Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pricing vulnerable claims in a Lévy-driven model

We obtain an explicit expression for the price of a vulnerable claim written on a stock whose predefault dynamics follows a Lévy-driven SDE. The stock jumps to zero at default with a hazard rate given by a negative power of the stock price. We recover the characteristic function of the terminal log price as the solution of an infinite-dimensional system of complex-valued first-order ordinary differential equations. We provide an explicit eigenfunction expansion representation of the characteristic function in a suitably chosen Banach space and use it to price defaultable bonds and stock options. We present numerical results to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method.
Effect of Local Tidal Lung Strain on Inflammation in Normal and Lipopolysaccharide-Exposed Sheep*

Objectives:Regional tidal lung strain may trigger local inflammation during mechanical ventilation, particularly when additional inflammatory stimuli are present. However, it is unclear whether inflammation develops proportionally to tidal strain or only above a threshold. We aimed to 1) assess the relationship between regional tidal strain and local inflammation in vivo during the early stages of lung injury in lungs with regional aeration heterogeneity comparable to that of humans and 2) determine how this strain-inflammation relationship is affected by endotoxemia. Design:Interventional animal study. Setting:Experimental laboratory and PET facility. Subjects:Eighteen 2- to 4-month-old sheep. Interventions:Three groups of sheep (n = 6) were mechanically ventilated to the same plateau pressure (30–32 cm H2O) with high-strain (VT = 18.2 ± 6.5 mL/kg, positive end-expiratory pressure = 0), high-strain plus IV lipopolysaccharide (VT = 18.4 ± 4.2 mL/kg, positive end-expiratory pressure = 0), or low-strain plus lipopolysaccharide (VT = 8.1 ± 0.2 mL/kg, positive end-expiratory pressure = 17 ± 3 cm H2O). At baseline, we acquired respiratory-gated PET scans of inhaled 13NN to measure tidal strain from end-expiratory and end-inspiratory images in six regions of interest. After 3 hours of mechanical ventilation, dynamic [18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose scans were acquired to quantify metabolic activation, indicating local neutrophilic inflammation, in the same regions of interest. Measurements and Main Results:Baseline regional tidal strain had a significant effect on [18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose net uptake rate Ki in high-strain lipopolysaccharide (p = 0.036) and on phosphorylation rate k3 in high-strain (p = 0.027) and high-strain lipopolysaccharide (p = 0.004). Lipopolysaccharide exposure increased the k3-tidal strain slope three-fold (p = 0.009), without significant lung edema. The low-strain lipopolysaccharide group showed lower baseline regional tidal strain (0.33 ± 0.17) than high-strain (1.21 ± 0.62; p < 0.001) or high-strain lipopolysaccharide (1.26 ± 0.44; p < 0.001) and lower k3 (p < 0.001) and Ki (p < 0.05) than high-strain lipopolysaccharide. Conclusions:Local inflammation develops proportionally to regional tidal strain during early lung injury. The regional inflammatory effect of strain is greatly amplified by IV lipopolysaccharide. Tidal strain enhances local [18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose uptake primarily by increasing the rate of intracellular [18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose phosphorylation.
A behavioural approach to remittances analysis

This paper approaches the migrant’s motivation to remit from a new, behavioural perspective. We apply the well-established Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) using a structural equation model for the first time for this specific research question. Our micro-dataset stems from a 2009/10 survey, covering Albanian migrants from Kosovo living in Germany as well as their home-country households. More than 90% of Kosovar migrants living in Germany remit. However, little is known about their underlying motivations. Our analytical results show that the migrant’s attitude and norms are decisive for the remitting behaviour. The common socio-economic approach lacks explanatory power backed by theory.
Performance in sports teams

Purpose – The purpose of this research is twofold: to evaluate the performance of Spanish First‐Division soccer teams, comparing the sports results that they actually obtain with those that they should have obtained on the basis of their potential, and to propose a future course of action.Design/methodology/approach – In order to assess the potential of each team in the Spanish professional soccer league between the years 1998 and 2005 an output‐oriented version of Data Envelopment Analysis is used. In this way it is possible to calculate the number of points a team could have achieved with an efficient use of its actual resources and, consequently, its potential position in the league classification.Findings – The main conclusion is that a team's final league position depends more on its efficient use of resources than on its potential.Practical implications – From the practical perspective, the results seem to stress that measures directed at improving soccer teams' results should focus on improving the.
Optimal DC gapped inductor design including high-frequency effects

DC inductor design has recently drawn the attention of magnetic designers due to the rise in the number of DC-DC power converter applications, such as electric vehicles and renewable distributed generation systems. The design methods found in the literature are highly iterative and make it difficult to assess the design trends and optimize the power converter as a whole. In this paper, the DC gapped inductor design problem is analyzed. A unified inductor model is first developed and a novel inductor design methodology is then proposed. The comprehensive inductor model makes it possible to easily introduce all the phenomena present in the inductor operation in the design process, including winding high-frequency effects and fringing flux in the gap. With this so-called analytical inductor design methodology, the inductor energy density can be maximized while achieving high efficiencies. Finally, an inductor for a fuel cell 2.4 kW-22 kHz boost converter is optimally designed reaching an energy density of 0.61 J/dm3 and an efficiency of 99.04%.
Why do costs act as a barrier in maternity care for some, but not all women? A qualitative study in rural Nepal

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to analyse cost as a barrier to the uptake of antenatal care (ANC) in rural Nepal amidst a variety of barriers and facilitators. Design/methodology/approach - – A qualitative study with face-to-face interviews were conducted with 50 ANC users and non-users participants. The setting is rural Nepal, some 20 kilometres outside the capital Kathmandu. Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed and translated into English and results were presented thematically. Findings - – Cost was sometimes a barrier to seeking ANC for poor rural women. It included transport costs, opportunity costs of not being able to work in the household and service-related costs (such as blood or urine tests). The effect of cost as a barrier varied between women of different socio-economic status. Cost was a barrier to accessing ANC partly due to the women's lack of control over household resources. Social implications - – It is important to consider cost in the wider socio-economic context of rural people's lives as financial costs alone do not explain the level of uptake of ANC. Originality/value - – This study provides an original insight of women's experiences on financial issues relating to the use of ANC services in Nepal. Another important aspect of this study was approached with the multiple respondents (i.e. women, their husbands and their mothers-in-law) regarding the use of ANC and financial impact in the use of services. The findings of this study have important implications in health policy formation by providing clear picture of women's financial situation in access to ANC.
Empirical confidence intervals for USDA commodity price forecasts

Conventional procedures for calculating confidence limits of forecasts generated by statistical models provide little guidance for forecasts based on a combination or a consensus process rather than formal models, as is the case with US Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecasts. This study applied and compared several procedures for calculating empirical confidence intervals for USDA forecasts of corn, soybean and wheat prices over the 1980/81 through 2006/07 marketing years. Alternative procedures were compared based on out-of-sample performance over 1995/96 through 2006/07. The results of this study demonstrate that kernel density, quantile distribution and best fitting parametric distribution (logistic) methods provided confidence intervals calibrated at the 80% level prior to harvest and 90% level after harvest. The kernel density-based method appears most accurate both before and after harvest with the final value falling inside the forecast interval 77% of the time before harvest and 92% after harvest, followed by quantile regression (73% and 91% before and after harvest, respectively) logistic distribution (73% and 90% before and after harvest, respectively) and histogram (66% and 84% before and after harvest, respectively). Overall, this study demonstrates that empirical approaches may be used to construct more accurate confidence intervals for USDA corn, soybean and wheat price forecasts.
Vertical Integration in American Manufacturing, 1899 – 1948

As part of a long-range project compiling data and source materials for American business history, we recently completed an extensive examination of vertical integration in a cross section of American manufacturing firms in the period 1899-1948. The purpose of this examination was to determine when, where, and why vertical integration occurred in the period after the giant mergers and before the conglomerates. The purpose of this note is to present a summary of the conclusions drawn from the mass of data assembled in the study. Before presenting the conclusions, however, a brief description of the methodology is necessary. We obtained our sample of firms by making a collated list of the one hundred largest American industrial firms in 1899, 1909, 1919, 1929, 1935, and 1948. This list was compiled from A. D. H. Kaplan's Big Enterprise in a Competitive System and contains all firms listed by Kaplan except those mining, transportation, finance, realty, motion picture, and publishing companies which we excluded as nonmanufacturing. The sample firms were classified by principal product into the twenty major manufacturing categories defined in the 1957 Standard Industrial Classification Manual and one additional category which we called "Retail Stores. " In order to obtain clusters of firms large enough to permit meaningful trend analyses over time we combined categories 24 (lumber and wood products) and 26 (paper and allied products) and added some firms not on Kaplan's list to various categories. The additional firms were chosen on the basis of national prominence and data availability. The total sample is so composed that information is available for a minimum of four firms in each manufacturing category for the years 1929, 1935, and 1948. We checked all the firms in the sample for integration in all the
Evaluating and developing parameter optimization and uncertainty analysis methods for a computationally intensive distributed hydrological model

Evaluating and Developing Parameter Optimization and Uncertainty Analysis Methods for a Computationally Intensive Distributed Hydrological Model. (August 2008) Xuesong Zhang, B.S, Qingdao University, China; M.S., Beijing Normal University, China Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Raghavan Srinivasan This study focuses on developing and evaluating efficient and effective parameter calibration and uncertainty methods for hydrologic modeling. Five single objective optimization algorithms and six multi-objective optimization algorithms were tested for automatic parameter calibration of the SWAT model. A new multi-objective optimization method (Multi-objective Particle Swarm and Optimization & Genetic Algorithms) that combines the strengths of different optimization algorithms was proposed. Based on the evaluation of the performances of different algorithms on three test cases, the new method consistently performed better than or close to the other algorithms. In order to save efforts of running the computationally intensive SWAT model, support vector machine (SVM) was used as a surrogate to approximate the behavior of SWAT. It was illustrated that combining SVM with Particle Swarm and Optimization can save efforts for parameter calibration of SWAT. Further, SVM was used as a surrogate to implement parameter uncertainty analysis fo SWAT. The results show that SVM helped save more than 50% of runs of the computationally intensive SWAT model The effect of model structure on the uncertainty estimation of streamflow simulation was examined through applying SWAT and Neural Network models. The 95% uncertainty intervals estimated by SWAT only include 20% of the observed data, while
Vocabulary Expansion Technique for Advertisement Classification

Contextual advertising is an important revenue source for major service providers on the Web. Ads classification is one of main tasks in contextual advertising, and it is used to retrieve semantically relevant ads with respect to the content of web pages. However, it is difficult for traditional text classification methods to achieve satisfactory performance in ads classification due to scarce term features in ads. In this paper, we propose a novel ads classification method that handles the lack of term features for classifying ads with short text. The proposed method utilizes a vocabulary expansion technique using semantic associations among terms learned from large-scale search query logs. The evaluation results show that our methodology achieves 4.0% ~ 9.7% improvements in terms of the hierarchical f-measure over the baseline classifiers without vocabulary expansion.
Levodopa therapy and survival in idiopathic Parkinson's disease

We studied survival in all Olmsted County Parkinson's disease (PD) patients seen at the Mayo Clinic from 1964 to 1978, attempting to answer two questions: (1) What effect does levodopa have on survival in PD? and (2) Does the timing of levodopa administration influence survival? We chose this period because it allowed us to study patient records with a spectrum of disease durations before levodopa treatment; in many patients, the treatment delay was exclusively due to levodopa being unavailable prior to 1969. Mortality of the entire PD cohort (N = 179; 61% levodopa-treated) was greater than that of the general population (matched chronologically, geographically, and by age and gender). Lower age at onset of motor symptoms, lower Hoehn and Yahr stage at first neurologic visit for parkinsonism, and treatment with levodopa were all independent predictors of improved survival. Using a time-dependent Cox regression model, we assessed the impact of the timing of levodopa administration during the course of illness on mortality, while statistically controlling for other factors (ie, patient selection for levodopa treatment, and independent predictors of survival). Risk of death following initiation of levodopa was significantly reduced (p < 0.001), regardless of pre-levodopa duration of illness. This reduction gradually diminished over a period of 4 years on levodopa, but continued to be significantly reduced. After 4 years, increasing survival benefit again progressively accrued over time to at least 17 years of levodopa treatment (p < 0.001). At no point in time was levodopa treatment associated with increased mortality, arguing against substantial levodopa toxicity. However, despite levodopa-improved survival, mortality continues to be increased in PD relative to the general population.
Paper in Business Analytics Identifying News Articles in Dutch Tweets

Twitter is a microblogging platform that gives people fast and easy real time access to information on what is happening in the world. In this work we aim to identify the tweets belonging to a given news article. We use a collection of dutch tweets and articles from the news portals nu.nl and nos.nl. Using a vector space model (VSM) with term frequency inverse document frequency (tf-idf) weighting and cosine similarity to compare each tweet to a collection of news articles. Time windows are introduced to deal with the small likelihood of a tweet belonging to a news article that was published more than a certain time before or after the tweet. The time window of four hours proves to be most successful with an overall accuracy of 90.82% and an accuracy of 57.65% for tweets that do not contain the URL. The results of this research allow to study the spread and speed of news in future works.
Mammalian Exo1 encodes both structural and catalytic functions that play distinct roles in essential biological processes

Significance Exonuclease1 (EXO1) is involved in a variety of DNA repair pathways and is implicated in multiple biological processes. To determine the contribution of the enzymatic and structural functions of EXO1 in these processes, we compared mice with catalytically inactive EXO1-knockin and complete EXO1-knockout mutations. We found that the catalytic function of EXO1 is essential for the DNA damage response, double-strand break repair, chromosomal stability, and tumor suppression, whereas EXO1’s structural role alone is critical for mismatch repair, antibody diversification, and meiosis. Our study reveals differential requirements for both EXO1 functions in DNA repair and tumorigenesis in vivo. Mammalian Exonuclease 1 (EXO1) is an evolutionarily conserved, multifunctional exonuclease involved in DNA damage repair, replication, immunoglobulin diversity, meiosis, and telomere maintenance. It has been assumed that EXO1 participates in these processes primarily through its exonuclease activity, but recent studies also suggest that EXO1 has a structural function in the assembly of higher-order protein complexes. To dissect the enzymatic and nonenzymatic roles of EXO1 in the different biological processes in vivo, we generated an EXO1-E109K knockin (Exo1EK) mouse expressing a stable exonuclease-deficient protein and, for comparison, a fully EXO1-deficient (Exo1null) mouse. In contrast to Exo1null/null mice, Exo1EK/EK mice retained mismatch repair activity and displayed normal class switch recombination and meiosis. However, both Exo1-mutant lines showed defects in DNA damage response including DNA double-strand break repair (DSBR) through DNA end resection, chromosomal stability, and tumor suppression, indicating that the enzymatic function is required for those processes. On a transformation-related protein 53 (Trp53)-null background, the DSBR defect caused by the E109K mutation altered the tumor spectrum but did not affect the overall survival as compared with p53-Exo1null mice, whose defects in both DSBR and mismatch repair also compromised survival. The separation of these functions demonstrates the differential requirement for the structural function and nuclease activity of mammalian EXO1 in distinct DNA repair processes and tumorigenesis in vivo.
Corporate Investment Decisions and Corporate Control: Evidence from Going-Private Transactions

The investment decisions of firms over a five-year period immediately prior to being taken private are examined. The results indicate that announcements of new investments made by going-private candidates are characterized by significant negative median abnormal returns. These findings appear to be driven largely by the subsample of contested transactions. For this subsample and its control group, the likelihood of becoming a buyout candidate is significantly inversely related to the wealth effects of the firm's investment decisions. Overall, the results suggest that one source of value in going-private transactions, particularly contested transactions, is the reduction of agency costs observed in the form of poor investment decisions.
Intangible liabilities: beyond models of intellectual assets

Purpose – Most models of intellectual capital measurment equal intellectual capital with intellectual assets. Nevertheless, companies sometimes must incur liabilities to make intellectual assets truly actionable. This fact suggests the existence of intangible liabilities. The aim of this paper is to refine the methods of assessment of intellectual capital by refining and extending the concept of intangible liabilities.Design/methodology/approach – The paper consists of a literature review of prior conceptualisations of intangible liabilities, and an empirical exploration of the employer‐employee relationships that can originate intangible liabilities.Findings – The results of the empirical research show that a non‐fulfilment of perceived obligations by the company might cause organisational members to refrain from deploying their organisational knowledge in organisational processes. Thus, these obligations can be conceptualised as intangible liabilities.Research limitations/implications – The research has.
Full-Wave Modeling of Fabry-Perot Resonator in Millimeter Waves

One of two numerical principles on dielectric materials in connection with Multi Level Fast Multipole Method (MLFMM) and Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) approximation of Method of Moments (MoM) have to be applied to analyze electrically large structures at higher frequencies. The paper deals with a development and comparison of several models of Fabry-Perot resonator for spectroscopic measurement of both gas attenuation and spontaneous emission. A simplified model capable to solve the resonator performance up to 110 GHz (i.e. the radius of the mirrors corresponding to 55 times wavelength) is introduced.
The long-run performance following Japanese rights issues

Japanese firms conducting 260 rights issues on the Tokyo Stock Exchange between 1971 and 1986 have subsequently performed poorly. The long-term downward drift is remarkably similar to those following Japanese initial public offerings and seasoned equity offerings, accompanied by a reliable pattern of post-issue deterioration of accounting profitability. The evidence therefore reinforces the 'windows of opportunity' explanation for the new issue puzzle, since rights issues involve much fewer changes in corporate ownership structure.
E-Enabled Closed-Loop Supply Chains

Information and Communication Technology can help companies realize new innovative business opportunities in the area of closed-loop supply chains. This article examines closed-loop supply chains from three perspectives: processes, customers, and products. Exploiting the possibilities of closed-loop supply chains involves handling uncertainties by providing adequate information. Information on recovery options for a product, product preferences of the customer, and the state of the product can be used to reduce uncertainty. Data that is retrieved from the closed-loop supply chain by new technologies can be transformed into management information in a systematic way. This article presents a framework to address uncertainty reduction strategies.