Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing Investors' Risk Tolerance Through a Questionnaire

The Italian version of this paper can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2126578.The assessment of investors' risk tolerance by investment firms is a crucial issue both for regulators and for the industry. The economic and psychological literature has identified a set of factors affecting the risk preferences and perception by individuals and a series of features that make the questionnaire an effective tool for risk profiling. The present study analyses the questionnaires used by a representative sample of Italian intermediaries in compliance with the suitability obligations dictated by the Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID). In the light of the economic and psychological literature we review the way questionnaires are structured and given as well as their contents and wording. Regarding contents several limitations affect questionnaires. Questions used to assess customers’ investment knowledge and experience are poor: they often rely on individuals’ self-evaluation and are not aimed at verifying familiarity with basic notions like the relationship between risk and expected return and portfolio diversification. In addition the "measurement" of risk attitude almost always overlaps identification of the holding period and the purpose of the investment, in contrast with the suggestion of the literature stating that these items should be covered independently because they are affected by different factors. The way questions elicit risk tolerance does not control for those cognitive and behavioural biases which could induce flawed answers. As regards the wording, questions are often vague, ambiguous and use complex language unlikely to be understood.
Transporting Commodities: Hedging Against Price, Demand and Freight Rate Risk with Options

Like options on stocks, options on commodities provide firms with protection against adverse price movements. Many firms procure commodity at an offshore location and transport it via ocean freight. Increased globalization and increased demand for ocean-based transportation has resulted in ocean freight itself becoming a volatile commodity. We consider a commodity processor and develop models to determine the firm’s optimal hedging policy. The models allow for three sources of uncertainty; demand, commodity spot price and freight rate. The scenarios differ based on assumptions on independence between the uncertainties, and also assumptions on market competitiveness. The optimal hedging policies are variants of the classical newsvendor critical fractile. We show that partially procuring the commodity and its freight through option contracts, rather than entirely on the volatile spot market creates value, even for a risk-neutral firm. We then perform extensive numerical experiments to study the influence of the underlying parameters on the optimal hedging policies and value creation.
Diverse Image Annotation

In this work we study the task of image annotation, of which the goal is to describe an image using a few tags. Instead of predicting the full list of tags, here we target for providing a short list of tags under a limited number (e.g., 3), to cover as much information as possible of the image. The tags in such a short list should be representative and diverse. It means they are required to be not only corresponding to the contents of the image, but also be different to each other. To this end, we treat the image annotation as a subset selection problem based on the conditional determinantal point process (DPP) model, which formulates the representation and diversity jointly. We further explore the semantic hierarchy and synonyms among the candidate tags, and require that two tags in a semantic hierarchy or in a pair of synonyms should not be selected simultaneously. This requirement is then embedded into the sampling algorithm according to the learned conditional DPP model. Besides, we find that traditional metrics for image annotation (e.g., precision, recall and F1 score) only consider the representation, but ignore the diversity. Thus we propose new metrics to evaluate the quality of the selected subset (i.e., the tag list), based on the semantic hierarchy and synonyms. Human study through Amazon Mechanical Turk verifies that the proposed metrics are more close to the humans judgment than traditional metrics. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can produce more representative and diverse tags, compared with existing image annotation methods.
Attention problems in very preterm children from childhood to adulthood: the Bavarian Longitudinal Study.

BACKGROUND Very preterm (VP; gestational age <32 weeks) and very low birth weight (VLBW; <1500 grams) is related to attention problems in childhood and adulthood. The stability of these problems into adulthood is not known. METHODS The Bavarian Longitudinal Study is a prospective cohort study that followed 260 VP/VLBW and 229 term-born individuals from birth to adulthood. Data on attention were collected at 6, 8, and 26 years of age, using parent reports, expert behavior observations, and clinical ADHD diagnoses. RESULTS At each assessment, VP/VLBW individuals had significantly more attention problems, shorter attention span, and were more frequently diagnosed with ADHD than term-born comparisons. In both VP/VLBW and term-born individuals, overall, attention span increased and attention problems decreased from childhood to adulthood. Attention problems and attention span were more stable over time for VP/VLBW than term-born individuals. Similarly, ADHD diagnoses showed moderate stability from childhood to adulthood in VP/VLBW, but not in term-born individuals. However, when those with severe disabilities were excluded, differences between VP/VLBW and term-born individuals reduced. CONCLUSIONS Despite improvement in attention regulation from childhood to adulthood, children born very preterm remained at increased risk for attention problems in adulthood. In contrast, term-born children with clinical attention problems outgrew these by adulthood. As inattentive behavior of VP/VLBW children may be overlooked by teachers, it may be necessary to raise awareness for school intervention programs that reduce attention problems in VP/VLBW children.
Research Trends and Its Determinants in Mobile Commerce Research (1999-2012)

This paper wanted to find out research trends and its determinants on mobile commerce research reviewing 439 articles from 1999, the starting year of this field to 2012. Our analytical framework has 4 categories such as general, technology, consumer and firm, and 14 sub-categories. The results are as follows: First, studies on mobile commerce can be divided into 5 stages. Second, trends of mobile commerce are closely related to the evolution of mobile technologies such as communication technologies and devices (2G, 3G, 3G+, 4G LTE, LTE-A). Third, this field was led by USA until 2005 and has been led by Taiwan after 2006. Fourth, China, Korea, UK and Canada are also leading countries, all of which have mobile device manufacturers. Research trends of non-manufacturing countries and manufacturing countries are different from each other. In addition, the trends of leading countries are different from each other reflecting each country`s business needs.
Refinements in husbandry, care and common procedures for non-human primates

Preface Whenever animals are used in research, minimizing pain and distress and promoting good welfare should be as important an objective as achieving the experimental results. This is important for humanitarian reasons, for good science, for economic reasons and in order to satisfy the broad legal principles in international legislation. It is possible to refine both husbandry and procedures to minimize suffering and improve welfare in a number of ways, and this can be greatly facilitated by ensuring that up-to-date information is readily available. The need to provide such information led the British Veterinary Association Animal Welfare Foundation (BVAAWF), the Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) to establish a Joint Working Group on Refinement (JWGR) in the UK. The chair is Professor David Morton and the secretariat is provided by the RSPCA. This report is the ninth in the JWGR series. The RSPCA is opposed to the use of animals in experiments that cause pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm and together with FRAME has particular concerns about the continued use of non-human primates. The replacement of primate experiments is a primary goal for the RSPCA and FRAME. However, both organizations share with others in the Working Group, the common aim of replacing primate experiments wherever possible, reducing suffering and improving welfare while primate use continues. The reports of the refinement workshops are intended to help achieve these aims. This report produced by the British Veterinary Association Animal Welfare Foundation (BVAAWF)/Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME)/Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA)/Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) Joint Working Group on Refinement (JWGR) sets out practical guidance on refining the husbandry and care of non-human primates (hereinafter primates) and on minimizing the adverse effects of some common procedures. It provides a valuable resource to help understand the physical, social and behavioural characteristics and needs of individual primates, and is intended to develop and complement the existing literature and legislative guidelines. Topics covered include refinements in housing, husbandry and common procedures such as restraint, identification and sampling, with comprehensive advice on issues such as primate communication, assessing and facilitating primate wellbeing, establishing and maintaining social groups, environmental and nutritional enrichment and animal passports. The most commonly used species are the key focus of this resource, but its information and recommendations are generally applicable to other species, provided that relevant individual species characteristics are taken into account.
Constrained neighbor lists for SPH-based fluid simulations

In this paper we present a new approach to create neighbor lists with strict memory bounds for incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. Our proposed approach is based on a novel efficient predictive-corrective algorithm that locally adjusts particle support radii in order to yield neighborhoods of a user-defined maximum size. Due to the improved estimation of the initial support radius, our algorithm is able to efficiently calculate neighborhoods in a single iteration in almost any situation. We compare our neighbor list algorithm to previous approaches and show that our proposed approach can handle larger particle numbers on a single GPU due to its strict guarantees and is able to simulate more particles in real time due to its benefits in regard to performance. Additionally we demonstrate the versatility and stability of our approach in several different scenarios, for example multi-scale simulations and with different kernel functions.
The influence of health literacy on colorectal cancer screening knowledge, beliefs and behavior.

OBJECTIVE To determine if health literacy is associated with knowledge of colorectal cancer (CRC) and CRC screening tests, with perceived benefits and barriers to CRC screening, with perceived risk of CRC, with reported self-efficacy for completing CRC screening and with receipt of CRC tests. METHODS A convenience sample of 99 subjects completed a health literacy assessment, the Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM) and a structured interview. RESULTS Limited or inadequate health literacy was significantly associated with less knowledge about CRC and CRC screening and with more reported barriers to completing fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) and colonoscopy in multivariate analysis. Health literacy was not associated with perceived benefits or reported self-efficacy for completing FOBT or colonoscopy, with perceived risk of developing CRC or with completing CRC tests. However, our small sample size limited our power to detect differences. CONCLUSIONS Patients with limited health literacy have less knowledge about CRC and CRC screening and report more barriers to completing FOBT and colonoscopy. Interventions to improve CRC screening should consider the health literacy of patients, especially when addressing barriers to screening. Future studies are needed to better define the role of health literacy in CRC screening.
SIC pair generation in optimal time using rotatable counters

In this work we present a novel module termed rotatable counter and its use to design an on-chip generator of SIC pairs. The presented generator is optimal in time, in the sense that it generates the n-bit SIC pairs in time n × 2^n clock cycles, i.e. equal to the theoretical minimum.
Bedload research international cooperative: BRIC

A Bed load Research International Cooperative – BRIC – has been formed as a web-based global organization for research that will provide a better understanding of bed load processes and improved means for estimating bed load discharge. The BRIC is a non-profit group of researchers, practitioners, resource managers et al. interested in acquisition and use of bed load data for research and/or for application in studies or management of river systems. Thus, it is by and for the international bed load-research community. The BRIC website consists of four components in addition to external links: i) A membership entry form and membership database; ii) bibliographic citations and related information; iii) bed load research venues; and iv) an under-construction portal to bed load data. The three functional components are fully searchable by keyword and other criteria. The strength of the BRIC is its membership. Those interested in the BRIC concept are invited to join and participate in the BRIC free-of-charge.
Training and organizational effectiveness: moderating role of knowledge management process

Purpose – Training alone is not sufficient to enhance organizational effectiveness to a greater level because not all knowledge obtained from the training is properly transferred and applied to the organization. This study aims to investigate whether efforts invested by Malaysian manufacturers in employee training and knowledge transfer affect organizational effectiveness. Design/methodology/approach – This study adopted a quantitative research design. The questionnaire developed for this study captured the training related to individual/managerial skills, the knowledge management process in place to capture and apply the knowledge obtained through training, and the organizational effectiveness. A closed-ended online survey was sent to 1,000 members of the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) throughout Malaysia and 88 manufacturers responded. The unit of analysis was an organization. Findings – The study found the following: training employees to acquire individual/managerial skills and process sk.
Strategy, Sustainability, and Innovative Financial Reporting

Strategy and strategic planning are integral to continued business success and growth in a competitive global environment, and this fact is only becoming increasingly important. In order for managerial decision makers to effectively navigate the competitive landscape it is essential to simultaneously sustain and innovate. Sustainability, in various forms, has been debated in both academic and practitioner literature for decades, but recently has evolved into a more integrated version of sustainability and business performance. Innovative ideas, including those linked to sustainability, require measurement and ranking using non-traditional metrics and evaluative tools. Accounting and finance, moving from traditional roles as gatekeepers to one of business decision maker, are well positioned to provide much needed information and evaluation to managerial teams via innovative financial reporting.
Innovation and Creativity in Public Sector

The position of public sector in European countries is significant, especially now when Europe has a goal of smart, inclusive and sustainable growth. The paper examines manners how public sector can contribute to achievement of this goal. The aim of the paper is to investigate the existing modern perspectives on public sector and find out the linkages between them. It deals with the role and importance of intelligence, innovation and creativity in public sector processes. It examines the nature of smart, innovative and creative approach to public sector, their main factors, indicators and variables. The purpose of the paper is to introduce and point out the mentioned approaches that may provide alternatives to previous procedures in public sector. The main findings are based on the main aim of this article, which is to develop a better understanding of innovative, smart and creative approach in public sector with a particular focus on the public involvement.
Identifying Consumer Dissatisfaction Response Styles: An Agenda for Future Research

The study of consumer complaint behaviours (CCB) and other dissatisfaction responses is an important economic activity with implications for brand loyalty and switching, market feedback mechanisms and consumer welfare. Previous research is examined, namely how consumers respond to dissatisfaction in the marketplace and whether different consumers utilise different styles. Several gaps from conceptual, empirical and profiling standpoints are identified and based on these a detailed agenda to guide future research is developed. Guidelines for tackling substantive, research design and methodology issues are provided.
Optimization of Pairings and Detection Conditions for Measurement of FRET between Cyan and Yellow Fluorescent Proteins

Detection of Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between cyan and yellow fluorescent proteins is a key method for quantifying dynamic processes inside living cells. To compare the different cyan and yellow fluorescent proteins, FRET efficiencies were measured for a set of the possible donor:acceptor pairs. FRET between monomeric Cerulean and Venus is more efficient than the ECFP:EYFP pair and has a 10% greater Förster distance. We also compared several live cell microscopy methods for measuring FRET. The greatest contrast for changes in intramolecular FRET is obtained using a combination of ratiometric and spectral imaging. However, this method is not appropriate for establishing the presence of FRET without extra controls. Accurate FRET efficiencies are obtained by fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy, but these measurements are difficult to collect and analyze. Acceptor photobleaching is a common and simple method for measuring FRET efficiencies. However, when applied to cyan to yellow fluorescent protein FRET, this method becomes prone to an artifact that leads to overestimation of FRET efficiency and false positive signals. FRET was also detected by measuring the acceptor fluorescence anisotropy. Although difficult to quantify, this method is exceptional for screening purposes, because it provides high contrast for discriminating FRET.Note: M. Rizzo and K. Segawa performed this research at Vanderbilt University (same address as Piston). W. Zipfel performed research at Cornell University.
γ‐Aminobutyric Acid Function in the Rat Striatum Is Under the Double Influence of Nigrostriatal Dopaminergic and Thalamostriatal Inputs: Two Modes of Regulation?

Abstract: Glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), γ‐[3H]‐aminobutyric acid ([3H]GABA) high‐affinity uptake into synaptosomes, and endogenous GABA content were measured in the rat striatum 2–3 weeks following 6‐hydroxydopamine injection in the ipsilateral substantia nigra to destroy the nigrostriatal dopaminergic pathway and after kainic acid injection into the centromedial‐parafascicular complex of the ipsilateral thalamus to lesion the thalamostriatal input. Both lesions resulted in apparent GAD increase concomitant with a decreased [3H]GABA uptake into striatal synaptosomes. GABA content was increased selectively following the dopaminergic lesion. Kinetic analysis of the uptake process for [3H]GABA showed selectively a decreased Vmax following the dopaminergic lesion; in animals with thalamic lesion, however, the change only concerned the Km, which showed a decreased affinity of the transport sites for [3H]GABA. Determination of Km and Vmax for GAD action on its substrate glutamic acid showed an increased affinity of GAD for glutamic acid in the case of the dopaminergic lesion without any change in Vmax, whereas the thalamic lesion resulted in GAD increase concomitant with a selective increase in Vmax. These data suggest that striatal GABA neurons are under the influence of nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons which may reduce the GABA turnover, whereas the exact nature of the powerful control also revealed on these neurons following thalamic lesion remains to be determined. Both lesions induced adaptive neurochemical responses of striatal GABA neurons, possibly reflecting in the case of the dopaminergic deprivation an increased GABA turnover.
The Challenges of Accurate Project Status Reporting

Project managers perceive and report project status. Recognizing that their status perceptions might be wrong and that they may not faithfully report what they believe, leads to a natural question how different is true software project status from reported status? Here, we construct a two-stage model, which accounts for project manager errors in perception and bias that might be applied before reporting status to executives. We call the combined effect of errors in perception and bias, project status distortion. The probabilistic model has roots in information theory and uses discrete project status from traffic light reporting. The true status of projects of varying risk was elicited from a panel of five experts, and formed the model input. Key findings suggest that executives should be skeptical of favorable status reports, and that for higher risk project executives should concentrate on decreasing bias if they are to improve the accuracy of project reporting.
Presence and Importance of Connexin43 During Myogenesis

We analyzed the expression of connexin(Cx)43 in proliferating and differentiating C2C12cells and in myoblasts obtained from newborn mice. Cx43 was present in both cell types and under both conditions. The functional role of gap junctional communication (GJC) during terminal differentiation was evaluated in C2C12myoblasts in the presence or absence of the gap junction blocker 18β-glycyrrhetinic acid (β-GA). Differentiation was temporally analyzed through myogenin expression, activity of creatine kinase (CK), and yield of multinucleated cells. In cells treated with β-GA, the CK activity and myotube formation were reversibly blocked. While in control cultures positive myogenin expression was seen in cell clusters, in β-GA treated cultures the myogenin immunoreactivity was detected in few, preferentially sparse cells. The role of Cx43 during terminal differentiation was evaluated in cultures of myoblasts obtained from Cx43Cre-ER(T)/fltransgenic mice. Inducible deletion of Cx43 was obtained upon activation of Cre-ER(T) via 4-OH-tamoxifen applications. Cx43 deletion led to a drastic decrease in myogenin expression at 24 h of differentiation as compared to myoblasts from control mice. Our results indicate that Cx43-containing gap junctions are required for normal skeletal muscle terminal differentiation. These channels might provide a pathway for the intercellular transfer of signals involved in myogenesis.