Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Retirement Investor Risk Tolerance in Tranquil and Crisis Periods: Experimental Survey Evidence

We conduct a choice experiment to investigate the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 on retirement saver investment choice and risk aversion. Analysis of estimated individual risk parameters shows a small increase in mean risk aversion between the relatively tranquil period of early 2007 and the crisis conditions of late 2008. Investment preferences of survey respondents, estimated using the scale-adjusted version of a latent class choice model, also change during the crisis. We identify age and income as important determinants of preference classes in both surveys and age is also identified as a key determinant of variability (scale). Young and low income individuals make choices that are more consistent with standard mean-variance analysis, but older and higher income individuals react positively to both higher returns and increasing risk in returns. Overall we find a mild moderating of retirement investor risk tolerance in 2008.
WATER MARKETING IN THE CROCODILE RIVER, SOUTH AFRICA

Abstract Transfers of water in the Crocodile River above and below the gorge (near Nelspruit and Malelane) were studied based on a survey in the area during November 2003, followed up by telephonic interviewing during March 2004. Almost all the water trades (permanent and rentals) observed in this study were from farmers above the gorge to farmers below the gorge. In order to study whether the water market promotes efficiency the data were subjected to several statistical analyses (Principal Components, Ridge Regression, Logit). It is concluded that in the transfer of water some attributes in the purchasing area such as lower production risk (sugar cane) and lower financial risk and better cashflow (bananas and sugar cane) were more important than the income per cubic meter of water. Water supply in this area is highly irregular while farmers were found to be extremely risk averse especially as far as down-side risk is concerned. The average water price in this area in recent years (2002 to 2003) was between R2,000 and R3,000 per ha (1ha = 8,000 cubic meter). Buyers are large progressive farmers that purchase (and rent) from many sellers (or lessees). It is concluded that information (sale prices and rents) is asymmetrical. Few permanent transfers have taken place in the Crocodile River in recent years. It is concluded that there are reasons why transfers at present are not processed and role players should discuss these reasons and possible solutions before further action is taken.
Rural-Urban Migration and its Effects on Infant and Child Mortality in Ghana

This paper examines the socioeconomic characteristics of rural-urban migrants, child mortality and maternity child health care in Ghana. Data from the 1988 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey shows that infant mortality is lower among rural-urban migrants compared to rural non-migrants. Proportional hazards model estimates reveal that the survival chances of children of rural-urban migration persist after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics. However, these advantages disappear after demographic variables are included in the model in spite of the proximity and accessibility to medical facilities enjoyed by the migrants. This finding suggests that socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of migrants could be an important determinant of the survival of children of rural-urban migrants.
Restructuring welfare for the unemployed: the Hartz legislation in Germany

The `Hartz legislation' of 2003/04, which restructured the benefit and administrative system for the long-term unemployed in Germany, is commonly ascribed to the recommendations made by the Hartz Commission and the political leadership of Chancellor Schröder. These aspects have been crucial politically in policy making, but are insufficient to fully explain this legislation. Here it is argued that the Hartz Commission was largely insignificant in Policy formulation instead learning prior to the Commission located in an expert forum by the Bertelsmann Foundation as well as a Ministry of Labour project group explains the direction and content of this reform. The case of the Hartz legislation, whereby the `frozen welfare state' of Germany critically departed from its conservative path, provides strong support for the significance of learning in major social policy reforms.
Powerful Community Relationships and Union Renewal in Australia

Terms such as labour-community coalitions, community unionism and social movement unionism are important features of current strategies for union renewal. This article develops a three-part framework of union-community relationships, from ad hoc to deeply engaged relationships. Criteria such as common interest, coalition structure, scale and union participation are identified as important variables for relationship variation and campaign success. The article explores the framework by analyzing three case studies from Sydney, Australia, involving the central labour council—Unions NSW. The paper argues that union-community relationships vary significantly; ad hoc relationships are useful to react to a crisis while deeper relationships are most useful to build a long-term agenda. Deeper relationships are supported when they are built alongside a process of internal union renewal. Deeper relationships are more successful if unions develop workplace leaders, support political union education and provide space for workplace stewards to connect to community campaigns.
Operating performance of European bank mergers

With very few exceptions the accepted viewpoint established by (predominantly) US research is that bank operating performance is not improved after merger. In this article we concentrate on European banks and investigate post-merger operating performance for 35 publicly listed bank mergers that were completed between 1992 and 1997. We find that industry-adjusted mean cash flow return did not significantly change after merger but stayed positive. We also find that the merger led to a significant decrease in profitability and capitalisation. Our key finding, in contrast to the US evidence, is that cost-efficiency ratios improved, although the improvement was not large enough to offset the profitability decrease. We also find that low profitability levels, conservative credit policies and good cost-efficiency status before merger are the main determinants of industry-adjusted cash flow returns and provide the source for improving these returns after merger.
Estimating the Return on Investment Opportunities in Financial Markets and Establishing Optimized Portfolio by Artificial Intelligence

This project is looking for increasing return on investment, by presenting models based on artificial intelligence. Investment in financial markets could be considered in short-term (daily) and middle-term (monthly) basis/ hence the daily data in Tehran Stock Exchange and the rates of foreign exchange and gold coins have been extracted for the period Mar. 2010 to Sep. 2012 and recorded as the data into the neural networks and the genetic programming model. Also the monthly rate of return and risk of 20 active companies of the stock exchange, and the monthly risk values of foreign exchange and gold coin, as well as bank deposits were used as genetic algorithms in order to provide optimum investment portfolios for the investors. The results obtained from executing the models indicates the efficiency of both methods of artificial neural network and also genetic programming in the short-term financial markets predictions, but artificial neural networks show a better efficiency. Also the efficiency of geneticalgorithm was approved in improving the rate of return and risks, via identifying the optimum investment portfolios.
Removing Heterogeneity Bias from Logit Model Estimation

This paper introduces a new estimation procedure for the logit model that is an extension of a conditional estimation procedure developed by Chamberlain Chamberlain, G. 1978. On the use of panel data. Working paper, Harvard University, 1--52; Chamberlain, G. 1980. Analysis of covariance with qualitative data. Rev. Econom. Stud.47 225--238. The method eliminates heterogeneity bias which is present in the estimates produced by traditional estimation techniques. It improves the goodness of fit and explanatory power of these models, while incorporating purchase event feedback.
Robust Estimation for the Orthogonal GARCH Model

In this paper, we propose a class of robust M‐estimators for the orthogonal generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) model. The method involves the estimation of only univariate GARCH models and hence easy to estimate and does not put additional constraints on the model. The forecasting performance of the class of robust estimators in predicting correlation and value‐at‐risk using various evaluation measures are investigated. We found empirical evidences of the better predictive potential of estimators such as least absolute deviation and B‐estimator over the widely used quasi‐maximum likelihood estimator when the error distribution is heavy‐tailed and asymmetric. Applications to real data sets are also presented.
Beyond Phonology

The difficulties experienced by below-average readers in phonological decoding tasks are well documented. Recent research has suggested that additional deficits in perceptual—motor fluency, handedness, and memory may also exist among below-average readers. To evaluate these claims, average and below-average readers and spellers were compared on a range of phonological processing, verbal short-term and working memory, rapid naming, handedness, and perceptual—motor fluency tasks. Average and below-average readers were sampled in a comparable manner and were also comparable on age, gender, nonverbal ability, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. Below-average readers and spellers performed lower than average readers and spellers on rhyme detection, pseudoword decoding, and rapid digit (but not picture) naming tasks, but showed no differences in handedness tasks or on a range of other perceptual—motor tasks.
Knowledge integration: a step forward? Continuities and changes in Arequipa’s water governance system

The new Peruvian Water Law (2009) inaugurated a transition phase in the country’s water governance model, in theory changing the power relations among the actors involved in the decision-making process. Formerly excluded actors were invited to participate and bring their particular views into multi-stakeholder spaces. While this diversity of actors, informed by different types of knowledge, has been highlighted as an attribute of more adaptive systems, it does not necessarily lead to a real change in the constellation of power. The case of Arequipa illustrates this shift towards a new water governance system, with the creation of a river basin council based on a prior (and exceptional) example of informal multi-stakeholder water management. Yet the growing participation of a large mining company in financing water-related infrastructure, and its alliances with other actors, might challenge the potential of the new participatory body to represent equally the interests and views of all its members, and therefore to question the existing norms to bring about transformative change. (1)
Networking for sustainable tourism – towards a research agenda

This paper proposes a research agenda for networking for sustainable tourism research based on a collaborative workshop of international tourism academics and researchers and an extensive review of the relevant literature. Each year, Building Excellence in Sustainable Tourism – an Education Network (BEST EN) holds a Think Tank on a topical issue in sustainable tourism education. One aim of the Think Tank is to develop a relevant research agenda that draws on the collective knowledge of participants and acknowledges the interdependent economic, environmental and social objectives in sustainable tourism. Six main areas were identified as important for a research agenda on networking for sustainable tourism and its implementation: theory, methodology and conceptual issues; actors, culture and power; lifecycle, evolution and dynamics of networks; knowledge transfer; macro-perspectives and strategic action, vision, innovation and management of networks. This paper presents and discusses these research themes in the context of a literature review on networks and networking for sustainability in tourism. It is found that substantial progress has been made in the investigation of private sector networks at the destination levels; research on networks involving public sector stakeholders and networks across sectors and levels of governance, however, remains limited.
Dividend Behaviour of Indian Companies Under Monetary Policy Restrictions

In this study we examine the dividend behaviour of Indian companies. We use the GMM estimator, which is the most suitable methodology in a dynamic setting. Our results show that Indian firms have lower target ratios and higher adjustment factors. The most significant result is that the restricted monetary policies have significant influence on the dividend behaviour of Indian firms, causing about 5-6 percent reduction in the payout ratios. The significance of the macro economic policy variable suggest that monetary policy restrictions do have an impact on the cost of raising funds, and the information asymmetry between lenders and borrowers increases that forces companies to reduce their dividend payout.
MPC: a new message passing library in CORBA

The need for interoperability among the rapidly proliferating amount of hardware and software led to the definition of CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), which standardizes the execution support of distributed object applications. This architecture offers a good interoperability and encapsulation support. In addition, the method invocation mechanism offers several features and can be used as a good communication model. Consequently, the use of such architecture for distributed metacomputing applications seems interesting and promising. However, its implementation is difficult because of protocol diversity and communication modes used by parallel applications. Moreover, this diversity of protocols is added to the intrinsic difficulty of the use of the object design approach and basic mechanisms of CORBA components. To cure this problem, we develop a message passing library in the CORBA environment called MPC (Message Passing in CORBA). We quickly present the basic concepts of this library and the point-to-point communication protocol used.
Determination of the Appropriate Event Window Length in Individual Stock Event Studies

It is common practice to assess the average effect of some type of announcement on stock prices by performing event studies on a large sample of firms and then averaging or otherwise combining the results. One benefit of this procedure is that the event window length can be standardized across observations because the errors from having too long or short an event window should have a small impact on the average by the Law of Large Numbers. Here, we examine various potential rules for determining the length of an event window when looking at a limited number of observations. We find that rules based on continuing price movements yield window lengths that correlate with the "size" of the news, as measured by the magnitude of earnings surprises, while a rule based on abnormally high volume does not have this property.
Hidradenitis suppurativa, a review of pathogenesis, associations and management. Part 2

Hidradenitis suppurativa is a chronic, painful, autoinflammatory condition resulting in nodules, abscesses and sinus tracts. We present an evidence‐based review providing new understanding of the pathogenesis of hidradenitis suppurativa and associated comorbidities. By the nature of their speciality, dermatologists are uniquely positioned to investigate and treat patients.
Documents classification by using ontology reasoning and similarity measure

Ontology-based documents classification method is introduced to solve the problem of classifier training and not considering semantic relations between words in traditional Machine Learning algorithms. However, previous work on ontology-based documents classification have some drawbacks on precision and run-time performance. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel ontology-based documents classification method by using ontology reasoning and similarity measure. Firstly, weighted terms set are extracted from documents, and categories are represented by ontologies; then the lowest concepts for each ontology is computed by using ontology reasoning techniques; next similarity score between documents and ontology is computed by using Google Distance measure; finally, web documents are assigned to categories according to the similarity score. Experimental results show our method is effective when comparing with the current ontology-based classification method, especially in the delicate classification evaluation, and the run-time performance is also better.
Nonequilibrium Mechanics of Active Cytoskeletal Networks

Cells both actively generate and sensitively react to forces through their mechanical framework, the cytoskeleton, which is a nonequilibrium composite material including polymers and motor proteins. We measured the dynamics and mechanical properties of a simple three-component model system consisting of myosin II, actin filaments, and cross-linkers. In this system, stresses arising from motor activity controlled the cytoskeletal network mechanics, increasing stiffness by a factor of nearly 100 and qualitatively changing the viscoelastic response of the network in an adenosine triphosphate–dependent manner. We present a quantitative theoretical model connecting the large-scale properties of this active gel to molecular force generation.
Cognitive modulation of appraisal variables in the emotion process of autonomous agents

In this paper, we present a scheme for modulating the results of evaluating emotional stimuli using appraisal dimensions. The level of modulation depends on cognitive information projected from components of a cognitive agent architecture. In particular, the proposed scheme models the influence of cognition on appraisal dimensions by modifying the limits of fuzzy membership functions associated to each appraisal dimensions in real time. The computational scheme proposed is designed in the context of an Integrative Framework designed to facilitate, through input and output interfaces, the development of computational models of emotion capable of interacting with cognitive components implemented in a given cognitive agent architecture. We also describe a possible scenario to show the functionality of the proposed scheme. This scheme is aimed at modeling in autonomous agents the interaction that occurs between cognitive and affective processes in humans.
Triggering and Relay Node Selection for Self-User Relaying

Self-user relaying technology is designed to support multiple self-owned devices especially when wearable devices are becoming more popular. In this letter, with a consideration of power control and discontinuous reception mechanism, a power model and energy metric are derived to analyze self-user relaying performance. Results show that under a typical traffic model, self-user relaying can improve energy performance when the relay node itself has the maximum traffic volume. Additionally, a simple battery budget threshold based relay node selection is suggested for limited battery budget of nodes.
An Assessment of the Performance of Mutual Fund Management: 1969–1975

Numerous studies have already examined the investment performance of mutual fund management with data from the 1950s and 1960s. Although the previous studies differed in the time period and evaluation method, they generally agreed that mutual funds, on the average, had failed to outperform the market over time. Thus they rendered a strong support to the efficient market hypothesis. Yet there is a need for an investigation of the data of the past several years. This study evaluates the quarterly investment performance of mutual funds in the period 1969–1975, using the weighted index benchmark portfolio approach.
A sensitive method for confocal fluorescence microscopic visualization of starch granules in iodine stained samples

Synthesized by glycogen synthase and starch synthases (SS) using ADP-glucose as the sugar donor molecule, glycogen and starch accumulate as predominant storage carbohydrates in most bacteria and plants, respectively. We have recently shown that the so-called “starch-less” Arabidopsis thaliana adg1–1 and aps1 mutants impaired in ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase do indeed accumulate low starch content in normal growth conditions, and relatively high starch content when plants were cultured in the presence of microbial volatiles. Our results were strongly supported by data obtained using a highly sensitive method for confocal fluorescence microscopic visualization of iodine stained starch granules. Using Arabidopsis leaves from WT plants, aps1 plants, ss3/ss4 plants lacking both class III and class IV SS, gbss plants lacking the granule-bound SS, and sus1/sus2/sus3/sus4 plants lacking four genes that code for proteins with sucrose synthase activity, in this work we precisely describe the method for preparation of plant samples for starch microscopic examination. Furthermore, we show that this method can be used to visualize glycogen in bacteria, and pure starch granules, amylose and amylopectin.
Human CRL4DDB2 ubiquitin ligase preferentially regulates post-repair chromatin restoration of H3K56Ac through recruitment of histone chaperon CAF-1

Acetylated histone H3 lysine 56 (H3K56Ac) diminishes in response to DNA damage but is restored following DNA repair. Here, we report that CRL4DDB2 ubiquitin ligase preferentially regulates post-repair chromatin restoration of H3K56Ac through recruitment of histone chaperon CAF-1. We show that H3K56Ac accumulates at DNA damage sites. The restoration of H3K56Ac but not H3K27Ac, H3K18Ac and H3K14Ac depends on CAF-1 function, whereas all these acetylations are mediated by CBP/p300. The CRL4DDB2 components, DDB1, DDB2 and CUL4A, are also required for maintaining the H3K56Ac and H3K9Ac level in chromatin, and for restoring H3K56Ac following induction of DNA photolesions and strand breaks. Depletion of CUL4A decreases the recruitment of CAF-1 p60 and p150 to ultraviolet radiation- and phleomycin-induced DNA damage. Neddylation inhibition renders CRL4DDB2 inactive, decreases H3K56Ac level, diminishes CAF-1 recruitment and prevents H3K56Ac restoration. Mutation in the PIP box of DDB2 compromises its capability to elevate the H3K56Ac level but does not affect XPC ubiquitination. These results demonstrated a function of CRL4DDB2 in differential regulation of histone acetylation in response to DNA damage, suggesting a novel role of CRL4DDB2 in repair-driven chromatin assembly.
Self-Similar Barkhausen Noise in Magnetic Domain Wall Motion.

A model for domain wall motion in ferromagnets is analyzed. Long-range magnetic dipolar interactions are shown to give rise to self-similar dynamics when the external magnetic field is increased adiabatically. The power spectrum of the resultant Barkhausen noise is of the form $1/{\ensuremath{\omega}}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, where $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\approx}1.5$ can be estimated from the critical exponents for interface depinning in random media.