Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization and origin of episyenites in the southern Caballo Mountains, Sierra County, NM

A bstrAct — Brick-red, K-feldspar-rich rocks, called episyenites (altered rocks that were desilicated and metasomatized by alkali-rich solu- tions) are found in several areas in southern and central New Mexico. These rocks contain anomalous concentrations of rare earth elements (REE, <2329 ppm), uranium (U, <9721 ppm), thorium (Th, <1378 ppm), niobium (Nb, <247 ppm) and high heavy REE (<133 ppm Yb and <179 ppm Dy). In the Caballo Mountains, the timing of metasomatism is older than late Cambrian as episyenite clasts occur in the Cambrian-Ordovician Bliss Formation that unconformably overlies episyenites and Proterozoic host rocks. 40 Ar/ 39 Ar dating of K-feldspars within the episyenites yields complex and intriguing age results that are likely related to multiple fluid-alteration events possibly during the Ancestral Rocky Mountains and Laramide orogenies. Rare U, Th, Nb, and REE minerals are found in the Caballo episyenites and could in- dicate potential REE mineralization at depth, including heavy REE. Synchysite is a major host of light REEs in the episyenites, while heavy REEs are concentrated predominantly in xenotime and priorite. Textural evidence and field relationships indicates that REE-bearing phases co-precipitated during metasomatism prior to deposition of the Cambrian-Ordovician Bliss Formation. The maximum age of the metasomatism forming the episyenites is between the age of the host granite (~1400 Ma) and the Bliss Formation (late Cambrian-early Ordovician). The K-feldspars in the episyenites were then re-heated during the Ancestral Rocky Mountains and Laramide orogenies.
Investigating the Impact of CAP on Consumption and MPC of Saudi Beneficiaries

Since 2017, Saudi Arabia government adopted several reforms to minimize the side effects of implementing new fiscal policies such as energy price increases and the introduction of new taxation system (VAT). The Citizen’s Account Program (CAP) is one way to achieve this objective as cash transfer program that directed to minimize the side effects of implementing these policies. In this paper, following Keynesian theory and Shapiro & Slemrod (2003) model, we investigate how consumption and income can be affected directly by implementing new fiscal policies. By using data from Saudi Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), this paper estimate households’ marginal propensity to consume (MPC) and examine how the propensity differs with income and find that CAP benefit derived Saudi households to spent an average of 20-halala for each one-riyal received. This paper is an attempt to determine how Saudi consumers adjust their consumption to income changes generated by subsidy, as well as understanding which economic models are more consistent with the consumption adjustments observed in the data. Empirically, we find that Saudi consumers would allocate on average 19.5%, 25.5% and 16.8% of the additional income to non-durables, semi-durable goods and services respectively. These findings corroborate with the theoretical prediction and empirical results from other countries. ( نطاوملا باسح جمانرب ريثأت نم ققحتلا CAP يدحلا ليملاو كلاهتسلاا ىلع ) ( كلاهتسلال (MPC نييدوعسلا نيديفتسملل
Dynamic Competitive Insurance∗

I analyze long-term contracting in insurance markets with asymmetric information and a finite or infinite horizon. Risk neutral firms compete in the provision of long-term insurance contracts for risk-averse buyers. A risk-relevant characteristic is privately observed by the buyer and evolves stochastically over time following a Markov process. A long-term contract specifies the premium and coverage obtained by the buyer, possibly contingent on the history of type reports and accidents. Optimal contracts offer a choice between a partial coverage policy and a perpetual complete coverage policy in each period. The analysis of the incentive constraints shows that contracts display a dynamic pricing scheme: the complete-coverage premium decreases with the number of periods the buyer chooses partial insurance, which serves as a signal of his initial type. Allocative inefficiency decreases along all histories. With an infinite horizon, all agents receive full coverage eventually, and the long-run distribution of premia is described by the length of partial coverage spells. I establish uniqueness of equilibrium with firms making zero profits, regardless of the initial type of the buyer. I also extend the qualitative properties of the contracts to the monopoly setting and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for equilibrium existence.
Examining Saudi EFL University Students’ Readiness for Online Learning at the Onset of Covid-19 Pandemic

Nowadays, especially after the COVID-19 crisis lockdown, the heavy reliance on technology and online platforms led to a greater expectation of more learning autonomy among English learners in EFL contexts such as Saudi Arabia. The sudden shift to online learning requires an investigation into students’ readiness and willingness for such a mode of learning. This can provide educators with many prospects about learning outcomes achievement and assessment, test performance, and interaction during classes. Therefore, the current study seeks to contribute to the well-known area of learner autonomy research, which is still lacking in the context of the study, by exploring the readiness of Saudi first-year undergraduate English learners towards online education. Participants’ level of readiness is identified according to their autonomous behaviors and activities. The study will also assess the investigated concept considering the influence of gender and field of study of the participants on their autonomy levels. A total of 802 students participated in this study. It was found that Saudi first-year university students are moderately autonomous, that both males and females have similar levels of aptitude and readiness for taking responsibility for their learning, and that English-major and non-English-major groups showed comparatively similar levels across different learning autonomy dimensions. Yet interestingly, English-major participants displayed a relatively lower autonomy level than students of other majors.
When the Panic Broke Out: Covid-19 and Investment Funds' Portfolio Rebalancing Around the World

To contribute to the understanding of investment funds' (IFs) behaviour, the paper exploits the exogenous shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and analyses more than 12 million security sales and purchases during the first four months of 2020 by over 20,000 IFs from more than 40 national jurisdictions and investing in more than 100 economies and 20 industries. Our estimates reveal that, when the emergency strikes, IFs do not sell indiscriminately but divest from assets considered the most vulnerable at the moment, that is, those issued by more COVID-affected countries and industries. Our results also show several dimensions of heterogeneity according to the pandemic outbreak phase, asset type, IF category and performance, extent of unitholders' outflows, and nationality of IFs. Our results, on the one hand, provide new evidence on the intrinsic fragility of IFs and the connection between their choices and fire sales, but, on the other, they also show that IF industry includes heterogeneous institutions that behave very differently. Finally, our results document that monetary policy measures have a reassuring effect also for IFs, which corroborates recent evidence on a non-bank financial institution channel of unconventional monetary policies.
The A/B Test Deception: Divergent Delivery, Ad Response Heterogeneity, and Erroneous Inferences in Online Advertising Field Experiments

Advertisers and researchers use tools provided by advertising platforms to conduct randomized experiments for testing user responses to creative elements in online ads. Internally valid comparisons between ads require the mix of experimental users exposed to each ad to be similar across all ads. But that internal validity is threatened when platforms' targeting algorithms deliver each ad to its own optimized mix of users, which diverges across ads. We extend the potential outcomes model of causal inference to treat random assignment of ads and the user exposure states for each ad as two separate decisions. We then demonstrate how targeting ads to users leads advertisers to incorrectly infer which ad performs better, based on aggregate test results. Through analysis and simulation, we characterize how bias in the aggregate estimate of the difference between two ads' lifts is driven by the interplay between heterogeneous responses to different ads and how platforms deliver ads to divergent subsets of users. We also identify conditions for an undetectable "Simpson's reversal," in which all unobserved types of users may prefer ad A over ad B, but the advertiser mistakenly infers from aggregate experimental results that users prefer ad B over ad A.
Social Capital and Insider Trading

Using a large U.S. dataset on insider purchases and variations in the social capital of U.S. counties, we find that the intensity (profitability) of insider trading is positively (negatively) associated with social capital. These results are more pronounced when we restrict our sample to include only opportunistic (rather than routine) insider purchases. Our results indicate that insiders affiliated with firms headquartered in counties with high levels of social capital are relatively more likely to foster market information efficiency by making additional insider purchases. However, they are less likely than those affiliated with firms outside such counties to time the market to increase the profitability of their insider purchases. Furthermore, we address endogeneity issues and establish that these relationships are causal by applying an instrumental variable approach. Finally, we show that the main driver of the positive (negative) relationship between the intensity (profitability) of insider purchases and social capital is the density of social networks (the strength of civic norms).
Alone at Home: The Impact of Social Distancing on Norm-consistent Behavior

Around the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has turned daily live upside down since social distancing is probably the most effective means of containing the virus until herd immunity is reached. Social norms have been shown to be an important determinant of social distancing behaviors. By conducting two experiments and using the priming method to manipulate social isolation recollections, we study whether social distancing has in turn affected norms of prosociality and norm compliance. The normative expectations of what behaviors others would approve or disapprove in our experimental setting did not change. Looking at actual behavior, however, we find that persistent social distancing indeed caused a decline in prosociality – even after the relaxation of social distancing rules and in times of optimism. At the same time, our results contain some good news since subjects seem still to care for norms and become more prosocial once again after we draw their attention to the empirical norm of how others have previously behaved in a similar situation.
How COVID‐19 Medical Supply Shortages Led to Extraordinary Trade and Industrial Policy

Early in the COVID‐19 pandemic, a global shortage of hospital gowns, gloves, surgical masks, and respirators caused policymakers globally to panic. China increased imports and decreased exports of this personal protective equipment, removing supplies from world markets. Shortages led to European Union and US export controls as well as other extraordinary policy actions, including a US effort to reserve supplies manufactured in China by a US‐headquartered multinational. By April 2020, China's exports had mostly resumed, and over the rest of the year its export volumes surged. But China's export prices also skyrocketed and remained elevated through 2020, reflecting severe and continued shortages. This paper explores these and other government actions, such as US trade war tariffs and US industrial policy in the form of over $1 billion of subsidies to build out its domestic personal protective equipment supply chain, as well as potential lessons for future pandemic preparedness and international policy cooperation.
A Tale of Two Premiums Revisited

This paper investigates the effect of the “financialization” of commodity markets in terms of pricing. I explore whether the emergence of commodity index traders affects weekly returns and turnover during the roll periods. I split the sample (1994–2017) into the pre-financialization (1994–2003) and the post-financialization (2004–2017). I directly test whether the market share of index traders contributes to commodity returns and whether risk adjustments (based on momentum, basis, basis-momentum, open interest, crowding, and average factors) alter liquidity and insurance premiums documented in Kang, Rouwenhorst, and Tang (2020). I also examine how the financialization affects liquidity and insurance premiums. Finally, since previous results are obtained with Fama-MacBeth regressions, I use an alternative method totest how liquidity and insurance premiums determine commodity returns.
Private Benefits of Corporate Philanthropy and Distortions to Corporate Financing and Investment Decisions

We find that corporate giving represents a private benefit of control that distorts corporate investment and financing activity, consistent with free cash flow agency theory. Corporate giving discourages managers from pursuing external financing, especially debt issuance, to minimize outside monitoring. It creates preferences for internally financed cash acquisitions for the same reason. These distortions reduce shareholder wealth. Following the 2003 dividend tax cut or hedge fund activism, corporate charitable contributions fall, while investment rises, suggesting suboptimal investment caused by managerial private benefit extraction. Merger announcements show negative stock market reactions that are more pronounced for acquirers with poor corporate governance.
Market Socialism and Economic Inefficiency: Evidence from the Chinese IPO Market

Under market socialism, how much economic efficiency is lost in the pursuit of political objectives? We estimate that between January 2014 and July 2020, price controls in the Chinese initial public offering (IPO) market have transferred RMB 1.3 trillion (USD 203 billion) of wealth from firms to investors. On average, firms receive only 40.6% of the full market value of their shares. The majority of the wealth transferred (88.5%) has been dispersed via lottery to the general investing public, in which wealthier investors (in expectation) receive a larger share of the wealth transfer. The remaining wealth transfer is allocated to institutional investors and private individuals who bypass the lottery system.
ECB Monetary Policy and Bank Default Risk

We empirically analyze the effect of ECB monetary policy on bank default risk, captured by bank CDS spreads, of Euro Area banks during the period 2008-2018. We disentangle the impact of monetary policy in a direct channel and an indirect effect operating through a sovereign risk channel. We document that accommodative ECB policies in general lower bank default risk. ECB policy actions exert their beneficial effect on the banks’ perceived risk profile through a combination of a direct effect and an indirect-through-the-sovereign effect. We demonstrate that these effects are stronger for banks in peripheral countries of the Euro Area and that the downward effect on bank default risk was especially pronounced in the 2012-2014 sovereign stress period. Yet, our time-varying impact analysis shows that the beneficial effect of ECB policy persists in the post-2014 era during which the ECB implemented its asset purchase program and other unconventional tools. Our results support the argument that, on balance, the beneficial effects of accommodative ECB monetary policy on Euro Area banks’ risk profile outweigh any negative side-effects.
Least kth-Order and Rényi Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract We investigate the use of parameterized families of information-theoretic measures to generalize the loss functions of generative adversarial networks (GANs) with the objective of improving performance. A new generator loss function, least kth-order GAN (LkGAN), is introduced, generalizing the least squares GANs (LSGANs) by using a kth-order absolute error distortion measure with k≥1 (which recovers the LSGAN loss function when k=2). It is shown that minimizing this generalized loss function under an (unconstrained) optimal discriminator is equivalent to minimizing the kth-order Pearson-Vajda divergence. Another novel GAN generator loss function is next proposed in terms of Rényi cross-entropy functionals with order α>0, α≠1. It is demonstrated that this Rényi-centric generalized loss function, which provably reduces to the original GAN loss function as α→1, preserves the equilibrium point satisfied by the original GAN based on the Jensen-Rényi divergence, a natural extension of the Jensen-Shannon divergence. Experimental results indicate that the proposed loss functions, applied to the MNIST and CelebA data sets, under both DCGAN and StyleGAN architectures, confer performance benefits by virtue of the extra degrees of freedom provided by the parameters k and α, respectively. More specifically, experiments show improvements with regard to the quality of the generated images as measured by the Fréchet inception distance score and training stability. While it was applied to GANs in this study, the proposed approach is generic and can be used in other applications of information theory to deep learning, for example, the issues of fairness or privacy in artificial intelligence.
Implications of U-Pb ages of detrital zircons in Mesozoic strata of the Four Corners region for provenance relations in space and time

U-Pb ages for individual detrital zircons in sandstone record the ages of igneous source rocks in which zircon and accompanying quartz crystals formed because zircon U-Pb ages are not reset by either sedimentary or diagenetic processes. Ages of detrital zircons reflect ultimate sand sources in basement rocks but allowance must be made in provenance interpretations for potential recycling of resistant zircon grains from more proximate sources in sedimentary assemblages. Our database for Mesozoic strata in the Four Corners region includes 2213 concordant or nearly concordant U-Pb ages of detrital zircons from 24 samples (Triassic to Cretaceous). Chinle channel sands were derived largely from the Ouachita orogen where uplifted on the northern shoulder of the pre-Gulf of Mexico rift system, from which Ouachita-derived sand was carried westward by paleoriver systems ~1500 km long with headwaters in the Ouachita foreland. Southern tributaries of central Chinle paleorivers contributed detritus from Precambrian basement and the Cordilleran magmatic arc lying south of the Colorado Plateau. Eolian dune sands of Glen Canyon and San Rafael ergs were derived largely from pre-Atlantic rift highlands along the Appalachian belt, transported to deltas or floodplains in the northern Rocky Mountains region by a transcontinental paleoriver system ~2000 km long carrying Appalachian-derived sediment, and delivered southward to the Colorado Plateau ergs by the paleowinds recorded by dune crossbedding. Salt Wash (Morrison) and Burro Canyon (including Jackpile) fluvial sands were largely reworked from older Jurassic eolianites forming sedimentary cover over the Mogollon paleohighlands, but Westwater Canyon (Morrison), Cretaceous (Toreva-Gallup-Menefee ) fluvial and fluviodeltaic sands contain prominent components of detrital zircon derived from Proterozoic Mogollon basement and its sedimentary cover, and from the Mesozoic Cordilleran magmatic arc lying still farther south.
A MECHANICAL DEVICE USED TO IMPROVE THE VISION INSPECTION IN SMALL SCALE INDUSTRY

The dimentional and quality control tasks have to be performed at the onest of any assembly line. Defected surface even small ones leads to non-conforming of the final product. The automated artificial inspection has proved its acceptance due to its significant advantages. The first aim of this paper, is to describe the operational and design features of the mechanical device that could be integrated in the vision inspection systems. The device contributes positively to improve the inspection efficiency as it is integrated in the vision systems. The designed mechanical device will be used to properly fix, orients, and presents the inspected objects in a vertical and horizontal plans to the acquisition system, in order to provide more accurate feedback information regarding the inspected objects. This arrangement can be achieved by linear and rotary motions provided by the device. The device drives the objects in a linear motion along the measurement direction in the front field of the acquisition system. While the rotary motion is necessry to rotate the object in order to ensure a coplete scannunig of entire surface of the inspected object. It allows the CCD cameras to capture adequite images during each rotation from both vertical and horizontal plans. The design and research has been made on basis of a good understanding of the vision concepts and applications. The device design is relaible, simple in construction and has flexible operation. It was tested with two different shapes: cylindrical and prismatic. The obtained images of the inspected surface (with scanned pits, texture, scratches, cracks, and finishing) demonstrated its capibilty for accurate inspection if integrated with the vision inspection systems. The design and operational characteristics are presented in the next sections.
Molecular characterization and expression analysis of an antimicrobial peptide, mytimacin-6, in the small abalone, Haliotis diversicolor

Macin is a family of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and is involved in the immune responses of marine mollusks. In the present study, a novel Mytimacin (denoted as Hd-mtmc 6) was identified from the small abalone Haliotis diversicolor by RNA-seq and RACE techniques. Hd-mtmc 6 contained a coding sequence of 243 bp and encoded 80 amino acids, with a putative peptide mytimacin 6 consisting of 61 amino acid residues. The mature peptide of Hdmtmc 6 exhibited typical characteristics of AMPs, including net positive charge (+4), higher hydrophobic residue ratio (37%), and lower molecular mass. Eight cysteines in the mature peptide formed four disulfide bond bridges (C1-C6, C2C5, C3-C7, and C4-C8). Moreover, the presence of the macin domain, a threedimensional structure similar to that of hydramacin-1, and a phylogenetic relationship suggested that Hd-mtmc 6 could be a new member of the invertebrate macin family. In unchallenged abalone, the Hd-mtmc 6 transcript was expressed in all tested tissues and could be detected at different stages of embryonic development. Vibrio harveyi challenge caused a significant Hd-mtmc 6 transcripts upregulation within 2 6 h in the mantle and hepatopancreas. Our results suggested that Hd-mtmc 6 may be involved in innate immune responses of small abalone. Further investigations are required to confirm its antibacterial activity at the protein level.