Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Survey Data in Nowcasting Euro Area GDP Growth

This paper evaluates the impact of new releases of financial, real activity and survey data on nowcasting euro area gross domestic product (GDP). We show that all three data categories positively impact on the accuracy of GDP nowcasts, whereby the effect is largest in the case of real activity data. When treating variables as if they were all published at the same time and without any time lag, financial series lose all their significance, while survey data remain an important ingredient for the nowcasting exercise. The subsequent analysis shows that the sectoral coverage of survey data, which is broader than that of timely available real activity data, as well as their information content stemming from questions focusing on agents' expectations, are the main sources of the ‘genuine’ predictive power of survey data. When the forecast period is restricted to the 2008–09 financial crisis, the main change is an enhanced forecasting role for financial data. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Three-dimensional multivoxel proton MR spectroscopy of the brain in children with neurofibromatosis type 1.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), the most common autosomal dominant genetic disorder, frequently manifests as focal areas of signal intensity (FASI) on T2-weighted MR images. The purpose of our study was to investigate whether tumor(s), focal areas of signal intensity (FASI), and normal brain can be differentiated by using 3D multivoxel localized proton MR spectroscopy in children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) disorder. METHODS Five children with NF1 and two healthy control subjects, all in the 3- to 11-year-old age group, were studied with a new 3D proton MR spectroscopy technique: a hybrid of 1D fourth-order transverse Hadamard spectroscopic imaging and 2D chemical shift imaging. A 3D volume-of-interest (VOI) was image-guided onto the site of the abnormality and identified on three orthogonal images. Proton MR spectroscopy partitioned the VOI into 6 x 6 x 4 (or 8 x 8 x 4) voxels, 1.5 (or 1.0) cm3 each. RESULTS Simultaneous coverage of the entire VOI yielded good spectral signal-to-noise ratio from 136 (or 256) voxels in 27 minutes. Proton MR spectroscopy indicated that FASI a) are characterized by significantly elevated choline (Cho), reduced creatine (Cr), 2>Cho: Cr>1.3, and near normal N-acetylaspartate (NAA) levels; b) are different from tumors that exhibit Cho:Cr>2 and no NAA; c) have no intrinsic lipid or lactate signal(s); and d) correlate in spatial extent but are more extensive than indicated by MR imaging. CONCLUSION Three-dimensional multivoxel proton MR spectroscopy reveals distinct metabolic features that differentiate normal, FASI, and tumor regions in the pediatric brain.
Time-Related Changes in Neural Systems Underlying Attention and Arousal During the Performance of an Auditory Vigilance Task

Vigilance behavior, or watch keeping, involves the focusing of attention on the detection of subtle changes in the environment that occur over a long period of time. We investigated the time course of changes in brain activity during the continuous performance of a 60-min auditory vigilance task. The task required the detection of an intensity drop that occurred in 5% of the auditory stimuli. Six 1-min samples of cerebral blood flow (CBF) and electroencephalographic (EEG) activity were obtained at l0-min intervals during the vigilance performance. Changes in CBF were measured by means of positron emission tomography (PET). Performance data (hits, false alarms, reaction time) were analyzed across six 10-min blocks. Eight healthy male volunteers participated in the study. During the 60-min test, the number of correct detections (hits) did not change, but both the reaction time and EEG activity in the theta (4 to 7 Hz) range progressively increased across testing. CBF in several subcortical structures (thalamus, substantia innominata, and putamen) and cortical areas (ventrolateral, dorsolateral, and orbital frontal cortex; parietal cortex; and temporal cortex) decreased as a function of time-on-task; changes in the cortical regions were limited to the right hemisphere. Blood flow also decreased in the temporalis muscles. At the same time, CBF increased in several visual cortical areas including the left and right fusiform gyri. Furthermore, the thalamic blood-flow response co-varied with that in the substantia innominata, the ponto-mesencephalic tegmentum, and the anterior cingulate cortex. The right ventrolateral-frontal blood-flow response covaried with that in the right parietal, orbitofrontal, and dorsolateral frontal cortex. 'Iko main conclusions are drawn from the obtained data. First, we suggest that the observed time-related changes in reaction time, EEG activity, and blood flow in the temporalis muscles are related to changes in the level of arousal (alertness) and that CBF changes in the thalamus-related neural circuitry represent a brain correlate of such changes. Second, we speculate that time-related CBF decreases in cortical regions of the right hemisphere underlie a shift from controlled to automatic attentional processing of the auditory stimuli.
Prediction of Individual Eating Habits Using Short-Term Food Recording

In order to maintain and improve health, it is very important to grasp one's eating habits in his/her everyday life. Ideally, individual long-term food recording is preferred to make health suggestion about eating. However, it is not easy for an individual to continuously record his/her dishes in the long term. It would be beneficial to predict one's eating habits only by his/her short-term food recording. In this paper, we propose a method to predict individual eating habits only by short-term recording. We make use of personal food recording data and methodologies of recommendation such as collaborative filtering and evaluating the accuracy of prediction. In experiments using various terms of recording, we are able to achieve an accuracy of more than 70% for details about food dishes, and more than 90% in a food category using seven days of food recording.
Misconfigurations discovery between distributed security components using the mobile agent approach

Nowadays, to survey and guarantee the security policy in networks, the administrator uses different network security components, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems (IDS). For a perfect interoperability between these components in the network, these latter must be configured properly to avoid misconfiguration anomalies between them. However, there are a set of anomalies between alerting rules in the IDS and filtering rules in firewalls, that degrade the network security policy. In this paper, we will present a mobile agent based architecture to detect misconfigurations between these distributed components and generate a new set of rules free of errors. A case study will illustrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Gene Regulatory Network for Tapetum Development in Arabidopsis thaliana

In flowering plants, male gametophyte development occurs in the anther. Tapetum, the innermost of the four anther somatic layers, surrounds the developing reproductive cells to provide materials for pollen development. A genetic pathway of DYT1-TDF1-AMS-MS188 in regulating tapetum development has been proven. Here we used laser microdissection and pressure catapulting to capture and analyze the transcriptome data for the Arabidopsis tapetum at two stages. With a comprehensive analysis by the microarray data of dyt1, tdf1, ams, and ms188 mutants, we identified possible downstream genes for each transcription factor. These transcription factors regulate many biological processes in addition to activating the expression of the other transcription factor. Briefly, DYT1 may also regulate early tapetum development via E3 ubiquitin ligases and many other transcription factors. TDF1 is likely involved in redox and cell degradation. AMS probably regulates lipid transfer proteins, which are involved in pollen wall formation, and other E3 ubiquitin ligases, functioning in degradating proteins produced in previous processes. MS188 is responsible for most cell wall-related genes, functioning both in tapetum cell wall degradation and pollen wall formation. These results propose a more complex gene regulatory network for tapetum development and function.
On the limitations of equivalent circuits for the modeling of periodic structures

The use of equivalent circuits in the modeling of the scattering properties of frequency selective surfaces and other periodic structures provides a simplified and insightful approach to the involved original problem. Many of the equivalent circuits available in the literature are based on heuristic derivation of such circuits, which are valid over a given frequency range. However, some works are focused on the systematic derivation of the topology of the associated multi-modal equivalent network. In this work, the conditions under which these networks can be obtained are discussed in depth. The limits of validity of this approach are also considered.
The CUG-binding protein binds specifically to UG dinucleotide repeats in a yeast three-hybrid system.

The CUG-binding protein (CUG-BP) has been reported to be involved in the pathogenesis of myotonic dystrophy (DM) through binding to a CUG trinucleotide repeat located in the 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) of the DM protein kinase (DMPK) gene. We found that CUG-BP associates with long CUG trinucleotide repeats ((CUG)(11)(CUG)(12)), but not with short repeats ((CUG)(12)) in a yeast three-hybrid system. On the other hand, CUG-BP+LYLQ, an alternatively spliced isoform of CUG-BP, does not associate with CUG trinucleotide repeats regardless of the repeat length. In addition to these findings, we found that CUG-BP and CUG-BP+LYLQ strongly and specifically associate with UG dinucleotide repeats. Deletion analyse of CUG-BP revealed that the absence of the first or third RNA-binding domain (RBD I and RBD III, respectively) does not affect the interaction between CUG-BP and UG dinucleotide repeats. Loss of the second RNA-binding domain (RBD II) decreases the affinity of CUG-BP for UG dinucleotide repeats by about 40%. Unexpectedly, deletion of the linker domain most severely reduces the interaction, although this region does not contain a known RNA-binding motif. Our results suggest the possibility that both CUG-BP and CUG-BP+LYLQ associate with UG repeat-containing mRNAs and regulate such metabolic properties as mRNA localization, stability, and translation, and provide new insights into the pathogenesis of DM.
RecAuth : Recommending Authors Based on Keywords

Ample references should be collected prior to conducting research and writing academic papers. The references should be of high quality, which are often produced by authors who are highly reputable in their respective field of research. Less experienced researchers would benefit greatly from a tool that gives them suggestions on the authors that share their research interests. A framework, called RecAuth, was developed to recommend a list of authors who have high relevance to the key phrases and have produced highly influential work based on an input set of keywords. The algorithm leveraged the propagation of ranking over venues and authors to generate author rankings. It was found that the recommended authors are highly consistent with the top ranking authors found on Google Scholar.
Effects of Monetary Policy Shocks on UK Regional Activity: A Constrained MFVAR Approach

This paper examines the effects of monetary policy shocks on UK regional economic growth and dispersion in a novel Constrained Mixed Frequency Vector Autoregressive framework. Compared to a standard MFVAR, the model partially accounts for missing quarterly observations for regional growth by exploiting national growth data. Results suggest significant heterogeneity in the importance of monetary policy shocks across regions. Mortgage indebtedness is highly related to regional sensitivity to monetary policy shocks. Also, there is some evidence suggesting that regions with larger share of manufacturing output and small and medium sized firms in employ ment are more sensitive to monetary policy shocks.
Fine-grained LFW database

Current deep learning methods have achieved human-level performance on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) database, but we think it is because that the limited number of pairs on LFW do not capture the real difficulty of large-scale unconstrained face verification problem. Besides the intra-class variations like pose, illumination, occlusion and expression, highly visually similarity of different persons' faces is an another challenge. It is unavoidable in large dataset and many researchers ignore it. Therefore, in this paper, we firstly select some visually similar pairs in LFW database by combining the deep learning method and human annotation results. Preserving the matched pairs and replacing the mismatched pairs of LFW with the selected similar pairs, we obtain the Fine-grained LFW (FGLFW) database which can better reflect the real difficulty of face verification. Experimental results show that methods achieving not bad performance on LFW drops more than 11% even 25% on FGLFW. It reflects that visually similar pairs are difficult to current methods and our FGLFW database is a quite challenging database. Researchers still have a long way to go for solving face verification problem on such a database.
Latent profile analysis of a cohort of patients with eating disorders not otherwise specified.

OBJECTIVE This article examined possible ways of classifying eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS) using latent profile analysis (LPA). METHOD Of 687 patients being seen for an evaluation for an eating disorder, 284 were classified as having anorexia nervosa (AN) or bulimia nervosa (BN). LPA was performed on the remaining 403 cases (EDNOS). RESULTS Five clusters were identified that characterized individuals who appeared to be: (1) subsyndromal restrictor AN patients that denied a great deal of eating disorder (ED) psychopathology; (2) subsyndromal ED patients, some but not all of whom were low weight; (3) subsyndromal BN with higher rates of vomiting than binge-eating; (4) primarily overweight individuals with low levels of ED pathology; or (5) overweight patients who most resembled binge eating disorder (BED). CONCLUSION Most EDNOS cases resembled AN, BN, or BED cases and can be conceptualized several ways, one of which is to see them as existing on a continuum with the DSM-IV ED.
Exploiting Cyclic Prefix for Turbo-OFDM Receiver Design

In an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, the cyclic prefix (CP) has traditionally been not useful for data detection at the receiver. This paper presents a low-complexity turbo-OFDM receiver to exploit all of the extra information offered by the CP to improve the data detection and channel estimation performance. In the receiver, two iterative processes, namely, the outer iteration based on the turbo equalization principle and the inner iteration based on the expectation–maximization algorithm, are proposed. The CP observation, which contains extra information about data and channel, is represented by a Forney-style factor graph and incorporated into the inner iteration for joint channel estimation and data detection, using a Gaussian message passing process. The extrinsic messages of the data enhanced by exploiting the CP are then exchanged in the outer iteration for joint channel estimation, data detection, and decoding to further improve a system performance. To effectively implement the receiver, several approximations are introduced to reduce the computational complexity to be logarithmic in the length of the OFDM symbol $N$ , i.e., $\mathcal O(NlogN)$ per OFDM symbol. Extensive simulation results show that the bit error rate performance of the proposed low-complexity turbo-OFDM receiver is superior to that of existing turbo-OFDM receivers with exploiting the channel information in the CP only or without exploiting the CP, as well as conventional OFDM receivers, in particular for time-varying channels.
Bayesian Model Selection for Structural Break Models

We take a Bayesian approach to model selection in regression models with structural breaks in conditional mean and residual variance parameters. A novel feature of our approach is that it does not assume knowledge of the parameter subset that undergoes structural breaks, but instead conducts model selection jointly over the number of structural breaks and the subset of the parameter vector that changes at each break date. Simulation experiments demonstrate that conducting this joint model selection can be quite important in practice for the detection of structural breaks. We apply the proposed model selection procedure to characterize structural breaks in the parameters of an autoregressive model for post-war U.S. inflation. We find important changes in both residual variance and conditional mean parameters, the latter of which is revealed only upon conducting the joint model selection procedure developed here.
Slow wave activity and prior sleep/wakefulness on an irregular schedule

SUMMARY Eight subjects were exposed to a sleep schedule of 8, 4, 2, or 0 h of night sleep (awakening at 07 hours) followed by ad lib sleep from 1100 hours. Stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that SWA per cycle was closely related to the amount of prior waking, the amount of prior napping and the amount of prior sleep in the same sleep episode. The homeostatic ‘factor S’ of the three‐process model of sleep regulation of Folkard and Åkerstedt predicted as much of the variance of SWA as did the three prior sleep/wake variables together. It was concluded that SWA is closely related to prior sleep/wake history and follows a course similar to that of recovery of alertness.
Parents’ Marital Distress, Divorce, and Remarriage: Links With Daughters’ Early Family Formation Transitions

The authors used data from the Add Health study to estimate the effects of parents’ marital status and relationship distress on daughters’ early family formation transitions. Outcomes included traditional transitions (marriage and marital births) and nontraditional transitions (cohabitation and nonmarital births). Relationship distress among continuously married parents was not related to any outcome. Offspring with single parents and remarried parents had an elevated risk of nonmarital births and nonmarital cohabitation. Offspring with remarried parents with a high-distress relationship had an elevated risk of early marriages and marital births. These results, combined with analyses of mediating variables, provide the strongest support for a modeling perspective, although some support also was found for a perspective based on escape from stress.
Effects of a single large dose of vitamin A, given during the postpartum period to HIV-positive women and their infants, on child HIV infection, HIV-free survival, and mortality.

BACKGROUND Low maternal serum retinol level is a risk factor for mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Multiple-large-dose vitamin A supplementation of HIV-positive children reduces mortality. The World Health Organization recommends single-large-dose vitamin A supplementation for postpartum women in areas of prevalent vitamin A deficiency; neonatal dosing is under consideration. We investigated the effect that single-large-dose maternal/neonatal vitamin A supplementation has on MTCT, HIV-free survival, and mortality in HIV-exposed infants. METHODS A total of 14,110 mother-infant pairs were enrolled < or =96 h after delivery, and both mother and infant, mother only, infant only, or neither received vitamin A supplementation in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial with a 2 x 2 factorial design. All but 4 mothers initiated breast-feeding. A total of 4495 infants born to HIV-positive women were included in the present analysis. RESULTS Neither maternal nor neonatal vitamin A supplementation significantly affected postnatal MTCT or overall mortality between baseline and 24 months. However, the timing of infant HIV infection modified the effect that supplementation had on mortality. Vitamin A supplementation had no effect in infants who were polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive [corrected] for HIV at baseline. In infants who were PCR negative at baseline and PCR positive at 6 weeks, neonatal supplementation reduced mortality by 28% (P=.01), but maternal supplementation had no effect. In infants who were PCR negative at 6 weeks, all 3 vitamin A regimens were associated with ~2-fold higher mortality (P< or =.05). CONCLUSIONS Targeted vitamin A supplementation of HIV-positive children prolongs their survival. However, postpartum maternal and neonatal vitamin A supplementation may hasten progression to death in breast-fed children who are PCR negative at 6 weeks. These findings raise concern about universal maternal or neonatal vitamin A supplementation in HIV-endemic areas.
Do Idioms Have a Heart? The SIDE (Sentiment of IDiomatic Expressions) Project

This paper presents some preliminary results of the SIDE project, which aims at investigating the emotional content of idioms from both a behavioral and computational point of view. In this first work, we collected affective ratings for a set of 45 Italian verb-noun idioms and 45 Italian non-idiomatic verb-noun pairs and then performed a computational study to analyze the role of linguistic information in determining the affective rating of idioms and non-idioms. To this end, we exploited an existing vector-based computational model to calculate a distributional polarity score. The correlation analysis between such a score and human-rated valence revealed a high correlation among the variables as well as a significantly lower polarity score of idioms with respect to non-idioms reflecting their stronger negative content.
GDP Forecasting Bias due to Aggregation Inaccuracy in a Chain- Linking Framework

When evaluating the economy’s performance, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the most often used indicator and it is therefore also one of the most often forecasted. Due to the shortcomings of the traditional fixed-base methods, many countries have adopted chain-linking to avoid price structure obsolescence. This has meant that GDP’s well-known accounting identities hold only approximately raising challenges for those reading the numbers, but also for forecasters that follow approaches that rely on these accounting properties. Oddly enough, the issue of aggregation is hardly mentioned in forecasting. This omission could be the result of everybody adopting the chain-linking methodology with ease and considering it unnecessary to make a point out of it, but it could also originate from ignoring the issue altogether. Whatever the reason for this omission, it could lead practitioners that are unfamiliar with the method to make unnecessary mistakes. This document presents explicitly the role of prices in a bottom-up forecasting framework and, based on it, argues that they should be taken into account when generating aggregate forecasts based on the accounting identities. Also, something that should be taken into consideration by practitioners is that discrepancies due to aggregation inaccuracy are not necessarily negligible.