Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reading Between the Lines: Financial Reporting, Implied Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Financial Performance

We provide one of the first analyses of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and firm performance using only annual financial reports. We document a link between corporate financial performance (CFP) and CSR, although this is not always positive. Specifically, we investigate whether CSR performance can be implied from financial reporting and provide evidence that CSR information implied by financial reports have a significant association with CFP. Furthermore, we provide the first comprehensive study of CSR reporting and link it with CFP in New Zealand. JEL Classification: G10, G32
A General Framework for Mixed-Domain Echo Cancellation in Discrete Multitone Systems

In full-duplex communication systems with discrete multi-tone (DMT) modulation, echo cancellers are employed to cancel echo by means of adaptive filters. Generally, the structure present in the DMT signals is used to decrease the computational complexity of these cancellers by splitting the operations between the time and frequency domains. In this work, we introduce a general framework for designing echo cancellers for such systems in an arbitrary mixed domain. This is achieved by introducing a generic decomposition of the Toeplitz data matrix at the transmitter in terms of arbitrary unitary matrices. Then, based on this decomposition, a new mixed-domain echo cancellation structure is derived, which performs an exact instantaneous gradient-type adaptation. This mixed-domain configuration is also extended for realizing constrained adaptation whereby linear constraints are used to ensure the proper mapping of the weight vectors in different domains. The proposed structures offer a unified framework to study existing cancellers and to design new ones with better performance measures. This framework is employed to propose a new canceller based on discrete trigonometric transformations. The analytical and numerical results presented show that this canceller has a faster convergence rate than the existing ones with similar complexity and is more robust.
A note on lattice renormings

It has been recently shown in [1] and [2] that every equivalent norm on the classical separable Banach spaces c0 or lp, p even, (as well as on many other spaces) can be uniformly approximated on bounded sets by a sequence of C∞Fréchet smooth norms. Although the method of construction requires some technical conditions on the space to be satisfied (in particular the existence of a Schauder basis), it seems to suggest that perhaps the following statement should be valid: Suppose X is a separable Banach space that admits an equivalent Ck-Fréchet smooth norm. Then every equivalent norm on X can be approximated uniformly on bounded sets by a sequence of Ck-Fréchet smooth norms. On the other hand, we do not know of any example of a nonseparable Banach space where a similar statement would be valid for k ≥ 2. In the present note we give a partial solution to this problem for the space c0(Γ) and k = ∞. More precisely we show that on c0(Γ), Γ uncountable, every equivalent strongly lattice norm can be approximated by a sequence of C∞-Fréchet smooth norms.
Synonym Suggestion for Tags on Stack Overflow

The amount of diverse tags used to classify posts on Stack Overflow increased in the last years to more than 38,000 tags. Many of these tags have the same or similar meaning. Stack Overflow provides an approach to reduce the amount of tags by allowing privileged users to manually create synonyms. However, currently exist only 2,765 synonym-pairs on Stack Overflow that is quite low compared to the total number of tags. To comprehend how synonym-pairs are built, we manually analyzed the tags and how the synonyms could be created automatically. Based on our findings, we then present TSST, a tag synonym suggestion tool, that outputs a ranked list of possible synonyms for each input tag. We first evaluated TSST with the 2,765 approved synonym-pairs of Stack Overflow. For 88.4% of the tags TSST finds the correct synonyms, for 72.2% the correct synonym is within the top 10 suggestions. In addition, we applied TSST to 10 randomly selected Android related tags and evaluated the suggested synonyms with 20 Android app developers in an online survey. Overall, in 80% of their ratings, developers found an adequate synonym suggested by TSST.
Investigating emotion recognition and empathy deficits in Conduct Disorder using behavioural and eye-tracking methods

The aim of this thesis was to characterise the nature of the emotion recognition and empathy deficits observed in male and female adolescents with Conduct Disorder (CD) and varying levels of callous-unemotional (CU) traits. The first two experiments employed behavioural tasks with concurrent eye-tracking methods to explore the mechanisms underlying facial and body expression recognition deficits. Having CD and being male independently predicted poorer facial expression recognition across all emotions, which held across both static and dynamic faces. Eye tracking data indicated that males showed reduced attention to the eye region of the face across all emotions, relative to females, with CD predicting lower levels of attention to the eyes for fearful, sad, and surprised faces. Critically, the deficits observed in facial emotion recognition were not explained by atypical eye movements in the CD group. Contrary to expectations, high levels of CU traits within the CD group were not associated with impaired recognition of fear or a reduced tendency to fixate the eye region of the face. Males with CD exhibited global deficits in body expression recognition relative to male and female controls. These deficits held for both dynamic and static bodies and were not modulated by CU traits. Eye-tracking data demonstrated that having CD and being male were both related to a reduced tendency to fixate the arms of fearful and neutral bodies. Once again, deficits in body expression recognition were not explained by atypical eye movements in the CD group. Contrary to predictions, CU traits in the CD group were associated with an increased preference to fixate the arms. Taken together, these two eye-tracking studies indicate that adolescents with CD, and particularly males, show impairments in facial and body expression recognition that are not solely related to overt attentional mechanisms. The final two experiments employed an empathic accuracy (EA) task that involved watching video clips of actors recounting emotionally-charged autobiographical experiences. Relative to control males, CD males showed deficits in sadness, fear, and disgust recognition, as well as reduced affective empathy for the same three emotions. In the second experiment, we found that CD females did not show significant deficits in emotion recognition but they did exhibit reduced affective empathy for fear and happiness. Contrary to predictions, CD adolescents showed an intact ability to track changes in emotional intensity (measure of EA). Although CU traits in males with CD were negatively correlated with EA for sadness, no other significant correlations with CU traits or differences between high and low CU traits subgroups were found in either study. The findings from this thesis have important implications for interventions aiming to remediate the emotion recognition and empathy deficits observed in CD, as well as approaches to subtyping CD.
Motion estimation by precoded image planes matching

This paper presents a new approach for block based motion estimation based on Boolean matching in precoded image planes. It is proposed to add redundancy to the pixel representation for the purpose of motion estimation computation reduction. Images are pre-coded to enable a Boolean-only matching criterion that approximates the mean absolute difference. Fast matching criteria evaluation with a simple scheme suitable for hardware implementation is facilitated.
Online NON-negative Tensor Deconvolution for source detection in 3DTV audio

The following article describes research on source detection in multi channel (3DTV) audio streams. The problem is extremely complex due to the fact that multiple layers can be present in scenes (background music, ambience, commentator). In this work a new algorithm is developed that exploits the information from the different audio channels to detect, and possibly localize and separate independent audio sources. An algorithm based on online Non-negative Tensor Deconvolution is realized, to deal with sound sources with time dependent positions in the channel matrix. The evaluation is made on 3DTV 5.1 film soundtracks and on synthetic mixes of 3DTV 5.1 audio with target sounds from a sound effects database: a significant improvement of the detection performance is shown, compared with other decomposition techniques.
Determination of protonation constants of l-glutamic acid and l-methionine in 1,2-propanediol-water mixtures

The solute-solvent interactions of L-glutamic acid and L-methionine have been studied in 0-60%. V/V 1,2-propanediol-water media using the pH-metric method. The protonation constants have been calculated with the computer program MINIQUAD75. Selection of the best fit chemical model of the acid-base equilibria is based on standard deviation in protonation constants and residual analysis using crystallographic R-factor and sum of squares of residuals in all mass-balance equations. Linear variation of protonation constants with inverse of dielectric constant of the solvent mixture has been attributed to the dominance of the electrostatic forces. Distributions of species, protonation equilibria and effect of influential parameters on the protonation constants have also been presented.
Forming an Integrated Lexical Resource for Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper reports a full-scale linkage of noun senses between two existing lexical resources, namely WordNet and Roget's Thesaurus, to form an Integrated Lexical Resource (ILR) for use in natural language processing (NLP). The linkage was founded on a structurally-based sense-mapping algorithm. About 18,000 nouns with over 30,000 senses were mapped. Although exhaustive verification is impractical, we show that it is reasonable to expect some 70-80% accuracy of the resultant mappings. More importantly, the ILR, which contains enriched lexical information, is readily usable in many NLP tasks. We shall explore some practical use of the ILR in word sense disambiguation (WSD), as WSD notably requires a wide range of lexical information.
Feature Optimization of Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion is divided into four categories, Fear, Happy, Neutral and Surprise in this paper. Traditional features and their statistics are generally applied to recognize speech emotion. In order to quantify each feature’s contribution to emotion recogni-tion, a method based on the Back Propagation (BP) neural network is adopted. Then we can obtain the optimal subset of the features. What’s more, two new characteristics of speech emotion, MFCC feature extracted from the fundamental frequency curve (MFCCF0) and amplitude perturbation parameters extracted from the short- time av-erage magnitude curve (APSAM), are added to the selected features. With the Gaus-sian Mixture Model (GMM), we get the highest average recognition rate of the four emotions 82.25%, and the recognition rate of Neutral 90%.
Un modèle d'accompagnement professionnel d'un changement: Pour un leadership novateur

Les perspectives d'internationalisation, l'avenement de nouvelles technologies, les changements visant le developpement de competences viennent bousculer le monde du travail. De grands bouleversements demandent aux personnels de s'adapter rapidement a de nouvelles situations. C'est dans ce contexte que le livre Un modele d'accompagnement professionnel d'un changement. Pour un leadership novateur devient un outil de reference pour la reflexion, l'implantation, l'analyse et l'evaluation d'une demarche d'accompagnement professionnel d'un changement. Une telle demarche facilite le renouvellement des pratiques et le developpement de competences professionnelles necessaires a l'accompagnement de ce changement. Ces competences sont longuement decrites dans le livre Competences professionnelles pour l'accompagnement d'un changement. Un referentiel, complementaire au modele. Ce modele est le resultat d'un projet d'accompagnement-recherche-formation realise en education. Cependant, les resultats et les retombees de ce projet visant le renouvellement des pratiques professionnelles sauront inspirer toute personne, collectivite, institution, organisation ou entreprise qui desire mettre en place un changement oriente et comportant des elements de prescription.
Minimising RTT across homogeneous 802.11 WLANs with CAIA Delay-Gradient TCP (v0.1)

Common loss-based TCP algorithms (such as NewReno) are known to induce significant additional latency over 802.11 wireless LANs (WLANs), negatively impacting multimedia traffic sharing the same network. Using live experimental trials (under FreeBSD 9.0 on the Emulab 802.11 testbed) we show that CAIA’s delaygradient TCP (CDG) version 0.1 induces two to seven times lower latency than NewReno and CUBIC in homogeneous 802.11 WLAN environments while achieving equivalent goodput. This is beneficial in 802.11 WLAN environments where TCP and multimedia traffic must coexist and the network administrators have control over each end-host’s choice of TCP algorithm.
Identifying Logical Location via GPS-Enabled Mobile phone and Wearable Camera

More and more location-based services become relying on the logical notion of a physical location, known as logical location (e.g. Starbucks, KFC). In this paper, we propose a new way to identify logical location using (1) a GPS-enabled mobile phone and (2) a wearable camera embedded in user's glasses. When a user with a wearable camera is detected paying attention to a certain physical location, all the logical locations within the error range of the GPS coordinates are considered as the matched candidates. We select the representative frames in the video stream corresponding to user's interested location in real-time and use multi-view images taken beforehand to represent each logical location. We then extract the Scale Invariant Feature Transform visual features from both the representative video frames and pre-stored images of candidate logical locations for video-image matching, the logical location that the user pays attention to can thus be identified. In order to differentiate the cases where users watch certain objects rather than a logical location in the street, we use Support Vector Machine to classify the two cases so that only the valid logical location is identified. Our proposed approach is proved weather and user independent, and it does not request additional user efforts compared with previous solutions. The results tested using a real-world dataset can achieve an average accuracy of 91.08%.
Android malware analytic method based on improved multi-level signature matching

The rapid development of smartphones bring not only convenience but also a great number malwares to people's daily life. And the open source of Android operating system worsens the current situation. This paper proposed an Android malware analytic method based on improved multi-level signature matching algorithm. For signature generation we combined multi-level signature generation method with MD5 hash function, achieving the unique identification of API calls, method, class, and the whole application. With the signature obtained, the same mal-signatures of one kind malicious behavior in the malware database can be extracted successfully. Then the confirmed information of mal-signature can be used to check other applications, so that all the suspected applications containing same mal code as the malware database can be found. Finally locating and analyzing the main mal code of those suspected applications is necessary to determine whether they are malwares. Experiments indicated that our system can find malwares based on the malware database.
Pedestrian detection in low resolution night vision images

This paper presents a test of pedestrian detection in low resolution night vision infrared images. An image feature extractor based on histograms of oriented gradients followed by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier are evaluated, optimized and used. Tests performed on three different night vision infrared datasets show that the classification quality of the proposed method is very high even in very low resolutions of images. In practice, large frame size for analysis not always improves the classification effectiveness, but always requires more time for processing.
Fatalism and exposure to health information from the media: examining the evidence for causal influence

ABSTRACT Fatalistic attitudes have a negative impact on a broad variety of health behaviors and behavioral determinants of health. A growing body of research has documented an association between media exposure and fatalism; however, scholarship has not been able to ascertain the causal direction. This review synthesizes the current state of the literature. A major finding is that most studies purporting to assess the relationship between media exposure and fatalism use conflated measures of fatalism. Among those that use an appropriate measure, there is some evidence that increased exposure to media increases fatalism. Although there is a substantive theoretical rationale for such effects, more research is needed to make a definitive claim and to explain the mechanism for such effects.
Range Minimum Queries : Simple and Optimal , At Last !

For an array A of n objects from a totally ordered universe, a range minimum query rmqA(i, j) asks for the position of the minimum element in the sub-array A[i, j]. This fundamental algorithmic problem has applications in string processing, text indexing, text compression, document retrieval, and graphor tree-navigation, just to name a few. We focus on the setting where the array A is static and known in advance, and can hence be preprocessed into a scheme in order to answer future queries faster. It has been known for a long time (Gabow et al., STOC 1984) that there is a linear-time preprocessing scheme for O(1)-RMQs by reducing this problem to the computation of lowest common ancestors in trees (Harel and Tarjan, SICOMP 13(2): 1984). The drawback of this and most later schemes is their huge space consumption of O(n log n) bits, which is not optimal. We make the assumption that the input array A cannot be used at query time. This is important for at least two reasons: (1) In some applications such as document retrieval systems (Muthukrishnan, SODA 2002; Sadakane, ISAAC 2002), only the position of the minimum matters, and not the value of that minimum. Hence it would be a waste of space to keep A in memory just for answering RMQs. (2) In applications where the access to A takes ω(1) time, schemes that need to access A for answering RMQs can never have constant query time. An important example of this comes from string processing, where RMQ is often used in conjunction with the array of longest common prefixes of lexicographically consecutive suffixes, which has non-constant access time if it is stored in a space-efficient form (Sadakane, SODA 2002). Under the assumption that A cannot be used at query time, a natural lower bound of 2n−Θ(log n) bits for RMQ-schemes exists. The only previous scheme in this setting is due to Sadakane (ISSAC 2002), and needs 4n+o(n) bits of space. Apart from not being asymptotically optimal, it has the further drawback that it needs O(n log n) bits of intermediate space at preprocessing time if it is to be constructed in linear time. This peak space consumption often limits the practicability of a data structure. We settle the above mentioned problems of Sadakane’s solution by giving the first truly succinct preprocessing scheme for O(1)-RMQs. Its final space consumption is 2n + o(n) bits, thus being asymptotically optimal. We also give a simple linear-time construction algorithm for this scheme that needs only n+ o(n) bits of space in addition to the 2n+ o(n) bits needed for the final data structure, thus lowering the peak space consumption from O(n log n) to O(n) bits. An interesting side effect of our work is that we also lower the space-consumption for O(1)computation of lowest common ancestors in BPSor DFUDS-encoded ordered trees (Sadakane, SODA 2002; Jansson et al., SODA 2007) from O( log 2 log n log n ) to O( n log log n log n ) bits.
Laterally driven polysilicon resonant microstructures

Interdigitated finger (comb) structures are demonstrated to be effective for electrostatically exciting the resonance of polysilicon microstructures parallel to the plane of the substrate. Linear plates suspended by a folded-cantilever truss and torsional plates suspended by spiral and serpentine springs are fabricated from a 2- mu m-thick phosphorus-doped low-pressure chemical vapor deposited polysilicon film. Resonance is observed visually, with frequencies ranging from 18 kHz to 80 kHz and quality factors from 20 to 130. Simple beam theory is adequate for calculating the resonant frequencies, using a Young's modulus of 140 GPa and neglecting residual strain in the released structures. <<ETX>>
First Case of Fermat's Last Theorem

In this paper two conjectures are proposed based on which we can prove the first case of Fermat's Last Theorem(FLT) for all primes $p \equiv -1 (\bmod~6)$. With Pollaczek's result {\bf [1]} and the conjectures the first case of FLT can be proved for all primes greater than 3. With a computer Conjecture1 was verified to be true for primes $\leq 2437$ and Conjecture2 for primes $\leq 100003$.
Everyday geographies of stroke survivors : a case study examining the relationship between activity space, health and well-being.

Although it is well known that stroke can be a very debilitating experience, little evidence exists in the literature about how well stroke survivors fare in the community after leaving the hospital. The purpose of this research study is to contribute a deeper understanding of the day-to-day experiences of stroke survivors living in the community and to investigate how the geographic concept of ‘activity space’ can be applied to understand their well-being and everyday experiences. The research design uses both spatial (i.e., geomatics) and qualitative analysis (i.e., analysis of narratives) in a case-study approach to examine well-being and the activity spaces of stroke survivors who live in two communities on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Primary data were collected through personal interviews with 21 stroke survivors who were recruited from Stroke Recovery Group populations in Victoria and Oceanside. Using self-rated health (SRH) as a measure of well-being, spatial behaviours and qualitative data were analyzed to illustrate the everyday experiences of stroke survivors. Geomatics, refers to the application of spatial analysis techniques was iv used to measure and evaluate the activity space of stroke survivors. Qualitative data were used to complement the spatial findings to provide insight into how the stroke itself, as well as personal experience and coping resources can impact a stroke survivor’s activity space. The spatial analysis is organized to highlight differences among stroke survivors on the basis of geography and SRH. Taken together, these results illustrate how a multimethod approach (i.e., spatial analyses in combination with narrative data) can be employed to understand the activity spaces and everyday experiences of stroke survivors. While illuminating the experiences of stroke survivors with life in their communities, this approach may also have utility in the study of other chronic illnesses.