Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hedge Funds and the US Real Estate Bubble: Evidence from NYSE Real Estate Firms

The recent US Real Estate Bubble had consequences not only for the real economy but for the stock market as well. Real Estate Investment Trusts' (REITS) prices reached levels which could not be supported by their fundamentals until mid-2007. Using this observation as a starting point we examine the behavior of a sample of hedge fund managers in the REITS sector of the NYSE. Our working assumption is based on the Abreu & Brunnermeier [2003] argument that rational investors under certain conditions may not always short a bubble but instead ride it so as to gain from the price rise. Using data on Hedge Fund holdings from the 13F Filing database provided by Thomson Financial, we find that hedge funds were overloaded with REITS stocks prior to the price peak of the sector but their positions were placed in such a way that they gained from this strategy. Moreover, non-specialized hedge fund managers outperformed specialized ones.
Synthesis of Deactoxycephalosporin C by a Mutant of Cephalosporium acremonium

A number of Cephalosporium acremonium mutants blocked in the synthesis of cephalosporin C were investigated for accumulation of other β-lactam compounds. The non-cephalosporin C producers were isolated after exposing the superior cephalosporin C-producing strain M8650-4 to ultraviolet light (268 nm). One of the blocked mutants, MH63, accumulated deacetylcephalosporin C (0.4 mg/ml), deacetoxycephalosporin C (1.5 mg/ml), and penicillin N (2.7 mg/ml). In contrast, the parent of MH63 produced high levels of cephalosporin C as well as deacetylcephalosporin C (2.2 mg/ml) and penicillin N (1.0 mg/ml), but only traces of deacetoxycephalosporin C (about 0.1 mg/ml). Deacetoxycephalosporin C was isolated from the mutant strain and identified by ultraviolet light, nuclear magnetic resonance, bioactivity spectrum, and co-migration with authentic standard in three chromatography systems.
Static analysis and exponential random graph modelling for micro-blog network

Social network analysis has been used to study complex networks by analysing their static structure and the dynamic changes. Although one of the newer forms of social media, micro-blogs have quickly become one of the most popular communication platforms. This popularity accounts for, in part, an increase in the scientific interest in micro-blogs and their users. In this paper, we chose as our test bed diabetes-related posts from the Chinese micro-blog Sina Weibo. We calculated the degree, average shortest path, betweenness and clustering coefficient of the Sian Weibo network to analyse its static structure. We demonstrate the characteristic results of average degree, diameter and clustering coefficient of diabetes micro-blog static structure. More importantly, we introduce a general model for micro-blog with directed network data, Exponential-family Random Graph Models (ERGMs). Meanwhile, we illustrate the utility for estimating, analysing and simulating micro-blog network. We also provide a goodness-of-fit approach to capture and reproduce the structure of the fitted micro-blog network. Parameter estimation of the model, similarity results of simulated networks and observed networks, and goodness of fit analysis for the micro-blog network all illustrate that ERGMs are excellent methods for deeply capturing complex network structures.
Growth and Labor-Managed Firms

Some results suggest if the economy is competitive is does not matter whether firms are run capitalists or workers. In particular, in the long run labor-managers use the same amount of labor and hire the same amounts of non-labor inputs as a similar capitalists firm. Here we reexamine this issue when the production possibilities are characterized by technical progress. It is argued that labor-managers can sometimes increase the present value of firm-members’ income by committing to a policy of steadily reduction of labor-use. In turn this implies that changes of the saving rate changes growth.
Current Understanding of Rhodococcus equi Infection and its Zoonotic Implications

Rhodococcus equi is a soil actinomycete responsible for severe respiratory disease in young foals leading to high mortality. The organism is also emerging as an important pathogen in im - mune-compromised humans. Intracellular localization of R. equi makes therapeutic management very difficult and prolonged lasting up to three months. Presently no suitable vaccine and effective serological test for early diagnosis is available. High mortality rate, non-availability of suitable di- agnostic methods during early phase of infection and high cost of prolonged treatments makes it a disease of high economic importance and thus is considered among the top most disease problems affecting equine industry globally.
Improving the Scalability of ALS-based Large Recommender Systems with Similar User Index

Alternating Least Squares (ALS) is popular method to compute matrix factorization in the parallel way. However, due to the time complexity in predicting user’s preference, ALS is not scalable to large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a similar user index-based parallel matrix factorization approach. Since the group of similar users is indexed in advance, there is no need to compute similarities between all users in datasets. Furthermore, the size of a matrix is reduced because the matrix is only composed of indexed user’s ratings and items. The current advanced cloud computing including Hadoop, MapReduce and Amazon EC2 are employed to implement the proposed approaches. We empirically show that the use of similar user index resolves the scalable issue of ALS and improves the performance of large scale recommender systems in distributed computing environment.
Value Relevance of Earnings and Book Values for Greek Listed Firms

In this paper we investigate the value relevance of accounting information for the Greek listed companies for the period 1995-2009. For our purpose we examine the way that two accounting variables, earnings and book value, affect the share price. According to our findings from the statistical analysis, the book value and the earnings are value relevant and can explain the share price in the same degree. Also the incremental explanatory power of each variable to a model that contains the other is immaterial.
Business relationships during project afterlife: antecedents, processes, and outcomes

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to increase understanding of post-project business relationships in service-intensive projects, a topic unexplored to date. This research contributes to the project marketing research focusing on post-project interaction, by building a conceptual research framework capable of illustrating the path from the initiation of a relationship through the project’s afterlife. Design/methodology/approach – A comparative case study is used across four different service-intensive project contexts to highlight the conceptual research framework, derived from the IMP-related interaction research, in practice. Findings – According to the research findings, there are at least four potential post-project business relationships associated with service-intensive projects. Furthermore, the findings indicate that these relationships embody certain antecedent and process characteristics, enabling us to compile four distinct development paths. Research limitations/implications – The four.
.comQ: Dimensionalizing, Measuring, and Predicting Quality of the E-tail Experience

Quality is related to customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty in both product and services settings. Thus, quality is expected to be a determinant of online retailer success as well. Based on online and offline focus groups, a sorting task, and an online survey of Harris Interactive's customer panel, the authors establish the dimensions of the e-tail experience, and develop a reliable and valid scale for the measurement of online quality. The analysis suggests that four factors - website design (including information, order processing, navigation, and product selection), fulfillment/reliability, privacy/security and customer service - are strongly predictive of customer judgments of quality and satisfaction, customer loyalty and attitudes toward the website (AST).
Reconfigurable TAP controllers with embedded compression for large test data volume

The increasing modularity of state-of-the-art integrated circuit designs leads to new requirements in terms of accessibility during testing and debugging, particularly in post-silicon phases. IEEE 1149.1 Test Access Port (TAP) controllers are typically introduced to the design and certain external hardware equipment is incorporated to enable the required access. However, transferring large data through this TAP causes high costs. Thus, an embedded compression architecture is introduced to the TAP to significantly reduce the test application time and the test data volume. Here, the retargeting of the test data is a crucial task. This work presents a partition-based formal retargeting technique to take advantage of embedded compression while processing even large and high-entropic test data. The proposed technique tackles the shortcomings of previously proposed retargeting approaches, which require an impractical computational effort for large test data volume or cause an adverse impact on the test application time. For evaluating the proposed method, several different test data sets have been processed to determine suitable parameter sets. As shown by the results, this method allows to compress even huge and high-entropic test data in average by 37.3% and to compress functional verification tests for state-of-the-art industrial designs by up to 62.5%. Furthermore, any adverse impact on the test application time is completely avoided and the procedure always finishes within reasonable run-time.
Adoption of formal agricultural credit by opinion leaders and other farmers in differentially developed villages of Bangladesh

Adoption behaviour of formal agricultural credit by the opinion leaders and farmers in a progressive and less progressive villages were studied. Overall adoption followed a pattern for different groups and sub-groups of the respondents. The likelihood of adoption of formal agricultural credit were higher among tenant farmers than the owner operators. Second, information variables have positive impact on the probability of adoption of formal agricultural credit. Moreover, along with the economic factors, non-economic factors also played significant role in the adoption of formal agricultural credit. Development agents should take the homogenous group-based credit disbursement indoctrination into account. For this process opinion leaders and their existing social networks should be used for the dissemination of loan information and possible loan guarantor schemes. Cost-saving measures to reach the remote and less progressive village were discussed.
Household Enterprise in Base-of-the-Pyramid Markets: the Influence of Institutions and Family Embeddedness

Nearly half of the population in Africa lives on less than $1.25 per day in what scholars refer to as base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) markets. More broadly, BOP markets account for two billion of the world's population living in extreme poverty. Household enterprises, a dominant organizational form in BOP markets, draw upon significant levels of family involvement. In order to cope with poverty, the involvement often includes inputs from elderly to young family members. Yet, we have little understanding of how family embeddedness influences household enterprise outcomes in BOP markets. The article presents a model that explains how the institutional environments with BOP markets influence family embeddedness in the household enterprise, and how family embeddedness influences household enterprises’ poverty-related outcomes (i.e., subsistence and child well-being). It also examines how household enterprises can draw upon income diversification strategies to reduce their vulnerability to poverty. The theory presented herein provides a foundation for scholars to examine family firm-related issues in BOP markets.
Theoretical study of highly strained InAs material from first-principles modelling: application to an ideal QD

We study the properties of highly strained InAs material calculated from first-principles modelling using ABINIT packages. We first simulate the characteristics of bulk InAs crystals and compare them with both experimental and density functional theory results. Secondly, we focus our attention on the strain effects on InAs crystals with a gradual strain reaching progressively the lattice matched parameters of InP, GaAs and GaP substrates. Section 4 is dedicated to the study of a hypothetical spherical InAs/GaP quantum dot (QD). The effect of hydrostatic deformations for both InAs zinc-blende phase and InAs rocksalt phase is discussed. Section 5 is devoted to the dependence of the lattice parameter aoz versus aox (aoy), Γ gap energies and band line-ups at the Γ point for biaxial deformations and interfacial structures. Ab initio results are compared with the empirical calculations which reveal nonlinear behaviour of the conduction band for highly strained InAs material.
Immunoprecipitation of DNA-protein complexes cross-linked by cis-diamminedichloroplatinum.

For the study of in vitro and in vivo DNA-protein interactions, cross-linking reactions driven by UV or formaldehyde have been frequently used, followed by standard protocols of immunoprecipitation and analysis of the DNA isolated from the complexes. Here we present a basically modified method to analyze the DNA-protein cross-linked complexes obtained by an alternative cross-linking reagent. The innovations presented here include cross-linking by cis-diamminedichloroplatinum II, a fast method to isolate DNA-protein complexes using gel-filtration chromatography, and a modified procedure to obtain specific immunocomplexes that can be analyzed either for DNA or for protein content. The application of this method to two nuclear proteins from chicken liver nuclei is described.
Revisiting Sovereign Bankruptcy

Sovereign debt crises occur regularly and often violently. Yet there is no legally and politically recognized procedure for restructuring the debt of bankrupt sovereigns. Procedures of this type have been periodically debated, but so far been rejected, for two main reasons. First, countries have been reluctant to give up power to supranational rules or institutions, and creditors and debtors have felt that there were sufficient instruments for addressing debt crises at hoc. Second, fears that making debt easier to restructure would raise the costs and reduce the amounts of sovereign borrowing in many countries. This was perceived to be against the interests of both the providers of both creditors and major borrowers.This report argues that both the nature and our understanding of sovereign debt problems have changed, over the course of the last decade, in a direction that creates a much stronger case for an orderly sovereign bankruptcy regime today than ten years ago. Pre-crisis policy mistakes are now recognized to be a much more severe problem for borrowing countries than the costs or limited availability of private financing. Recent court rulings – particularly a recent U.S. ruling that gives "holdout creditors" that decline a restructuring offer the right to interfere with payments to the creditors that accept such an offer. This will complicate efforts to resolve future debt crises on an ad hoc basis. Finally, sovereign debt crises are no longer just a problem in emerging markets, but a core concern in advanced countries as well – particularly in the Euro area. If the Euro is to survive, this will require both better ways to resolve debt crises and stronger, market-based incentives that prevent debt problems from occurring in the first place.To address these problems, policy proposals are presented at two levels: for the Euro area, and globally. A Euro area sovereign debt restructuring regime could be developed by amending the Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). This would both restrict the scope for lending to highly indebted countries without also restructuring their debts, and protect Euro area members receiving ESM financial assistance from legal action byholdout creditors. At the global level, a number of proposals are discussed, ranging from a coordinated introduction of "aggregate collective action clauses" that would allow a supermajority of bondholders across all bonds to amend bond payment terms to an amendment of the IMF articles that would limit the legal remedies of holdouts when a debt restructuring proposal has been accepted both by a majority of creditors and endorsed by the IMF.
Optimal Snap-Stabilizing Neighborhood Synchronizer in Tree Networks

We propose a snap-stabilizing synchronization technique, called the Neighborhood Synchronizer that synchronizes nodes with their neighbors in a tree network. The scheme has optimal memory requirement — only one bit per processor. is snap-stabilizing [11], meaning that it always behaves according to its specification. The proposed synchronizer being snap-stabilizing is optimal in terms of stabilization time. We show an application of the synchronizer by designing an efficient broadcast algorithm in tree networks. is also snap-stabilizing and needs only 2h + 2m - 1 rounds to broadcast m messages, where h is the height of the tree.
Yes‐associated protein is an independent prognostic marker in hepatocellular carcinoma

Yes‐associated protein (YAP), a downstream target of the Hippo signaling pathway, was recently linked to hepatocarcinogenesis in a mouse hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) model. The objective of the current study was to investigate the clinical significance of YAP in HCC and its prognostic values in predicting survival and tumor recurrence.
Design and simulation of a MIMO OFDM baseband transceiver for high throughput wireless LAN

This work proposes a MIMO OFDM baseband transceiver design for the next-generation high-throughput wireless LAN using two transmit antennas and two receive antennas. A MIMO OFDM receiver with algorithms for timing and frequency synchronization, tracking, channel estimation, and MIMO detection is designed and implemented in software. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver is capable of transmission with a data rate that is twice that of the current IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN standard.
Scalable Cache Management for ISP-Operated Content Delivery Services

Content delivery networks (CDNs) have been the prevalent method for the efficient delivery of content across the Internet. Management operations performed by CDNs are usually applied only based on limited information about Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks, which can have a negative impact on the utilization of ISP resources. To overcome these issues, previous research efforts have been investigating ISP-operated content delivery services, by which an ISP can deploy its own in-network caching infrastructure and implement its own cache management strategies. In this paper, we extend our previous work on ISP-operated content distribution and develop a novel scalable and efficient distributed approach to control the placement of content in the available caching points. The proposed approach relies on parallelizing the decision-making process and the use of network partitioning to cluster the distributed decision-making points, which enables fast reconfiguration and limits the volume of information required to take reconfiguration decisions. We evaluate the performance of our approach based on a wide range of parameters. The results demonstrate that the proposed solution can outperform previous approaches in terms of management overhead and complexity while offering similar network and caching performance.
Cost and benefits of rent control in Kumasi, Ghana

Over the past forty years, rent control has been a feature of housing in Ghana. This study focusses on the housing market in Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana. The authors examine the characteristics of the rent control regime in force there, and assess the costs and benefits of rent control, on landlords and on tenants, and its effect on the housing stock. Rent control has been successful in ensuring that housing is very inexpensive for most households, in both absolute terms and in the proportion of income devoted to rent. These controls have deprived landlords of economic returns on their property, causing them to withdraw stock from renting to use for their own family members and to reduce maintenance. However, rent control is not the only constraint on the housing market, in Kumasi or in Ghana. The paper also describes other supply side and regulatory constraints; such as those affecting land, finance, and choice of building design and materials. A number of options for relaxation/decontrol are studied with the aid of a simple present value model. Along with decontrol of new construction it is recommended that floating up and out of controls over a five year period should be considered, along with policy changes to ensure ready supplies of land, finance, and building materials. Such policies are essential, given that private housing investment provides the great majority of rooms in Ghanaian urban areas.
Double Gate Tunnel FET with ultrathin silicon body and high-k gate dielectric

In this paper we propose a novel design for a double gate tunnel field effect transistor (DG TFET), for which the simulations show significant improvements compared with single gate devices with a SiO 2 gate dielectric. For the first time, double gate devices using a high-K gate dielectric are explored, showing on-current as high as 1 mA for a gate voltage of 1.2 V, reduced off-current as low as 0.1 fA, improved average subthreshold swing of 52 mV/decade, and a minimum point slope of 18 mV/decade. An Ion/Ioff ratio of more than 1012 is shown
Smartphone recognition of the U.S. banknotes' denomination, for visually impaired people

We have developed the prototype of a system that recognizes the denomination of the largest U.S.A. currency notes in circulation in Ecuador, aimed at visually impaired people. It is capable of reproducing audio messages that announce the denomination of a banknote in front of a smartphone camera by processing each frame of its continuous filming. This work takes its theoretical basis from the Digital Image Processing (DD? ) techniques and primarily from the image recognition method known as Eigenfaces, which is based on the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) mathematical theory. Tests on two different Nokia smartphones show an accuracy rate of 99.8% and a processing speed of at least 7 frames per second.