Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Essais sur les réformes de la régulation bancaire : quelques leçons de la crise financière

Pour limiter le potentiel systemique des crises financieres futures il est necessaire de renforcer la dimension macro-prudentielle de la regulation. Nous proposons dans cette these les quatre pistes de reflexion suivantes pour la construction d’un cadre macro-prudentiel plus robuste : i) detecter les decisions qui jouent un role decisif sur le niveau de risque de la banque et sur son exposition aux crises financieres; ii) se servir d’un indicateur de levier agrege pour detecter l’emballement de l’offre de credits ; iii) introduire une forme de Prompt Corrective Action en Europe dont les signaux de detection seraient composes d’informations sur le capital et sur la liquidite des banques ; iiii) trouver le meilleur moyen de lutter contre le risque de hasard moral des institutions financieres systemiques. Les resultats de ces travaux sont les suivants :1) l’association d’une politique de levier agressive et d’une politique de financement largement orientee sur les marches a court terme est le facteur determinant pour reperer les banques vulnerables ; 2) l’indicateur de levier agrege que nous avons construit a un pouvoir predictif assez eleve et peut par consequent etre utilise comme instrument de detection des crises financieres ; 3) l’information sur le risque de liquidite semble etre un bon complement aux ratios de capital pour detecter les banques vulnerables et declencher l’intervention des superviseurs dans le cadre d’une Prompt Corrective Action europeenne ; 4) les solutions les plus pertinentes pour resoudre le probleme de hasard moral associe aux institutions systemiques semblent etre celles qui visent a simplifier la structure des banques afin d’en faciliter la resolution.
On the design of low delay nearly-PR and PR FIR cosine modulated filter banks having approximate cosine-roll transition band

An efficient method for designing a class of nearly perfect reconstruction (NPR) or perfect reconstruction (PR) cosine modulated filter banks (CMFBs) with prototype filters having an approximate cosine-rolloff transition band is presented. The NPR CMFBs in (Vaidyanathan, 1992) and (Koilpillai and Vaidyanathan, 1991) is first generalized to include low-delay CMFBs. It is shown that a prototype filter with cosine-rolloff transition band will automatically satisfy the flatness condition required by an NPR CMFB. This allows us to formulate the design problem as a convex minimax or least squares problem, and its optimal solution can be solved by the Remez exchange algorithm or more sophisticated semidefinite programming (SDP) method. By using the NPR CMFB so obtained as the initial guess to the nonlinear constrained optimization algorithm such as the Fmincon function of MATLAB, high quality low-delay PR CMFBs can readily be obtained. CMFBs with arbitrary-length linear-phase or low-delay prototype filters can also be obtained readily by this method. Design examples and comparison with existing methods are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Accountable certificate management using undeniable attestations

This paper initiates a study of accountable certificate management methods, necessary to support long-term authenticity of digital documents. Our main contribution is a model for accountable certificate management, where clients receive attestations confirming inclusion/removal of their certificates from the database of valid certificates. We explain why accountability depends on the inability of the third parties to create contradictory attestations. After that we define an undeniable attester as a primitive that provides efficient attestation creation, publishing and verification, so that it is intractable to create contradictory attestations. We introduce authenticated search trees and build an efficient undeniable attester upon them. The proposed system is the first accountable long-term certificate management system. Moreover, authenticated search trees can be used in many security-critical applications instead of the (sorted) hash trees to reduce trust in the authorities, without decrease in efficiency. Therefore, the undeniable attester promises looks like a very useful cryptographic primitive with a wide range of applications.
Prospective memory rehabilitation based on visual imagery techniques

Despite the frequency of prospective memory (PM) problems in the traumatic brain injury (TBI) population, there are only a few rehabilitation programmes that have been specifically designed to address this issue, other than those using external compensatory strategies. In the present study, a PM rehabilitation programme based on visual imagery techniques expected to strengthen the cue–action association was developed. Ten moderate to severe chronic TBI patients learned to create a mental image representing the association between a prospective cue and an intended action within progressively more complex and naturalistic PM tasks. We hypothesised that compared to TBI patients (n = 20) who received a short session of education (control condition), TBI patients in the rehabilitation group would exhibit a greater improvement on the event-based than on the time-based condition of a PM ecological task. Results revealed however that this programme was similarly beneficial for both conditions. TBI patients in the rehabilitation group and their relatives also reported less everyday PM failures following the programme, which suggests generalisation. The PM improvement appears to be specific since results on cognitive control tasks remained similar. Therefore, visual imagery techniques appear to improve PM functioning by strengthening the memory trace of the intentions and inducing an automatic recall of the intentions.
Histogram of Oriented Depth Gradients for Action Recognition

In this paper, we report on experiments with the use of local measures for depth motion for visual action recognition from MPEG encoded RGBD video sequences. We show that such measures can be combined with local space-time video descriptors for appearance to provide a computationally efficient method for recognition of actions. Fisher vectors are used for encoding and concatenating a depth descriptor with existing RGB local descriptors. We then employ a linear SVM for recognizing manipulation actions using such vectors. We evaluate the effectiveness of such measures by comparison to the state-of-the-art using two recent datasets for action recognition in kitchen environments.
Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts

This article explores differences between male and female writing in a large subset of the British National Corpus covering a range of genres. Several classes of simple lexical and syntactic features that differ substantially according to author gender are identified, both in fiction and in nonfiction documents. In particular, we find significant differences between male- and female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More generally, it is found that even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as 'involved' while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as 'informational'. Finally, a strong correlation between the characteristics of male (female) writing and those of nonfiction (fiction) is demonstrated.
Firm-Specific Production Factors in a DSGE Model with Taylor Price Setting

This paper compares the Calvo model with a Taylor contracting model in the context of the Smets-Wouters (2003) Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model. In the Taylor price setting model, we introduce firm-specific production factors and discuss how this assumption can help to reduce the estimated nominal price stickiness. Furthermore, we show that a Taylor contracting model with firm-specific capital and sticky wage and with a relatively short price contract length of four quarters is able to outperform, in terms of empirical fit, the standard Calvo model with homogeneous production factors and high nominal price stickiness. In order to obtain this result, we need very large real rigidities either in the form of a huge (constant) elasticity of substitution between goods or in the form of an elasticity of substitution that is endogenous and very sensitive to the relative price.
Social Support and Health in Diabetes Patients: An Observational Study in Six European Countries in an Era of Austerity

Introduction Support from individual social networks, community organizations and neighborhoods is associated with better self-management and health outcomes. This international study examined the relative impact of different types of support on health and health-related behaviors in patients with type 2 diabetes. Methods Observational study (using interviews and questionnaires) in a sample of 1,692 type 2 diabetes patients with 5,433 connections from Bulgaria, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Outcomes were patient-reported health status (SF-12), physical exercise (RAPA), diet and smoking (SDCSCA). Random coefficient regression models were used to examine linkages with individual networks, community organizations, and neighborhood type (deprived rural, deprived urban, or affluent urban). Results Patients had a median of 3 support connections and 34.6% participated in community organizations. Controlled for patients’ age, sex, education, income and comorbidities, large emotional support networks were associated with decrease of non-smoking (OR = 0.87). Large practical support networks were associated with worse physical and mental health (B = -0.46 and -0.27 respectively) and less physical activity (OR = 0.90). Participation in community organizations was associated with better physical and mental health (B = 1.39 and 1.22, respectively) and, in patients with low income, with more physical activity (OR = 1.53). Discussion Participation in community organizations was most consistently related to better health status. Many diabetes patients have individual support networks, but this study did not provide evidence to increase their size as a public health strategy. The consistent association between participation in community organizations and health status provides a clear target for interventions and policies.
Iron deficiency prevalence and dietary patterns by school district in Istanbul.

INTRODUCTION The aim of this study was to record the prevalence of iron deficiency (serum ferritin concentration <15 microg L(-1)) among schoolchildren and identify possible factors related to the development of this medical condition. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study population consisted of 504 schoolchildren attending three primary schools, located in two districts of Istanbul with higher and lower socio-economic level (SEL) respectively. Certain biochemical and haematological indices of iron status were measured. Dietary intake was estimated using the 24-h recall technique and a food frequency questionnaire. RESULTS The prevalence of iron deficiency in the lower SEL school district was twice that of the higher SEL school district (42% and 21.2% respectively). Furthermore, the levels of serum ferritin, mean corpuscular volume, mean corpuscular haemoglobin (all P < 0.001) and mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (P = 0.016) were higher for students in the higher than in the lower SEL school district. Consumption of tea, cola beverages and dairy products was more frequent by children living in the lower than in the higher SEL school district. Furthermore, consumption of red meat and citrus fruits was less frequent by boys in the lower than in the higher SEL school district. CONCLUSIONS Iron deficiency was more prevalent among children from the lower SEL school district. Different patterns in the consumption of foods and beverages that inhibit or enhance intestinal iron absorption between children in the two school districts could provide some explanation for the observed differences in the prevalence of iron deficiency.
The ISIS project: real experience with a fault tolerant programming system

Abstract : The ISIS project has developed a distributed programming toolkit and a collection of higher level applications based on these tools. ISIS is now in use at more than 300 locations world-wide. Here, we discuss the lessons (and surprises) gained from this experience with the real world. ISIS differs from other process-group-based systems because it integrates group membership changes with communication, and because of the multicase communication primitives we call CBCAST and ABCAST. Virtual synchrony underlies those aspects of ISIS that have been most successful. The approach makes it possible for a process to infer the state and actions of remote process using local state information and events that have been locally observed. Our experiences confirm that using this property, one can often arrive at elegant, efficient solutions to problems that would be difficult to formulate-and extremely complex to implement-on a bare message-passing system. (rrh)
Refined single trunk tree: a rectilinear steiner tree generator for interconnect prediction

We devised an efficient and accurate estimation of the rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (SMT), which is an essential building block for on-line and posteriori interconnect prediction. We proposed a new rectilinear Steiner tree generator, Refined Single Trunk Tree (RST-T). Compared with traditional minimal spanning tree based Steiner tree heuristics, RST-T has several advantages. 1. The algorithm runs very fast. Experiments show that RST-T algorithm runs 50 times faster than Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm for 10-pin nets. 2. The RST-T provides excellent wire length estimation of the optimal solutions. For the nets of no more than 10 pins, the average wire length of RST-T is within 6 percent of the optimal solutions. Actually, for the nets with five or less pins, the wire length of RST-T is optimal. 3. The topology of RST-T remains stable when pin locations deviate. Experiments show that the topologies of routing trees produced by the proposed algorithm is much more stable than the minimum spanning tree and iterative 1-Steiner heuristics.
Organizational Capital, Managerial Heterogeneity, and Firm Dynamics

We argue that economists have studied the role of management from three perspectives: contingency theory (CT), an organization-centric empirical approach (OC), and a leader-centric empirical approach (LC). To reconcile these three perspectives, we augment a standard dynamic firm model with organizational capital, an intangible, slow-moving, productive asset that can only be produced with the direct input of the firm’s leadership and that is subject to an agency problem. We characterize the steady state of an economy with imperfect governance, and show that it rationalizes key findings of CT, OC, and LC, as well as generating a number of new predictions on performance, management practices, CEO behavior, CEO compensation, and governance. ∗We thank Jacques Cremer, Luis Garicano, Hugo Hopenhayn, Navin Kartik, Qingmin Liu, Michael Raith, Jorgen Weibull, Pierre Yared, and participants to seminars at University of Athens, Columbia, Cowles Foundation Summer Conference, EIEF, EUI, LSE, Rochester, St Gallen, and Toulouse for useful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Sui Sun Cheng for his suggestions on how to analyze the recurrence equation.
Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies.

I f you were the only person on earth who knew how to use a fishing rod, you would be tremendously empowered. If you were the only person on earth who knew how to read and write, you would be frustrated and empowered only in tiny ways, like writing notes to yourself. When it comes to social media, knowing how to post a video or download a podcast—technology-centric encoding and decoding skills—is not enough. Access to many media empowers only those who know how to use them. We need to go beyond skills and technologies. We need to think in terms of literacies. And we need to expand our thinking of digital skills or information literacies to include social media literacies.
Global Electric Heterogeneity Risk Score for Prediction of Sudden Cardiac Death in the General Population: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) and Cardiovascular Health (CHS) Studies

Background— Asymptomatic individuals account for the majority of sudden cardiac deaths (SCDs). Development of effective, low-cost, and noninvasive SCD risk stratification tools is necessary. Methods and Results— Participants from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study and Cardiovascular Health Study (n=20 177; age, 59.3±10.1 years; age range, 44–100 years; 56% female; 77% white) were followed up for 14.0 years (median). Five ECG markers of global electric heterogeneity (GEH; sum absolute QRST integral, spatial QRST angle, spatial ventricular gradient [SVG] magnitude, SVG elevation, and SVG azimuth) were measured on standard 12-lead ECGs. Cox proportional hazards and competing risks models evaluated associations between GEH electrocardiographic parameters and SCD. An SCD competing risks score was derived from demographics, comorbidities, and GEH parameters. SCD incidence was 1.86 per 1000 person-years. After multivariable adjustment, baseline GEH parameters and large increases in GEH parameters over time were independently associated with SCD. Final SCD risk scores included age, sex, race, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, and GEH parameters as continuous variables. When GEH parameters were added to clinical/demographic factors, the C statistic increased from 0.777 to 0.790 (P=0.008), the risk score classified 10-year SCD risk as high (>5%) in 7.2% of participants, 10% of SCD victims were appropriately reclassified into a high-risk category, and only 1.4% of SCD victims were inappropriately reclassified from high to intermediate risk. The net reclassification index was 18.3%. Conclusions— Abnormal electrophysiological substrate quantified by GEH parameters is independently associated with SCD in the general population. The addition of GEH parameters to clinical characteristics improves SCD risk prediction.
Efficient Differentiation of Hepatocytes from Human Embryonic Stem Cells Exhibiting Markers Recapitulating Liver Development In Vivo

The potential to differentiate human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) in vitro to provide an unlimited source of human hepatocytes for use in biomedical research, drug discovery, and the treatment of liver diseases holds great promise. Here we describe a three‐stage process for the efficient and reproducible differentiation of hESCs to hepatocytes by priming hESCs towards definitive endoderm with activin A and sodium butyrate prior to further differentiation to hepatocytes with dimethyl sulfoxide, followed by maturation with hepatocyte growth factor and oncostatin M. We have demonstrated that differentiation of hESCs in this process recapitulates liver development in vivo: following initial differentiation, hESCs transiently express characteristic markers of the primitive streak mesendoderm before turning to the markers of the definitive endoderm; with further differentiation, expression of hepatocyte progenitor cell markers and mature hepatocyte markers emerged sequentially. Furthermore, we have provided evidence that the hESC‐derived hepatocytes are able to carry out a range of hepatocyte functions: storage of glycogen, and generation and secretion of plasma proteins. More importantly, the hESC‐derived hepatocytes express several members of cytochrome P450 isozymes, and these P450 isozymes are capable of converting the substrates to metabolites and respond to the chemical stimulation. Our results have provided evidence that hESCs can be differentiated efficiently in vitro to functional hepatocytes, which may be useful as an in vitro system for toxicity screening in drug discovery.
Self-organising supply networks: A case study of the SA mining industry

For efficient operation, it is vital for supply chain management leaders and policy makers to recognize the nature of the system they deal with. Supply chains, are increasingly recognized as systems of systems, which are complex networks exhibiting self-organising properties. In large scale real-life networks, self-organisation manifests itself in distinctive structural patterns, such as Power Law connectivity distribution, scale-free, fractal, and nearly decomposable modular structure. Identification of such structural patterns in real-world supply networks may provide useful insights into their dynamics and functionality, and as a result, apply adequate governance frameworks to embrace structural complexity. To this end, the methods for identification of complexity traits in real-world industrial supply networks are of interest. A case study of the mining industry supply network in South Australia has been used to propose a method for identifying self-organisation patterns in regional industrial supply network structures. The approach combines network analysis and recent methods for testing Power Law distributions. The findings provide insights into the mining industry supply network functionality, including such operational characteristics as robustness, responsiveness, flexibility, and resilience.
Snowpack Characterization in Mountainous Regions Using C-Band SAR Data and a Meteorological Model

This paper presents a method to characterize snow cover in mountainous regions using dual-polarization C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. It is demonstrated that an accurate modeling of the liquid water distribution inside the snowpack, using a multilayer meteorological snow model, is required to characterize snow with precision. A multilayer-snow electromagnetic (EM) backscattering model is developed based on the vector radiative transfer, the strong fluctuation theory, and physical parameters supplied by the meteorological model. However, the limited resolution of the meteorological snow model is insufficient for predicting a refined EM backscattering at a massif scale. An adequate spatial reorganization of these snow profiles, based on a comparison between simulated and measured dual-polarization SAR data, leads to a better estimation of some snowpack parameters. In particular, the monitoring of snow liquid water content is presented improving the capacity of wet snow mapping as compared to a classical SAR-based method. This methodology shows good capacities both for qualitative and quantitative snow assessments, opening the way for a new operational method.
An agent-based architecture for distributed imagery and geospatial computing

This paper gives a description of the design and implementation of the agent-based imagery and geospatial processing architecture (AIGA). Our approach centers on the development of an ontology, light-weight agents, and an agent communication language for imagery and geospatial computing. AIGA agents cooperate with each other to answer specific queries and to efficiently manage distributed resources. Many of the imagery and geospatial exploitation tasks that AIGA agents process are highly complex, with several processing steps involved. We describe in detail how the AIGA system is inherently parallel, thus allowing for parallel implementations of both new and legacy imagery and geospatial exploitation algorithms. As this system is agent driven, the parallelism is highly dynamic, reconfigurable via the AIGA communication language, an XML-based specification called I-XML. We describe the details the AIGA, I-XML specifications, and our Java based prototype.