Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Asymmetric Foreign Exchange Cash Flow Exposure: A Firm-Level Analysis

This study analyzes foreign exchange (FX) cash flow and equity exposures of a sample of U.S. multinational firms. Focusing on asymmetry in FX cash flow exposures to direction and magnitude of FX shocks, the study finds that asymmetry is pervasive in several alternative measures of FX cash flow exposure. Also, after decomposing FX equity exposures into discount rate and cash flow components, the study documents significant asymmetries in FX discount rate exposures. The latter finding implies that market-related factors in addition to cash flow–based arguments need to be considered when further exploring FX equity exposure. This study also highlights the importance of model specification: models with asymmetric specifications detect more firms with significant FX exposures.
Molecular evidence for color discrimination in the Atlantic sand fiddler crab, Uca pugilator

SUMMARY Fiddler crabs are intertidal brachyuran crabs that belong to the genus Uca. Approximately 97 different species have been identified, and several of these live sympatrically. Many have species-specific body color patterns that may act as signals for intra- and interspecific communication. To understand the behavioral and ecological role of this coloration we must know whether fiddler crabs have the physiological capacity to perceive color cues. Using a molecular approach, we identified the opsin-encoding genes and determined their expression patterns across the eye of the sand fiddler crab, Uca pugilator. We identified three different opsin-encoding genes (UpRh1, UpRh2 and UpRh3). UpRh1 and UpRh2 are highly related and have similarities in their amino acid sequences to other arthropod long- and medium-wavelength-sensitive opsins, whereas UpRh3 is similar to other arthropod UV-sensitive opsins. All three opsins are expressed in each ommatidium, in an opsin-specific pattern. UpRh3 is present only in the R8 photoreceptor cell, whereas UpRh1 and UpRh2 are present in the R1-7 cells, with UpRh1 expression restricted to five cells and UpRh2 expression present in three cells. Thus, one photoreceptor in every ommatidium expresses both UpRh1 and UpRh2, providing another example of sensory receptor coexpression. These results show that U. pugilator has the basic molecular machinery for color perception, perhaps even trichromatic vision.
Improved estimates of cancer-specific survival rates from population-based data.

BACKGROUND Accurate estimates of cancer survival are important for assessing optimal patient care and prognosis. Evaluation of these estimates via relative survival (a ratio of observed and expected survival rates) requires a population life table that is matched to the cancer population by age, sex, race and/or ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and ideally risk factors for the cancer under examination. Because life tables for all subgroups in a study may be unavailable, we investigated whether cause-specific survival could be used as an alternative for relative survival. METHODS We used data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program for 2,330,905 cancer patients from January 1, 1992, through December 31, 2004. We defined cancer-specific deaths according to the following variables: cause of death, only one tumor or the first of multiple tumors, site of the original cancer diagnosis, and comorbidities. Estimates of relative survival and cause-specific survival that were derived by use of an actuarial method were compared. RESULTS Among breast cancer patients who were white, black, or of Asian or Pacific Islander descent and who were older than 65 years, estimates of 5-year relative survival (107.5%, 106.6%, and 103.0%, respectively) were higher than estimates of 5-year cause-specific survival (98.6%, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 98.4% to 98.8%; 97.4%, 95% CI = 96.2% to 98.2%; and 99.2%, 95% CI = 98.4%, 99.6%, respectively). Relative survival methods likely underestimated rates for cancers of the oral cavity and pharynx (eg, for white cancer patients aged ≥65 years, relative survival = 54.2%, 95% CI = 53.1% to 55.3%, and cause-specific survival = 60.1%, 95% CI = 59.1% to 60.9%) and the lung and bronchus (eg, for black cancer patients aged ≥65 years, relative survival = 10.5%, 95% CI = 9.9% to 11.2%, and cause-specific survival = 11.9%, 95% CI = 11.2 % to 12.6%), largely because of mismatches between the population with these diseases and the population used to derive the life table. Socioeconomic differences between groups with low and high status in relative survival estimates appeared to be inflated (eg, corpus and uterus socioeconomic status gradient was 13.3% by relative survival methods and 8.8% by cause-specific survival methods). CONCLUSION Although accuracy of the cause of death on a death certificate can be problematic for cause-specific survival estimates, cause-specific survival methods may be an alternative to relative survival methods when suitable life tables are not available.
Proteomic analysis of rice seedlings infected by Sinorhizobium meliloti 1021

Rhizobial endophytes infect and colonize not only leguminous plants, but several non‐leguminous species as well. Using green fluorescent protein tagging technique, it has been shown that Rhizobia infect different varieties of rice species and migrate from plant roots to aerial tissues such as leaf sheaths and leaves. The interaction between them was found to promote the growth of rice. The growth promotion is the cumulative result of enhanced photosynthesis and stress resistance. In addition, indole‐3‐acetic acid also contributes to the promotion. Gel‐based comparative proteomic approaches were applied to analyze the protein profiles of three different tissues (root, leaf sheath and leaf) of Sinorhizobium meliloti 1021 inoculated rice in order to get an understanding about the molecular mechanism. Upon the inoculation of rhizobia, proteins involved in nine different functional categories were either up‐regulated or down‐regulated. Photosynthesis related proteins were up‐regulated only in leaf sheath and leaf, while the up‐regulated proteins in root were exclusively defense related. The results implied that there might have been an increase in the import and transport of proteins involved in light and dark reactions to the chloroplast as well as more efficient distribution of nutrients, hence enhanced photosynthesis. Although the initiation of defensive reactions mainly occurred in roots, some different defense mechanisms were also evoked in the aerial tissues.
Early Clinical Implications of Microalbuminuria in Patients with Acute Ischaemic Stroke.

INTRODUCTION Cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases are leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Stroke accounts for the second leading cause of death, about 11.13% of total deaths worldwide. Microalbuminuria is known to be associated with increased risk of mortality in ischaemic stroke patients. But there have been no studies to assess whether microalbuminuria affects the early clinical outcome of patients with acute ischaemic stroke. AIM This study aims to investigate whether microalbuminuria affects the early clinical outcome of patients with acute ischaemic stroke. MATERIALS AND METHODS This is a prospective study of patients with ischaemic stroke (who presented within 24 hours of symptom onset) who were consecutively admitted in three tertiary care centres during the time period from November 2013 to June 2015. Early clinical outcomes in patients were assessed by investigating the presence of Early Neurological Deterioration (END) using the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale. Urine albumin creatinine ratio was divided into two categories - Normal (less than 30mg/g of creatinine) or Urine Microalbuminuria (30-300 mg/g of creatinine). RESULTS Total 42 out of 70 patients (60%) were found to have microalbuminuria. In multivariate logistic regression analysis, microalbuminuria was found to be independently associated with END in patients with acute ischaemic stroke (p=0.044). CONCLUSION In the early periods following acute ischaemic stroke, patients with microalbuminuria have worse clinical outcome.
Exploring Asynchronous Design Techniques for Process-Tolerant and Energy-Efficient Subthreshold Operation

Supply voltage scaling is one of the easiest ways to reduce energy dissipation. Therefore, researchers have considered subthreshold logic as a promising option to achieve ultra low energy dissipation. However, circuit propagation delay is extremely sensitive to PVT variations under subthreshold operation. Hence, large delay margin is required for successful operation of conventional synchronous designs. Since leakage energy contributes to a substantial portion of total energy dissipation in subthreshold operation, the leakage energy dissipated for the required delay margin degrades energy efficiency significantly. In addition, even small intra-die variations result in large clock skew and hence, it is difficult to efficiently handle timing issues such as the setup and the hold time violations. In this work, we explore asynchronous design approach to address these challenges in subthreshold operation. We employ critical-path replica to generate completion signals of combinational logic blocks and use classical four-phase handshaking for communication between pipeline flip-flops. Since the proposed design approach uses only local clock buffers, it is easier to handle timing problems compared to synchronous designs. We compared iso-yield minimum energy dissipation of two design approaches (synchronous and asynchronous) in an inverter chain. Despite leakage overhead due to pad delay of critical-path delay line and ? return-to-zero? time of four-phase handshaking, the proposed asynchronous design shows 71% energy savings compared to its synchronous counterpart. To demonstrate subthreshold operation of the proposed design approach, we fabricated an 8-tap FIR filter in 90 nm CMOS. Measured oscilloscope plots of handshaking and output bus signals show that the design operates successfully below 300 mV. We also measured energy consumption of the FIR filter from 19 test chips-the average was 4.64 pJ and the standard deviation was 0.3526 pJ.
Complementary Person-Environment Fit as a Predictor of Job Pursuit Intentions in the Service Industry

There is an intrinsic link between the success of service firms and the availability of appropriate labor resources, making employee attraction and retention a critical concern for service organizations. Effects of recruitment efforts are influenced by applicants’ subjective person-environment (P-E) fit, referring to the compatibility between an individual and a work environment. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of employer attractiveness in the relationship between potential employees’ perceptions of P-E fit and job pursuit intentions in the service industry. This study was conducted with a group of 335 undergraduates and graduates enrolled in tourism and hospitality studies in Poznan. Data were collected through group-administered questionnaires. Research revealed that students generally did not believe that a career in the hospitality sector would fulfill their needs, rating job attributes slightly higher than organization attributes. Regression analyses showed that both person-job (P-J) fit and person-organization (P-O) fit were positively related to intentions to apply for a job, with the former being a stronger predictor. The relationship under study was fully mediated by the perceived attractiveness of hospitality employers. The findings contribute to an improved understanding of the influence of P-J and P-O fit on work-related attitudes and intentions of Generation Y prospective employees in the hospitality industry.
On the Distribution of the Estimated Coherence

The recent paper by Abdelfattah and Nicolas proposed a novel coherence magnitude estimator and studied its properties. Here, we derive simpler and more explicit expressions for four of the properties that were studied: 1) the probability density function; 2) moments; 3) Mellin transform; and 4) second-kind moments. We establish numerical efficiency of these expressions and provide simple Maple programs for inversion. We expect that the results presented here could enhance applicability of the new estimator.
Social impairments in Rett syndrome: characteristics and relationship with clinical severity.

BACKGROUND While behavioural abnormalities are fundamental features of Rett syndrome (RTT), few studies have examined the RTT behavioural phenotype. Most of these reports have focused on autistic features, linked to the early regressive phase of the disorder, and few studies have applied standardised behavioural measures. We used a battery of standardised measures of behaviour and functioning to test the following hypotheses: (1) autistic behaviour is prominent throughout childhood in RTT; (2) autistic features are more salient in individuals with milder presentation; (3) severity of autistic behaviour is associated with a wider range of behavioural problems; and (4) specific MECP2 mutations are linked to more severe autistic behaviour. METHODS Eighty MECP2 mutation-positive girls with RTT (aged 1.6-14.9 years) were administered: (1) the Screen for Social Interaction (SSI), a measure of autistic behaviour suited for individuals with severe communication and motor impairment; (2) the Rett Syndrome Behaviour Questionnaire (RSBQ), covering a wide range of abnormal behaviours in RTT; (3) the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS); and (4) a modified version of the Rett Syndrome Severity Scale (RSSS). Regression analyses examined the predictive value of age and RSSS on autistic behaviour and other behavioural abnormalities. T-tests further characterised the behavioural phenotype of individual MECP2 mutations. RESULTS While age had no significant effect on SSI or RSBQ total scores in RTT, VABS Socialization and Composite scores decreased over time. Clinical severity (i.e. RSSS) also increased with age. Surprisingly, SSI performance was not related to either RSSS or VABS Composite scores. Autistic behaviour was weakly linked with the RSBQ Hand behaviour factor scores, but not with the RSBQ Fear/Anxiety factor. Clinical (neurological) severity did not predict RSBQ scores, as evidenced by the analysis of individual MECP2 mutations (e.g. p.R106W, p.R270X and p.R294X). CONCLUSIONS Our data suggest that in RTT, autistic behaviour persists after the period of regression. It also demonstrated that neurological and behavioural impairments, including autistic features, are relatively independent of one another. Consistent with previous reports of the RTT phenotype, individual MECP2 mutations demonstrate complex associations with autistic features. Evidence of persistent autistic behaviour throughout childhood, and of a link between hand function and social skills, has important implications not only for research on the RTT behavioural phenotype, but also for the clinical management of the disorder.
A tour of CVC4: How it works, and how to use it

CVC4 is a solver for Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). This tutorial aims to give participants an overview of SMT, describe the main features of CVC4, and walk through in-depth examples using CVC4 to demonstrate how to solve real problems with an SMT solver. We will provide a detailed description of various aspects of CVC4's internals, including its architecture, its capacity for dealing with quantifiers, its finite model finder, and the linear arithmetic solver. We will show examples of software and hardware verification problems, and how they are encoded and handled by these features in CVC4. Participants are expected to have only a basic knowledge of what SMT is. This tutorial will give casual users a taste of encoding complex, real-world problems in SMT and effectively using CVC4 to solve them. Participants will be left with some knowledge of what goes on inside a modern SMT solver and some of the practical issues that arise in using them. CVC4, jointly developed at New York University and the University of Iowa, is freely available for both research and commercial use under an open-source license. The organizers of this tutorial are all architects and implementors of CVC4 and have extensive expertise in the area of SMT.
Scalable Generation of Type Embeddings Using the ABox

Structured knowledge bases gain their expressive power from both the ABox and TBox. While the ABox is rich in data, the TBox contains the ontological assertions that are often necessary for logical inference. The crucial links between the ABox and the TBox are served by is-a statements (formally a part of the ABox) that connect instances to types, also referred to as classes or concepts. Latent space embedding algorithms, such as RDF2Vec and TransE, have been used to great effect to model instances in the ABox. Such algorithms work well on large-scale knowledge bases like DBpedia and Geonames, as they are robust to noise and are low-dimensional and real-valued. In this paper, we investigate a supervised algorithm for deriving type embeddings in the same latent space as a given set of entity embeddings. We show that our algorithm generalizes to hundreds of types, and via incremental execution, achieves near-linear scaling on graphs with millions of instances and facts. We also present a theoretical foundation for our proposed model, and the means of validating the model. The empirical utility of the embeddings is illustrated on five partitions of the English DBpedia ABox. We use visualization and clustering to show that our embeddings are in good agreement with the manually curated TBox. We also use the embeddings to perform a soft clustering on 4 million DBpedia instances in terms of the 415 types explicitly participating in is-a relationships in the DBpedia ABox. Lastly, we present a set of results obtained by using the embeddings to recommend types for untyped instances. Our method is shown to outperform another feature-agnostic baseline while achieving 15x speedup without any growth in memory usage.
Image reconstruction for electrical capacitance tomography exploiting sparsity

We present a new image reconstruction method for Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) by exploiting the sparsity of reconstructed images. ECT image reconstruction is generally ill-posed because the number of measurements is small whereas the image dimensions are large. Inspired by recent developments in Compressive Sensing (CS), given the sparsity of the signal (image), our idea is to apply an efficient and stable algorithm through L1 regularization to recover the sparse signal with sufficient measurements that have cardinality comparable to the sparsity of the signal. In this paper, we apply an efficient GPSR (Gradient Projection for Sparse Reconstruction) algorithm to reconstruct the sparse signal under DCT basis (GPSR-DCT). Our results on real data show that the proposed GPSR-DCT algorithm can better preserve object boundary and shape, as compared to a representative state-of-the-art ECT image reconstruction algorithm, Projected Landweber Iteration with Linear Back Projection initialization (LBP-PLI).
Wissenschaftliche Analysen mit Hilfe der amtlichen Umsatzsteuerstatistik

Neue Impulse für die empirische Wirtschaftsforschung können von der besseren Erschließung von Unternehmensdaten der amtlichen Statistik für die Wissenschaft ausgehen. Dabei geht es nicht um die Nutzungsmöglichkeiten von Tabellendaten – diese ist zweifellos bereits gegeben – sondern vielmehr um die Nutzung der Einzeldaten, die hinter den Tabellen stehen. Mit diesen kann ein Wissenschaftler eigene Forschungsideen entwickeln und verwirklichen, ohne darauf angewiesen zu sein, dass seine spezielle Fragestellung „zufällig“ mit einer in der amtlichen Statistik veröffentlichten Tabelle beantwortet werden kann.
Temporal and spatial behaviour of the single cathode spot ignition in vacuum

Optical emission of a single cathode spot was studied to improve understanding of cathode spot initiation and dynamics. A single cathode spot was generated with high reproducibility in a gap under UHV conditions at a liquid Ga-In-alloy cathode. Discharges were initiated by rectangular voltage pulses of 100 ns length produced by a cable generator. The spot radiation was recorded in time with a high temporal and spectral resolution by a spectrograph coupled with a streak camera and a CCD camera. Cathode spot light radiation was found to be as weak in the discharge beginning as the equipment set records nothing. Cathode spot radiation becomes bright when cathode spot plasma approaches closely to the anode. Unlike spot initiation in a pure vacuum gap, a cathode spot starts as a bright flash when the gap is filled with plasma.
Phylogenetic andmolecular clock inferencesof cyanobacterial strainswithinRivulariaceae fromdistant environments

Heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria are important players at both evolutionary and ecological scales, but to date it has been difficult to establish their phylogenetic affiliations. We present data from a phylogenetic and molecular clock analysis of heterocystous cyanobacteria within the family Rivulariaceae, including the genera Calothrix, Rivularia, Gloeotrichia and Tolypothrix. The strains were isolated from distant geographic regions including fresh and brackish water bodies, microbial mats from beach rock, microbialites, pebble beaches, plus PCC strains 7103 and 7504. Phylogenetic inferences (distance, likelihood and Bayesian) suggested the monophyly of genera Calothrix and Rivularia. Molecular clock estimates indicate that Calothrix and Rivularia originated 1500 million years ago (MYA) ago and species date back to 400–300 MYA while Tolypothrix and Gloeotrichia are younger genera (600–400 MYA).
Influence of maternal magnesium sulphate and ritodrine treatment on the neonate: a study with six‐month follow‐up

Magnesium sulphate and ritodrine are commonly used drugs in the prevention of preterm delivery. However, the effects of these treatments on the newborn are controversial. It has previously been suggested that antenatal tocolytic magnesium sulphate decreases the incidence of cerebral palsy, but increases paediatric mortality. On the other hand, antenatal ritodrine treatment has been reported to increase the incidence of neonatal peri‐intra‐ventricular haemorrhage (PIVH). We investigated the cerebral ultrasonographic findings, neurological outcome and apparent life‐threatening events (ALTE) among 63 infants, born before 33 wk of gestation, whose mothers were antenatally treated for premature birth with ritodrine or magnesium sulphate, and for pre‐eclampsia with magnesium sulphate. Cerebral ultrasonography was performed during the first week of life and repeated before hospital discharge. The pathological findings were confirmed by a paediatric radiologist. A paediatrician and a physiotherapist performed the neurological follow‐up examination of the survivors at 6 mo of age. We found Grade 3^1 PIVH in 15% of the infants exposed to maternal ritodrine treatment, in 9% of the infants whose mothers received tocolytic magnesium treatment, and in none of those exposed to maternal magnesium treatment for pre‐eclampsia (p = 0.19). However, no differences were observed in 6‐mo development or in the rate of paediatric mortality and ALTE among these three study groups. Because of the retrospective design and the limited number of subjects, the results of this study must be interpreted with caution.