Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Implicit Representations of Space after Bilateral Parietal Lobe Damage

There is substantial evidence that the primate cortex is grossly divided into two functional streams, an occipital-parietal-frontal pathway that processes where and an occipital-temporal-frontal pathway that processes what (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982). In humans, bilateral occipital-parietal damage results in severe spatial deficits and a neuropsychological disorder known as Balint's syndrome in which a single object can be perceived (simultanagnosia) but its location is unknown (Balint, 1995). The data reported here demonstrate that spatial information for visual features that cannot be explicitly located is represented normally below the level of spatial awareness even with large occipital-parietal lesions. They also demonstrate that parietal damage does not affect preattentive spatial coding of feature locations or complex spatial relationships between parts of a stimulus despite explicit spatial deficits and simultanagnosia.
Do controls on capital inflows insulate domestic variables against external shocks

In this paper we attempt to analyse whether price-based controls on capital inflows are successful in insulating economies against external shocks. We present results from VAR models that indicate that Chile and Colombia, countries that adopted controls on capital inflows, seem to have been relatively well insulated against external disturbances. Subsequently, we use the ARDL approach to co-integration in order to isolate the effects of the capital controls on the passthrough of external disturbances to domestic interest rates in those economies. We conclude that there is strong evidence that the capital controls allowed for greater policy autonomy.
Policy Preferences for Output Stability before and after Inflation Targeting

É proibida a reprodução parcial ou integral do conteúdo deste documento por qualquer meio de distribuição, digital ou im-presso, sem a expressa autorização do Insper ou de seu autor. A reprodução para fins didáticos é permitida observando-sea citação completa do documento Abstract This paper examines a set of inflation-targeting countries and presents evidence on the attitude of policymakers to positive and negative output gaps. In fact, central banks may dislike deviations from potential output of one sign more than deviations of the opposite sign. Instead of the usual quadratic specification, an asymmetric loss function describes these policy preferences. In this paper, we test for asymmetries concerning the output gap. Since the degree of symmetry may change with policy regimes, we consider, for each country, two sample periods: before and after the adoption of inflation targeting. Empirical results support a quadratic loss function for the majority of monetary policymakers, irrespective of the monetary policy regime.
An Algorithm for Merging Hyperellipsoidal ClustersPatrick

This report discusses an algorithm for merging hyperellipsoidal clusters. The eeective merging radius between two clusters is introduced, and this measure is used to determine the order in which clusters are combined. We continue to merge clusters until a desired number of clusters is reached, or until the minimum eeective merging radius is larger than some predetermined threshold.
Running and Jumping Variables in RD Designs: Evidence Based on Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Birth Weights

Throughout the years spanned by the U.S. Vital Statistics Linked Birth and Infant Death Data (1983-2002), birth weights are measured most precisely for children of white and highly educated mothers. As a result, less healthy children, who are more likely to be of low socioeconomic status, are disproportionately represented at multiples of round numbers. This has crucial implications for any study using a regression discontinuity design in which birth weights are used as the running variable. For example, estimates will be biased in a manner that leads one to conclude that it is “good” to be strictly to the left of any 100-gram cutoff. As such, prior estimates of the effects of very low birth weight classification (Almond, Doyle, Kowalski, and Williams 2010) have been overstated and appear to be zero. This analysis highlights a more general problem that can afflict regression discontinuity designs. In cases where attributes related to the outcomes of interest predict heaping in the running variable, estimated effects are likely to be biased. We discuss approaches to diagnosing and correcting for this type of problem.
A model of competition between unemployed and employed job searchers

This paper replicates the analysis of Burgess, concerning a model of job competition between employed and unemployed job search. Using an annual data set of Dutch flows into and out of unemployment, we find results remarkably similar to those found by Burgess for the U.K. So also for The Netherlands, this competition is of crucial importance for the determination of the unemployment outflow rate.
Assessment of Microshear Bond Strength: Self-Etching Sealant versus Conventional Sealant

Objective Recently, self-etching fissure sealants have been introduced to reduce technical sensitivity; however, their efficacy should be assessed. The aim of this study was to assess of the microshear bond strength of self-etching and conventional fissure sealants. Materials and Methods: Thirty non-carious third molars were randomly divided into three groups (N=10). Microcylinders of Concise fissure sealant were bonded to prepared buccal and lingual surfaces using the two following procedures. In the first group, phosphoric acid was used to prepare the substrate; whereas in group two, Concise was used in combination with Prompt L-Pop. In group 3, a self-etching fissure sealant (Enamel Loc) was utilized per se. After 24 hours, the samples were subjected to 500 rounds of thermocycling and shear bond testing using a microtensile tester machine with a crosshead speed of 0.5mm/min. Data were analyzed using one-way repeated measure ANOVA and Bonferroni Post HOC tests (SPSS version 16). Results: The mean and standard deviation of microshear bond strength of the groups were as follows: Group 1: Concise+ etching (14.59 ± 1.19 MPa), Group 2: Concise+Prompt L-Pop (12.86 ± 1.98 MPa), and Group 3: Enamel Loc (5.59 ± 0.72 MPa). One-way ANOVA revealed that all the differences were significant and the conventional sealant exhibited the highest mean bond strength. Conclusion: Conventional sealant using phosphoric acid etch application prior to fissure sealant application demonstrated more bond strength in comparison with that of self-etch bonding and self-etch sealant.
Verifying and Synthesising Multi-Agent Systems against One-Goal Strategy Logic Specifications

Strategy Logic (SL) has recently come to the fore as a useful specification language to reason about multi-agent systems. Its one-goal fragment, or SL[1G], is of particular interest as it strictly subsumes widely used logics such as ATL*, while maintaining attractive complexity features. In this paper we put forward an automata-based methodology for verifying and synthesising multi-agent systems against specifications given in SL[1G]. We show that the algorithm is sound and optimal from a computational point of view. A key feature of the approach is that all data structures and operations on them can be performed on BDDs. We report on a BDD-based model checker implementing the algorithm and evaluate its performance on the fair process scheduler synthesis.
Improving implementation of inflation targeting in New Zealand: an investigation of the Reserve Bank's inflation errors

I investigate New Zealand's rate of inflation and its deviations from target using two new methods: 1) Rowe's (2002) new way of examining the correlations between inflation deviations from target and indicators. Any significant correlations, whether in a simple or multivariate framework, are interpreted as evidence against optimal policy setting. 2) Cukierman and Gerlach (2003) and Ruge-Murcia's (2001) new inflation bias hypothesis. As a counterpoint to Kydland and Prescott's (1977) and Barro and Gordon's (1983) time inconsistency explanation of inflation bias, Ruge-Murcia, Cukierman and Gerlach take the different view that even if central banks target the natural rate of unemployment or the potential level of output, some inflation bias might still exist if their loss function is asymmetric. I examine the inflation errors from 1982 to 2003 to investigate how information contained in these might be used to improve future inflation targeting in New Zealand.
MAP-REDUCE Runtime Enforcement of Information Flow Policies

We propose a flexible framework that can be easily customized to enforce a large variety of information flow properties. Our framework combines the ideas of secure multi-execution and map-reduce computations. The information flow property of choice can be obtained by simply changes to a map (or reduce) program that control parallel executions. We present the architecture of the enforcement mechanism and its customizations for non-interference (NI) (from Devriese and Piessens) and some properties proposed by Mantel, such as removal of inputs (RI) and deletion of inputs (DI), and demonstrate formally soundness and precision of enforcement for these properties.
Mining for context recognition in document filtering and classification

Much information has been hierarchically organized to facilitate information browsing, retrieval, and dissemination. In practice, much information may be entered at any time, but only a small subset of the information may be classified into some categories in a hierarchy. Therefore, achieving document filtering (DF) in the course of document classification (DC) is an essential basis to develop an information center, which classifies suitable documents into suitable categories, reducing information overload while facilitating information sharing. In this paper, we present a technique ICenter, which conducts DF and DC by recognizing the context of discussion (COD) of each document and category. Experiments on real-world data show that, through COD recognition, the performance of ICenter is significantly better. The results are of theoretical and practical significance. ICenter may serve as an essential basis to develop an information center for a user community, which shares and organizes a hierarchy of textual information.
Production of Land-Cover Maps for Damietta City Using Remote Sensing Techniques

One of the most important and vital study topics in Egypt is determining and identifying the changes in agricultural areas relative to time in order to prevent and control the urbanization in the agricultural areas. To achieve this goal, the production of large scaled accurate land-cover maps is a must. This study deals with the production of land cover maps from the corrected processed remotely sensed data, including: panchromatic Quick Bird, multi-spectral Quick Bird and multi-spectral SPOT data. Different dates of acquisitions of the remotely sensed data of the area under consideration, namely Damietta city, were used. The work employs different processes to carry out the study objectives, including collecting ground control points using Omnistar GPS to be used in the geometric correction of the remotely sensed data; classification of multispectral data to obtain the cultivated land and urban areas; as well as using the change detection technique to determine the changes in the cultivated land and urbanization in the area under consideration during the studied time period. The change detection study was performed using multi-spectral SPOT (acquired in 1997) and multi-spectral Quick Bird (acquired in 2007) as well as base maps.
Planning Domain + Execution Semantics: A Way Towards Robust Execution?

Robots are expected to carry out complex plans in real world environments. This requires the robot to track the progress of plan execution and detect failures which may occur. Planners use very abstract world models to generate plans. Additional causal, temporal, categorical knowledge about the execution, which is not included in the planner's model, is often avail- able. Can we use this knowledge to increase robustness of execution and provide early failure detection? We propose to use a dedicated Execution Model to monitor the executed plan based on runtime observations and rich execution knowl- edge. We show that the combined used of causal, temporal and categorical knowledge allows the robot to detect failures even when the effects of actions are not directly observable. A dedicated Execution model also introduces a degree of mod- ularity, since the platform- and execution-specific knowledge does not need to be encoded into the planner.
Affine-permutation symmetry: invariance and shape space

Studying similarity of objects by looking at their shapes arises naturally in many applications. However, under different viewpoints one and the same object appears to have different shapes. In addition, the correspondences between their feature points are unknown to the viewer. In this paper, we introduce the concept of intrinsic shape of an object that is invariant to affine-permutation shape distortions. We study geometry of the intrinsic shape space in the framework of differentiable manifolds with the emphasis on the computational aspects. We represent the intrinsic shape space as a folded Grassmann manifold. This allows us to easily analyze and compare different intrinsic shapes under the affine-permutation distortion without explicitly computing and recovering these intrinsic shapes. We present the mathematical equations for connecting two intrinsic shapes by a geodesic, measuring their similarity, and morphing one intrinsic shape onto another.
HDO abundance in the envelope of the solar-type protostar IRAS 16293–2422

We present IRAM 30m and JCMT observations of HDO lines towards the solar-type protostar IRAS 16293-2422. Five HDO transitions have been detected on-source, and two were unfruitfully searched for towards a bright spot of the outflow of IRAS 16293-2422. We interpret the data by means of the Ceccarelli, Hollenbach and Tielens (1996) model, and derive the HDO abundance in the warm inner and cold outer parts of the envelope. The emission is well explained by a jump model, with an inner abundance of 1e-7 and an outer abundance lower than 1e-9 (3 sigma). This result is in favor of HDO enhancement due to ice evaporation from the grains in theinner envelope. The deuteration ratio HDO/H2O is found to be f_in=3% and f_out < 0.2% (3 sigma) in the inner and outer envelope respectively and therefore, the fractionation also undergoes a jump in the inner part of the envelope. These results are consistent with the formation of water in the gas phase during the cold prestellar core phase and storage of the molecules on the grains, but do not explain why observations of H2O ices consistently derive a H2O ice abundance of several 1e-5 to 1e-4, some two orders of magnitude larger than the gas phase abundance of water in the hot core around IRAS 16293-2422.
Differential Susceptibility to Neurotoxicity Mediated by Neurotrophins and Neuronal Nitric Oxide Synthase

NMDA neurotoxicity, which is mediated, in part, by formation of nitric oxide (NO) via activation of neuronal NO synthase (nNOS), is modulated by neurotrophins. nNOS expression in rat and mouse primary neuronal cultures grown on a glial feeder layer is significantly less than that of neurons grown on a polyornithine (Poly-O) matrix. Neurotrophins markedly increase the number of nNOS neurons, nNOS protein, and NOS catalytic activity and enhance NMDA neurotoxicity via NO-dependent mechanisms when neurons are grown on glial feeder layers. In contrast, when rat or mouse primary cortical neurons are grown on a Poly-O matrix, neurotrophins have no influence on nNOS neuronal number or NOS catalytic activity and reduce NMDA neurotoxicity. Primary neuronal cultures from mice lacking nNOS grown on a glial feeder layer fail to respond to neurotrophin-mediated enhancement of neurotoxicity. Together, these results indicate that nNOS expression and NMDA NO-mediated neurotoxicity are dependent, in part, on the culture paradigm, and neurotrophins regulate the susceptibility to NMDA neurotoxicity via modulation of nNOS. Furthermore, these results support the idea that NMDA neurotoxicity in culture is critically dependent on the developmental state of the neurons being assessed and suggest that, when cortical neurons are cultured on a glial feeder layer, they do not reach nearly as mature a phenotype as when grown on a Poly-O matrix.
Learning to discover objects in RGB-D images using correlation clustering

We introduce a method to discover objects from RGB-D image collections which does not require a user to specify the number of objects expected to be found. We propose a probabilistic formulation to find pairwise similarity between image segments, using a classifier trained on labelled pairs from the recently released RGB-D Object Dataset. We then use a correlation clustering solver to both find the optimal clustering of all the segments in the collection and to recover the number of clusters. Unlike traditional supervised learning methods, our training data need not be of the same class or category as the objects we expect to discover. We show that this parameter-free supervised clustering method has superior performance to traditional clustering methods.
The Black Mark beside My Name Server: Exploring the Importance of Name Server IP Addresses in Malware DNS Graphs

This short exploratory empirical paper examines a question of how important the Internet protocol (IP) addresses of name servers are in linking together Internet domains that have distributed malware or otherwise having been associated with malicious computer networks. By using the domain name system (DNS) for building a relational representation, the found importance is elaborated with a dataset comprised of nearly sixty thousand domains. Besides the empirical exploration related to these domains, the paper provides a stylized discussion on the construction of empirical DNS graphs, including the concrete reduction and learning of the observed malware graph. With these two deliverables, the paper contributes to the active research field of DNS mining, further pinpointing a number of relevant research challenges for applications of complex network analysis for studying computer networking and cyber security.
A Smoothing Method for a Statistical String Similarity

We often need to measure similarity between objective information when integrating information. We propose an algorithm in this paper for the Bayesian estimation of the parameters of a statistical string similarity model. To do this we need a smoothing technique for the parameter estimation, because a string similarity model usually contains many parameters. We can make a parameter estimation for the statistical similarity model by introducing a Dirichlet prior. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective enough for approximate matching.
An accurate model for size optimization of an embedded permanent magnet for drug delivery with capsule robots

An actively controlled drug delivery system (DDS) is an essential module to be included in the next generation of capsule endoscopy. Its development will allow physicians to perform non-invasive procedures and treat diseases in the digestive system. Despite many attempts to magnetically actuate internal permanent magnets (IPMs) embedded in prototype capsule robots to enhance their capabilities, further miniaturization and optimization of the IPMs are required to achieve more efficient torque transmission while minimizing the size of the IPMs. In this paper, we optimize the IPM's size to obtain a high magnetic torque that activates a DDS which is based on an overly miniaturized slider-crank mechanism. The IPM is optimized by means of analytical models. Our experimental results, which are in agreement with the analytical results, show that a high torque and force are generated on the piston of the DDS that expels drug out of a reservoir when an optimized IPM is embedded in the capsule robot.
Claymore: Three-Dimensional Modeling Tool

We describes a method for manipulating a threedimensional object without considering conventional three independent orthogonal views. We apply the direct manipulation method to operate the threedimensional object. We propose \augmented manipulation" method which is an enhanced direct manipulation technique by using additional information. We implement three-dimensional modeling tool \Claymore" by using the \augmented manipulation" technique. Users can construct three-dimensional models in an intuitive manner.
Fingerprint identification using Delaunay triangulation

Presents an indexing-based approach to fingerprint identification. Central to the proposed approach is the idea of associating a unique topological structure with the fingerprint minutiae using Delaunay triangulation. This allows for choosing more "meaningful" minutiae groups (i.e., triangles) during indexing, preserves index selectivity, reduces memory requirements without sacrificing recognition accuracy, and improves recognition time. Specifically, assuming N minutiae per fingerprint on average, the proposed approach considers only O(N) minutiae triangles during indexing or recognition. This compares favorably to O(N/sup 3/), the number of triangles usually considered by other approaches, leading to significant memory savings and improved recognition time. Besides their small number, the minutiae triangles we used for indexing have good discrimination power since, among all possible minutiae triangles, they are the only ones satisfying the properties of the Delaunay triangulation. As a result, index selectivity is preserved and indexing can be implemented in a low-dimensional space. Some key characteristics of the Delaunay triangulation are: (i) it is unique (assuming no degeneracies), (ii) can be computed efficiently in O(NlogN) time, and (iii) noise or distortions affect it only locally. The proposed approach has been tested on a database of 300 fingerprints (10 fingerprints from 30 persons), demonstrating good performance.
Classifying Patients with Chronic Pelvic Pain into Levels of Biopsychosocial Dysfunction Using Latent Class Modeling of Patient Reported Outcome Measures

Chronic pelvic pain affects multiple aspects of a patient's physical, social, and emotional functioning. Latent class analysis (LCA) of Patient Reported Outcome Measures Information System (PROMIS) domains has the potential to improve clinical insight into these patients' pain. Based on the 11 PROMIS domains applied to n=613 patients referred for evaluation in a chronic pelvic pain specialty center, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to identify unidimensional superdomains. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was performed to identify the number of homogeneous classes present and to further define the pain classification system. The EFA combined the 11 PROMIS domains into four unidimensional superdomains of biopsychosocial dysfunction: Pain, Negative Affect, Fatigue, and Social Function. Based on multiple fit criteria, a latent class model revealed four distinct classes of CPP: No dysfunction (3.2%); Low Dysfunction (17.8%); Moderate Dysfunction (53.2%); and High Dysfunction (25.8%). This study is the first description of a novel approach to the complex disease process such as chronic pelvic pain and was validated by demographic, medical, and psychosocial variables. In addition to an essentially normal class, three classes of increasing biopsychosocial dysfunction were identified. The LCA approach has the potential for application to other complex multifactorial disease processes.