Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Are Scale Economies in Banking Elusive or Illusive? Evidence Obtained by Incorporating Capital Structure and Risk-Taking into Models of Bank Production

This paper explores how to incorporate banks' capital structure and risk-taking into models of production. In doing so, the paper bridges the gulf between (1) the banking literature that studies moral hazard effects of bank regulation without considering the underlying microeconomics of production and (2) the literature that uses dual profit and cost functions to study the microeconomics of bank production without explicitly considering how banks' production decisions influence their riskiness. Various production models that differ in how they account for capital structure and in the objectives they impute to bank managers -- cost minimization versus value maximization -- are estimated using U.S. data on highest-level bank holding companies. Modeling the bank's objective as value maximization conveniently incorporates both market-priced risk and expected cash flow into managers' ranking and choice of production plans. Estimated scale economies are found to depend critically on how banks' capital structure and risk-taking is modeled. In particular, when equity capital, in addition to debt, is included in the production model and cost is computed from the value-maximizing expansion path rather than the cost-minimizing path, banks are found to have large scale economies that increase with size. Moreover, better diversification is associated with larger scale economies while increased risk-taking and inefficient risk-taking are associated with smaller scale economies.
Modeling exome sequencing data with generalized Gaussian distribution with application to copy number variation detection

Exome sequencing provides us an effective way to discover genetic factors that might be associated with phenotypes for complex diseases. Compared with the whole-genome sequencing, exome sequencing can satisfy the high sequencing coverage requirement while under the limited budge constraint. However, due to the nature that exons are distributed sparsely along the genome, and the technical variability between samples, the analysis of exome sequencing data is complicated and direct utilization of current whole-genome sequencing targeted methods yields wrong results. In this paper, we propose a novel model to represent the exome sequencing data. Under this model, we show that the technical variability as well as random sequencing error follow the generalized Gaussian distribution. Based on this observation, we propose a method to detect the copy number variation. Studies on real data from 1000 Genomes Projects validate the proposed algorithm.
Increase in ovarian blood volume during ovulation in the gonadotropin-primed immature rat.

This study quantifies ovarian blood volume in Wistar rats by measuring the optical density (414 nm) of hemoglobin in ovarian extracts and comparing this measurement to the optical density of known amounts of whole blood. Immature rats were primed with pregnant mare's serum gonadotropin (PMSG), 10 IU s.c. , at 23 days of age. On Day 25, the ovulatory process was initiated by human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), 10 IU s.c. , and ova began to appear in the oviducts 10 h later. At 2-h intervals, the ovaries were extirpated and homogenized in 1.0 ml of 0.05 M tris (hydroxymethyl)aminomethane buffer (pH 7.4) for 30 s. Homogenates were centrifuged for 20 min and the supernatant fluids were analyzed with a Gilford RESPONSE UV/VIS spectrophotometer. The hemoglobin in these ovarian extracts had the same peak absorbance of 414 nm characteristic of oxyhemoglobin in whole blood taken by cardiac puncture of the rats. There was a linear relationship between the absorbance and the volume of whole blood in the samples. The volume of blood per ovary from groups of 8 rats was 0.60 +/- 0.07 microL at 0 h after hCG. The volume increased to 1.37 +/- 0.26 microL at 4 h after hCG and reached a peak of 4.55 +/- 0.72 microL at 10 h. Indomethacin treatment (0.3-10.0 mg/rat, s.c.) partially inhibited this 7-fold increase in ovarian blood volume. In conclusion, the increase in ovarian blood volume during ovulation may reflect the vasodilation and hyperemia that are characteristic of inflamed tissues.
Deficits in the Sensitivity to Pitch Sweeps by School-Aged Children Wearing Cochlear Implants

Sensitivity to static changes in pitch has been shown to be poorer in school-aged children wearing cochlear implants (CIs) than children with normal hearing (NH), but it is unclear whether this is also the case for dynamic changes in pitch. Yet, dynamically changing pitch has considerable ecological relevance in terms of natural speech, particularly aspects such as intonation, emotion, or lexical tone information. Twenty one children with NH and 23 children wearing a CI participated in this study, along with 18 NH adults and 6 CI adults for comparison. Listeners with CIs used their clinically assigned settings with envelope-based coding strategies. Percent correct was measured in one- or three-interval two-alternative forced choice tasks, for the direction or discrimination of harmonic complexes based on a linearly rising or falling fundamental frequency. Sweep rates were adjusted per subject, in a logarithmic scale, so as to cover the full extent of the psychometric function. Data for up- and down-sweeps were fitted separately, using a maximum-likelihood technique. Fits were similar for up- and down-sweeps in the discrimination task, but diverged in the direction task because psychometric functions for down-sweeps were very shallow. Hits and false alarms were then converted into d′ and beta values, from which a threshold was extracted at a d′ of 0.77. Thresholds were very consistent between the two tasks and considerably higher (worse) for CI listeners than for their NH peers. Thresholds were also higher for children than adults. Factors such as age at implantation, age at profound hearing loss, and duration of CI experience did not play any major role in this sensitivity. Thresholds of dynamic pitch sensitivity (in either task) also correlated with thresholds for static pitch sensitivity and with performance in tasks related to speech prosody.
Special Issue on Distributed Computing and Artificial Intelligence

There is a wide range of military and civil applications where Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and MultiAgent Systems (MASs) can be used for providing contextawareness for troops and special corps. On the one hand, WSNs comprise an ideal technology to develop Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLSs) aimed at indoor environments, where existing global navigation satellite systems do not work properly. On the other hand, agent-based architectures allow building autonomous and robust systems that are capable of working on highly dynamic scenarios. This paper presents two piracy scenarios where the n-Core platform can be applied. n-Core is a hardware and software platform intended for developing and deploying easily and quickly a wide variety of WSNs applications based on the ZigBee standard. In the first scenario a RTLS is deployed to support boarding and rescue operations. In the second scenario a multi-agent system is proposed to detect the unloading of illegal traffic of merchandise at ports. Keywords— Wireless Sensor Networks, Real-Time Locating Systems, Multi-Agent Systems, Maritime Piracy. Manuscript received June 15, 2012. This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Subprograma Torres Quevedo). Óscar García is with the R&D Department of Nebusens, S.L. Scientific Park of the University of Salamanca, Building M2, calle Adaja s/n, 37185, Villamayor de la Armuña, Salamanca, Spain (corresponding author to provide phone: +34923134594; e-mail: oscar.garcia@nebusens.com). Ricardo S. Alonso is with the R&D Department of Nebusens, S.L. Scientific Park of the University of Salamanca, Building M2, calle Adaja s/n, 37185, Villamayor de la Armuña, Salamanca, Spain (e-mail: ricardo.alonso@nebusens.com). Dante I. Tapia is with the R&D Department of Nebusens, S.L. Scientific Park of the University of Salamanca, Building M2, calle Adaja s/n, 37185, Villamayor de la Armuña, Salamanca, Spain (e-mail: dante.tapia@nebusens.com). Fabio Guevara is with the R&D Department of Nebusens, S.L. Scientific Park of the University of Salamanca, Building M2, calle Adaja s/n, 37185, Villamayor de la Armuña, Salamanca, Spain (e-mail: fabio.guevara@nebusens.com). Fernando de la Prieta is with the Department of Computer Science and Automation, University of Salamanca. Plaza de la Merced, s/n, 37008, Salamanca, Spain (e-mail: fer@usal.es). Raúl A. Bravo is with the Department of Computer Science and Automation, University of Salamanca. Plaza de la Merced, s/n, 37008, Salamanca, Spain (e-mail: raulabel@usal.es).
Efficient and Fast Method of Wall Parameter Estimation by Using UWB Radar System

Precise SAR imaging of objects or detection of moving a person behind a wall with UWB radar or nondestructive testing of walls in civil engineering requires the knowledge of wall parameters like thickness and permittivity. Their use in the data processing produces more precise and realistic results. The measurement of the wall parameters is challenge in a real environment especially when there is access only from one side of the wall. In this paper, an effective and fast algorithm for wall parameters estimation that can be used in practice is presented. For that purpose the magnitudes and the time positions of reflections from inner and outer interfaces of the wall are extracted from the data. A new scanning method reduces drastically the clutter caused by objects in the measurement environment such as reflections from other walls, the ceiling, the floor and antenna crosstalk. The algorithm was tested on 13 different types of walls with different permittivity and thickness. A handheld M-sequence UWB radar with horn and circular antennas was used for data gathering. The proposed method is very robust and the error of the thickness estimation was less than 10% for most of walls. The whole measurement can be handled by one person. The wall parameter estimation runs in real time and is fully automated.
Improving Network I/O Performance in Virtual Machines through Workload Profile Clustering

The unpredictability of virtual machines workload makes effective CPU resources allocation a hard assignment for the hypervisor. Even if a virtual machine is allocated with adequate CPU resources, the quality of service of those running both CPU and I/O intensive tasks (heterogeneous workload), may be seriously affected if they are not provided in a timely manner. As server consolidation grows, CPU sharing among multiple virtual machines leads to negative impact on I/O intensive tasks running within the guest OS, due to incurred scheduling latency and lack of prioritization by hypervisor's scheduler. Although a fair amount of researches have dedicated to improve I/O performance on a multi-core platform through the implementation of coexisting schedulers, heterogeneous workloads still lacks of in-depth exploration. In this paper, we systematically evaluate scheduler's interference on I/O responsiveness of heterogeneous workloads domains under server consolidation. The performance study aims to create a synthetic heterogeneous workload based on media streaming applications by varying packet sizes. Furthermore, we apply the coexisting schedulers approach in order to analyze the linearity of quality of service metrics such as throughput, jitter and packet loss over this specific scenario.
Part-of-Speech Tagging for Historical English

As more historical texts are digitized, there is interest in applying natural language processing tools to these archives. However, the performance of these tools is often unsatisfactory, due to language change and genre differences. Spelling normalization heuristics are the dominant solution for dealing with historical texts, but this approach fails to account for changes in usage and vocabulary. In this empirical paper, we assess the capability of domain adaptation techniques to cope with historical texts, focusing on the classic benchmark task of part-of-speech tagging. We evaluate several domain adaptation methods on the task of tagging Early Modern English and Modern British English texts in the Penn Corpora of Historical English. We demonstrate that the Feature Embedding method for unsupervised domain adaptation outperforms word embeddings and Brown clusters, showing the importance of embedding the entire feature space, rather than just individual words. Feature Embeddings also give better performance than spelling normalization, but the combination of the two methods is better still, yielding a 5% raw improvement in tagging accuracy on Early Modern English texts.
PREDICTION OF NOSOCOMIAL INFECTION ACQUISITION IN VENTILATED PATIENTS BY NASAL NITRIC OXIDE: PROOF-OF-CONCEPT STUDY

The development of biomarkers able to predict the occurrence of nosocomial infection could help manage preventive strategies, especially in medical patients whose degree of acquired immunosuppression may be variable. We hypothesized that the NO fraction present in the airways (upper and lower) of critically ill patients under mechanical ventilation could constitute such a biomarker. We conducted an observational proof-of-concept study in a medical intensive care unit of a teaching hospital. Forty-five patients (26 men; 72 [25th-75th percentiles] years [56-82]; Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, 63 [50-81], 14 infected) under mechanical ventilation (>3 days) underwent on day 1 and day 3 of their stay: nasal and exhaled (partitioned in bronchial and alveolar sources) bedside NO measurements, determination of urine NO end products and plasma cytokine (IL-6, IL-10) concentrations, and Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score calculation. Nosocomial infection incidence was recorded during the 15 subsequent days. Fifteen patients (33%) acquired a nosocomial infection (16 infections, 15 ventilator-associated pneumonia and 1 bacteremia). Nasal NO was the only marker significantly different between patients with and without subsequent infection (day 1, 52 ppb [20-142] vs. 134 [84-203], P = 0.038; day 3, 98 ppb [22-140] vs. 225 [89-288], P = 0.006, respectively). Nasal NO fraction 148 ppb or less at day 3 had an 80% sensitivity, a 70% specificity, and an odds ratio of 2.7 (95% confidence interval, 1.9-3.8) to predict acquisition of nosocomial infection. Nonsurvivors had a higher IL-6 concentration on day 3 (P = 0.014), whereas their nasal NO fractions were not significantly different. Nasal NO seems to be a relatively sensitive and specific biomarker of subsequent nosocomial infection acquisition (at least for ventilator-associated pneumonia), which warrants confirmation in a multicenter trial. ABBREVIATIONS-AUC-area under the curve; ICU-intensive care unit; NO-nitric oxide; NPV-negative predictive value; PPV-positive predictive value; SAPS-Simplified Acute Physiology Score; SOFA-Sequential Organ Failure Assessment
Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) Scale

WHY : The incidence of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) increases with age ranging from 7% to 38% (2011 Alzheimer’s disease Facts and Figures). Older adults with MCI have as high as 14% higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s dementia (2011 Alzheimer’s disease Facts and Figures). While studies have shown that treatment with an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor prior to progression has delayed dementia onset by 3 years, currently there is no endorsed treatment recommendations for MCI. BEST TOOL : The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA© Version 7.1) was developed as a quick screening tool for MCI and early Alzheimer’s dementia. It assesses the domains of attention and concentration, executive functions, memory, language, visuoconstructional skills, conceptual thinking, calculations, and orientation. There are two alternative MoCA© forms (Version 7.2 and 7.3) available in an effort to decrease possible learning effects when used repeatedly (Phillips et al., 2011). The MoCA© has been tested extensively for use in a variety of disorders affecting cognition such as HIV, Huntington’s chorea, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, vascular dementia, and substance abuse in addition to the well older adult. It has been tested in 14 different languages, ages ranging from as young as 49 in two reports to old-old (85+) with a variety of education levels. The total possible score is 30 points with a score of 26 or more considered normal. To better adjust the MoCA for lower educated individuals, 2 points should be added to the total MoCA score for those with 4-9 years of education and 1 point for 10-12 years of education (Johns et al., 2010). The score range for MCI is 19-25.2
Solar Corona Amplitude Scintillation Modeling and Comparison to Measurements at X-Band and Ka-Band

Signal-strength fluctuations on a spacecraft-to-Earth link due to solar charged particles can degrade telemetry performance. The degree of amplitude scintillation induced on an emitted spacecraft signal by the intervening charged particles of the solar corona during a spacecraft-to-Earth superior conjunction depends on the minimum distance from the Sun of the signal ray path (solar elongation), the current phase of the solar cycle (solar maximum versus solar minimum), and the sub-solar latitude of the signal path. For spacecraft telemetry, frame errors have been observed to significantly increase due to scintillation, when the solar elongation becomes small enough, or when the solar coronal environment of the signal path is plagued with solar activity such as coronal mass ejections or streamers. This degradation in telemetry data return occurs at solar elongation angles of 2 deg and below at 8.4 GHz (X-band) and is expected to start occurring at about 1 deg at 32 GHz (Ka-band). This article presents both theoretical and statistical models, which have been derived based on spacecraft solar conjunction measurements to characterize the degree of solar scintillation as a function of solar elongation angle at both X-band and Ka-band. Such models may be useful to flight projects and design engineers in the planning of solar conjunction operational scenarios.
An in vitro approach to the evaluation of foot-ankle kinematics: Performance evaluation of a custom-built gait simulator

Despite their well-known limitations, in vitro experiments have several benefits over in vivo techniques when exploring foot biomechanics under conditions characteristic of gait. In this study, we present a new setup for dynamic in vitro gait simulation that integrates a numerical model for generating the tibial kinematics control input, and we present an innovative methodology to measure full three-dimensional joint kinematics during gait simulations. The gait simulator applies forces to the tendons. Tibial kinematics in the sagittal plane is controlled using a numerical model that takes into account foot morphology. The methodology is validated by comparing joint rotations measured during gait simulation with those measured in vivo. In addition, reliability and accuracy of the control system as well as simulation input and output repeatability are quantified. The results reflect good control performance and repeatability of the control inputs, vertical ground reaction force, center of pressure displacement, and joint rotations and translations. In addition, there is a good correspondence to in vivo kinematics for most patterns of motion at the ankle, subtalar, and Chopart’s joints. Therefore, these results show the relevance and validity of including specimen-specific information for defining the control inputs.
Fluciclovine positron emission tomography in the setting of biochemical recurrence following local therapy of prostate cancer

Approximately one in five men will demonstrate biochemical recurrence (BCR) following local therapy for prostate cancer (PCa). Advanced imaging modalities including positron emission tomography (PET) imaging of various radiotracers have become more commonplace to visualize foci of disease recurrence. We performed a systematic review of the literature to describe current evidence in support of 18F-fluciclovine (Axumin) PET imaging in this clinical setting. An English literature search was conducted on PubMed/Medline for original investigations on 18F-fluciclovine PET for PCa. Boolean criteria included the terms: prostate, fluciclovine, FACBC and Axumin. Published articles meeting these criteria and their respective bibliographies and diagnostic modalities were included after review, when appropriate. Our literature review identified 93 articles. Among these, 18 met our inclusion criteria. Evidence suggests 18F-fluciclovine PET imaging is safe, well-tolerated and offers acceptable sensitivity and specificity for the detection of localized intraglandular and extraprostatic PCa foci in the setting of persistence or recurrence after primary treatment. Compared to other available PET radiotracers available, evidence suggests that 18F-fluciclovine may outperform ProstaScint and 11C-choline in this clinical setting. Furthermore, 18F-fluciclovine PET may aid guiding decision-making in regards to salvage therapy planning. Further investigation is warranted to validate these early findings and to further compare this agent to other available radiotracers in this setting.
SP^2Bench: A SPARQL Performance Benchmark

Recently, the SPARQL query language for RDF has reached the W3C recommendation status. In response to this emerging standard, the database community is currently exploring efficient storage techniques for RDF data and evaluation strategies for SPARQL queries. A meaningful analysis and comparison of these approaches necessitates a comprehensive and universal benchmark platform. To this end, we have developed SP^2Bench, a publicly available, language-specific SPARQL performance benchmark. SP^2Bench is settled in the DBLP scenario and comprises both a data generator for creating arbitrarily large DBLP-like documents and a set of carefully designed benchmark queries. The generated documents mirror key characteristics and social-world distributions encountered in the original DBLP data set, while the queries implement meaningful requests on top of this data, covering a variety of SPARQL operator constellationsand RDF access patterns. As a proof of concept, we apply SP^2Bench to existing engines and discuss their strengths and weaknesses that follow immediately from the benchmark results
k-Nearest Neighbor Augmented Neural Networks for Text Classification

In recent years, many deep-learning based models are proposed for text classification. This kind of models well fits the training set from the statistical point of view. However, it lacks the capacity of utilizing instance-level information from individual instances in the training set. In this work, we propose to enhance neural network models by allowing them to leverage information from $k$-nearest neighbor (kNN) of the input text. Our model employs a neural network that encodes texts into text embeddings. Moreover, we also utilize $k$-nearest neighbor of the input text as an external memory, and utilize it to capture instance-level information from the training set. The final prediction is made based on features from both the neural network encoder and the kNN memory. Experimental results on several standard benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms the baseline model on all the datasets, and it even beats a very deep neural network model (with 29 layers) in several datasets. Our model also shows superior performance when training instances are scarce, and when the training set is severely unbalanced. Our model also leverages techniques such as semi-supervised training and transfer learning quite well.