Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Boosting Approach to Forecasting the Volatility of Gold-Price Fluctuations Under Flexible Loss

We use a boosting approach to study the time-varying out-of-sample informational content of various financial and macroeconomic variables for forecasting the volatility of gold-price fluctuations. We use an out-of-sample R2 statistic to evaluate forecasts as a function of the shape of a forecaster’s loss function. We show that, when compared to an autoregressive benchmark forecast, those forecasters tend to benefit from using predictions implied by the boosting approach who encounter a larger loss when underestimating rather than overestimating the future volatility of gold-price fluctuations. We use a simulation experiment to study the significance of this benefit.
Developing the literacy skills of children from areas of economic disadvantage

This piece of work consists of three papers. The first paper is a systematic review of literature investigating the effectiveness of preschool, classroombased literacy interventions used with children living in economic disadvantage. The review consists of nine studies, the majority of which found significant short term effects of intervention. Two of the studies reported long term outcomes which were found to be non-significant. Consequently, recommendations for further research included exploration of a wider range of factors in raising the literacy levels of children from economic disadvantage. The second paper is a bridging document which explains how the various decisions in this piece of work were made, including the research focus, methodology, method and analysis. Through the bridging document, ontology, epistemology and reflexivity are explored and ethical and quality issues are discussed. The third paper describes and discusses a piece of empirical research. Following on from recommendations in the systematic review, a wide range of factors which may be useful in enhancing the literacy levels of children from economic disadvantage were explored. A participatory model of research was used which involved training six pupils from a school situated in a deprived area to carry out research with their peers. The group produced a collaborative mind map and interviewed five of their peers. Six themes emerged from these methods: resources, strategies, skills, people, enjoyment and practice. The benefits and limitations of using a participatory research model are discussed. The data gathered was deemed to be useful but not necessarily better than that gathered using more traditional non-participatory methods. Implications and suggestions for further research are explored.
My program is correct but it doesn’t run: A review of novice programming and a study of an introductory programming paper

1.0 Introduction 2.0 Learning to program 2.1 Overview 2.1. 1 Experts vs. novices 2.1. 2 Knowledge vs. strategies 2.1. 3 Comprehension vs. generation 2.1. 4 Procedural vs. object–oriented 2.1. 5 Other 2.2 Novice programmers 2.2.1 The task 2.2.2 Mental models and processes 2.2.3 Novice capabilities and behavior 2.2.4 Kinds of novice 2.3 Novice learning and teaching in CS1 2.3.1 Goals and progress 2.3.2 Course design and teaching methods 2.3.3 Alternative methods and curricula 2.4 Summary 3.0 A study of an introductory programming paper 3.1 The design of COMP103 3.1. 1 Context 3.1. 2 Lectures and knowledge 3.1. 3 Laboratory sessions and strategy 3.1. 4 Summary 3.2 The study 3.2.1 Background 3.2.2 Method 3.3 Results 3.3.1 Lab based problem tallies 3.3.2 Trends 3.3.3 Other observations 4.0 Discussion 4.1 Kinds of novice 4.2 Knowledge, strategies, and effective teaching and learning 4.3 A framework 5.0 Summary References Appendix A: Demonstrators’ checklist Appendix B: Results for typical laboratory sessions
Quantitative determination of optical trapping strength and viscoelastic moduli inside living cells

With the success of in vitro single-molecule force measurements obtained in recent years, the next step is to perform quantitative force measurements inside a living cell. Optical traps have proven excellent tools for manipulation, also in vivo, where they can be essentially non-invasive under correct wavelength and exposure conditions. It is a pre-requisite for in vivo quantitative force measurements that a precise and reliable force calibration of the tweezers is performed. There are well-established calibration protocols in purely viscous environments; however, as the cellular cytoplasm is viscoelastic, it would be incorrect to use a calibration procedure relying on a viscous environment. Here we demonstrate a method to perform a correct force calibration inside a living cell. This method (theoretically proposed in Fischer and Berg-Sørensen (2007 J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 9 S239)) takes into account the viscoelastic properties of the cytoplasm and relies on a combination of active and passive recordings of the motion of the cytoplasmic object of interest. The calibration procedure allows us to extract absolute values for the viscoelastic moduli of the living cell cytoplasm as well as the force constant describing the optical trap, thus paving the way for quantitative force measurements inside the living cell. Here, we determine both the spring constant of the optical trap and the elastic contribution from the cytoplasm, influencing the motion of naturally occurring tracer particles. The viscoelastic moduli that we find are of the same order of magnitude as moduli found in other cell types by alternative methods.
Carotid intima–media thickness is a predictor of coronary artery disease in South African black patients

Background Several studies have shown that increased carotid intima–media thickness (CIMT) confers risk of future coronary artery disease (CAD) and stroke. The present study aimed at investigating whether CIMT is a predictor of CAD in South African black patients. Methods and Results This was a prospective study of 53 patients, 41 men and 12 women, with ages ranging from 30 to 70 years. All patients had undergone coronary angiography for suspected CAD. B-mode ultrasound measurement of the carotid intima–media thickness was carried out in all patients, the operator being blinded to the coronary angiography findings. Twenty-nine of the 38 (76%) subjects with established CAD had increased CIMT, with an average mean CIMT of 1.13 mm. Single-vessel disease was present in 12 people, double-vessel disease in 11 and triple-vessel disease in 12. There was a significant positive linear trend between CIMT and the number of involved coronary vessels (p < 0.0001, r = 0.44). Conclusions Increased CIMT correlated with evidence of angiographically proven CAD. The median percentile scores showed a progressive increase as the number of vessels involved increased. CIMT could be useful as a screening tool for the presence of CAD in the South African black population.
Does the Bachelor of Business curriculum reflect the sustainability paradigm shift ? interim results from a study of first-year subjects

A shift away from the dominant economic growth paradigm built on unsustainable production and consumption levels towards the sustainability paradigm is a major challenge for University business education. This paper reports the preliminary results from an empirical study to determine the extent of sustainability embeddedness into the curriculum of an Australian university’s undergraduate business school program at the first-year level. A two-step data collection process was followed over the first of two teaching periods, involving content analysis of curriculum and semi-structured indepth interviews with subject and course coordinators. Initial results indicate that the paradigm shift is underway, whereby most subject coordinators conceptualise sustainability in a more sophisticated way than is reflected in the actual curriculum. We failed to uncover a genuinely significant level of embedded skills or content.
Gremlin-mediated BMP antagonism induces the epithelial-mesenchymal feedback signaling controlling metanephric kidney and limb organogenesis

Epithelial-mesenchymal feedback signaling is the key to diverse organogenetic processes such as limb bud development and branching morphogenesis in kidney and lung rudiments. This study establishes that the BMP antagonist gremlin (Grem1) is essential to initiate these epithelial-mesenchymal signaling interactions during limb and metanephric kidney organogenesis. A Grem1 null mutation in the mouse generated by gene targeting causes neonatal lethality because of the lack of kidneys and lung septation defects. In early limb buds, mesenchymal Grem1 is required to establish a functional apical ectodermal ridge and the epithelial-mesenchymal feedback signaling that propagates the sonic hedgehog morphogen. Furthermore, Grem1-mediated BMP antagonism is essential to induce metanephric kidney development as initiation of ureter growth, branching and establishment of RET/GDNF feedback signaling are disrupted in Grem1-deficient embryos. As a consequence, the metanephric mesenchyme is eliminated by apoptosis, in the same way as the core mesenchymal cells of the limb bud.
Change of Accent as an Atypical Onset of non Fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia

Language disorders can be the first symptom of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The main variants of PPA are: the non-fluent/agrammatic variant, the semantic variant and the logopenic variant. Several additional variants of PPA, however, have been described and are considered as atypical presentations. We describe the case of a woman presenting a progressive isolated language disturbance, characterized by an early dysprosodia, phonological and semantic paraphasias, agrammatism, impairment in repetition, writing of non-words and sentence comprehension. This clinical picture pointed to an atypical presentation of the non-fluent variety. The frequent symptom overlap between the different variants of PPA, most likely reflecting differences in the topography of the pathological changes, needs to be considered in the definition of diagnostic criteria.
Information Retrieval Advances using Relevance Feedback

Relevance Feedback (RF) is a powerful technique whereby a user can instruct an Information Retrieval (IR) system to find additional relevant documents by providing relevance information on certain documents or query terms. There are several major design decisions that can affect how a RF system can help users. In this paper, I present a brief literature survey covering two emphases of RF: term selection and term weighting in the two prevalent IR models: probabilistic and vector-based. I then summarize how both the techniques and the underlying models can be combined and to what ends. Finally, I hypothesize why Relevance Feedback is not prevalent on World Wide Web search services, and give suggestions on which methods may be appropriate and what, if anything, should be done to add feedback techniques to Web searching.
Automatic Concept Retrieval with Rubrico

With the vast repositories of knowledge available via computers nowadays there is an expectation that the relevant portion of this knowledge is accessed and used when creating contributions to the world‘s store of knowledge. Search engines have been popular and useful for some decades but there remains the key problem of narrowing down the search to find precisely what there in a given document of document set. While the Information Retrieval community has developed solutions to increase relevance and precision, the work is based largely on key-word searching (Zhu and Dreher 2009). Clearly, manual search and find options are useful only with very limited data sets and we need computers to help us achieve that final set for manual inspection and processing. Recent developments, especially in ontologies (W3C 2004) have made possible the treatment of textbased datasets in intelligent‘ ways. Our work falls into this category. Here we report of the outcome of our effort to search for, or find, as we prefer to think of it, concepts rather than key-words. The software embodying the conceptual searching ideas being reported in this article has been named Rubrico and is intended to use for lecturers who can use this program for marking purposes or for getting a better impression of the concepts that are lectured in a specific topic. But it also can be used for any other task where ontologies should be retrieved out of an electronic text or ontologies have to be improved. This article starts with background information regarding concept analysis, ontologies and available software toolkits. Rubrico our prototype software package to find concepts reposing within a document set, and assist users in structuring them into a rubric or (possibly) hierarchical framework, is explained. There are many applications for concept search and find and one strong motivator in our research group named SATM4BE1 was our work in automated essay grading, and plagiarism detection. For this task concepts are retrieved from a reference or model and compared with the retrieved concepts in target documents. This permits forming
Exploring the Balance between Folding and Functional Dynamics in Proteins and RNA

As our understanding of biological dynamics continues to be refined, it is becoming clear that biomolecules can undergo transitions between ordered and disordered states as they execute functional processes. From a computational perspective, studying disorder events poses a challenge, as they typically occur on long timescales, and the associated molecules are often large (i.e., hundreds of residues). These size and time requirements make it advantageous to use computationally inexpensive models to characterize large-scale dynamics, where more highly detailed models can provide information about individual sub-steps associated with function. To reduce computational demand, one often uses a coarse-grained representation of the molecule or a simplified description of the energetics. In order to use simpler models to identify transient disorder in RNA and proteins, it is imperative that these models can accurately capture structural fluctuations about folded configurations, as well as the overall stability of each molecule. Here, we explore a class of simplified model for which all non-hydrogen atoms are explicitly represented. We find that this model can provide a consistent description of protein folding and native-basin dynamics for several representative biomolecules. We additionally show that the native-basin fluctuations of tRNA and the ribosome are robust to variations in the model. Finally, the extended variable loop in tRNAIle is predicted to be very dynamic, which may facilitate biologically-relevant rearrangements. Together, this study provides a foundation that will aid in the application of simplified models to study disorder during function in ribonucleoprotein (RNP) assemblies.
A Tracking Algorithm for Rigid Point-Based Marker Models

Tracking of objects and persons by using a stereo camera system setup and markers is applied since several years in Virtual and Augmented Reality or other applications. In especial infrared tracking systems are getting increasingly popular, because of their precision and robustness. Often, markers for such systems are spherical and therefore not distinguishable, making the consideration of geometric constellations of several markers necessary to identify objects and to determine their transformations. This paper presents an algorithm for tracking rigid constellations of markers, which can be adapted to the needs of corresponding applications.
Prevalence of Hyperuricemia and Gout in Mainland China from 2000 to 2014: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

We systematically identified the prevalence of hyperuricemia and gout in mainland China and provided informative data that can be used to create appropriate local public health policies. Relevant articles from 2000 to 2014 were identified by searching 5 electronic databases: PubMed, Google Scholar, Chinese Wanfang, CNKI, and Chongqing VIP. All of the calculations were performed using the Stata 11.0 and SPSS 20.0 software. The eligible articles (n = 36; 3 in English and 33 in Chinese) included 44 studies (38 regarding hyperuricemia and 6 regarding gout). The pooled prevalence of hyperuricemia and gout was 13.3% (95% CI: 11.9%, 14.6%) and 1.1% (95% CI: 0.7%, 1.5%), respectively. Although publication bias was observed, the results did not change after a trim and fill test, indicating that that impact of this bias was likely insignificant. The prevalence of hyperuricemia and gout was high in mainland China. The subgroup analysis suggested that the geographical region, whether the residents dwell in urban or rural and coastal or inland areas, the economic level, and sex may be associated with prevalence.
Performance Evaluation and Impact of Weighting Factors on an Energy and Delay Aware Dynamic Source Routing Protocol

Typical applications of the mobile ad-hoc network, MANET, are in disaster recovery operations which have to respect time constraint needs. Since MANET is affected by limited resources such as power constraints, it is a challenge to respect the deadline of a real-time data. This paper proposes the Energy and Delay aware based on Dynamic Source Routing protocol, ED-DSR. ED-DSR efficiently utilizes the network resources such as the intermediate mobile nodes energy and load. It ensures both timeliness and energy efficiency by avoiding low-power and overloaded intermediate mobile nodes. Through simulations, we compare our proposed routing protocol with the basic routing protocol Dynamic Source Routing, DSR. Weighting factors are introduced to improve the route selection. Simulation results, using the NS-2 simulator, show that the proposed protocol prolongs the network lifetime (up to 66%), increases the volume of packets delivered while meeting the data flows real-time constraints and shortens the endto- end delay.
Forward Search Value Iteration for POMDPs

Recent scaling up of POMDP solvers towards realistic applications is largely due to point-based methods which quickly converge to an approximate solution formedium-sized problems. Of this family HSVI, which uses trial-based asynchronous value iteration, can handle the largest domains. In this paper we suggest a new algorithm, FSVI, that uses the underlying MDP to traverse the belief space towards rewards, finding sequences of useful backups, and show how it scales up better than HSVI on larger benchmarks.
MRGD, a MAS-related G-protein Coupled Receptor, Promotes Tumorigenisis and Is Highly Expressed in Lung Cancer

To elucidate the function of MAS-related GPCR, member D (MRGD) in cancers, we investigated the in vitro and in vivo oncogenic function of MRGD using murine fibroblast cell line NIH3T3 in which MRGD is stably expressed. The expression pattern of MRGD in clinical samples was also analyzed. We found that overexpression of MRGD in NIH3T3 induced focus formation and multi-cellular spheroid formation, and promoted tumors in nude mice. In other words, overexpression of MRGD in NIH3T3 induced the loss of contact inhibition, anchorage-independent growth and in vivo tumorigenesis. Furthermore, it was found that the ligand of MRGD, beta-alanine, enhanced spheroid formation in MRGD-expressing NIH3T3 cells. From investigation of clinical cancer tissues, we found high expression of MRGD in several lung cancers by immunohistochemistry as well as real time PCR. Based on these results, MRGD could be involved in tumorigenesis and could also be a novel anticancer drug target.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES THE DYNAMICS OF HOUSING PRICES

We analyze the prices of owner-occupied housing in 97 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2011. Our tests indicate that price changes exhibit positive serial correlation at the one year intervals, with subsequent reversals of price changes over longer intervals. Consistent with our simple model, regional differences in observed price patterns reflect differences in the serial correlation of the demand shocks as well as the elasticity of supply responses. Sheridan Titman Finance Department McCombs School of Business University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712-1179 and NBER titman@mail.utexas. edu Ko Wang Carey Business School Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218 ko.wang@jhu.edu Jing Yang Department of Finance California State University Fullerton, CA 92831 jyang@fullerton.edu
Improve LLC Bypassing Performance by Memory Controller Improvements in Heterogeneous Multicore System

The shared last-level cache (SLLC) in heterogeneous multicore system is an important memory component that shared and competitive between multiple cores, so how to improve the SLLC performance has become an important research area. Last-level cache (LLC) bypassing technique that bypasses the LLC a part of memory requests is one of the most effective methods. The bypassed requests are sent directly to off-chip main memory (DRAM) rather than eliminated. We find that the bypassed requests influence the original scheduling sequence in Memory Controller (MC) severely. Besides, immoderate bypassing will disturb the MC load balance. We propose a 3-step method memory that adjusts memory scheduling algorithm to optimize LLC bypassing performance. The first step is adding an independent bypass stream for bypassed requests. The second step is scheduling the bypass stream with a smaller probability than that of normal GPU stream. The third step is adding a guard mechanism for MC. By dynamically set and revoke the guard, we can avoid unbalanced bypassing. For case study, we applied the 3-step method on two modern memory schedulers. The experimental results show that after applied the 3-step method, the schedulers improve the system performance obviously.
New Subquadratic Approximation Algorithms for the Girth

We consider the problem of approximating the girth, $g$, of an unweighted and undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges. A seminal result of Itai and Rodeh [SICOMP'78] gave an additive $1$-approximation in $O(n^2)$ time, and the main open question is thus how well we can do in subquadratic time. In this paper we present two main results. The first is a $(1+\varepsilon,O(1))$-approximation in truly subquadratic time. Specifically, for any $k\ge 2$ our algorithm returns a cycle of length $2\lceil g/2\rceil+2\left\lceil\frac{g}{2(k-1)}\right\rceil$ in $\tilde{O}(n^{2-1/k})$ time. This generalizes the results of Lingas and Lundell [IPL'09] who showed it for the special case of $k=2$ and Roditty and Vassilevska Williams [SODA'12] who showed it for $k=3$. Our second result is to present an $O(1)$-approximation running in $O(n^{1+\varepsilon})$ time for any $\varepsilon > 0$. Prior to this work the fastest constant-factor approximation was the $\tilde{O}(n^{3/2})$ time $8/3$-approximation of Lingas and Lundell [IPL'09] using the algorithm corresponding to the special case $k=2$ of our first result.
PKDD Discovery Challenge Recommending Given Names

Recommender systems are data filtering systems that suggest data items of interest by predicting user preferences. In this paper, we describe the recommender system developed by the team named uefs.br for the offline competition of the 15th ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge 2013 on building a recommendation system for given names. The proposed system is a hybrid recommender system that applied a content-based approach, a collaborative filtering approach and a popularity approach. The final recommendation is composed by the results of these three different approaches, in which parameters where optimized according to experiments conducted in datasets built from train data.