Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Topology of the Foreign Currency/Forint Swap Market

In our study, we examine the network structure of the currency swap market, the volume of which amounts to several times the Hungarian GDP. With this paper, we aim to establish a complete picture of the market by complementing the results for the overnight market. Additionally, we can now analyse a longer time series than in our 2013 study. We look at the properties of the graphs in segments representing various maturities. We find that the properties of the graph derived from the overall market and the dynamics of those properties are identical to those of the short-term market, while trends differ for various tenors. The longer the maturities, the less the graphs satisfy the small-world property. The longest markets are increasingly closer to random graphs. Although the effect of shocks to large actors is smaller in such graphs, this change also suggests that counterparties trusted each other less as transactions became longer. This is also reinforced by the fact that following the onset of the crisis, the number of connected vertices gradually decreased in the networks of longer markets. In other words, weakening trust is also manifested in the decreasing number of counterparties. This is confirmed by the development of average degree and average path length, and by affinity functions.
Does Collusion Pay ... Does Antitrust Work

While the per se illegality of price fixing has been relatively uncontroversial compared to other aspects of antitrust policy, some argue that market forces can break down collusion, even without intervention by the authorities [20]. This argument raises the possibility that collusion is not profitable, and that antitrust policy is unnecessary and ineffective. Relatively few studies have examined either the impact of conspiracy on profitability, or the effectiveness of antitrust intervention [ 18, 276 77]. In one of these studies, Asch and Seneca [1] looked at a sample of 51 firms that were found guilty of, or that pleaded nolo contendere to, Sherman Act conspiracy charges during 1958-67. When these companies were compared to a random sample of 50 other firms, the authors found (to their surprise) that the conspiring firms were less profitable than those in the control group, other things equal. In another study, Sultan [20] observed a positive but insignificant relationship between price fixing meetings and turbine generator prices. In a subsequent simulation analysis, however, he found a significant impact of conspiracy: predicted turbine generator prices for a model including conspiracy effects were about nine percent higher than those for a model without conspiracy [20, 348]. In sum, the questions of conspiracy's impact and antitrust's effectiveness remain uncertain.
Enhancing the Practical Relevance of Research

This article seeks to encourage scholars to conduct research that is more relevant to the decisions faced by managers and policymakers, and addresses why research relevance matters, what relevance means in terms of a journal article, and how scholars can increase the relevance of their research. I define relevant research papers as those whose research questions address problems found (or potentially found) in practice and whose hypotheses connect independent variables within the control of practitioners to outcomes they care about using logic they view as feasible. I provide several suggestions for how scholars can enhance research relevance, including engaging practitioners in on‐campus encounters, at managerial conferences, and at crossover workshops; conducting site visits and practitioner interviews; working as a practitioner; and developing a practitioner advisory team. I describe several ways that scholars can convey relevant research insights into practitioners, including presenting at practitioner conferences, writing for practitioners in traditional crossover journals and in shorter pieces like op‐eds and blogs, and attracting the interest of those who write columns, blogs, and articles about research for practitioners. I conclude by describing a few ways that academic institutions can encourage more relevant research, focusing on journals, professional societies, and doctoral programs.
IN ETHNICALLY DIVERSE CARDIOLOGY PATIENTS

Results: Overall, significantly more patients screened positive for distress than depression (33% vs 27%, X5130.11, P5.00). The ANOVA comparing PHQ scores by ethnic group was significant, F(4, 867)54.46, P5.01 with Hispanics and Southeast Asians scoring significantly higher than East Asians. An ANOVA comparing IES scores by ethnic group was also significant, F(4, 760)53.63, P5.01. with Southeast Asians scoring significantly higher than Caucasians.
Gendered pathways to hukou status mobility in China

One of China’s most important institutions is its hukou system, a registry that assigns benefits to household members based on rural or urban location. Changes in hukou status are not easy, but hukou mobility from rural to urban status is an important path to upward social mobility in China. While this hukou conversion is well covered in the literature pertaining to other research, previous studies have failed to solve the puzzle as to why this status change is achieved more often by rural women than rural men, even though these women are less likely to have more education, Communist Party membership, or military service – the three best-known predictors of hukou mobility in China. I believe this lapse in previous studies is because researchers assume that mobility is gender-neutral and then only examine the predictors of hukou conversion that favor rural men. These studies overlook a crucial predictor that probably favors women – marriage – and thus their findings are subject to an omitted variable bias. Using the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2008, a nationally representative dataset with unique information on the hukou conversion process, this paper explicitly brings the gender perspective into hukou mobility studies and finds gender-specific pathways in the hukou conversion process. The patterns of gendered divergence in hukou mobility reflect how the socioeconomic status of rural migrants is shaped by the institutional, economic, and sociocultural factors that impose constraints and provide opportunities in China.
Theory of Current Transients in Planar Semiconductor Devices: Insights and Applications to Organic Solar Cells

© 2015 American Physical Society. Time-domain current measurements are widely used to characterize semiconductor material properties, such as carrier mobility, doping concentration, carrier lifetime, and the static dielectric constant. It is therefore critical that these measurements be theoretically understood if they are to be successfully applied to assess the properties of materials and devices. In this paper, we derive generalized relations for describing current-density transients in planar semiconductor devices at uniform temperature. By spatially averaging the charge densities inside the semiconductor, we are able to provide a rigorous, straightforward, and experimentally relevant way to interpret these measurements. The formalism details several subtle aspects of current transients, including how the electrode charge relates to applied bias and internal space charge, how the displacement current can alter the apparent free-carrier current, and how to understand the integral of a charge-extraction transient. We also demonstrate how the formalism can be employed to derive the current transients arising from simple physical models, like those used to describe charge extraction by linearly increasing voltage (CELIV) and time-of-flight experiments. In doing so, we find that there is a nonintuitive factor-of-2 reduction in the apparent free-carrier concentration that can be easily missed, for example, in the application of charge-extraction models. Finally, to validate our theory and better understand the different current contributions, we perform a full time-domain drift-diffusion simulation of a CELIV trace and compare the results to our formalism. As expected, our analytic equations match precisely with the numerical solutions to the drift-diffusion, Poisson, and continuity equations. Thus, overall, our formalism provides a straightforward and general way to think about how the internal space-charge distribution, the electrode charge, and the externally applied bias translate into a measured current transient in a planar semiconductor device.
Prevalence of Obesity Among Male Adolescents in Arar Saudi Arabia: Future Risk of Cardiovascular Disease

Background: Obesity in adolescence is crucial as it represents an important stage in human life. Dietary habits are greatly associated with lifestyle. Many reports suggested direct relationship between adolescent fatness and increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) which will be found in young adult population. Aim: Determine the prevalence of overweight and obesity among male adolescents in Arar city, Saudi Arabia (KSA). We estimated the future risk of developing cardiovascular diseases in this age‐group and its possible correlation to different lifestyles and dietary habits. Results: A total of 523 male students with a mean age of 16.7 ± 0.9 years participated in the current study in which 30.4% of those students were obese and 17.2% were overweight. A direct relationship was found between body weight and different dietary and lifestyle habits. The risk of CVD based on waist height ratio (WHtR) was found in 33.5% of participants (30.4% obese, 2.1% overweight and 1% normal weight); moreover, the risk of CVD was strongly related to different dietary and lifestyle habits. Conclusion: Overweight and obesity were high among adolescent male students in Arar, who became susceptible to the risk of CVD. Arar showed the highest rate of obesity all over KSA. Both obesity and risk of CVD were strongly related to bad dietary habits and lifestyle.
Memristive Device Based Circuits for Computation-in-Memory Architectures

Emerging computing applications (such as big-data and Internet-of-things) are extremely demanding in terms of storage, energy and computational efficiency, while todays architectures and device technologies are facing major challenges making them incapable to meet these demands. Computation-in-Memory (CIM) architecture based on memristive devices is one of the alternative computing architectures being explored to address these limitations. Enabling such architectures relies on the development of efficient memristive circuits being able to perform logic and arithmetic operations within the non-volatile memory core. This paper addresses memristive circuit designs for CIM architectures. It gives a complete overview of all designs, both for logic as well as arithmetic operations, and presents the most popular designs in details. In addition, it analyzes and classifies them, shows how they result in different CIM flavours and how these architectures distinguish themselves from traditional ones. The paper also presents different potential applications that could significantly benefit from CIM architectures, based on their kernel that could be accelerated.
Supporting the social media needs of emergency public information officers with human-centered design and development

Emergency response agencies, which operate as command-and-control organizations, push information to members of the public with too few mechanisms to support communication flowing back. Recently, information communication technologies (ICTs) such as social media have challenged this one-way model by allowing the public to participate in emergency response in new and unexpected ways. These developments place new pressure on emergency managers to release information over social media streams, monitor online activities during an emergency event, incorporate information provided by members of the public into response efforts, and engage in the public conversation around an event. Within US emergency response organizations, public information officers (PIOs) are in a unique position to use these emerging communication technologies. PIOs are responsible for communicating official response information to members of the public during an emergency event and ensuring that the information available in the public arena is accurate and complete. In this dissertation work, I examine how social media and the forms of public participation enabled by it are changing the role of the PIO. Based on this understanding, I explore ICT solutions for the PIO through human-centered methods that include the PIO in the design process. Finally, I design, implement, and evaluate a software application informed by this work that supports the social media needs of PIOs. With the aim of improving emergency response efforts, I demonstrate how empirically-based understandings of emergency management work can inform technology design, practice, and policy. This dissertation research provides the following contributions: (1) an examination of PIOs' roles and the sociotechnical environment in which they work; (2) a new model of PIO communication that takes into account new communication pathways that have been enabled by ICT; (3) a set of requirements for supporting PIO social media communication needs; (4) the design, implementation, and evaluation of a tool—the PIO Monitoring Application—that supports the social media monitoring, documenting, reporting, and organizing needs of PIOs during an emergency event; (5) a description of the likely future role of PIOs and how that role might be supported.
Essays on household employment, trade liberalisation, and income in developing countries

This thesis consists of three distinct essays on development economics. In chapter 2, I examine the effect of variation in the intensity of trade policy changes across industries over time on informal sector jobs in India, taking into account heterogeneous nature of the labour market regulations, using difference-in-difference identification approach and repeated cross sectional data for the period 1988 and 1994. The results suggest that the probability of informal employment increases in more exposed industries to trade liberalisation relative to less exposed industries, but industries experienced reduction in informality if more exposed industries are located in states with flexible labour regulations. Chapter 3 of the thesis examines the relationship between parental income, child labour and human capital accumulation in India, using the unanticipated trade liberalisation that created exogenous variation in industry specific tariffs over time as instrument. The variation in industry tariff leads to differences in earnings of parents across industries, and this provides a good setting for the identification of the causal effect of changes in parents’ income on child’s labour and schooling. Using instrumental variable (IV) estimation approach, I find positive income effect for children’s schooling but a negative effect on work, and the effect is larger for girls compared to boys. Chapter 4 examines the effect of income shocks on household welfare, taking into account various coping strategies adopted by households. Using the General Household Panel survey data in Nigeria for the period 2010-2012 and fixed effects estimation approach, idiosyncratic shocks are found to have little impact on consumption and the various riskcoping strategies play only limited roles in providing the much needed insurance to households in the face of shocks. Also, the effect of shocks vary according to households characteristics, such as whether the household-head is male or female, and being urban or rural dweller are crucial.
Degree-of-Freedom Strengthened Cascade Array for DOD-DOA Estimation in MIMO Array Systems

In spatial spectrum estimation, difference co-array can provide extra degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) for promoting parameter identifiability and parameter estimation accuracy. For the sake of acquiring as more DOFs as possible with a given number of physical sensors, we herein design a novel sensor array geometry named cascade array. This structure is generated by systematically connecting a uniform linear array (ULA) and a non-uniform linear array, and can provide more DOFs than some exist array structures but less than the upper-bound indicated by minimum redundant array (MRA). We further apply this cascade array into multiple input multiple output (MIMO) array systems, and propose a novel joint direction of departure (DOD) and direction of arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm, which is based on a reduced-dimensional weighted subspace fitting technique. The algorithm is angle auto-paired and computationally efficient. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations prove the advantages and effectiveness of the proposed array structure and the related algorithm.
Electricity Investment: An Evaluation of the New British Energy Policy and its Implications for the European Union

Traditionally, the electricity market has been characterized by vertically integrated monopolies due to the special features of this commodity, such as non-storability in the longer term, the physical laws requiring instant equation of supply and demand and the need for a complex and integrated network, controlled by a system operator. Despite these features, however, a wave of reforms promoting competition has been initiated in most markets, including the US and Europe, accompanied by regulation. In this paper we offer an overview of the current electricity policy debate taking place in the UK, which may pose the basis for a rethinking of the dominant policy paradigm. We review the technological and economic features of electricity markets, focusing on the rationales underlying the reforms put in place in the European Union and highlighting the impacts and potentially problematic consequences of liberalization in terms of investment and infrastructure, related to overarching economic, social and policy goals, focusing on the implications of environmental and climate-change mitigation policies as well as poverty reduction issues. The paper analyses the possible consequences, in terms of reforms and regulation of the electricity industry, of these new goals, suggesting that they may be relevant for the electricity industry in the EU.
Potassium and sodium microdomains in thin astroglial processes: A computational model study

A biophysical model that captures molecular homeostatic control of ions at the perisynaptic cradle (PsC) is of fundamental importance for understanding the interplay between astroglial and neuronal compartments. In this paper, we develop a multi-compartmental mathematical model which proposes a novel mechanism whereby the flow of cations in thin processes is restricted due to negatively charged membrane lipids which result in the formation of deep potential wells near the dipole heads. These wells restrict the flow of cations to “hopping” between adjacent wells as they transverse the process, and this surface retention of cations will be shown to give rise to the formation of potassium (K+) and sodium (Na+) microdomains at the PsC. We further propose that a K+ microdomain formed at the PsC, provides the driving force for the return of K+ to the extracellular space for uptake by the neurone, thereby preventing K+ undershoot. A slow decay of Na+ was also observed in our simulation after a period of glutamate stimulation which is in strong agreement with experimental observations. The pathological implications of microdomain formation during neuronal excitation are also discussed.
A further study of life expectancy by socioeconomic factors in the National Longitudinal Mortality Study.

OBJECTIVES The objective of this article is to provide estimates of life expectancy for White, Black, and Hispanic populations by socioeconomic factors. Effects of educational, income, employment, and marital status on life expectancy are presented and interpreted. DESIGN The National Longitudinal Mortality Study, consisting of a number of Current Population Surveys (CPS) linked to mortality information obtained from the National Death Index, provides data to construct life tables for various socioeconomic and demographic groups. Probabilities of death are estimated using a person-year approach to accommodate the aging of the population over 11 years of follow up. RESULTS Across various ethnicity-race-sex groups, longer life expectancy was observed for individuals with higher levels of education and income, and for those who were married and employed. The differences in life expectancy between levels of the socioeconomic characteristics tended to be larger for men than for women. Also, differences were found to be larger for the non-Hispanic Black population compared to the non-Hispanic White population. Hispanic White men exhibited patterns similar to those of non-Hispanic White and Black men. CONCLUSIONS For selected ethnicity-race-sex groups, the impact of socioeconomic variables on life expectancy is dramatic. The shorter life expectancy observed among the poor, the less educated, the unmarried, and those not in the labor force, highlights the impact of socioeconomic disadvantage on survival. Further, the substantial 14-year differential favoring the employed over those not in the labor force may be partially explained by unemployment due to poor health. Another reason may be that employed individuals have greater access to health care than do those not in the labor force.
Potential mechanism and drug candidates for sepsis-induced acute lung injury

The present study aimed to explore the mechanisms underlying sepsis-induced acute lung injury (ALI) and identify more effective therapeutic strategies to treat it. The gene expression data set GSE10474 was downloaded and assessed to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Principal component analysis, functional enrichment analysis and differential co-expression analysis of DEGs were performed. Furthermore, potential target drugs for key DEGs were assessed. A total of 209 DEGs, including 107 upregulated and 102 downregulated genes were screened. A number of DEGs, including zinc finger and BTB domain containing 17 (ZBTB17), heat shock protein 90 kDa β, member 1 (HSP90B1) and major histocompatibility complex, class II, DR α were identified. Furthermore, gene ontology terms including antigen processing and presentation, glycerophospholipid metabolism, transcriptional misregulation in cancer, thyroid hormone synthesis and pathways associated with diseases, such as asthma were identified. In addition, a differential co-expression network containing ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme E2 D4, putative and tubulin, γ complex associated protein 3 was constructed. Furthermore, a number of gene-drug interactions, including between HSP90B1 and adenosine-5′-diphosphate and radicicol, were identified. Therefore, DEGs, including ZBTB17 and HSP90B1, may be important in the pathogenesis of sepsis-induced ALI. Furthermore, drugs including adenosine-5′-diphosphate may be novel drug candidates to treat patients with ALI.
Development and Evaluation of 3 D Autoencoders for Feature Extraction Entwicklung und Evaluation

This thesis addresses the problem of aligning connectome data. The advancing scale in connectome reconstruction introduces new problems. One particular problem are spatial shifts and distortions in the image data that make it hard to come to a global alignment. This problem can be solved by splitting the data into small sub-cubes and creating the connectome for every sub-cube isolated and subsequently merge the sub-connectomes to the global connectome. In this thesis the alignment of each sub-cube is achieved with an image registration approach that had an accuracy of 84% on real data. Moreover, a 3D shape descriptor for feature extraction is presented. It can be used to extract rich features for later matching algorithms. It combines the ability of a recently introduced neural network architecture called PointNet to work on point cloud data with an autoencoder and a cost function that guarantees invariance to permutations in the input. The unsupervised classification task on ModelNet40 achieved an accuracy of 83.1% and showed that the shape descriptor is able to extract useful features.