Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Foreign trade specialization and international competitivenessOf Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the EU 12

The main purpose of this paper is to examine the foreign trade patterns and/or specialization in foreign trade of three EU member countries – namely, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and candidate country Turkey – and to compare the foreign trade patterns with the EU/12 in the period 1995- 2005. The paper is divided into seven main sections. The first section summarizes the export and import developments of the countries in question between the years 1995 and 2005. The second section describes the methodology and data sets. Empirical analysis is found in the third section,where in five subsections we investigate international competitiveness and trade specialization using different indices. In the fourth part of the research we compare the dynamic products in world exports with dynamic products in the exports of the four countries. The final section gives brief conclusions drawn from the results and considers the future position of Turkey within the enlarged EU. In this research we do not intend to explain why the foreign trade patterns are different in the considered countries. We simply try to show whether and where there are any differences in foreign trade specialisation among the four countries and EU/12. Key words: Turkey, Spain, Greece, Portugal, the EU, Foreign Trade, Competitiveness. *Acknowledgements: this paper is a part of research project called Go-Euro-Med within the 6th.Framework.
Revisiting Causality Inference In Markov Chain

Identifying causal relationships is a key premise of scientific research. Given the mass of observational data in many disciplines, new machine learning methods offer the possibility of using an empirical approach to identifying unappreciated causal relationships and to understanding causal behavior. Conventional methods of causality inference from observational data require a considerable length of time series data to capture cause and effect relationships. We believe that important causal relationships can be inferred from the composition of one-step transition rates (Markov Chains) to and from an event. Here we introduce 'Causality Inference using Composition of Transitions' (CICT), a computationally efficient method that reveals causal structure with high accuracy. We characterize the differences in causes, effects, and random events in the composition of their inputs and outputs. To demonstrate our method, we have used an administrative inpatient healthcare dataset to set up a graph network of patients transition between different diagnoses. Then we apply our method to patients transition graph, revealing deep and complex causal structure between clinical conditions. Our method is highly accurate in predicting whether a transition in a Markov chain is causal or random and performs well in identifying the direction of causality in bidirectional associations. Moreover, CICT brings in new information that enables unsupervised clustering methods to discriminate causality from randomness. Comprehensive performance analysis using C-statistics, goodness-of-fit statistics and decision analysis of predictive models, as well as comparison with the medical ground truth, validates our findings.
The hippocampus is involved in mental navigation for a recently learned, but not a highly familiar environment: A longitudinal fMRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to investigate the hypothesis that memory for a large‐scale environment is initially dependent on the hippocampus but is later supported by extra‐hippocampal structures (e.g., precuneus, posterior parahippocampal cortex, and lingual gyrus) once the environment is well‐learned. Participants were scanned during mental navigation tasks initially when they were newly arrived to the city of Toronto, and later after having lived and navigated within the city for 1 yr. In the first session, activation was observed in the right hippocampus, left precuneus, and postcentral gyrus. The second session revealed activation in the caudate and lateral temporal cortex, but not in the right hippocampus; additional activation was instead observed in the posterior parahippocampal cortex, lingual gyrus, and precuneus. These findings suggest that the right hippocampus is required for the acquisition of new spatial information but is not needed to represent this information when the environment is highly familiar. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Stochastic Matching in Hypergraphs

We study the stochastic matching problem on k-uniform hypergraphs. In this problem, we are given a hypergraphH on V vertices. With each hyperedge E, we are given a probability pe of its existence i.e. an edge e exists in the hypergraph with probability pe , independent of all other edges. Each edge also has a weight associated with it. Our goal is to construct a matching with maximum expected weight. The only way we can find out if the an edge e exists or not is to try to query it, and if the edge is indeed present in the graph, we must include it in our matching. How should we adaptively query the edge set so that we attain our goal? We present an LP based 1 k+1/2 + o(1/k) approximation algorithm for this problem. This improves on the current best known bound of k + 1 due to Bansal et al. [1]. We use the standard LP relaxation for the hypergraph matching problem to get an upper bound on the optimal algorithm. The LP variables give us a hint on the probabilities with which to probe edges. We then present a new attenuation scheme which “attenuates” the edge probabilities given by the LP to get a good approximation ratio. Intuitively, attenuation is needed because if an edge is probed with very high probability, it hurts some of the other edges. Instead of attenuating all the edges by the same factor (as in Bansal et al. [1]), our scheme attenuates each edge differently.
Deriving quantitative overviews of free text assessments on the web

Many research efforts are addressing the problem of enabling automatic summarization of opinions and assessments stated on the web in product reviews, discussion forums, and blogs. One key difficulty is that relevant assessments scattered throughout web pages are obscured by variations in natural language. In this paper, we focus on a novel aspect of enabling aggregations of assessments of degree to which a given property holds for a given entity (for instance, how touristy is Boston). We present GrainPile, a user interface for extracting from the web, aggregating and quantifying degree assessments of unconstrained topics. The interface provides a variety of functions: a) identification of dimensions of comparison (properties) relevant to a particular entity or set of entities, b) comparisons of like entities on user-specified properties (for example, which university is more prestigious, Yale or Cornell), c) tracing the derived opinions back to their sources (so that the reasons for the opinions can be found). A central contribution in GrainPile is the evaluated demonstration of feasibility of mapping the recognized expressions (such as fairly, very, extremely, and so on) to a common scale of numerical values and aggregating across all the extracted assessments to derive an overall assessment of degree. GrainPile's novel assessment and aggregation of degree expressions is shown to strongly outperform an interpretation-free, co-occurrence based method.
A new method of preparing embeddment-free sections for transmission electron microscopy: applications to the cytoskeletal framework and other three-dimensional networks

Diethylene glycol distearate is used as a removable embedding medium to produce embeddment -free sections for transmission electron microscopy. The easily cut sections of this material float and form ribbons in a water-filled knife trough and exhibit interference colors that aid in the selection of sections of equal thickness. The images obtained with embeddment -free sections are compared with those from the more conventional epoxy-embedded sections, and illustrate that embedding medium can obscure important biological structures, especially protein filament networks. The embeddment -free section methodology is well suited for morphological studies of cytoskeletal preparations obtained by extraction of cells with nonionic detergent in cytoskeletal stabilizing medium. The embeddment -free section also serves to bridge the very different images afforded by embedded sections and unembedded whole mounts.
Interannual variability of snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, United States: Examples from two alpine watersheds

The distribution of snow and the energy flux components of snowmelt are intrinsic characteristics of the alpine water cycle controlling the location of source waters and the effect of climate on streamflow. Interannual variability of these characteristics is relevant to the effect of climate change on alpine hydrology. Our objective is to characterize the interannual variability in the spatial distribution of snow and energy fluxes of snowmelt in watersheds of a maritime setting, Tokopah Basin (TOK) in California's southern Sierra Nevada, and a continental setting, Green Lake 4 Valley (GLV4) in Colorado's Front Range, using a 12 year database (1996–2007) of hydrometeorological observations and satellite‐derived snow cover. Snowpacks observed in GLV4 exhibit substantially greater spatial variability than in TOK (0.75 versus 0.28 spatial coefficient of variation). In addition, modeling results indicate that the net turbulent energy flux contribution to snowmelt in GLV4 is, on average, 3 times greater in magnitude (mean 29% versus 10%) and interannual variability (standard deviation 17% versus 6%) than in TOK. These energy flux values exhibit strong seasonality, increasing as the melt season progresses to times later in the year (R2 = 0.54–0.77). This seasonality of energy flux appears to be associated with snowmelt rates that generally increase with onset date of melt (0.02 cm d−2). This seasonality in snowmelt rate, coupled to differences in hydrogeology, may account for the observed differences in correspondence between the timing of snowmelt and timing of streamflow in these watersheds.
Child Poverty in Vietnam: Using Adult Equivalence Scales to Estimate Income-Poverty for Different Age Groups

Estimates of child poverty are based on the percentage of children living in poor households, which ignores the issue of intrahousehold allocation. It is commonly argued that the fact that data are collected at the household level means it is not possible to report figures relating to the number of children living in poverty. Yet analysts using income and expenditure data routinely make adjustments to these data which implicitly tell us exactly how much of household expenditure is going on each child. These adjustments are the use of adult equivalence scales. These scales give child consumption as a proportion of that of an adult male, and hence can be used to calculate child consumption shares. These scales may be estimated econometrically, and are hence based on intra-household allocation patterns for the households under study. Moreover, the scales can be estimated separately for different sub-samples of the population, allowing estimates of child poverty rates for different groups; for example how child poverty differs between boys and girls or for different ethnic groups. This paper presents such estimates in the case of Vietnam.
Disclosure, ownership structure, earnings announcement lag and cost of equity capital in emerging markets: The case of the Egyptian stock exchange

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of voluntary disclosure, ownership structure attributes and timely disclosure on cost of equity capital in the emerging Egyptian capital market. Design/methodology/approach - – A content analysis of annual reports is used to measure the extent of voluntary disclosure. Earnings announcement lag (EAL) is used to measure the quality of voluntary disclosure (i.e. timely disclosure). Finally, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) framework is used to estimate cost of equity capital. Findings - – The authors find a negative relationship between the level of voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital. More specifically, the authors document that this association is strongly significant under high ownership dispersion, low government ownership and shorter EAL. Finally, EAL is positively associated with cost of equity capital. Research limitations/implications - – The authors use the CAPM framework as a proxy for the cost of equity since forecasted earnings per share are not communicated by financial analysts in the Egyptian Stock Exchange. Practical implications - – The findings demonstrate for managers that the increased levels of voluntary and timely disclosure reduce the cost of external finance and improve the marketability of firms’ equities, which may directly impact growth opportunities especially when information is communicated to investors in a timely fashion. For regulators, it provides evidence that high government ownership reduces the value relevance of voluntary disclosure among investors, while free float as a proxy for high ownership dispersion improves it. Originality/value - – The findings show that corporate disclosure policy depends more on the managers’ incentives to provide informative annual reports than on standards and regulations. The study also represents a first attempt that demonstrates how ownership structure and timely disclosure influence the relationship between disclosure and cost of equity capital.
Orchestration of Stepwise Synaptic Growth by K[superscript +] and Ca[superscript 2+] Channels in Drosophila

Synapse formation is tightly associated with neuronal excitability. We found striking synaptic overgrowth caused by Drosophila K (cid:1) channel mutations of the seizure and slowpoke genes, encoding Erg and Ca 2 (cid:1) -activated large-conductance (BK) channels, respectively. Thesemutantsdisplaytwodistinctpatternsof“satellite”buddingfromlarvalmotorterminussynapticboutons.Double-mutantanalysisindicatesthatBKandErgK (cid:1) channelsinteractwithseparatesetsofsynapticproteinstoaffectdistinctgrowthsteps.Post-synapticL-type Ca 2 (cid:1) channels,Dmca1D,andPSD-95-likescaffoldprotein,Discslarge,arerequiredforsatellitebuddinginducedby slowpoke and seizure mutations.Pre-synaptic cacophony Ca 2 (cid:1) channelsandtheNCAM-likeadhesionmolecule,FasciclinII,takepartinamaturationstepthat is partially arrested by seizure mutations. Importantly, slowpoke and seizure satellites were both suppressed by rutabaga mutations that disrupt Ca 2 (cid:1) /CaM-dependent adenylyl cyclase, demonstrating a convergence of K (cid:1) channels of different functional categories in regulation of excitability-dependent Ca 2 (cid:1) influx for triggering cAMP-mediated growth plasticity.
Chapter 10 Par Lab Progress on Correctness Tools for Parallel Programs

The trend towards processors with more and more parallel cores is increasing the need for software that can take advantage of parallelism. The most widespread method for writing parallel software is to use explicit threads. Writing correct multithreaded programs, however, has proven to be quite challenging in practice. The key difficulty is nondeterminism. The threads of a parallel application may be interleaved non-deterministically during execution. In a buggy program, non-deterministic scheduling will lead to non-deterministic results—some interleavings will produce the correct result while others will not. We propose an assertion framework for specifying that regions of a parallel program behave deterministically despite non-deterministic thread interleaving. Our framework allows programmers to write assertions involving pairs of program states arising from different parallel schedules. We describe an implementation of our deterministic assertions as a library for Java, and evaluate the utility of our specifications on a number of parallel Java benchmarks. We found specifying deterministic behavior to be quite simple using our assertions. Further, in experiments with our assertions, we were able to identify two races as true parallelism errors that lead to incorrect non-deterministic behavior. These races were distinguished from a number of benign races in the benchmarks.
Research and implementation of concurrent transmission with real-time multimedia

With the development of the Internet of Thing (IOT) industry, real-time multimedia data transmission services increased significantly. In this paper, we study the key problems of concurrent transmission of real-time multimedia, and we divide the transmission process into stream processing layer, transport control layer and multicast concurrency layer. Particularly in the transport control layer we use UDP-TCP mixing mechanism to implement transmission rate control and lost packet retransmission, and a proxy-based application layer multicast (ALMP) method is proposed to implement concurrent transmission of multimedia data. Finally, we test the performance of data forwarding node in concurrent transmission. The result shows that work of data forwarding node is effective and reliable when users have a highly concurrent operation, and the proposed proxy-based application layer multicast method is effective compare to traditional method when optimize the performance of data forwarding node.
Additional Evidence That the Polymerase Subunits Contribute to the Viral Replication and the Virulence of H5N1 Avian Influenza Virus Isolates in Mice

Genetically similar H5N1 viruses circulating in the avian reservoir exhibit different levels of pathogenicity in mice. In this study, we characterized two highly pathogenic H5N1 avian isolates—A/Hunan/316/2005 (HN05), which is highly pathogenic in mice, and A/Hubei/489/2004 (HB04), which is nonpathogenic. In mammalian cells, HN05 replicates more efficiently than HB04, although both viruses have similar growth kinetics in avian cells. We used reverse genetics to generate recombinant H5N1 strains containing genes from HN05 and HB04 and examined their virulence. HN05 genes encoding the polymerase complex determine pathogenicity and viral replication ability both in vitro and in vivo. The PB2 subunit plays an important role in enhancing viral replication, and the PB1 and PA subunits contribute mainly to pathogenicity in mice. These results can be used to elucidate host-range expansion and the molecular basis of the high virulence of H5N1 viruses in mammalian species.
Road estimation with sparse 3D points from stereo data

Obstacle detection is a fundamental task for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Self-driving cars. Several commercial systems like Adaptive Cruise Controls and Collision Warning Systems depend on them to notify the driver about a risky situation. Several approaches have been presented in the literature in the last years. However, most of them are limited to specific scenarios and restricted conditions. In this paper we propose a fast obstacle estimation to stereo cameras followed by a robust road estimation method. Our approach uses only disparity maps and works with a low number of pixels instead of the entire image. Experimental tests have been carried out in different conditions using the standard ROAD-KITTI benchmark, obtaining positive results.
The Tyrosine Phosphatase SHP-1 Regulates Hypoxia Inducible Factor-1α (HIF-1α) Protein Levels in Endothelial Cells under Hypoxia

Introduction The tyrosine phosphatase SHP-1 negatively influences endothelial function, such as VEGF signaling and reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation, and has been shown to influence angiogenesis during tissue ischemia. In ischemic tissues, hypoxia induced angiogenesis is crucial for restoring oxygen supply. However, the exact mechanism how SHP-1 affects endothelial function during ischemia or hypoxia remains unclear. We performed in vitro endothelial cell culture experiments to characterize the role of SHP-1 during hypoxia. Results SHP-1 knock-down by specific antisense oligodesoxynucleotides (AS-Odn) increased cell growth as well as VEGF synthesis and secretion during 24 hours of hypoxia compared to control AS-Odn. This was prevented by HIF-1α inhibition (echinomycin and apigenin). SHP-1 knock-down as well as overexpression of a catalytically inactive SHP-1 (SHP-1 CS) further enhanced HIF-1α protein levels, whereas overexpression of a constitutively active SHP-1 (SHP-1 E74A) resulted in decreased HIF-1α levels during hypoxia, compared to wildtype SHP-1. Proteasome inhibition (MG132) returned HIF-1α levels to control or wildtype levels respectively in these cells. SHP-1 silencing did not alter HIF-1α mRNA levels. Finally, under hypoxic conditions SHP-1 knock-down enhanced intracellular endothelial reactive oxygen species (ROS) formation, as measured by oxidation of H2-DCF and DHE fluorescence. Conclusions SHP-1 decreases half-life of HIF-1α under hypoxic conditions resulting in decreased cell growth due to diminished VEGF synthesis and secretion. The regulatory effect of SHP-1 on HIF-1α stability may be mediated by inhibition of endothelial ROS formation stabilizing HIF-1α protein. These findings highlight the importance of SHP-1 in hypoxic signaling and its potential as therapeutic target in ischemic diseases.
Research on application of Kalman filter to reduce random angle error of satcom station

In order to reduce angle error of satcom station on the metrical vessel, Kaiman filter is used to filter angle-error signals in servo system of satcom station in this paper. Angle-error signal is frequently corrupted by random noise. Kaiman filter based on Singer model, which is a kind of linear minimum variance estimation, is a good tool for denoising the angle-error signal in servo system. Experimental results on application display that Kaiman filter can reduce random noise of the angle-error signal effectively and thus improving tracking precision of satcom station on the vessel.
Efficient parameter inference in general hidden Markov models using the filter derivatives

Estimating online the parameters of general state-space hidden Markov models is a topic of importance in many scientific and engineering disciplines. In this paper we present an online parameter estimation algorithm obtained by casting our recently proposed particle-based, rapid incremental smoother (PaRIS) into the framework of recursive maximum likelihood estimation for general hidden Markov models. Previous such particle implementations suffer from either quadratic complexity in the number of particles or from the well-known degeneracy of the genealogical particle paths. By using the computational efficient and numerically stable PaRIS algorithm for estimating the needed prediction filter derivatives we obtain a fast algorithm with a computational complexity that grows only linearly with the number of particles. The efficiency and stability of the proposed algorithm are illustrated in a simulation study.
USI Answers: Natural Language Question Answering Over (Semi-) Structured Industry Data

This paper describes USI Answers a natural language question answering system for semi-structured industry data. The paper reports on the progress towards the goal of offering easy access to enterprise data to a large number of business users, most of whom are not familiar with the specific syntax or semantics of the underlying data sources. Additional complications come from the nature of the data, which comes both as structured and unstructured. The proposed solution allows users to express questions in natural language, makes apparent the system’s interpretation of the query, and allows easy query adjustment and reformulation. The application is in use by more than 1500 users from Siemens Energy. We evaluate our approach on a data set consisting of fleet data.