Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Duopoly with Both Ruin and Entry

Duopoly is modeled here as a prisoner's dilemma repeated in continuous time. Firms wish to maximize discounted flows of dividend payments, which are paid when capitalization levels permit. A firm is ruined when its capitalization falls below zero, but each ruined firm is immediately replaced by a new entrant. Attempting to ruin a rival is not necessarily an attractive strategy here, since the postentry game against the new rival may be a less favorable one. On the other hand, firms that are close to ruin have little to lose by playing aggressively and, hence, are attractive targets of aggression themselves. Equilibria are constricted that reflect these considerations.
A CMOS Hard-Decision Analog Convolutional Decoder Employing the MFDA for Low-Power Applications

The use of analog circuits to reduce the size and power consumption of channel decoders such as Viterbi decoders has been an active area of research over the recent years. However, the need for digital memory to store the history of the path elimination decisions in a Viterbi decoder, limits the potential advantages that could be offered by an all-analog convolutional decoder implementation. This is especially so in cases where the use of an older silicon process technology is dictated by the application; hence, the power-reduction benefits offered by deep sub-micrometer digital designs cannot be exploited. A novel alternative convolutional decoding method which allows for an entirely analog implementation is the modified feedback decoding algorithm (MFDA). This paper describes the first integrated realization of a convolutional decoder employing the MFDA. The rate-1/2, constraint-length-3 decoder, employs a current-mode analog signal processing core and was fabricated in a 0.6-mum CMOS process technology, occupying an area of 0.5 mm2. Measured results show that decoding speeds in excess of 1-Mb/s are possible with virtually no loss in coding gain. Total power consumption is 2.45 mW from a single 3-V supply. Although a hard-decision decoder, conversion to soft-decision decoding requires only the inclusion of a simple analog delay line as shown in the paper. The decoder is dedicated to an implantable biotelemetry system, but it can also find use in other low-power applications. System-level coding simulations are also presented which are useful for the construction of larger decoders where the benefits of the MFDA approach would be more pronounced.
Detection of bacteria from biological mixtures using immunomagnetic separation combined with matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry.

A rapid method for identifying specific bacteria from complex biological mixtures using immunomagnetic separation coupled to matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry has been developed. The technique employs commercially available magnetic beads coated with polycolonal antibodies raised against specific bacteria and whole cell analysis by MALDI-MS. A suspension of a bacterial mixture is mixed with the immunomagnetic beads specific for the target microorganism. After a short incubation period (20 mins) the bacteria captured by the beads are washed, resuspended in deionized H(2)O and directly applied onto a MALDI probe. Liquid suspensions containing bacterial mixtures can be screened within 1 h total analysis time. Positive tests result in the production of a fingerprint mass spectrum primarily consisting of protein biomarkers characteristic of the targeted microorganism. Using this procedure, Salmonella choleraesuis was isolated and detected from standard bacterial mixtures and spiked samples of river water, human urine, and chicken blood.
Market News in Commodity Price Theory: Application to the Ethiopian Grain Market

This paper examines the effect of "news" or advance information about future production on competitive storage behaviour and prices using a structural model of commodity markets. In particular, it generalizes the neoclassical storage model to incorporate information on future harvests, while allowing for seasonal production, two features important to African and other developing country grain markets. The model is first developed to suit the case of the Ethiopian grain markets, and a general model is then stated. The effects on welfare and price variability of the addition of news are discussed, as well as changes in key demand and uncertainty parameters. The model is shown to replicate some features of the data better than the model without news, particularly the high autocorrelation in price, and performs better in formal estimation. However, it appears that the incorporation of news still fails to explain the extreme seasonal price movements observed. Copyright 2004, Wiley-Blackwell.
The Role of Retail and Institutional Traders in Options Markets

This article examines the role of retail and institutional traders in an options market. Using unique data from the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX), trading profits are decomposed into a liquidity part and a position-taking part. Despite the presence of exogenous market makers, both institutional and retail traders derive average gains from supplying liquidity, suggesting that public traders are reluctant to pay for the larger cost of immediacy offered by market makers. Both trader groups incur average losses from price movements unfavorable to their inventory position, indicating that market makers are slightly better at predicting market movements. Overall, the results suggest that retail and institutional traders have similar economic roles.
An Improved Method for In Situ Freezing of Cat Brain for Metabolic Studies

Abstract: This study introduces a new method for rapid freezing of the cat brain. The method employed a Styrofoam box which was fitted around the head of the animal. Liquid nitrogen was poured into the box until the head was submerged. Temperature changes in three brain sites (ventral hypothalamus, the fourth ventricle, and the corpus callosum) and levels of labile carbohydrate metabolites (glycogen, glucose, ATP, P‐creatine, and lactate) in five brain regions (cortex, thalamus, midbrain, cerebellum, and pons) frozen by the box method were compared with those frozen by a conventional cup method in which liquid nitrogen was poured into a hollow Styrofoam cup placed on top of the skull. The box method shortened the time of arrival of the freezing front and improved the freezing rate. The time required to bring the tissue to ‐20°C was shortened, from 20 min at the ventral hypothalamus and 10–12 min at the fourth ventricle with the cup method, to <5 min at both sites with the box technique. Continued perfusion of brainstem prior to freezing was demonstrated. Levels of metabolites frozen by either method were similar. Lactate levels in any of the five brain regions studied by either method were not elevated, indicating no ischemic change. The shorter freezing time resulting from the box method should provide improved temporal resolution in studying dynamic metabolic changes such as those frequently observed in pathological conditions.
Exchange Rate Volatility and Foreign Private Investment in Nigeria

This study investigates the dynamic relationship between exchange rate volatility and foreign private investment in Nigeria from 1980 to 2011. The rational for this study is the realization that a viable exchange rate regime that is stable and predictable presents rich vista for inflow of foreign investment. We employed the Error Correction Model (ECM) after a battery of preliminary investigations which include the Augmented Dickey Fuller (ADF) test for stationarity and the Engle and Granger two-step cointegration procedure. Our finding include among other things that; exchange rate volatility has a very weak effect on the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to Nigeria, both in the long run and in the short run and that exchange rate volatility has a weak effect on foreign portfolio investment in the short run but a strong positive effect in the long run. Based on our findings, an array of recommendation were made, which include the need for policy makers to develop sound exchange rate management system in the country, inter alia.
Comparator common-mode variation effects analysis and its application in SAR ADCs

The effects of comparator input common-mode voltage Vcm are analyzed in this paper. The analysis clearly shows a trade-off in the choice of Vcm in terms of offset, noise, power and speed. Based on the analysis, an energy efficient SAR ADC switching technique is proposed with less Vcm variation and better linearity compared with the widely used monotonic switching technique. Both the simulation results and prototype measured results match with the analysis.
The Origins and Restriction of Efficiency in Public Administration

This article is primarily a study in the history of the concept of efficiency. It is argued that efficiency originated in Aristotelian ideas about causality and acquired a broad, substantive meaning of “moving force. ” This meaning of the term was dominant well into 20th-century studies of public administration. In the course of the 20th century, however, efficiency became predominantly understood as “technical efficiency”: a ratio between resources and results. This connotation is especially clear in the explicit “textbook” definitions of efficiency. Nevertheless, we claim that the substantive meaning of efficiency is still around, and even at the heart of much criticism of efficiency. Technical efficiency obscures that efficiency in public administration is to be assessed in the light of public values. Efficiency as signifying the necessity of having capable operative administrative agents constitutes one of the, if not the, core value of the field.
REBASE—enzymes and genes for DNA restriction and modification

REBASE is a comprehensive database of information about restriction enzymes, DNA methyltransferases and related proteins involved in the biological process of restriction-modification. It contains fully referenced information about recognition and cleavage sites, isoschizomers, neoschizomers, commercial availability, methylation sensitivity, crystal and sequence data. Experimentally characterized homing endonucleases are also included. All newly sequenced genomes are analyzed for the presence of putative restriction systems and these data are included within the REBASE. The contents or REBASE may be browsed from the web () and selected compilations can be downloaded by ftp (). Additionally, monthly updates can be requested via email.
Estimating Gender Earnings Gap in the Informal Sector Kayayei Labour Market: Micro-Level Empirical Evidence from Kumasi, Ghana

The existence of differential-payment for labour market services between male and female is taken as a universal phenomenon in almost all countries regardless of the nature and structure of the economic system. The few previous studies that have compared male and female earnings in Ghana have concentrated on the formal sector, notably the public sector labour market, to the neglect of that of the informal sector. To overcome this deficiency and to aid in future policy formulation, this paper used a formalized method to analyze the log monthly earnings differential between male and female Kayayei migrants in the Kumasi informal sector labour market to determine what portion of this differential is due to different market skills and labour market discrimination. An important feature of the paper was the emphasis on discrimination in hiring that pertains in the Kumasi Kayayei informal sector labour market which suggests that male Kayayei operating in the informal sector labour market in Kumasi with sample average female characteristics earn 43% more on average and ceteris paribus than their female counterparts.
R&D Reporting Biases and Their Consequences

The immediate expensing of R&D expenditures is often justified by the conservatism principle. However, no accounting procedure consistently applied can be conservative throughout the firm' life. We ask the following questions: (a) When is the expensing of R&D conservative and when is it aggressive, relative to R&D capitalization? and (b) What are the capital market implications of these reporting biases? To address these questions we construct a model of profitability biases (differences between reported profitability under R&D expensing and capitalization) and show that the key drivers of the reporting biases are the differences between R&D growth and earnings growth (momentum), and between R&D growth and return on equity (ROE). Companies with a high R&D growth rate relative to their profitability (typically early cycle companies) report conservatively, while firms with a low R&D growth rate (mature companies) tend to report aggressively under current GAAP. Our empirical analysis, covering the period 1972-2003, generally supports the analytical predictions. In the valuation analysis we find evidence consistent with investor fixation on the reported profitability measures: we detect undervaluation of conservatively reporting firms and overvaluation of aggressively reporting firms. These misvaluations appear to be corrected when the reporting biases reverse from conservative to aggressive and vice versa.
Learning highly diverse robot throwing movements through quality diversity search

The behavior of a robot depends on its environment. Evolutionary approaches can be adapted to look for controllers that are robust to changing conditions [4, 10], but it is hard to guarantee that a single behavior will adapt to any new situation. An alternative approach consists in building a repertoire of behaviors in which to look for behaviors adapted to the context [1, 2]. Having a large set of behaviors instead of a single one further allows for extracting information about the robot, the environment and the task, thus opening the way to a self-built understanding of what makes sense for the robot [3] and to the acquisition of higher level representations that can solve new tasks faster and more efficiently [14].
STEREOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE COCHLEAR NUCLEI OF MONKEY (MACACA FASCICULARIS) AFTER DEAFFERENTATION

The cochlear nuclei (CN) in the brainstem receive the input signals from the inner ear through the cochlear nerve, and transmit these signals to higher auditory centres. A variety of lesions of the cochlear nerve cause deafness. As reported in the literature, artificial removal of auditive input, or ’deafferentation’, induces structural alterations in the CN. The purpose of this study was to estimate a number of relevant stereological parameters of the CN in control and deafferented Macaca fascicularis monkeys.
Joint Event-Partner Recommendation in Event-Based Social Networks

With the prevalent trend of combining online and offline interactions among users in event-based social networks (EBSNs), event recommendation has become an essential means to help people discover new interesting events to attend. However, existing literatures on event recommendations ignore the social attribute of events: people prefer to attend events with their friends or family rather than alone. Therefore, we propose a new recommendation paradigm: joint event-partner recommendation that focuses on recommending event-partner pairs to users. In this paper, we focus on the new problem of joint event-partner recommendation in EBSNs, which is extremely challenging due to the intrinsic cold-start property of events, the complex decision-making process for choosing event-partner pairs and the huge prediction space of event-partner combinations. We propose a generic graph-based embedding model (GEM) to collectively embed all the observed relations among users, events, locations, time and text content in a shared low-dimension space, which is able to leverage the correlation between events and their associated content and contextual information to address the cold-start issue effectively. To accelerate the convergence of GEM and improve its modeling accuracy, an adaptive noise sampler is developed to generate adversarial negative samples in the model optimization. Besides, to speed up the online recommendation, we propose a novel space transformation method to project each event-partner pair to one point in a new space and then develop effective space pruning and efficient online recommendation techniques. We conduct comprehensive experiments on our created real benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposals in terms of recommendation effectiveness, efficiency and scalability
Towards a human‐oriented metrology for improvement and change

Purpose – An overall aim with a new human‐oriented TQM metrology is to help managers in giving answers to the questions of what to measure, how to measure and why? It is the purpose of this paper to give input to answering these questions. In doing so the measurement problems are to be discussed in relation to the context in which the measurements are applied. Some common risks or failures are also to be discussed when more complex or advanced measurements are used such as LISREL or PLS measurements.Design/methodology/approach – The main methodology is to re‐interpret measurements from three company cases by having a special focus on understanding the importance of the human‐oriented dimension of TQM and Change Management. The European Excellence Model (EFQM) is used as the reference framework for understanding what to measure, how to measure and why? Findings – The measurements support the view that establishing measurements related to the human dimension of TQM and Change gives new opportunities for unde.
Transfer matrices to analyze the acoustic black hole effect in duct terminations

The acoustic black hole (ABH) effect for sound absorption in duct terminations can be achieved through a combination of two features. First, a power-law decay of the duct radius when approaching the tube end, and second, an appropriate decay of the wall admittance with the duct radius. The latter can be achieved by inserting a set of rigid rings with inner area decreasing to zero at the end of the tube, which constitute the ABH. The corresponding wall admittance can be modeled by means of a lumped compliance per unit surface at the continuum level. Yet in practice, one will have to deal with an imperfect ABH consisting of a finite amount of cavities separated by rings of finite thickness. The performance of such a retarding structure can be analyzed by means of the transfer matrix method for acoustic filters. In this work we do so for an ABH-like tube termination with linear decaying internal radius. The effects of varying the number of cavities, as well as the thickness of the separating rings and damping are investigated.
BPSK signal shaping and processing for digital SDR ionosonde

The paper presents the algorithms of BPSK signal shaping and processing for vertical incidence ionospheric sounding with the use of a hardware platform USRP which implements SDR technology. The principle “ADC to an antenna”, which provides completely digital processing, allows to apply new algorithms. The developed algorithms allow to obtain a quality images of ionograms with the use of low-power signals (less than 20 W). The algorithm of coherent spectral integration, which causes the increase in the SNR, and the algorithm of narrowband interferences mitigation, which uses median equalization, are presented. The efficiency of the algorithms was verified in the full-scale experiments on vertical incidence ionospheric sounding in Yoshkar-Ola.
3′-Azido-3′-Deoxythymidine (AZT) Mediates Cross-Resistance to Nucleoside Analogs in the Case of AZT-Resistant Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Variants

ABSTRACT Difficulties in deciphering the mechanisms of 3′-azido-3′-deoxythymidine (AZT)-resistance by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) variants are due in part to an inability to reconstitute resistance in vitro using AZT-resistant reverse transcriptases. We decided to characterize mechanisms of AZT resistance in tissue culture infections by studying the ability of drug-resistant viruses to synthesize viral DNA in the presence or absence of drug. Through use of PCR amplifications, we discovered an AZT-mediated stimulation of reverse transcription by AZT-resistant viruses carrying the M41L and T215Y mutations that can apparently override the inhibitory effects of AZT-5′-triphosphate. In addition, the presence of AZT also causes viruses containing the M41L and T215Y substitutions to have diminished sensitivity to other nucleoside analogs (i.e., ddC, ddI, and d4T). This AZT-mediated cross-resistance may help to explain the virological failure of treatment regimens that included ddI plus AZT or ddC plus AZT in situations in which the T215Y and/or M41L mutations were present (F. Brun-Vézinet, C. Boucher, C. Loveday, D. Descamps, V. Fauveau, J. Izopet, D. Jeffries, S. Kaye, C. Krzyanowski, A. Nunn, R. Schuurman, J. M. Seigneurin, C. Tamalet, R. Tedder, J. Weber, and G. J. Weverling, Lancet 350:983–990, 1997). Our results suggest that the use of AZT may be contraindicated in those patients for whom resistance to this compound (M41L and/or T215Y) has been demonstrated.
Stationary Vector Autoregressive Representation of Error Correction Models

The paper introduces a stationary vector autoregressive (VAR) representation of the error correction model (ECM). This representation explicitly regards the cointegration error a dependent variable, making the direct implementation of standard dynamic analyses using standard VAR models possible, particularly with respect to the cointegration error. Of course, an ECM does not have an explicit VAR form, and thus, it is not convenient for conducting such dynamic analyses. In this regard, we transform the original nonstationary VAR model into a VAR model with the cointegration error and stationary variables. Finally, we employ the model to dynamically analyze the real exchange rate between the US dollar and the Japanese yen.
Exploring Current Accessibility Challenges in the Multilingual Web for Visually-Impaired Users

The Web is an open network accessed by people across countries, languages and cultures, irrespective of their functional diversity. Over the last two decades, interest about web accessibility issues has significantly increased among web professionals, but people with disabilities still encounter significant difficulties when browsing the Internet. In the particular case of blind users, the use of assistive technologies such as screen readers is key to navigate and interact with web content. Although research efforts made until now have led to a better understanding of visually-impaired users' browsing behavior and, hence, the definition of web design best practices for an improved user experience by this population group, the particularities of websites with multiple language versions have been mostly overlooked. This communication paper seeks to shed light on the major challenges faced by visually impaired users when accessing the multilingual web, as well as on why and how the web localization community should contribute to a more accessible web for all.