept of metapolitical whiteness, it argues that a new conjuncture of white racial politics has emerged since 2016. This is predicated on the normalization of white supremacist discourse which utilizes novel forms of disseminating its message to a younger demographic. Ultimately, it contends that white supremacist discourse is re-entering mainstream political discourse and popular culture through ironic comedy and differentialist discursive strategies borrowed from the French new right.
Optimization Model for Multiple Backup Resource Allocation With Workload-Dependent Failure Probability

This paper proposes a multiple backup resource allocation model with a workload-dependent failure probability to minimize the maximum expected unavailable time (MEUT) under a protection priority policy. The workload-dependent failure probability is a non-decreasing function which reveals the relationship between the workload and the failure probability. The proposed model adopts hot backup and cold backup strategies to provide protection. For protection of each function with multiple backup resources, it is required to adopt a suitable priority policy to determine the expected unavailable time. We analyze the superiority of the protection priority policy for multiple backup resources in the proposed model; we provide the theorems that clarify the influence of policies on MEUT. We formulate the optimization problem as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem. We provide a lower bound of the optimal objective value in the proposed model. We prove that the decision version of the multiple resource allocation problem in the proposed model is NP-complete. A heuristic algorithm inspired by the water-filling algorithm is developed with providing an upper bound of the expected unavailable time obtained by the algorithm. The numerical results show that the proposed model reduces MEUT compared to baselines. The priority policy adopted in the proposed model suppresses MEUT compared with other priority policies. The developed heuristic algorithm is approximately 106 times faster than the MILP approach with 10−4 performance penalty on MEUT.
MUSICAL MNEMONICS TO FACILITATE LEARNING OF TRANSCRIPTION OF RNA

Malaysian students need to be skilful in both English and Malay in this global era. Matriculation students learn Biology in English, and they have difficulty in remembering the facts. Musical mnemonics were used to enable the students remember the facts of the process of Transcription of RNA correctly; and in the right order. The medians for the experimental group and control group were 10.0 and 4.0 respectively. Mann-Whitney test showed a significant effect was produced by the teaching approach; W (76) = 780, Z = -8.066, p = . 0005. Based on the findings, the researcher suggests that musical mnemonics should be used to facilitate recall of other biological processes. As a learning tool, musical mnemonics must meet several criteria in order to be effective, and the researcher has suggested the criteria. The results of this study imply that, with some innovations, Biology can be successfully learned in English.
Discrete Approximation Scheme in Distributionally Robust Optimization 1

Discrete approximation which is the prevailing scheme in stochastic programming in the past decade has been extended to distributionally robust optimization (DRO) recently. In this paper we conduct rigorous quantitative stability analysis of discrete approximation schemes for DRO, which measures the approximation error in terms of discretization sample size. For the ambiguity set defined through equality and inequality moment conditions, we quantify the discrepancy between the discretized ambiguity set and the original one with respect to Wasserstein metric. To establish the quantitative convergence, we develop a Hoffman error bound theory with Hoffman constant calculation criteria in infinite dimensional space, which can be regarded as a byproduct of independent interest. For the ambiguity set defined by Wasserstein ball, and moment conditions combined with Wasserstein ball, we present associated quantitative stability analysis by taking full advantage of the convexity inherently admitted by Wasserstein metric. Efficient numerical methods for specifically solving discrete approximation DRO problems with thousands of samples are also designed. In particular, we reformulate different types of discrete approximation problems into a class of saddle point problems with completely separable structures. The stochastic primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) algorithm where in each iteration we update a random subset of the sampled variables is then amenable as a solution method. Some primary numerical tests are reported.