Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Random-Time Binomial Model

In this paper we study Binomial Models with random time steps. We explain, how calculating values for European and American Call and Put options is straightforward for the Random-Time Binomial Model. We present the conditions to ensure weak-convergence to the Black-Scholes setup and convergence of the values for European and American put options. Differently to the CRR-model the convergence behaviour is extremely smooth in our model. By using extrapolation we therefore achieve order of convergence two. This way it is an efficient tool for pricing purposes in the Black-Scholes setup, since the CRR model and its extrapolations typically achieve order one. Moreover our model allows in a straightforward manner to construct approximations to jump-diffusions. The simple valuation approaches and the convergence properties carry immediately over from the Black-Scholes case.
The Rate of Gain of Perceived Workload in Sustained Attention

Perceived workload was measured via the NASA TLX following a visual vigilance task. Five task durations (10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 min) were combined factorially with two levels of discrimination difficulty (easy, hard) in a between groups design. Detection probability, computed from the final 10 min of watch in each duration condition, varied inversely with signal salience and declined over time. Overall workload varied directly with salience and increased linearly over time. The temporal growth in perceived workload was independent of signal salience. This result suggests that the rate of gain in workload is based upon general features of the vigilance situation rather than specific psychophysical demands such as signal salience.
Roles of chemokine receptor CX3CR1 in maintaining murine bone homeostasis through the regulation of both osteoblasts and osteoclasts

Summary Chemokines have recently been reported to be involved in pathological bone destruction. However, the physiological roles of chemokines in bone metabolism in vivo have not been well documented. We analyzed the bone phenotypes in Cx3cr1-deficient mice. The mice exhibited slight but significant increases in trabecular and cortical thickness, reduced numbers of osteoclasts and increased rates of osteoid formation. Although the morphometric parameters showed marginal differences, the Cx3cr1-deficient bones showed an elevated expression of Osterix/SP7, which encodes an essential transcriptional factor for osteoblasts, whereas the gene Osteocalcin/Bglap, which encodes a late marker, was downregulated. The levels of transcripts for various osteoclastic markers, such as receptor activator of NF-&kgr;B (RANK)/TNFRSF11A, receptor activator of NF-&kgr;B ligand (RANKL)/TNFSF11, tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b (TRAP5B)/ACP5B, Cathepsin K(CTSK), MMP3 and MMP13, were significantly decreased in the Cx3cr1-deficient bones. Cultured Cx3cr1-deficient osteoblastic cells showed inverse temporal patterns of osteoblastic marker expression and reduced calcium deposition. Furthermore, in vitro studies and immunofluorescence staining against CX3CR1 and CX3CL1 suggested a role for the CX3CR1–CX3CL1 axis in an early stage of osteoblast differentiation, possibly through their trans and cis interactions. Cultured Cx3cr1-deficient pre-osteoclasts showed impaired differentiation, mainly due to a deficiency of the CD115+CD11blo osteoclastogenic population of myeloid-lineage precursors. The treatment of bone-marrow-derived osteoclastic cultures with recombinant CX3CL1 at different time points suggested that the CX3CR1–CX3CL1 axis favors the maintenance of osteoclastic precursors, but not differentiated osteoclasts. These observations uncovered novel roles of the CX3CR1–CX3CL1 axis in the differentiation of both osteoblasts and osteoclasts.
Mixed chimerism following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in pediatric thalassemia major patients: a single center experience.

OBJECTIVE Stable mixed chimerism (MC) may result in cure for thalassemia major patients following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), but rejection can occur. Twenty-eight HSCTs for thalassemia major were reviewed retrospectively to evaluate the clinical course of MC with possible risk factors and predictors of outcome, with a median follow-up of 1669 days (811-3576 days). METHODS Chimerism was detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) or multiplex polymerase chain reaction depending on the sex match between the donor and the recipient. RESULTS Primary rejection, stable MC and full donor chimerism was detected in 3.6%, 17.8% and 78.6% of patients, respectively. Clinically, 4/5 patients with stable MC had thalassemia trait with donor chimerism as low as 14%. One patient was started on pRBC transfusions at 2.5 years postHSCT. CONCLUSION Stable MC can result in cure for thalassemia major patients. The clinical picture remains as the best guide for intervention until a more reliable predictor is available.
The Legislative Effectiveness of Gay and Lesbian Legislators

This article examines the legislative effectiveness of gay and lesbian state legislators. Legislative effectiveness is measured by legislators' perceptions of their effectiveness, their ability to block legislation, and their ability to see the bills they introduce pass. Although the number of openly gay and lesbian legislators is small, making this study exploratory, the findings are illuminating. Without controlling for legislators' relationships with colleagues or their ideology, lesbians, but not gay men, were less effective than other legislators, but after controlling for these factors lesbians were not significantly less effective than others.
“It's Cheesy When They Smile

Building on previous research in which we provided an opportunity for female college athletes to construct their own photographic portrayals, this study explored young female athletes' perceptions of the college athlete photographs. Fifty-two girls participated in focus group interviews where they viewed and discussed the images. The young athletes particularly liked images they perceived to show authentic athletes (e.g., in athletic settings, with appropriate sport attire), images they could relate to due to personal experiences, and images that reflected competent and passionate sportswomen. Images perceived as revealing a lack of motivation, poor sporting attitudes, and nonathletic poses generally were disliked. Images depicting multiple social identities (e.g., an athlete in a dress) were controversial and generated much discussion.
Illegitimacy undermines leader creativity only under stable power

Abstract Power hierarchies are ubiquitous in human societies and can improve behavioral coordination, efficiency and individual incentives to climb the hierarchical ladder. However, when power differentials lack legitimacy or are unstable, power struggles and conflict may emerge, as low power people may try to seize power. Power struggles and conflict at the interpersonal level can impede interpersonal cooperation, increase interpersonal competition, and distract individuals from the task at hand (Greer & Van Kleef, 2010). Here we examined the interactive effects of legitimacy and stability of power differences at an interpersonal level, and found that under power instability, legitimacy did not alter the creativity of highpower individuals. Under power stability, however, more creative insights were achieved when power was legitimate rather than illegitimate. Implications are discussed.
Cognitive Dysfunction and Imipramine in Outpatient Depressives

• A group of moderately depressed, nonpsychotic outpatients had impaired performance on a short-term item-recognition memory task (compared with a group of matched normal controls) without evidence of impaired speed or attention on two simpler tasks. Compared with placebo, treatment with imipramine hydrochloride in a multiple crossover design using threeweek treatment periods led to improved performance on the memory task without either clinically apparent improvement in depression or significantly improved performance on the other tasks. These results may reflect the relative complexity of the memory task rather than a specific impairment of short-term memory, but the data do support the presence of cognitive dysfunction in depression, even in ambulatory patients without substantial impairments of attention or motor functioning. The results also indicate that antidepressant drugs can produce improvement in cognitive function, possibly as a forerunner of clinical improvement.
Application-Agnostic Framework for Improving the Energy Efficiency of Multiple HPC Subsystems

The subsystems that compose a HPC platform (e.g. CPU, memory, storage and network) are often designed and configured to deliver exceptional performance to a wide range of workloads. As a result, a large part of the power that these subsystems consume is dissipated as heat even when executing workloads that do not require maximum performance. Attempts to tackle this problem include technologies whereby operating systems and applications can reconfigure subsystems dynamically, such as by using DVFS for CPUs, LPI for network components, and variable disk spinning for HDDs. Most previous work has explored these technologies individually to optimise workload execution and reduce energy consumption. We propose a framework that performs on-line analysis of an HPC system in order to identify application execution patterns without a priori information of their workload. The framework takes advantage of reoccurring patterns to reconfigure multiple subsystems dynamically and reduce overall energy consumption. Performance evaluation was carried out on Grid'5000 considering both traditional HPC benchmarks and real-life applications.
Impact of pegylated interferon α‐2B and ribavirin on hepatic fibrosis in liver transplant patients with recurrent hepatitis C: an open‐label series

Abstract: Background: Patients with recurrent hepatitis C virus (HCV) are often treated with interferon‐based therapy in an attempt to eradicate HCV and prevent cirrhosis requiring retransplantation. We describe our experience with pegylated interferon and ribavirin and the impact of this therapy on hepatic fibrosis.
Current Account Cyclicality in Debtor and Creditor Countries

This paper reexamines a classic question in international economics: What Is the current account response to a transitory income shock such as a temporary Improvement In the terms of trade, a transfer from abroad or unusually high production? To answer this question, we construct a world equilibrium model in which productivity varies across countries and international borrowing and lending takes place to exploit good investment opportunities. Despite Its conventional Ingredients, the model generates the novel prediction that favourable Income shocks lead to current account deficits In debtor countries and current account surpluses In creditor countries. Evidence from thirteen OECD countries broadly supports this prediction of the theory. We are grateful to Rudi Dornbusch for discussing these ideas with us. We also thank Daren Acemoglu, Jakob Svensson and participants in seminars at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Rochester and The World Bank for their useful comments. Further comments are welcome. Please contact the authors at akraay@worldbank.org (Kraay) orjaume@mit.edu (Ventura). The views expressed herein are the authors', and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank.
Exploring the Role of Leader—Subordinate Interactions in the Construction of Organizational Positivity

In this article we discuss individual implicit theories of how positive and negative organizing unfold. The discussion is grounded in data collected from 89 individuals working in different organizational contexts. An inductive logic was followed, based on critical incidents of positive and negative processes and outcomes presented by participants, according to how they viewed their professional situation. Through a dialectical process of analysis, we extracted six dimensions that were present in different combinations among narratives provided by the participants: recognition/indifference, communication/silence, interaction/separation, confidence/ distrust, loyalty/betrayal, and organizational transparency/organizational secrecy. We then analysed how these dimensions fit together and discovered that they could be organized around four major patterns combining the clarity/secrecy of organizational rules and the considerate/detached behavior of leaders. We assert that positive leaders are essential in the creation of patterns of organizing, regardless of the features of the external context.
Impact of reaction products from building materials and furnishings on indoor air quality — A review of recent advances in indoor chemistry

The variety of chemical substances present in modern building products, household products and furnishings provides potential for chemical reactions in the material (case 1), on the material surface (case 2) and in the gas phase (case 3). Such ‘‘indoor chemistry’’ is known as one of the main reasons for primary and secondary emissions. The conditions of production often cause unwanted side reactions and a number of new compounds can be found in finished products. Elevated temperatures are responsible for the degradation of cellulose, decomposition of non-heat-resistant additives and other thermally induced reactions like Diels–Alder synthesis. Heterogeneous chemistry takes place on the surface of materials. Well-known examples are the formation of aliphatic aldehydes from the oxidation of unsaturated fatty acids or the cleavage of photoinitiators under the influence of light. In case of composite flooring structures hydrolysis is one of the major pathways for the appearance of alcohols from esters. If different kinds of material are fixed together, emissions of new VOCs formed by inter-species reactions are possible. Other indoor air pollutants are formed by rearrangement of cleavage products or by metabolism. Compounds with –CQC– bonds like terpenes, styrene, 4-phenylcyclohexene, etc. undergo gas phase reactions with O3, NOx, OH and other reactive gases. It has been shown that such products derived from indoor-related reactions may have a negative impact on indoor air quality due to their low odor threshold or healthrelated properties. Therefore, the understanding of primary and secondary emissions and the chemical processes behind is essential for the evaluation of indoor air quality. This publication gives an overview on the current state of research and new findings regarding primary and secondary emissions from building products and furnishings. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keyword index: Building products; Chemical reactions; Primary and secondary emissions; Indoor chemistry
Supporting children’s mental health in schools: teacher views

Schools have increasingly been targeted as appropriate sites for mental health promotion and teachers are considered well placed to identify issues concerning students’ social and emotional well-being. Whilst teachers are now expected to be responsive to a wide range of student needs and circumstances, they receive little in their pre-service and subsequent teacher education to adequately prepare them for such realities. This paper reports the findings of a study that investigated teacher perspectives on student mental health and mental health education, including their sense of self-efficacy in relation to promoting and supporting children’s mental well-being in schools. These findings highlight a complex interplay between teachers’ constructions of ‘mental health’, the importance they place on mental health promotion in schools, issues of teacher confidence, role identity conflict and school culture, as well as teachers’ own sense of mental well-being. The discussion signals a need to pay close attention to the assumptions, values, beliefs and attitudes of teachers in relation to children’s mental health since these are integral to their confidence and skill in supporting children’s social and emotional well-being.
Task-Based User Profiling for Personalized Query Refinement

Existing studies on user search tasks focus mainly on applying user interests in personalized search results. However, few studies examined the effect of utilizing search tasks to assist users to design effective queries through query refinement. Moreover, none of the existing studies have examined the dynamic characteristics of users and their search task. This paper proposes a novel method for user profiling which addressed the two issues above. Our approach used a two-descriptor to represent long-term and short-term user interests extracted from search sessions within a search task. It modeled the user’s interests at the task level to improve the rankings of the candidate queries for query refinement through modules of task identification and updating. Experimental results showed that our task-based user-profiling method contributes to an increased precision of search results, and it produced more accurate refined queries, thereby resulting in shorter search sessions.
Comparison of Gender- and Speaker-adaptive Emotion Recognition

Deriving the emotion of a human speaker is a hard task, especially if only the audio stream is taken into account. While state-of-the-art approaches already provide good results, adaptive methods have been proposed in order to further improve the recognition accuracy. A recent approach is to add characteristics of the speaker, e.g., the gender of the speaker. In this contribution, we argue that adding information unique for each speaker, i.e., by using speaker identification techniques, improves emotion recognition simply by adding this additional information to the feature vector of the statistical classification algorithm. Moreover, we compare this approach to emotion recognition adding only the speaker gender being a non-unique speaker attribute. We justify this by performing adaptive emotion recognition using both gender and speaker information on four different corpora of different languages containing acted and non-acted speech. The final results show that adding speaker information significantly outperforms both adding gender information and solely using a generic speaker-independent approach.
Thailand Diabetic Registry cohort: predicting death in Thai diabetic patients and causes of death.

INTRODUCTION The prevalence of type 2 diabetes in Thailand is 9.8 percent which is double the number forecast by World Health Organization. There is inadequate information to statistically represent all Thai diabetic patients for their causes of death. OBJECTIVE To determine the clinical characteristics that predicted death and causes of death in Thai diabetic patients. MATERIAL AND METHOD This prospective cohort was a 3-year follow-up study of the Thai Diabetes Registry project done between April, 2003, and February, 2006, which registered 9,419 diabetic patients attending 11 diabetic clinics in tertiary medical centers in Bangkok and major provinces of Thailand. The dead or alive status (99.5%) was determined. The causes of death were defined by reviewing the medical records. RESULTS Of the 9,370 diabetic patients registered, 425 patients died, 1.84 percent per year. There was an increased risk of death associated with age, type of healthcare plan, lower education, insulin use, smoking, history of coronary artery disease and cerebrovascular disease, serum creatinine and high HbA1c. Lipid-lowering medication and metformin decreased the risk of death. Cardiovascular disease, infection and cancer were the prevalent causes of death. CONCLUSION The present study showed risk factors that influenced death and causes of death in Thai diabetics.
Globally Optimal Multisensor Distributed Random Parameter Matrices Kalman Filtering Fusion with Applications

This paper proposes a new distributed Kalman filtering fusion with random state transition and measurement matrices, i.e., random parameter matrices Kalman filtering. It is proved that under a mild condition the fused state estimate is equivalent to the centralized Kalman filtering using all sensor measurements; therefore, it achieves the best performance. More importantly, this result can be applied to Kalman filtering with uncertain observations including the measurement with a false alarm probability as a special case, as well as, randomly variant dynamic systems with multiple models. Numerical examples are given which support our analysis and show significant performance loss of ignoring the randomness of the parameter matrices.
EXPLOITATION OF FEATURE VECTOR STRUCTURE FOR SPEAKER ADAPTATION

In this paper we suggest that rather than modelling speaker mismatch as an affine transform of the entire feature vector, it can be modelled by an affine transform of the static coefficients with additional constraints imposed by the temporal relationships of the streams of coefficients. This results in the different streams sharing the same rotation matrix, and thus reduces the complexity and memory requirements for speaker adaptation, as well as minimises the adaptation data requirements. We present the solution for the case where temporal structure constrained transforms (TSCT) are optimised using the maximum likelihood criterion. The experiments presented in the paper show that with the proposed approach, a relative improvement in accuracy of around 26% can be observed for a digit recognition task over the use of block-diagonal transforms, with as little as two adaptation utterances.
Dissecting Virus Infectious Cycles by Cryo-Electron Microscopy

In response to events such as receptor binding and endocytic triggers, viruses undergo large-scale, dynamic conformational changes necessary for cell entry and genome delivery. In later stages of the infectious cycle, replication machinery must read and synthesize nucleic acid strands to generate new copies of genetic material, and structural proteins must assemble and package the appropriate contents in order to produce new infectious particles. Structural elucidation of these events is key to understanding them and their inhibition by antiviral agents such as neutralizing antibodies and drugs. Electron microscopy is a versatile technique that offers the ability to resolve three-dimensional structures of individual viral proteins and whole virions in multiple functional states, even in cells at different stages of infection (Fig 1). Here we focus on the use of transmission electron microscopy of frozen-hydrated specimens, i.e., cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). A major advantage of cryo-EM over other structural approaches is that samples of a broad range of sizes can be imaged under near-physiological conditions with native hydration intact. This approach does not require the specimen to be fixed, stained, or coaxed into a crystalline lattice. This versatility has enabled cryo-EM to expand the envelope of structural virology and opened new avenues for understanding the molecular and cellular processes of virus infection and pathogenesis. Fig 1 Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) enables one to gain insight into viruses over many levels of structural hierarchy, ranging from determination of near-atomic resolution structures of subunits and symmetrical virus assemblies to ultrastructural analysis . In this micro-review, we examine general approaches and recent applications of cryo-EM to virology. The reader is referred to a number of excellent reviews for more in-depth discussion of current methodology (e.g., [1,2]). Electron microscopy and structural virology have a long, shared history dating to the first images of bacteriophages gathered using some of the earliest electron microscopes [3]. As the technique of cryogenically preserving unfixed samples was being developed, again, viruses were among the first test subjects that helped to demonstrate the utility of cryo-EM for characterizing structure of large biological assemblies [4–6].