Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Earnings management and investment efficiency

Purpose – To verify the relationship between the quality of the accounting information, measured by earnings management, and the efficiency of investments made by Brazilian companies listed on the BM&FBovespa. Design/methodology/approach – Firstly, the investment efficiency benchmark was established, analyzing the level of investment and the growth in sales as shown in equation (1). After this classification, the results of the extreme quartiles, which were classified as over/ under investment, were used as dependent variables to analyze the relationship between income and investment management above or below predictable levels. Finally, to test this relationship, a multinomial logistic regression was used to evaluate the probability of over and under investments in companies that practice earnings management, compared to the benchmark. The sample that served as the basis for this study is composed of all the publicly-held companies that had or still have shares listed on the BM&FBOVESPA, covering the period from 1996 to 2012. Findings – The data analysis revealed empirical evidence that earnings management is positively related to levels investment and this can interfere in the probability of a company being classified as under or over investing. Therefore, based on the results found, it is confirmed that “the higher the level of earnings management, the greater the probability of the company deviating from the ideal level of investment. ” Originality/value – The results were consistent with the idea that the quality of accounting information plays a relevant role for managers in order to analyze the efficiency of investments.
Distributed Intelligent Microgrid Control Using Multi-Agent Systems

In the future, the individual entities of microgrids such as distributed generators and smart loads may need to determine their power generation or consumption in more economic ways. Intelligent agents can help the decision-making procedure of the entities by intelligent algorithms and state-of-the-art communication with central controller and other local agents. This paper presents the development of atable-top microgrid control system using multi-agent systems and also the demonstration of demand response programs during power shortage. In our table-top system, agents are implemented using microcontrollers and Zigbee wireless communication technology is applied for efficient data communication in the multi-agent system. The power system models of distributed generators and loads are implemented in the real-time simulator using Opal-RT system. The whole test system that includes real-time system simulation and agent hardware is implemented in the hardware-in-the-loop simulation framework. The performance of the developed system is tested for emergency demand response cases.
Mining alternative actions from community Q&A corpus for task-oriented web search

Web searchers often use a Web search engine to find a way or means to achieve his/her goal. For example, a user intending to solve his/her sleeping problem, the query "sleeping pills" may be used. However, there may be another solution to achieve the same goal, such as "have a cup of hot milk" or "stroll before bedtime. " The problem is that the user may not be aware that these solutions exist. Thus, he/she will probably choose to take a sleeping pill without considering these solutions. In this study, we define and tackle the alternative action mining problem. In particular, we attempt to develop a method for mining alternative actions for a given query. We define alternative actions as actions which share the same goal and define the alternative action mining problem as similar in the search result diversification. To tackle the problem, we propose leveraging a community Q&A (cQA) corpus for mining alternative actions. We propose a method to compute how well two actions can be alternative actions by using a question-answer structure in a cQA corpus. Our method builds a question-action bipartite graph and recursively computes how well two actions can be alternative actions. We conducted experiments to investigate the effectiveness of our method using two newly built test collections, each containing 50 queries. The experimental results indicated that our proposed method outperformed the query suggestion methods provided by the commercial search engines in terms of D#-nDCG.
Wireless Facility Scheduling for Data Center Networks

The control packets in the Data Center Networks (DCNs) have to contest with the data packets although they are usually much shorter in size and much more important in network management. Moreover, the uneven distribution of the packets may create potential hotspots in the DCN which could degrade network performance drastically. To bridge these gaps, a few proposals have been put forward to construct extra wireless facilities in the DCNs to help promote the performance of the control traffic and relieve the burden of the hotspots. However, little attention has been paid on how to efficiently schedule the wireless facilities. In this paper, a scheduling method is put forward which contains two steps, i.e. route calculation and flow scheduling. In the former step, a route set between each node pair is calculated in advance for later usage. Then, arrived data and control flows are scheduled according to multiple policies based on the given route sets in the flow scheduling step. A series of experiments have been done on NS3 to evaluate the performance of various scheduling policies proposed based on different design requirements. The results have validated our scheduling method's effectiveness in typical DCN settings.
MicroRNA miR-308 regulates dMyc through a negative feedback loop in Drosophila

Summary The abundance of Myc protein must be exquisitely controlled to avoid growth abnormalities caused by too much or too little Myc. An intriguing mode of regulation exists in which Myc protein itself leads to reduction in its abundance. We show here that dMyc binds to the miR-308 locus and increases its expression. Using our gain-of-function approach, we show that an increase in miR-308 causes a destabilization of dMyc mRNA and reduced dMyc protein levels. In vivo knockdown of miR-308 confirmed the regulation of dMyc levels in embryos. This regulatory loop is crucial for maintaining appropriate dMyc levels and normal development. Perturbation of the loop, either by elevated miR-308 or elevated dMyc, caused lethality. Combining elevated levels of both, therefore restoring balance between miR-308 and dMyc levels, resulted in lower apoptotic activity and suppression of lethality. These results reveal a sensitive feedback mechanism that is crucial to prevent the pathologies caused by abnormal levels of dMyc.
Multi-level characterization of balanced inhibitory-excitatory cortical neuron network derived from human pluripotent stem cells

Generation of neuronal cultures from induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) serve the studies of human brain disorders. However we lack neuronal networks with balanced excitatory-inhibitory activities, which are suitable for single cell analysis. We generated low-density networks of hPSC-derived GABAergic and glutamatergic cortical neurons. We used two different co-culture models with astrocytes. We show that these cultures have balanced excitatory-inhibitory synaptic identities using confocal microscopy, electrophysiological recordings, calcium imaging and mRNA analysis. These simple and robust protocols offer the opportunity for single-cell to multi-level analysis of patient hiPSC-derived cortical excitatory-inhibitory networks; thereby creating advanced tools to study disease mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental disorders.
Remnant Cholesterol and Myocardial Infarction in Normal Weight, Overweight, and Obese Individuals from the Copenhagen General Population Study.

BACKGROUND We tested whether high remnant cholesterol is associated with high myocardial infarction risk, independent of whether an individual is normal weight, overweight, or obese. METHODS A total of 106216 individuals from the Copenhagen General Population Study were followed for up to 11 years, during which 1565 experienced a myocardial infarction. Individuals were grouped by clinically meaningful remnant cholesterol concentrations of <0.5 mmol/L (19 mg/dL), 0.5 to 0.99 mmol/L (19-38 mg/dL), 1.0 to 1.49 mmol/L (39-58 mg/dL), and ≥1.5 mmol/L (58 mg/dL), and by body mass index (BMI) of <18.5 kg/m2 (underweight), 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m2 (normal weight), 25 to 29.9 kg/m2 (overweight), and ≥30 kg/m2 (obese). RESULTS Median calculated remnant cholesterol was 0.40 mmol/L [interquartile range (IQR), 0.30-0.55 mmol/L] [15 mg/dL (12-21 mg/dL)] for underweight, 0.50 mmol/L (IQR, 0.37-0.71 mmol/L) [19 mg/dL (14-27 mg/dL)] for normal weight, 0.70 mmol/L (IQR, 0.49-1.00 mmol/L) [27 mg/dL (19-39 mg/dL)] for overweight, and 0.85 mmol/L (IQR, 0.61-1.20 mmol/L) [(33 mg/dL (24-46 mg/dL)] for obese individuals. On continuous scales, remnant cholesterol was positively correlated with BMI until reaching a plateau of approximately 1 mmol/L (39 mg/dL) at BMI >35 kg/m2. R2 from an unadjusted linear regression for the correlation between calculated remnant cholesterol and BMI was 12%. Stepwise higher remnant cholesterol was associated with stepwise higher myocardial infarction risk in a similar pattern for normal weight, overweight, and obese individuals. When compared with individuals with remnant cholesterol <0.5 mmol/L (19 mg/dL), individuals with remnant cholesterol ≥1.5 mmol/L (58 mg/dL) had hazard ratios for myocardial infarction of 2.0 (95% CI, 1.3-3.2) for normal weight, 1.9 (95% CI, 1.4-2.6) for overweight, and 2.3 (95% CI, 1.4-3.5) for obese individuals. Directly measured remnant cholesterol increased 0.91 mmol/L (95% CI, 0.89-0.94 mmol/L) [35 mg/dL (34-36 mg/dL)] per 1 mmol/L (39 mg/dL) increase in calculated remnant cholesterol. CONCLUSIONS Remnant cholesterol and BMI were positively correlated; however, high remnant cholesterol was associated with higher myocardial infarction risk across the examined BMI subcategories, indicating that remnant cholesterol is a risk factor for myocardial infarction independent of overweight and obesity.
A Pipelined 12-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter with Continuous On-Chip Digital Correction

A 12-bit 43MHz switched capacitor pipelined analog- to-digital converter was implemented in a 0.5 mum 2P3M CMOS process based on 1.5-bit/stage architecture. The design features an on-chip continuous digital correction and a fully differential signal path circuitry that minimizes noise and relaxes comparator offset requirements. The design is a fully monolithic design that achieved an integral non-linearity of plusmn 0.7 LSB and differential non-linearity of plusmn 0.8 LSB with power dissipation of 94 mW.
The impairment in daily life of obese haemophiliacs

Summary. Obesity is a major health concern not only in the general population but also in patients with haemophilia. Little is known about the consequences of obesity for haemophilia patients. As obesity is an important risk factor for osteoarthritis, these effects may be even more pronounced in haemophilia patients who are prone to joint damage. The association between obesity and limitations in daily activities as well as the frequency of bleeds and use of factor VIII (FVIII) concentrate in obese and normal weight haemophilia patients was assessed. Fifteen obese (BMI ≥ 30 kg m−2) and fifteen normal weight (BMI ≤ 25 kg m−2) haemophilia A patients matched for severity and age were analysed. The Hemophilia Activities List (HAL) was used to assess the impairment in daily activities. Compared with the normal weight haemophilia patients, obese haemophiliacs had a significantly lower sum score (88/100 and 98/100, respectively, P = 0.02), which was mainly caused by an impaired lower limb function. All other components of the HAL also showed lower scores in the obese patients, but did not reach statistical significance. A higher frequency of bleeds requiring treatment with FVIII concentrate occurred in the obese haemophiliacs (17 bleeds in eight individuals) compared with the controls (three bleeds in three individuals) (P = 0.045). Compared with non‐obese haemophilia patients, obese haemophiliacs had more joint bleeds and a lower overall HAL score, which was driven by a lower limb function score. Prevention of overweight and weight reduction requires special attention from physicians treating haemophilia patients.
Sequential azacitidine plus lenalidomide in previously treated elderly patients with acute myeloid leukemia and higher risk myelodysplastic syndrome

Abstract The outcome of sequential azacitidine with lenalidomide has not been reported in previously treated patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and higher risk myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). This study describes a phase 2 study evaluating the safety and efficacy of this combination in elderly patients with AML and MDS with prior hypomethylating agent (HMA) and/or immunomodulatory agent exposure. Patients were treated on a 42-day cycle with azacitidine at 75 mg/m2 SQ/IV daily on days 1–7, followed by lenalidomide 50 mg orally daily on days 8–28. The median number of treatment cycles on study was two (range = 1–11). Of 32 evaluable patients, the overall response rate was 25%. Neutropenic fever was the most common serious adverse event, but overall the combination was well-tolerated. The median overall survival (OS) for responders vs non-responders was 9.8 vs 4.0 months, respectively (HR = 0.36, p = 0.016). In conclusion, this combination demonstrated modest clinical activity in this poor risk population.
Homogentisic acid is the product of MelA, which mediates melanogenesis in the marine bacterium Shewanella colwelliana D

Shewanella colwelliana D is a marine procaryote which produces a diffusible brown pigment that correlates with melA gene expression. Previously, melA had been cloned, sequenced, and expressed in Escherichia coli; however, the reaction product of MelA had not been identified. This report identifies that product as homogentisic acid, provides evidence that the pigment is homogentisic acid-melanin (pyomelanin), and suggests that MelA is p-hydroxyphenylpyruvate hydroxylase. This is the first report of pyomelanin in an obligate marine bacterium.
Real Time Opinion Mining and Analysis of Twitter Data

This era, in which we currently stand, is an era of public opinion and mass information. People from all around the globe are joined together through various information junctions to create a global community, where one thing from the far east reaches to the people of the far west within seconds. Nothing is hidden, everything and anything can be scrutinized to its core and through these global criticisms and mass discussions of gigantic magnitude, we have reached to the pinnacle of correct decisions and better choices. These pseudo social groups and data junctions have bombarded our society so much that they now hold the forelock of our opinions and sentiments, ergo, we reach out to these groups to achieve a better outcome. But, all this enormous data and all these opinions cannot be researched by a single person, hence, comes the need of sentiment analysis. In this paper we’ll try to accomplish this by creating a system that will enable us to fetch tweets from twitter and use those tweets against a lexical database which will create a training set and then compare it with the pre-fetched tweets. Through this we will be able to assign a polarity to all the tweets by means of which we can address them as negative, positive or neutral and this is the very foundation of sentiment analysis, so subtle yet so magnificent.
Image Region Forgery Detection: A Deep Learning Approach

In digital forensics, the detection of the presence of tampered images is of signiﬁcant importance. The problem with the existing literature is that majority of them identify certain features in images tampered by a speciﬁc tampering method (such as copy-move, splicing, etc). This means that the method does not work reliably across various tampering methods. In addition, in terms of tampered region localization, most of the work targets only JPEG images due to the exploita-tion of double compression artifacts left during the re-compression of the manip- ulated image. However, in reality, digital forensics tools should not be speciﬁc to any image format and should also be able to localize the region of the image that was modiﬁed. In this paper, we propose a two stage deep learning approach to learn features in order to detect tampered images in different image formats. For the ﬁrst stage, we utilize a Stacked Autoencoder model to learn the complex feature for each indi- vidual patch. For the second stage, we integrate the contextual information of each patch so that the detection can be conducted more accurately. In our experiments, we were able to obtain an overall tampered region localization accuracy of 91.09% over both JPEG and TIFF images from CASIA dataset, with a fall-out of 4.31% and a precision of 57.67% respectively. The accuracy over the JPEG tampered images is 87.51%, which outperforms the 40.84% and 79.72% obtained from two state of the art tampering detection approaches.
Switching time optimization for discontinuous switched systems

In this paper, an algorithm for switching time optimization for switched systems that exhibit discontinuities in the state trajectory on a switching is proposed. A derivative of the cost function with respect to the switching time is derived using a dynamic programming argumentation. Based on this derivative, a two-stage algorithm is described that alternates between solving an optimal control problem with fixed switching sequence and improving the switching times.
Geometry of Miura-folded metamaterials

This paper describes two folded metamaterials based on the Miura-ori fold pattern. The structural mechanics of these metamaterials are dominated by the kinematics of the folding, which only depends on the geometry and therefore is scale-independent. First, a folded shell structure is introduced, where the fold pattern provides a negative Poisson’s ratio for in-plane deformations and a positive Poisson’s ratio for out-of-plane bending. Second, a cellular metamaterial is described based on a stacking of individual folded layers, where the folding kinematics are compatible between layers. Additional freedom in the design of the metamaterial can be achieved by varying the fold pattern within each layer.
Cosmic inhomogeneities and averaged cosmological dynamics.

If general relativity (GR) describes the expansion of the Universe, the observed cosmic acceleration implies the existence of a "dark energy. " However, while the Universe is on average homogeneous on large scales, it is inhomogeneous on smaller scales. While GR governs the dynamics of the inhomogeneous Universe, the averaged homogeneous Universe obeys modified Einstein equations. Can such modifications alone explain the acceleration? For a simple generic model with realistic initial conditions, we show the answer to be "no." Averaging effects negligibly influence the cosmological dynamics.
Multispectral imaging of burn wounds: a new clinical instrument for evaluating burn depth

A real-time video imaging system called the imaging burn depth indicator (IBDI) is described; IBDI can discriminate areas of burn wounds expected to heal in three weeks or less from the day of injury from those areas not expected to heal in that time period. The analysis can be performed on or about the third day postburn on debrided burn wounds. The relative diffuse reflectivity of the burn-wound is measured in the red, green, and near-infrared wavelength bands and an algorithm established previously is used to translate this optical data into burn healing probabilities. Over 100 burn wound sites were studied. Burn sites were evaluated on day three postburn by the IBDI and by the attending physician. Overall, the IBDI was found to be more accurate in predicting burn healing than were the attending physicians. <<ETX>>
How do customer journeys regarding energy investments look like

It is generally acknowledged that the existing housing stock plays a vital role in attaining national and international energy efficiency targets. As for new building, mandatory regulations can be (and are) developed to attain energy-efficient homes, but energy improvements in the existing stock are, because of property rights, strongly dependent on the voluntary cooperation and participation of the owners. For many years, governments have been developing instruments for stimulating energy investments among homeowners. This is a subject of persistent concern, as many regulations and policy initiatives are not very successful, and good examples are scarce. Particularly regarding the owner-occupied sector, the term ‘customer journey’ is frequently used to denote the decision-making process from an initial interest in a good or service towards the purchase of it. The process is rarely straightforward and can have many pitfalls; there is a high risk that a willingness to invest is eventually not materialised in actual investments. On the basis of literature review, this paper outlines what the notion of a ‘customer journey’ includes. How can be process be described and analysed? What are the ‘stops’ in this journey, where critical decisions are taken? What kind of decisions are these? Which types of journeys can be distinguished? The paper reviews models and designs for customer journeys and addresses the policy implications.
Sample Path Large Deviations for Stochastic Evolutionary Game Dynamics

We study a model of stochastic evolutionary game dynamics in which the probabilities that agents choose suboptimal actions are dependent on payoff consequences. We prove a sample path large deviation principle, characterizing the rate of decay of the probability that the sample path of the evolutionary process lies in a prespecified set as the population size approaches infinity. We use these results to describe excursion rates and stationary distribution asymptotics in settings where the mean dynamic admits a globally attracting state, and we compute these rates explicitly for the case of logit choice in potential games.