Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An extreme value perspective on the changing dynamics of financial returns

In this thesis, we discuss a number of different approaches to analysing time series of multivariate financial returns with an emphasis on extreme movements. In the first case, we use a non-stationary, unconditional and non-parametric approach to model the volatility. The second method consists of modeling the volatility using a stationary, conditional and parametric approach while in the third case, we turn to a more direct extreme value analysis of the returns. We exemplify the use of these three methodologies through a detailed analysis of the returns of the daily foreign exchange noon buying rates in New York City for the British Pound (GBP) and the German Mark (DEM) over the last 23 years as well as daily closing prices of the Standard & Poors Composite Stock Price Index (S&P ) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index (DJI) over the last 26 years.
Use of the Alice visual environment in teaching and learning object-oriented programming

Learners at tertiary institutions struggle with writing object-oriented programs in complex object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. This paper describes a study that sought to improve learners' understanding of programming in the domain of OOP. This was done through the use of a visual programming environment (VPE) called Alice, which was designed to help novice programmers learn OOP concepts, whilst creating animated movies and video games. A questionnaire was administered to obtain quantitative and qualitative data regarding learners' understanding of OOP and their experience with the Alice environment. Findings indicate that learners spend insufficient time on programming exercises and struggle with problem-solving, applying OOP concepts, and abstraction. However, the use of Alice addressed challenges faced by experiment participants within the object-oriented domain and improved their motivation to learn OOP. Further results revealed that the test and exam performance of learners who used Alice, was not statistically better than those of similar learners who were not exposed to the Alice intervention.
Epidemiology of streptococcus group A in school aged children in Pemba.

BACKGROUND In Pemba (Zanzibar) all the risk factors which favour Group A Streptococci spreading, infections and late sequelae are present, though GAS epidemiology is unknown. OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of GAS pharyngeal carriers among school-aged-children. DESIGN Community-based cross sectional study, carried out at the end of the dry season (January-February 2001). SETTING Eight primary schools over the four Pemba districts were included in the study. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Two thousand two hundred and eighty six children aged 7-10 years were selected by random sampling and submitted to throat-swab after informed consent. Swabs were processed according to the "Lennette Manual of Clinical Microbiology" 7th Ed. Isolated were tested for antibiotic susceptibility toward penicillins, erythromycin, clindamycin, josamycin, cloramphenicol, levofloxacin, rifampin and tetracyclines. RESULTS Twenty seven point six percent of school-aged children harboured beta-haemolytic Streptococci in their pharynx; most of the isolates were serologically identified as non Group A streptococci group C and G represented more than 70% of all strains, 38.8% of whom were identified as group G; the prevalence of group A streptococci carriers among healthy children all over the island was 8.6%; group A streptococci isolates were sensitive to all the antibiotic tested, except tetracyclines, towards which 83.2% of strains were resistant. CONCLUSION This is the first research in the field of bacteriology carried out in Pemba. According to the epidemiology of group A streptococci and to the environmental and underlying factors which predispose to late group A streptococci sequelae, we suggest to consider antibiotic treatment for children presenting with sore throat with fever and swollen cervical lymphonodes without cough or coryza.
Approaches to Semantic Similarity Measurement for Geo‐Spatial Data: A Survey

Semantic similarity is central for the functioning of semantically enabled processing of geospatial data. It is used to measure the degree of potential semantic interoperability between data or different geographic information systems (GIS). Similarity is essential for dealing with vague data queries, vague concepts or natural language and is the basis for semantic information retrieval and integration. The choice of similarity measurement influences strongly the conceptual design and the functionality of a GIS. The goal of this article is to provide a survey presentation on theories of semantic similarity measurement and review how these approaches – originally developed as psychological models to explain human similarity judgment – can be used in geographic information science. According to their knowledge representation and notion of similarity we classify existing similarity measures in geometric, feature, network, alignment and transformational models. The article reviews each of these models and outlines its notion of similarity and metric properties. Afterwards, we evaluate the semantic similarity models with respect to the requirements for semantic similarity measurement between geospatial data. The article concludes by comparing the similarity measures and giving general advice how to choose an appropriate semantic similarity measure. Advantages and disadvantages point to their suitability for different tasks.
The first retinal axons and their microenvironment in zebrafish: cryptic pioneers and the pretract

The initial development of the optic tract was studied with light and electron microscopy in the zebrafish (Danio rerio). Intraocular injections of the fluorescent marker, 1,1′-dioctadecyl-3,3,3′,3′ tetramethylindocarbocyanine perchlorate (dil), labeled retinal axons and growth cones anterogradely, and injections of dil into the optic chiasm labeled retinal ganglion cells retrogradely. Labeled tissue was photoconverted and examined electron microscopically. The ventronasal retinal quadrant produced the first growth cones. They were the first growth cones in the optic stalk. The leading retinal growth cones, typically 4–10 in number, advanced alongside the tract of the postoptic commissure but rarely sent filopodia into it and never wrapped its axons. Instead, the retinal growth cones followed a pretract, a subpial region that was morphologically distinct from its surroundings and extended out in front of the leading growth cones, presaging the optic tract. Thus, the retinal growth cones, previously thought to be followers of preexisting axons, are actually cryptic pioneers whose proximity to the earlier axons masks their pioneering nature. We suggest that cryptic pioneers and pretracts are probably common elsewhere in the nervous system.
Safe Automatic Emergency Stop Control of Gantry Crane Including Moving Obstacles in Its Workspace

This paper proposes a safe emergency stop control for collision avoidance of gantry cranes. The crane mechanism is widely used for handling heavy load. A big problem is that the suspended load swings easily. This leads to possibilities of collision of load with obstacle during the crane work. Emergency stop for collision avoidance is, however, also dangerous. Because residual sways after the stop is easy to be caused by the stop. Therefore, this paper presents an anti-sway control method when the emergency stop. The method is based on inverse dynamics of the crane system. Thus the inverse dynamics problem is also discussed. Using the inverse dynamics calculation and a real time obstacle detection system, a feed-forward based emergency stop control method is proposed. Experiments of emergency stop control using the method are shown.
Introducing Molly: Distributed Memory Parallelization with LLVM

Programming for distributed memory machines has always been a tedious task, but necessary because compilers have not been sufficiently able to optimize for such machines themselves. Molly is an extension to the LLVM compiler toolchain that is able to distribute and reorganize workload and data if the program is organized in statically determined loop control-flows. These are represented as polyhedral integer-point sets that allow program transformations applied on them. Memory distribution and layout can be declared by the programmer as needed and the necessary asynchronous MPI communication is generated automatically. The primary motivation is to run Lattice QCD simulations on IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputers, but since the implementation is not yet completed, this paper shows the capabilities on Conway's Game of Life.
Design and implementation of a 1 GHz GaN HEMT class-F power amplifier for transistor model evaluation

Besides linearity, gain and output power, efficiency is an important issue for power amplifiers in wireless communication systems. Since power amplifiers are components which consume the major power in the entire system, improving power amplifiers' efficiency leads to significant improvement of the system's efficiency. One of the amplifier design concepts for efficiency enhancement is class-F power amplifier where the power transistor is operated as a switch. In order to obtain high power, the output voltage of the “off” state should be high, whereas the current should be zero. Thus, it is advantageous to use a power device with high breakdown voltage. This property is offered by power devices based on wide-bandgap semiconductor materials e.g. SiC, InP or GaN with GaN transistors as the most wide-spread and promising high frequency power devices. In addition GaN-based transistors offer also other advantages e.g. high power density, high frequency and temperature of operation, wide bandwidth, high output impedance for easy matching, etc… This paper proposes a high efficiency class-F power amplifier based on GaN HEMT with the operating frequency of 1 GHz. The optimum load and source impedance for the proposed class-F power amplifier are determined using load- and source-pull simulations. The output matching network was designed including harmonic resonators up to 5th harmonic. During the design process, the parasitics of the device's package are also taken into account in order to achieve the optimal class-F load condition at the intrinsic drain of the transistor inside the package. The fabricated class-F power amplifier achieved a maximum power added efficiency (PAE) of 68.45%. Simulation and measurement results have shown good agreement which confirms the accuracy of the device model under realistic condition of operation as a power device for a class-F power amplifier.
The Role of Indoleamine 2,3-Dioxygenase in Diethylnitrosamine-Induced Liver Carcinogenesis

Indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO), a tryptophan-catabolizing intracellular enzyme of the L-kynurenine pathway, causes preneoplastic cells and tumor cells to escape the immune system by inducing immune tolerance; this mechanism might be associated with the development and progression of human malignancies. In the present study, we investigated the role of IDO in diethylnitrosamine (DEN)-induced hepatocarcinogenesis by using IDO-knockout (KO) mice. To induce hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), hepatic adenoma, and preneoplastic hepatocellular lesions termed foci of cellular alteration (FCA), male IDO-wild-type (WT) and IDO-KO mice with a C57BL/6J background received a single intraperitoneal injection of DEN at 2 weeks of age. The mice were sacrificed to evaluate the development of FCA and hepatocellular neoplasms. HCC overexpressed IDO and L-kynurenine compared to surrounding normal tissue in the DEN-treated IDO-WT mice. The number and cell proliferative activity of FCAs, and the incidence and multiplicity of HCC were significantly greater in the IDO-WT than in the IDO-KO mice. The expression levels of the IDO protein, of L-kynurenine, and of IFN-γ, COX-2, TNF-α, and Foxp3 mRNA were also significantly increased in the DEN-induced hepatic tumors that developed in the IDO-WT mice. The mRNA expression levels of CD8, perforin and granzyme B were markedly increased in hepatic tumors developed in IDO-KO mice. Moreover, Foxp3-positive inflammatory cells had infiltrated into the livers of DEN-treated IDO-WT mice, whereas fewer cells had infiltrated into the livers of IDO-KO mice. Induction of IDO and elevation of L-kynurenine might play a critical role in both the early and late phase of liver carcinogenesis. Our findings suggest that inhibition of IDO might offer a promising strategy for the prevention of liver cancer.
Disaggregating the travel components in shopping centre choice

Transport mode attributes have often been neglected in the retailing and transportation literature in retail outlets choice studies. Most of the retailing and transportation literature has only adopted the traditional measures of deterrence, namely, travel time, distance and/or travel cost. Similar phenomena exist in real estate research, particularly in real estate market analysis and valuation. However, a few studies have shown that other attributes of the travel component, such as comfort, reliability of transport mode, etc., are significant in affecting shopping centres’ patronage. With the heightening of issues such as sustainable development and environmental pollution, many governments are gearing to provide greater choices and better quality public transport modes to shopping centres. Therefore, with more transport options, shoppers are likely to consider the characteristics of each transport option in greater detail in their choice of shopping centres. Therefore, in view of this widespread phenomenon, it is timely to provide greater understanding of the travel components in shopping trips. In the light of the above development, this paper aims to disaggregate the travel components in shopping centre choice. By way of principal component analysis, it presents the salient dimensions of transport attributes and shopping centre characteristics in shopping centre choice. Using the weighted factor rating, it found that, in addition to the shopping centre attributes, as well as the conventional measures of travel components, shoppers consider other travel factors in their choice of shopping centres. This in turn has implications on valuation practices.
Opinion Retrieval Systems using Tweet-external Factors

Opinion mining is a natural language processing technique which extracts subjective information from natural language text. To estimate an opinion about a query in large data collection, an opinion retrieval system that retrieves subjective and relevant information about the query can be useful. We present an opinion retrieval system that retrieves subjective and query-relevant tweets from Twitter, which is a useful source of obtaining real-time opinions. Our system outperforms previous opinion retrieval systems, and it further provides subjective information about Twitter authors and hashtags to describe their subjective tendencies.
Measuring changes in client lives through microfinance : contributions of different approaches

In the past two years, the publication of three impact evaluations of microcredit programs in India, the Philippines, and Morocco precipitated a spate of press reports questioning the value of microcredit and whether it had positive outcomes for poor people (Karlan and Zinman 2009 and Duflo and Banerjee 2009 and 2010). The impact evaluations used randomized controlled trials (RCTs), an evaluation methodology that randomly assigns an intervention to a treatment group and withholds it from a control group. Widely used in medical trials and particularly in drug trials, the RCT approach is growing in popularity among academics and evaluation specialists alike in the social sciences. There are now more than 300 RCTs completed or ongoing in sectors such as education, health, governance, finance, and the private sector.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Sustainable Questions : Determining the Expiration Date of Answers

Community question answering platforms have large repositories of previously answered questions. Reusing the answers for new questions is tempting. However, not all stored answers will still be relevant. We define a new and challenging problem concerning the sustainability of questions, and present metrics aimed at distinguishing between sustainable and non-sustainable questions. We find that an intuitive approach to sustainability of questions is not sufficient, but that simple properties can already distinguish between sustainable and non-sustainable questions.
Parallel Two-Way Clustering for Analysis of Microarray Gene Expression Data

Microarray technology allows to measure expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. The gene expression analysis is the process to find similar expression patterns under different conditions. In this paper the interrelated two way clustering proposed by Tang et. al is parallelized and implemented on MATLAB parallel computing environment with multicore processor. The method finds one set of biclusters at a time with specified number of genes and conditions. Advantage of serial interrelated two way clustering method is that one can use relationship between groups of genes and samples. The well-known techniques correlation coefficient and variance calculation for the gene expression profiles is used to reduce the genes from the list to generate more cohesive biclusters. We have shown the performance of both techniques here, that shows the genes have low variance and high correlation are the good coherent biclusters. We illustrate the method on well-known gene expression datasets: yeast microarray dataset. The performance of this method has shown the effectiveness for gene expression analysis in multi-core platform.
Testing for Market Power in the Norwegian Primary Aluminium Industry

The hypothesis of market power in the Norwegian primary aluminium industry is tested using plant-level panel data. Economies of scale are found to be present, and Norwegian aluminium plants charge a procyclical price-cost margin that significantly exceeds zero. Consequently, the simple competitive hypothesis is rejected. The hypothesis that products are differentiated is not rejected, since several plants are found to charge a price permanently over the world market price. A decline in industry concentration internationally, which is assumed to increase the degree of competition, has no significant effect on the price-cost margins of Norwegian plants.
An Idea Generation Supporting System Based on Anchor and Gestalt Theories

Although information technology applications vary widely, they are rarely used in support of creativity. This study presents an idea generation support system based on anchor and gestalt theories. Some perspectives from these theories are borrowed to build theoretical foundation of the proposed system. Anchor building is important to creative process. Applying stimuli suggested by gestalt theory can drive users to generate fresh ideas. The proposed system is domain-independent and can improve personal creativity.
IMPLICIT VECTORIAL OPERATOR SPLITTING FOR INCOMPRESSIBLE NAVIERSTOKES EQUATIONS IN PRIMITIVE VARIABLES

Стационарные несжимаемые уравнения Навье—Стокса в исходных переменных дополняются уравнением Пуассона для давления, при этом уравнение неразрывности исключается и доказывается эквивалентность исходной задаче. Вводится “фиктивное” время и применяется расщепление векторных операторов так, что система остается связанной на каждом дробном шаге по “времени”, что позволяет выполнять граничные условия без введения искусственного условия для давления. Для конвективных членов применяются консервативные аппроксимации второго порядка на разнесенных сетках. В качестве примера рассматривается двумерное течение в прямоугольной каверне. В расчетах для чисел Рейнольдса до 11 000 и на сетках размерности 512×512 ячеек воспроизведено ламинарное течение. Результаты, полученные на различных сетках, подтверждают согласованность и сходимость схемы. Вычисленные характеристики течения для Re ≤ 10 000 качественно хорошо согласуются с известными численными решениями других авторов.
C A ] 6 J un 2 00 3 Wavelets on Fractals ∗ †

We show that there are Hilbert spaces constructed from the Hausdorff measures H on the real line R with 0 < s < 1 which admit multiresolution wavelets. For the case of the middle-third Cantor set C ⊂ [0, 1], the Hilbert space is a separate subspace of L(R, (dx)) where s = log 3 (2). While we develop the general theory of multi-resolutions in fractal Hilbert spaces, the emphasis is on the case of scale 3 which covers the traditional Cantor set C. Introducing ψ 1 (x) = √ 2χ C (3x− 1) and ψ 2 (x) = χ C (3x) − χ C (3x− 2) we first describe the subspace in L(R, (dx)) which has the following family as an orthonormal basis (ONB): ψi,j,k(x) = 2 j ψi(3 j x− k), where i = 1, 2, j, k ∈ Z.
e-NFIS: Efficient negative frequent itemsets mining only based on positive ones

Negative association rules (NAR) mining, which has played important roles in real applications, mainly focuses on the form A⇒B, A⇒¬B, ¬A⇒B and ¬A⇒¬B so far, where A (e.g. (a<inf>1</inf>a<inf>2</inf>)) and B (e.g. (b<inf>1</inf>b<inf>2</inf>)) are occurring itemsets. Another form of negative association rules, such as a<inf>1</inf>¬a<inf>2</inf>⇒b<inf>1</inf>¬b<inf>2</inf>, which contain occurring (or positive) items and non-occurring (or negative) items, can also reflect the relations of itemsets from another angle. The first step to mine this form of NAR is to mine negative frequent itemsets (NFIS). This paper mainly focuses on this step and proposes a novel method, e-NFIS (efficient negative frequent itemsets), to mine NFIS. The main idea of e-NFIS is to mine NFIS only from positive frequent itemsets (PFIS). E-NFIS contains three aspects: 1) using traditional method to mine PFIS; 2) an efficient method to generate negative candidate itemsets from PFIS; 3) calculate the support of negative candidate itemsets only using the support of PFIS, without additional database scanning. Experimental results show that the e-NFIS is efficient.
Radioisotopic assessment of bone metabolism of the operated vertebra after inter-process stabilizer implantation in the lumbar segment of the spine

Introduction Lack of efficacy of pharmacotherapy and physiotherapy in spinal pain syndrome is an indication for intervertebral stabilizer implantation between the processes in the lumbar segment of the spine. Material and methods The group consisted of 32 patients qualified after radioisotopic single-photon emission computed tomography/computed tomography (SPECT/CT) examinations with assessment of bone metabolism and mineral density. For comparative purposes, the L2 vertebra was defined as normal. Parameters defined in the area of operated vertebrae were comparable to L2. Imaging examinations and a pain intensity test were performed before and 12 months after the procedure. Results In SPECT, osteotropic isotope (OI) activity in spinous bodies and processes was close to L2 values. Density assessed in CT of analysed vertebrae was close to L2. In the control examination, activity of OI in spinous bodies and processes was higher in the procedure area. Under the stabilizer, there was a strong positive correlation with the L2 parameters. The differences were statistically significant (p = 0.0002). The increase of OI activity in the elements above the stabilizer was variable. In the control examination, there was higher density of spinous processes and bodies above and under the stabilizer. The difference, compared to the L2 density, was statistically significant. Conclusions The radioisotopic method with SPECT/CT allows for the precise assessment of bone metabolism in the spine. After the procedure, a negative correlation was observed between bone metabolism changes and pain intensity test results.