Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MERCS: Multi-Directional Ensembles of Regression and Classification Trees

Learning a function f(X) that predicts Y from X is the archetypal Machine Learning (ML) problem. Typically, both sets of attributes (i.e., X,Y) have to be known before a model can be trained. When this is not the case, or when functions f(X) that predict Y from X are needed for varying X and Y, this may introduce significant overhead (separate learning runs for each function). In this paper, we explore the possibility of omitting the specification of X and Y at training time altogether, by learning a multi-directional, or versatile model, which will allow prediction of any Y from any X. Specifically, we introduce a decision tree-based paradigm that generalizes the well-known Random Forests approach to allow for multi-directionality. The result of these efforts is a novel method called MERCS: Multi-directional Ensembles of Regression and Classification treeS. Experiments show the viability of the approach.
Rapid Discrimination between Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 2 Groups A and B by Real-Time PCR

ABSTRACT We studied the feasibility of genotyping human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 2 groups A and B by real-time PCR. Two group-specific PCRs were developed. Real-time genotyping of 22 samples of genotype A, 10 samples of genotype B, and the isolate of new group H were compared to genotyping by sequencing and phylogeny. The group-specific PCRs specifically identified 84.3% of group A or B samples; isolate H was not detected. This method allowed rapid and specific discrimination between HIV-2 groups A and B and could be a useful tool for molecular epidemiological studies.
Speech Synthesis in Mexican Spanish using LSP as Voice Parameterization

A voice parameterization using Linear Spectral was implemented to a Mexican Spanish HMM-based Speech Synthesis System. Five phrases were synthesized and statistically validated by applying a MOS test to 30 listeners who analyzed the original voices compared to a synthetic voice. Results were compared to previous work where MFCC was used as voice parameterization, the comparison shows that LSP parameterization is above the mean score and pointed better than MFCC.
A Model of Competition in Banking: Bank Capital vs. Expertise

This paper presents a model of competition in the banking industry based upon the interplay of two factors: the level of capitalization of banks and their ability to monitor different types of projects (i.e., their expertise). In a setting of moral hazard with limited liability, banks must receive some rents to induce them to monitor projects diligently. The rents are decreasing in the banks' expertise and in the amount of capital that banks are able to commit to a project. This leads to a trade-off between capital and expertise. The analysis shows how shocks to bank capital and interest rates, and technological shocks can affect competition and monitoring efficiency in the banking sector.
Is Russia Drifting Toward an Oil-Rentier Economy?

Recent analysis considers that Russia is drifting toward an oil-rentier economy. In this paper, we will provide useful elements to check this hypothesis. First, we lead--at a theoretical level--with the characteristics that make an oil-rentier economy. Opposing the most extended tendency that associates rentierism to a certain macroeconomic scenario, we will infer that it is only possible to speak about rentierism if specific political and social conditions occur. Once the key conditions for rentierism are established, we study the case of Russia. The review of its actual conditions leads us to establish that, in the present situation, the diagnosis of rentierism for the Russian economy is far from being confirmed.
Development and application of a methodology to assess sanitary risks in Maputo, Mozambique

Sanitation-related health risks in low-income urban areas are concentrated in localities in which sanitation facilities and infrastructure are poorly developed and maintained. A simple and systematic approach to quantify these risks can be used to identify vulnerable communities and to support decisions about the types of interventions to mitigate these risks. The methodology described in this paper utilizes local stakeholder knowledge in a participatory process to score sanitation risks, using a framework of indicators that provides a quantitative assessment of the intensity and distribution of risk. The approach considers the extent of hazardous events related to faecal contamination of the environment, the level of local community exposure to this hazard, and vulnerability factors that exacerbate the impacts of infection. The paper describes the development of the methodology and its application in Maputo and outlines how this approach might be used to support the preparation of city sanitation plans. The approach is validated through the use of a conventional household survey, the results of which are compared with those from the community workshops.
The Exchange Rate, Dutch Disease and Manufacturing in South Africa: What do the Data Say?

The Dutch disease argument suggests that in commodity exporting countries "overvaluation" of the currency due to increases in commodity prices harms manufacturing even though the economy as a whole benefits, led by the booming natural resources sector. The relationship between the real exchange rate and manufacturing is studied here with regard to South Africa as a minerals-rich export-led economy. Since manufacturing is co-determined within a system of inter-related variables, a Johansen VAR/VEC cointegration approach was used to estimate these relationships. Using quarterly data for the sample period 1980â€”2010, the main findings are: world growth is the single most important determinant of domestic manufacturing; while the real exchange rate has the predicted negative sign, there is no evidence of a Dutch disease specific effect on manufacturing; large increases in unit labour costs since the early 1980s have dragged down manufacturing in South Africa over the sample period.
GARCH - Monte-Carlo Simulation Models with Wavelets Decomposition Algorithm for Stock Returns Prediction

In this paper we examine four different approaches in trading rules for stock returns. More specifically we examine the popular procedures in technical analysis, which are the moving average and the Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD) oscillator. The third approach is the simple random walk autoregressive model and the fourth model we propose is a Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) regression with wavelets decomposition and Monte- Carlo simulations algorithm developed in MATLAB. We examine five major stock market index returns for a testing forecasting period of 10 days ahead. We conclude that moving average and MACD might lead to net profits, but not in all cases, therefore are not consistent procedures. Furthermore, moving average 1-30 provides the best results. On the other hand random walk autoregressive model leads in all cases to net losses. Finally, the model we propose not only leads always to net profits, but also to significant higher profits in three stock indices than the respective conventional technical analysis tools.
Analysing marketing customization strategies in Australasian firms: a framework for services and goods exporters

Previous studies suggest that services and goods marketers can share internationalization and market entry frameworks. Very little research has investigated any similarity of marketing customization frameworks of services and goods exporters. This study has proposed a common customization framework, which was examined using the experiences of 101 services and goods firms operating in a highly different environment. It was found that the marketing environment–marketing strategy framework for service and good exporters was mostly similar, but that the extent of the influence of selected factors was stronger for service firms. The framework of marketing strategy–performance was confirmed to be mostly similar. The results of this study suggest that, after internationalization and market entry mode theories, a common marketing customization framework can probably be identified across selected services and goods sectors.
Students As Surrogates In Behavioral Accounting Research - Some Evidence

The use of students as subjects in behavioral accounting research is commonplace. Implicit in most studies that employ student subjects is the notion that students are reasonable surrogates for the real-world individuals of more direct interest to the researcher. Although several authors have noted potential problems involved in generalizing the results of such studies, little evidence exists on the adequacy of student surrogates in accounting. The purposes of this paper are (1) to analyze the existing evidence and (2) to provide some additional evidence on the surrogation issue relative to one specific type of behavioral accounting research.
Line Pilot Performance of Memory Items

Some system failures that can occur on commercial airliners require flight crews to perform checklist steps from memory prior to referring to the checklist. These steps, called memory items or recall steps, are for time critical actions crucial to the safe continuation of the flight (e.g., preventing severe aircraft damage or crew incapacitation). Typically, line pilots do not study memory items except in preparation for a proficiency check (PC), usually every 6 or 12 months. They arrive for their evaluation prepared to be tested on the recall of the memory items. Their performance in these evaluations may not reflect their performance on the line, months after a PC.
Steroid-responsive nephrotic syndrome and allergy: clinical studies

Eighty-four children with steroid-responsive nephrotic syndrome who had been shown to have, or were believed to have, minimal change histology were investigated to study the relationship between steroid-responsive nephrotic syndrome and allergy. They were found to have a greater incidence of the standard atopic disorders-asthma, eczema, recurrent urticaria, and hay fever. Their 1st-degree relatives had an increased incidence of these atopic disorders too. A nasal discharge was a frequent precursor or an accompaniment of nephrotic syndrome, but an overt atopic disorder at the same time was rare. Such disorders, related to relapse, occurred in only 5 children; in none was it a consistent or recurrent happening at the time of each relapse. No example of pollen hypersensitivity nephrotic syndrome was found, and no particular allergen could be identified with certainty as responsible for a child's nephrotic syndrome. No association was found between the time of relapse and the season of the year, or the season in which the child was born. Children with nephrotic syndrome had a greater incidence of positive skin tests to common antigens, the com-parative frequency of positive reactions to different antigens being similar to that found in children with asthma, although the total frequency was about half that of children with asthma. Despite the increased incidence of clinical features of atopy, measures to reduce the frequency of relapse of nephrotic syndrome by allergen avoidance, the use of disodium cromoglycate, and the use of a new oral antiallergic drug were unsuccessful.
Preoperative versus postoperative radiotherapy, single versus multiple courses of actinomycin d, in the treatment of Wilms' tumor. Preliminary results of a controlled clinical trial conducted by the international society of paediatric oncology (S.I.O.P.)

The preliminary results of a controlled clinical trial organized by the S.I. O.P. of radiotherapy and chemotherapy in patients with nephroblastoma are presented. Forty‐two centers have participated. Between September 1971 and October 1974, 398 patients were registered; 195 were eligible for the trial and were randomized. The remaining 203 patients were excluded from the trial, but were followed in the same way as the patients in the trial. The results were evaluated in terms of recurrence‐free survival rate and survival rate. Results in patients who received preoperative and postoperative radiotherapy (group A, 73 patients) were compared with the results in patients who recieved only postoperative radiotherapy (group B, 64 patients). The tumor ruptured at surgery in three patients of group A, and in 20 patients of group B, a difference that is statistically significant. No significant difference in survival and recurrence‐free survival between groups A and B is observed at present. Results in patients treated with a single course of actinomycin D (group I, 80 patients) were compared with the results in patients treated with multiple courses (group II, 80 patients). At present, no significant difference is found between the two groups.
Trade Unions and the Efficiency of the Natural Rate of Unemployment

Decentralized wage setting in search equilibrium models is inefficient because the meeting firm and worker ignore the dependence of job-matching probabilities on the number of firms and workers engaged in search. This paper investigates whether risk-neutral monopolistic unions will have an incentive to internalize this externality. I find that the externality will be internalized only if the union's policy is chosen by unemployed persons. If employed persons influence union policy, both the union wage and unemployment will be too high. A tax on the union wage combined with an employment subsidy to firms can correct this inefficiency.
Hedgehog signaling and laminin play unique and synergistic roles in muscle development

Hedgehog (Hh) signaling and laminin‐111, a basement membrane protein, are required for early muscle development. Hh signaling specifies different populations of muscle fibers and laminin‐111 is critical for early muscle morphogenesis. However, additional requirements for Hh signaling and laminin during later phases of muscle development are not known. Furthermore, interactions between Hh signaling and laminin in this context are unknown. We used laminin gamma1 mutant zebrafish and cyclopamine to block Hh signal transduction separately and in combination to investigate their functions and interactions. We found that both Hh signaling and laminin are required for normal myosin chain expression. In addition, Hh signaling and laminin act synergistically during fast‐twitch fiber elongation: fast muscle cells do not elongate in embryos deficient for both Hh signaling and laminin. Finally, we present evidence that suggests that Hh signaling is indirectly required via slow fiber specification for recovery of fast fiber elongation in laminin gamma1 mutant embryos. Developmental Dynamics 239:905–913, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The information contained in the components of earnings

This study investigates the relations between components of accounting earnings and stock returns1 by testing two hypotheses. The first is whether six commonly reported components of earnings provide additional information that is not contained in the earnings figure. The second is whether the additional information is associated with the timeseries properties of the components. In addition, other results regarding the components' relations with returns and the components' time-series properties are discussed. The six components analyzed in this study-gross profits, general and administrative expense, depreciation expense, interest expense, income taxes, and other items-are routinely reported in financial disclosures to
Nested Logit Analysis of Missing Response Observations

A new estimation technique is proposed to deal with missing response variables in the context of a nested multinomial logit model. Survey data often have a significant number of incomplete or missing responses. If such data are systematically missing (i.e. not missing at random) and if such observations are deleted from the analysis, biased sample selection results. The new method is applied to the empirical analysis of determining job loss status.
Verification for ASP denotational semantics: A case study using the PVS theorem prover

In this paper we present an encoding of the (recently proposed) denotational semantics for Answer Set Programming (ASP) and its monotonic basis into the input language of the theorem prover PVS. Using some libraries and features from PVS, we have obtained semi-automated proofs for several fundamental properties of ASP. In this way, to the best of our knowledge, we provide the ﬁrst known application of formal veriﬁcation to ASP.
Understanding SSL

Chris Hare 134.1 What Is SSL? 1777 134.2 Server Certificates . 1778 134.3 The SSL Handshake. 1778 The CLIENT-HELLO Message † The SERVERHELLO Message † The CLIENT-MASTER-KEY Message 134.4 Generating a New Master Key . 1779 Keys and More Keys † The SERVER-VERIFY Message † The CLIENT-FINISHED and SERVER-FINISHED Messages 134.5 Determining the Encryption Cipher. 1781 134.6 Client Certificates. 1782 The REQUEST-CERTIFICATE Message † The CLIENT-CERTIFICATE Message 134.7 Message Flow. 1783 Session Identifier Available † No Session Identifier Available † The Entire Handshake Illustrated 134.8 Is It All Encrypted? 1785 134.9 Error Handling. 1785 134.10 After the Handshake. 1786 SSL and the Web † SSL Tunnels
Bayesian efficiency analysis with a flexible form

: In this paper we describe the use of Gibbs sampling methods for drawing posterior inferences in a cost frontier model with an asymptotically ideal price aggregator, non-constant returns to scale and composed error. An empirical example illustrates the sensitivity of efficiency measures to assumptions made about the functional form of the frontier. We also examine the consequences of imposing regularity through parametric restrictions alone.
Hybrid Attentive Answer Selection in CQA With Deep Users Modelling

In this paper, we propose solutions to advance answer selection in Community Question Answering (CQA). Unlike previous works, we propose a hybrid attention mechanism to model question-answer pairs. Specifically, for each word, we calculate the intra-sentence attention indicating its local importance and the inter-sentence attention implying its importance to the counterpart sentence. The inter-sentence attention is based on the interactions between question-answer pairs, and the combination of these two attention mechanisms enables us to align the most informative parts in question-answer pairs for sentence matching. Additionally, we exploit user information for answer selection due to the fact that users are more likely to provide correct answers in their areas of expertise. We model users from their written answers to alleviate data sparsity problem, and then learn user representations according to the informative parts in sentences that are useful for question-answer matching task. This mean of modelling users can bridge the semantic gap between different users, as similar users may have the same way of wording their answers. The representations of users, questions and answers are learnt in an end-to-end neural network in a mean that best explains the interrelation between question-answer pairs. We validate the proposed model on a public dataset, and demonstrate its advantages over the baselines with thorough experiments.
Applied Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography

Applied Evolutionary Economics and Economic Geography aims to further advance empirical methodologies in evolutionary economics, with a special emphasis on geography and firm location. It does so by bringing together a select group of leading scholars including economists, geographers and sociologists, all of whom share an interest in explaining the uneven distribution of economic activities in space and the historical processes that have produced these patterns.
Design and Hardware-in-the-Loop Experiment of Multiloop Adaptive Control for DFIG-WT

An improved perturbation observer-based mu-ltiloop adaptive control (POMAC) method is proposed for the integrated control of a doubly fed induction generator-based wind turbine (DFIG-WT). In the proposed method, the DFIG-WT is first broken down into four independent subsystems in accordance with four outputs. Meanwhile, the compensation terms used in the vector control (VC) are adopted in order to achieve the complete decoupling among the subsystems. Then, in each subsystem, a perturbation term is introduced to describe the nonlinear dynamics and uncertainties of the subsystem. Estimates of the system's states and perturbation term are obtained by a high-gain state and perturbation observer (HGSPO). Finally, the optimal output feedback control of DFIG-WT is achieved using these estimations instead of the actual values. Simulation studies are carried out using MATLAB/Simulink. Meanwhile, a hardware-in-the-loop test platform is set up using the combination of digital signal processing and control engineering and real-time digital simulator, on which the experiment is carried out to test the validity of the proposed method. Results of the simulation and experiment reveal that POMAC performs better than VC in various cases, including variable wind speed conditions, slight grid voltage dip, and severe three-phase bolted fault. Moreover, its hardware implementation illustrates that POMAC can be used in real time in practice.
State‐Owned Enterprises, Inequality, and Political Ideology

State-owned enterprises continue to play a considerable role in many economies. In this study we empirically investigate the connections between these enterprises and inequality as mediated through political ideology. Using cross-country data on the relative size of the state-owned enterprise sector, we find strong empirical support for an inverted U-shaped relationship between its size and income inequality. We also find strong evidence that left-wing (vis-a-vis right-wing) governments are associated with a larger state-owned enterprise sector in countries with higher inequality. This result is robust to using cross-sectional vs. panel data, different identification strategies, and various controls.
Flexible Online Task Assignment in Real-Time Spatial Data

The popularity of Online To Offline (O2O) service platforms has spurred the need for online task assignment in real-time spatial data, where streams of spatially distributed tasks and workers are matched in real time such that the total number of assigned pairs is maximized. Existing online task assignment models assume that each worker is either assigned a task immediately or waits for a subsequent task at a fixed location once she/he appears on the platform. Yet in practice a worker may actively move around rather than passively wait in place if no task is assigned. In this paper, we define a new problem F lexible T wo-sided O nline task A ssignment (FTOA). FTOA aims to guide idle workers based on the prediction of tasks and workers so as to increase the total number of assigned worker-task pairs. To address the FTOA problem, we face two challenges: (i) How to generate guidance for idle workers based on the prediction of the spatiotemporal distribution of tasks and workers? (ii) How to leverage the guidance of workers' movements to optimize the online task assignment? To this end, we propose a novel two-step framework, which integrates offline prediction and online task assignment. Specifically, we estimate the distributions of tasks and workers per time slot and per unit area, and design an online task assignment algorithm, P rediction-oriented O nline task A ssignment in R eal-time spatial data (POLAR-OP). It yields a 0.47-competitive ratio, which is nearly twice better than that of the state-of-the-art. POLAR-OP also reduces the time complexity to process each newly-arrived task/worker to O(1). We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods via extensive experiments on both synthetic datasets and real-world datasets from a large-scale taxi-calling platform.