Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Working Papers / Documents de travail

In this paper, we provide a simple framework to show the existence of stationary bubbles on dividend-yielding ﬁnancial assets. These bubbles are compatible with a positive stationary fundamental value, rather than requiring its collapse in the long run. This result is obtained in an exchange overlapping generations economy with vintage ﬁnancial assets that depreciate over time. New assets are introduced in each period, ensuring a constant aggregate supply of ﬁnancial assets. Depreciation introduces a gap between the return of bubbles and the rate at which the dividends are discounted. Because the return of bubble can be lower or equal to the growth rate, we can have stationary equilibria with both a positive bubble and a positive fundamental value. Finally, our framework also allows us to discuss the role of the substitutability between ﬁnancial assets on the level of bubbles and fundamental values.
Working Papers / Documents de travail

Entrepreneurship, growth and total factor productivity are larger when there is a nancial bubble. We explain these facts using a growth model with nancial bubbles in which individuals face heterogeneous wages and returns on productive investment. The heterogeneity in the return of investment separates individuals between savers and entrepreneurs. Savers buy nancial assets, which are deposits or a nancial bubble. Entrepreneurs incur in a start-up cost and borrow to invest in productive capital. The bubble provides liquidities to credit-constrained entrepreneurs. These liquidities increase investment and entrepreneurship when the startup cost is large enough, which explains that growth and entrepreneurship can be larger with bubbles. Finally, productivity can be larger when the bubble further increases the investment of more productive entrepreneurs. This can occur when the return of investment is correlated with wages. JEL classi cation: E22; E44; G12. Keywords: Bubble, entrepreneurship, growth, productivity. Xavier Raurich thanks nancial support from the Spanish Government and the European Union through grant RTI2018-093543-B-I00. Thomas Seegmuller thanks the nancial support of the French National Research Agency Grant ANR-17-EURE-0020 and ANR-15-CE33000101.This paper bene ts from the comments of Anpeng Lee and the participants of seminars at Dongbei University, University of Guanajuato and also of the participants in the workshop of the Spanish Macroeconomics Network. yUniv. Lyon, Université Lumière Lyon 2, GATE UMR 5824, F-69130 Ecully, France. E-mail: clain-chamosset@gate.cnrs. fr zUniversity of Barcelona, Department of Economics, Av. Diagonal 696, 08034 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: xavier.raurich@ub.edu. xAix-Marseille Univ., CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Marseille, AMSE. 5 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet CS 50498 F-13205 Marseille cedex 1, France. E-mail: thomas.seegmuller@univamu.fr.
Working Papers / Documents de travail

This paper presents a general theory of child development that incorporates interactive learning and identity formation in social interactions with caregivers. The model sheds light on many puzzling aspects of child development. Child learning responds nonmonotonically to caregivers’ attention and approval in social interactions. I highlight key parental characteristics associated with child learning, and identity formation. The theory also explains why media devices widen human inequality. Lessons are finally drawn for the design of policies that alleviate human inequality.
Working Papers / Documents de travail

This paper describes an empiric study of aggregation and deliberation used during citizens’ workshops for the preference elicitation of 20 different ecosystem services (ESs) delivered by the Palavas coastal lagoons located on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea close to Montpellier (S. France). The impact of deliberation for the preference elicitation of 20 different ecosystem services (ESs) was studied by gathering and aggregating individual preferences before deliberation that were compared to the collective aggregation after deliberation. The same aggregation rules were used before and after deliberation and we compared two different aggregation methods, i.e. Rapid Ecosystem Services Participatory Appraisal (RESPA) and Majority Judgement (MJ). RESPA had been specifically tested for ESs, while MJ evaluates the merit of each item, an ES in our case, in a predefined ordinal scale of judgment. The impact of deliberation was strongest for the RESPA method. This new information acquired from application of social choice theory is particularly useful for ecological economics studying ES, and more practically for the development of deliberative approaches for public policies.
Emissions pricing instruments with intermittent renewables: second-best policy ✩ Preliminary Version

I analyze emissions pricing to support the integration of a renewable resource into an electricity mix composed of an emissions-intensive technology. I consider the intermittent nature of the resource such as wind energy and incremental externalities that become severe for high emissions levels. I show that an emissions tax is ine ﬃ cient when consumers are on ﬂat-rate electricity tari ﬀ s and do not adapt their consumption to varying production. The tax is ine ﬃ cient even with ﬂexibility in the markets when consumers are on varying tari ﬀ s. The renewable resource induces variability in fossil-fueled electricity production and associated marginal damage that does not match a predetermined tax. I study an Emissions Trading Scheme that provides ﬂexibility at the policy level. Emissions permits are traded at market prices. Since the emissions cap must still be predetermined, I show that it leads to ine ﬃ cient permits prices that do not match the marginal damages. I also ﬁnd that the two emissions pricing instruments are not implemented equivalently since the tax di ﬀ ers from the prices of permits.
Bidirectional long-short term memory and conditional random field for tourism named entity recognition

The common thing to do when planning a trip is to search for a tourist destination. This process is often done using search engines and reading articles on the internet. However, it takes much time to search for such information, as to obtain relevant information, we have to read some available articles. Named entity recognition (NER) can detect named entities in a text to help users find the desired information. This study aims to create a NER model that will help to detect tourist attractions in an article. The articles used for the dataset are English articles obtained from the internet. We built our NER model using bidirectional long-short term memory (BiLSTM) and conditional random fields (CRF), with Word2Vec as a feature. Our proposed model achieved the best with an average F1-Score of 75.25% compared to all scenarios tested.
Increased cortical plasticity leads to memory interference and enhanced hippocampal-cortical interactions

Our brain is continuously challenged by daily experiences. Thus, how to avoid systematic erasing of previously encoded memories? While it has been proposed that a dual-learning system with ‘slow’ learning in the cortex and ‘fast’ learning in the hippocampus could protect previous knowledge from interference, this has never been observed in the living organism. Here, we report that increasing plasticity via the viral-induced overexpression of RGS14414 in the prelimbic cortex leads to better one-trial memory, but that this comes at the price of increased interference in semantic-like memory. Indeed, electrophysiological recordings showed that this manipulation also resulted in shorter NonREM-sleep bouts, smaller delta-waves and decreased neuronal firing rates. In contrast, hippocampal-cortical interactions in form of theta coherence during wake and REM-sleep as well as oscillatory coupling during NonREM-sleep were enhanced. Thus, we provide the first experimental evidence for the long-standing and unproven fundamental idea that high thresholds for plasticity in the cortex protect preexisting memories and modulating these thresholds affects both memory encoding and consolidation mechanisms.
Emergent trends in the reported incidence of prostate cancer in Nigeria

Background: To date there has not been any nationwide age-standardized incidence data reported for prostate cancer in Nigeria. We examined and integrated diverse trends in the age-specific incidence of prostate cancer into a comprehensive trend for Nigeria, and examined how best the existing data could generate a countrywide age-standardized incidence rate for the disease. Methods: Data were obtained from studies undertaken between 1970 and 2007 in referral hospital-based cancer registries. Records from at least one tertiary hospital in each of the six geopolitical zones of Nigeria were examined retrospectively. Data were also reported for the rural population in cross-sectional prospective studies. Age-standardized incidence rates and the annual incidence of disease were calculated. Results: Higher incidence rates for prostate cancer during this period were recorded for patients aged 60–69 years and 70–79 years, with a lower incidence rate for patients aged younger than 50 years. An exponential annual incidence rate of disease was observed in the 50–79 year age group and peaked at 70–79 years before dropping again at age 80 years. The results showed metastasis in more than half of these hospital-based prostate tumors. Conclusion: Our results suggest that prostate cancer occurs at a relatively young age in Nigerians and that hospital-based registry reports may not appropriately reflect the incidence of the disease in Nigeria. A countrywide screening program is urgently needed. Finally, the difference in reported stages of disease found in Nigerians and African-Americans versus Caucasians suggests biological differences in the prognosis. Nigeria may thus typify one of the ancestral populations that harbor inherited genes predisposing African-Americans to high-risk prostate cancer. Clinical Epidemiology is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal focusing on disease and drug epidemiology, identification of risk factors and screening procedures to develop optimal preventative initiatives and programs. Specific topics include: diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, screening, prevention, risk factor modification, systematic reviews, risk & safety of medical interventions, epidemiology & bio- statical methods, evaluation of guidelines, translational medicine, health policies & economic evaluations. The manuscript management system is completely online and includes a very quick and fair peer-review system, which is all easy to use.
ContraSim - A Similarity Measure Based on Contrastive Learning

Recent work has compared neural network representations via similarity-based analyses, shedding light on how different aspects (architecture, training data, etc.) affect models’ internal representations. The quality of a similarity measure is typically evaluated by its success in assigning a high score to representations that are expected to be matched. However, existing similarity measures perform mediocrely on standard benchmarks. In this work, we develop a new similarity measure, dubbed ContraSim, based on contrastive learning. In contrast to common closed-form similarity measures, ContraSim learns a parameterized measure by using both similar and dissimilar examples. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation of our method, with both language and vision models, on the standard layer prediction benchmark and two new benchmarks that we introduce: the multilingual benchmark and the image–caption benchmark. In all cases, Con-traSim achieves much higher accuracy than previous similarity measures, even when presented with challenging examples, and reveals new insights not captured by previous measures.
Prevalence and Factors Associated with Non-AIDS Mortality in HIV-1 Patients Under cART followed-Up At Cta – CHNU FANN in Dakar .

Introduction: The antiretroviral combination therapy (cART) has reduced the risk of HIV transmission and AIDS mortality. However, despite this therapeutic success, mortality observed in patients infected with HIV is higher than that observed in general population. This reflects a growing proportion of deaths resulting from non-AIDS diseases. The knowledge of causes and factors associated with these deaths would help to optimize the quality of care for PLHIV. This is the reason why we focused this study on"Prevalence and factors associated with non-AIDS mortality in HIV-1 patients under cART followed-up at CTA-CHNU in Dakar Fann". Methodology: This is a descriptive and analytical cross-sectional study based on the medical records of HIV-1 patients under cART followed-up at the CTA of CNHU Fann in Dakar. It was conducted from January 2009 to December 2014. It included patients aged between18 and 65, infected with HIV-1, under first-line treatment and having been of follow-up for at least twelve months in the center, with CD4> 200 cells / mm3 and undetectable viral load. Result : During the period, 758 patients were eligible for this study. The average age was 44 with an IQR [2465], a male predominance (65%), i.e. a sex ratio of 1.9. The population was urban in majority (93%). Half (53%) of patients had an income generating activity and (49%) were living with a partner. The extremes of CD4 / CD8 ratio ranged between 0.18 and 2.22 with an average of 0.74. Of all the patients, (8.58%) presented a health history and 22 (2.90%) patients died. The risk of death was related to the age at 44 years (P═0,000), smoking (P═0,001), high LDL cholesterol value (P ═0,017) and CD4 / CD8 <0.74 (P═0,005). Conclusion: Antiretroviral treatment has significantly improved the quality of life of PLHIV. However factors such as old age, smoking, hypercholesterolemia and a low CD4 / CD8 ratio are strongly associated with nonAIDS mortality in well-controlled patients. Communication programs for effective prevention should be set up to accompany the care of PLHIV.
An evaluation of total body electrical conductivity to estimate body composition of largemouth bass, Micropterus salmoides

− Measurement of total body electrical conductivity (TOBEC) recently has been used to estimate the body composition of several ﬁsh species in a noninvasive manner. The present study was conducted to evaluate the use of TOBEC in estimating body composition of largemouth bass ( Micropterus salmoides ). A total of 85 largemouth bass weighing 154 to 3 245 g were measured for electrical conductivity after which their proximate composition was determined by chemical means. Signiﬁcant linear relationships existed between the natural logarithm of whole-body ash, lean body mass, lipid, protein, and water content and the natural logarithm of length and/or weight with r 2 values ranging from 0.860 to 0.999. Inclusion of the TOBEC value did not signiﬁcantly improve the prediction accuracy of these models. Equations were developed to allow the prediction of body composition of largemouth bass based on length and weight measurements. Prediction models including only length and weight as variables provided estimates of body components of an independent set of ﬁsh that were not signiﬁcantly different from chemically derived measurements of these components. These models should allow the rapid, nondestructive estimation of body composition of largemouth bass varying in size and condition without the added cost and processing time associated with measurement of TOBEC, although large prediction errors might prevent the detection of ecologically signiﬁcant differences in body composition. However, with additional data involving narrower ﬁsh-size ranges and constant temperatures for the development of prediction equations, TOBEC may improve the prediction accuracy of body composition estimates for largemouth bass. © 2000 Ifremer/CNRS/INRA/IRD/Cemagref/Éditions scientiﬁques et médicales Elsevier SAS Micropterus salmoides / body composition / TOBEC
Symposium 3: Neuropathology of dementing illness

About 20% of patients with AIDS develop a specific progressive cognitive ⁄ motor syndrome ‘HIV dementia’. It is regarded as a feature of full blown AIDS, but ‘mild cognitive disorders’ have also been reported in the early stages of HIV infection, and, more recently, in patients receiving high activity antiretroviral treatments (HAART). The clinical characteristics of these HIVassociated cognitive disorders are now well established, but the underlying pathology remains a matter of debate. Apart from opportunistic infections and tumours secondary to the immunodeficiency syndrome, and less specific changes related to other general or systemic complications of AIDS or its treatment, a variety of HIV-induced lesions have been described at different stages of HIV infection. Their possible causative role in HIV dementia has been considered. Indeed, just like HIV-associated cognitive disorders, HIV-induced lesions have original and specific features, have never been observed before the AIDS epidemic, and are found only in HIV-infected individuals, without evidence of another cause. However, although they are frequently found in patients with characteristic cognitive disorders, none can be regarded as the absolute pathological counterpart of HIV dementia. In this paper we review the different HIV-induced lesions of the CNS, focusing on their possible correlation with the cognitive disorders. We propose a pathogenetic hypothesis for HIV dementia and consider how it fits with the various HIV-induced lesions.
Lexical Semantics and Irregular Inflection

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) Lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) Semantic effects, in which the semantic features of a word become associated with regular or irregular forms; (3) Morphological structure effects, in which a word with a headless structure (e.g., a verb derived from a noun) blocks access to a stored irregular form; (4) Compositionality effects, in which the stored combination of an irregular word’s meaning (e.g., the verb’s inherent aspect) with the meaning of the inflection (e.g., pastness) doesn’t readily transfer to new senses with different combinations of such meanings. In four experiments, speakers were presented with existing and novel verbs and asked to rate their past-tense forms, semantic similarities, grammatical structure, and aspectual similarities. We found (1) an interaction between semantic and phonological similarity, coinciding with reported strategies of analogizing to known verbs and implicating lexical effects; (2) weak and inconsistent effects of semantic similarity; (3) robust effects of morphological structure, and (4) robust effects of aspectual compositionality. Results are consistent with theories of language that invoke lexical entries and morphological structure, and which differentiate the mode of storage of regular and irregular verbs. They also suggest how psycholinguistic processes have shaped vocabulary structure over history.
The bee fauna (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) of allotments in downtown Lisbon

In the last ten years, a growing number of studies have focused on urban green areas as potential refuges for biodiversity, where private gardens, urban parks and green roofs have relatively high diversities of wild bees. However, the western Mediterranean is still poorly studied and is a biodiversity hotspot that is already suffering the consequences of climate change. It is essential to rectify this and understand how urban settings can support biodiversity. In this context, this study provides an assessment of the taxonomic and functional composition of bee assemblages in three allotments in downtown Lisbon, Portugal. Using only an entomological net, we collected 202 specimens from April to July 2018, belonging to ﬁ ve families, 20 genera and 58 species, of which six are rare species in Portugal and nine ﬁ rst records for the Lisbon district. Megachilidae was the most diverse family, comprising 15 species, while Apidae was the most abundant family. Most of the species identi ﬁ ed were solitary and had a generalist pollen diet, with a low incidence of social and parasitic species.
Optimal Placement of STATCOM for voltage stability enhancement using particle swarm optimization

The major concern of power utilities is to maintain, in all situations, the supply of electrical power to all its customers without any failure. However, due to recent phenomenon such as demand power increase, insufficient power generation and other economical and environmental factors, most power system utilities operate with its equipment very close to their limits. With this situation, occurrences such as voltage instability and voltage collapse become likely to occur. The Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM), a shunt connected Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) device which is capable of regulating the voltage level through the generation or absorption of reactive power, is an important tool in order to prevent these occurrences from happening. In this article, a deterministic approach to the problem of where these devices have to be inserted and what size should they have in order to enhance the voltage stability margin to a specified level is introduced in a algorithmic form. This algorithm is constructed by using the Continuation Power Flow (CPF) method to calculate the point of maximum loadability of the power system and using the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) concept to find the optimal combination of locations and sizes of a group of STATCOM units.
MORE: Simultaneous Multi-View 3D Object Recognition and Pose Estimation Final Year Project (Computational Intelligence and Robotics)

In computer vision the problem of 3D object recognition has been tackled by many successful algorithms. In particular, in recent times, convolutional neural networks based on multi-view approaches ﬁgure among the best performing classiﬁers on 3D object datasets such as Princeton ModelNet, constituting de facto state-of-the-art. Although the research on the architectures for such networks has been widely explored, there has been little investigation on the beneﬁts of employing best-views estimation algorithms to select the views for prediction. Many objects have regular 3D shapes which carry symmetrical features and sets of projections of such objects carry redundancy of information which can be reduced selecting only very informative views. To demonstrate the employability of best-view selection algorithms, we propose an entropy estimation model to retrieve best-views for a multi-view convolutional neural network to perform simultaneous recognition and pose estimation on 3D objects. We demonstrated that our model learns features to generate entropy maps that approximate closely the entropy evaluation of depth-images projections of a 3D object. With such evaluation we select a small number of highly-informative camera poses to observe the object in space. We demonstrated that the views obtained from such positions are descriptive enough to achieve accuracy scores comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches on the ModelNet10 dataset.
More on involutions with local Engel or power commuting conditions

ABSTRACT Let R be a ring with * and with 1. Assume that R has no nil ideals (other than 0) and that R is integral over its center Z, that is to say, that each x in R satisfies a monic polynomial equation (in x) with coeﬃcients in Z. Then the following conditions are equivalent. Condition 1: * is a commuting (or normal) involution, that is, for each x in R, . Condition 2: For each x in R, there is an integer N = N(x)≥1 depending on x such that where dx is the map of R defined by dx(y): = yx−xy, for all y in R, and is the Nth power of dx (under composition). Condition 3: For each x in R, there is an integer depending on x such that .