Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toward wireless Networked Control Systems: An experimental study on real-time communications in 802.11 WLANs

Networked control systems (NCSs) exploit a packet switching network to fulfill complex control tasks without cumbersome point-to-point wiring infrastructures. But their performances are greatly influenced by time-varying packet delays and losses due to the communication system. As a consequence, real time operating systems are usually employed at NCS nodes to timely serve events scheduled by control applications. So far NCS issues have been mainly investigated assuming a wired network infrastructure. Anyway the trend is toward wireless communications. For these reasons, this paper proposes a real-time communication architecture based on the leading wireless 802.11 technology and on the real-time networking framework RTnet. The QoS offered by the proposed system, in terms of packet loss ratio and end-to-end delay, has been experimentally evaluated by varying protocol parameters. Results show that a proper tuning of system parameters can ensure robust real-time wireless communications. Thus, the present work can be considered an important step toward the design of a wireless networked control system.
Social Structures and the Occupational Composition of Skilled Worker Immigrants to Canada

The individual decision to immigrate is made in the context of larger social structures that influence the composition of the economic immigrant population over time. Over the last 20 years, economic immigrants to Canada have faced changing selection policies, cycles of economic recession and growth, increased demand for information technology skills, women’s increased labour force participation and an aging labour force. Using data from Statistics Canada’s Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), this paper examines the flow of economic immigrants to Canada by their occupational composition from 1980 to 2000. Relative to Canadians, when all immigrants from this period are grouped together, their economic integration is slow and does not reach parity with Canadians before 16 years. Among skilled worker immigrants, whereas the earlier cohorts did well but did not improve much over time, later cohorts started off in a relatively worse position, but early indications show a fairly steep slope to better relative average earnings. These differences support the need to examine immigrant integration by both the class of immigrant and the context at the time of immigration.
Medicaid Managed Care and the Health Care Utilization of Foster Children

A recent trend in state Medicaid programs is the transition of vulnerable populations into Medicaid managed care (MMC) who were initially carved out of such coverage, such as foster children or those with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the impact of the transition of foster children from fee-for-service Medicaid coverage to MMC coverage on outpatient health care utilization. There is very little empirical evidence on the impact of managed care on the health care utilization of foster children because of the recent timing of these transitions as well as challenges associated with finding data sets large enough to contain a sufficient number of foster children for such analysis. Using administrative Medicaid data from Kentucky, we use retrospective difference-in-differences analysis to compare the outpatient utilization of foster children transitioned to MMC in one region of the state with foster children in the rest of the state who remained in fee-for-service coverage. We find that the transition to MMC led to a 4 percentage point reduction in the probability of having any monthly outpatient utilization. We also estimate that MMC leads to a reduction in outpatient spending.
Rank Recommendation-Based Coordinated Scheduling for Interference Mitigation in Cellular Networks

An important challenge of wireless networks is to boost the cell edge performance and enable multi-streams transmissions to cell edge users. Interference mitigation techniques relying on multiple antennas and coordination among cells are nowadays heavily studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel type of coordination for OFDMA networks relying on multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver where the transmission ranks, i.e. the number of transmitted streams, and the user scheduling in all cells are jointly optimized in order to maximize a network utility function accounting for fairness among users. A distributed coordinated scheduler relying on an interference pricing mechanism and a master-slave architecture is introduced. The proposed scheme is operated based on the user report of a recommended rank for the interfering cells. It incurs a very low feedback overhead and enables an efficient link adaptation. It is moreover robust to practical system impairments and is applicable to both open-loop and closed-loop MIMO operations. A cell edge performance gain of 20% over uncoordinated LTE-Advanced is shown through system level simulations.
The effects of wireless communication failures on group behavior of mobile sensors

In social groups, complex group behavior often emerges from the local interaction among simple individuals. Throughout this study, we assume that individuals can access information by way of wireless communication. In this case, individuals are able to exchange accurate information with each other as long as wireless communication links between them are allowed. Subsequently, we propose a consensus decision-making model for studying the consistency of group behavior considering both the wireless communication range and the probability of successful communication. Our simulation results show the following conclusions: i consistency of the group behavior is absolutely achieved, when the wireless communication range is large enough and the probability of successful communication p=1; ii when the wireless communication range is large enough, the consistency of the group behavior is still achieved as long as p is bigger than some small constant; and iii the law in iii remains applicable when the number of individuals in the group changes. Therefore, one may infer that consistency of group behavior in mobile sensors is much more related to the extent of distribution of obtainable information than the amount of information, where the extent of distribution of obtainable information means that each individual can obtain information from wider area or from those individuals who are not only in its local area. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Earnings news and the firm size effect

Abstract. Prior studies on the firm size effect either do not adequately control for earnings or ignore the potential implication of earnings news for the firm size effect. Thus, they implicitly assume that the firm size effect is identical across all firms irrespective of earnings news. This study provides additional empirical evidence on the firm size effect by taking earnings news into account. The results indicate that the firm size effect persists even when earnings news, measured by the sign and magnitude of unexpected earnings, is controlled. The firm size effect, however, is pronounced only for firms with â€œgoodâ€ earnings news, but not for firms with â€œbadâ€ earnings news. Possible implications of these findings are explored. RA©sumA©. Les A©tudes qui ont A©tA© rA©alisA©es jusqu'A maintenant sur l'incidence de la taille de l'entreprise ne contrA´lent pas adA©quatement la variable bA©nA©fices ou ignorent les consA©quences potentielles de l'information relative aux bA©nA©fices sur l'incidence de la taille de l'entreprise. Elles supposent donc implicitement que l'incidence de la taille de l'entreprise est la mAame pour toutes les entreprises, peu importe l'information relative aux bA©nA©fices. La prA©sente A©tude ajoute aux preuves empiriques concernant l'incidence de la taille de l'entreprise, en tenant compte de l'inforrmation relative aux bA©nA©fices. Les rA©sultats de cette A©tude rA©vA¨lent que l'incidence de la taille de l'entreprise persiste, mAame lorsque l'information relative aux bA©nA©fices, mesurA©e en fonction de l'indication de bA©nA©fices imprA©vus et de leur ampleur, est contrA´lA©e. L'incidence de la taille de l'entreprise est toutefois marquA©e seulement dans le cas des entreprises pour lesquelles l'information relative aux bA©nA©fices est Â« positive Â», et non dans le cas des entreprises pour lesquelles l'information relative aux bA©nA©fices est Â« nA©gative Â». L'auteur explore les consA©quences possibles des rA©sultats de l'A©tude.
Application of MACD and RVI Indicators as Functions of Investment Strategy Optimization on the Financial Market

The determination of trends and prediction of stock prices is one of the main tasks of the MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) and the RVI (Relative Volatility Index) indicators of the technical analysis. The research covers the sample representing stocks which are continually traded on the financial market of the Republic of Serbia. Subject of this research is to determine the possibility of MACD and RVI indicators application in investment decision making processes on the financial market of the Republic of Serbia. The main goal of the research is to identify the most profitable parameters of the MACD and RVI indicators as functions of investment strategy optimization on the financial market. The main hypothesis of the research is that the application of the MACD and RVI indicators of technical analysis significantly contributes to investment strategy optimization on the financial market. The applied methodology during the research includes analyses, synthesis and statistical/ mathematical methods with special focus on the method of moving averages. Research results indicate significant possibilities in application of MACD and RVI indicators of technical analysis as functions of making optimum decisions on investment. According to the obtained results it is concluded that the application of the optimized MACD and RVI indicators of technical analysis in decision making process on investing on the financial market significantly contributes maximization of profitability on investments.
Causality between FDI Inflows and Export with Reference to India: An Analysis

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is the important means of promoting export. There has been an increase in the FDI in India depicting that Indian economy is an attractive place to invest in and operate business. In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the causal relationship between FDI and export in India. Using data from 1990 to 2013 for FDI and export from DBIE (website of RBI), the analysis is done using unit root testing, Johansen cointegration test and Granger causality test through Eviews. The paper concludes that neither FDI Granger-causes export nor export Granger-causes FDI.
Memetic clustering based on particle swarm optimizer and K-means

This paper proposes an efficient memetic clustering algorithm (MCA) for clustering based on particle swarm optimizer (PSO) and K-means. Particularly, PSO is used as a global search to allow fast exploration of the candidate cluster centers. PSO has strong ability to find high quality solutions within tractable time, but it suffers from slow-down convergence as the swarm approaching optima. K-means, achieving fast convergence to optimum solutions, is utilized as local search to fine-tune the solutions of PSO in the framework of memetic algorithm. The performance of MCA is evaluated on four synthetic datasets and three high-dimensional gene expression datasets. Comparison study to K-means, PSO, and PSO-KM (jointed PSO and K-means) indicates that MCA is capable of identifying cluster centers more precisely and robustly than the other counterpart algorithms by taking advantage of both PSO and K-means.
The truly remarkable universality of half a standard deviation: confirmation through another look

In this issue of Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, Farivar, Liu, and Hays present their findings in ‘Another look at the half standard deviation estimate of the minimally important difference in health-related quality of life scores (hereafter referred to as ‘Another look’) [1]. These researchers have re-examined the May 2003 Medical Care article ‘Interpretation of changes in health-related quality of life: the remarkable universality of half a standard deviation’ (hereafter referred to as ‘Remarkable’) [2] in the hope of supporting their hypothesis that the minimally important difference in health-related quality of life measures is undoubtedly closer to 0.3 standard deviations than 0.5 [3]. Nonetheless, despite their extensive wranglings with the exclusion of many articles that we included in our review; the inclusion of articles that we did not include in our review; and the recalculation of effect sizes using the absolute value of the mean differences, in our opinion, the results of the ‘Another look’ article confirm the same findings in the ‘Remarkable’ paper.
A Use of Double Integration in Sigma Delta Modulation

Sigma delta modulation is viewed as a technique that employs integration and feedback to move quantization noise out of baseband. This technique may be iterated by placing feedback loop around feedback loop, but when three or more loops are used the circuit can latch into undesirable overloading modes. In the desired mode, a simple linear theory gives a good description of the modulation even when the quantization has only two levels. A modulator that employs double integration and two-level quantization is easy to implement and is tolerant of parameter variation. At sampling rates of 1 MHz it provides resolution equivalent to 16 bit PCM for voiceband signals. Digital filters that are suitable for converting the modulation to PCM are also described.
Genetic variation at the delta‐sarcoglycan (SGCD) locus elevates heritable sympathetic nerve activity in human twin pairs

The Syrian Cardiomyopathic Hamster (BIO‐14.6/53.58 strains) model of cardiac failure, resulting from naturally occurring deletion at the SGCD (delta‐sarcoglycan) locus, displays widespread disturbances in catecholamine metabolism. Rare Mendelian myopathy disorders of human SGCD occur, although common naturally occurring SGCD genetic variation has not been evaluated for effects on human norepinephrine (NE) secretion. This study investigated the effect of SGCD genetic variation on control of NE secretion in healthy twin pairs. Genetic associations profiled SNPs across the SGCD locus. Trait heritability (h2) and genetic covariance (pleiotropy; shared h2) were evaluated. Sympathochromaffin exocytosis in vivo was probed in plasma by both catecholamines and Chromogranin B (CHGB). Plasma NE is substantially heritable (p = 3.19E‐16, at 65.2 ± 5.0% of trait variance), sharing significant (p < 0.05) genetic determination with circulating and urinary catecholamines, CHGB, eGFR, and several cardio‐metabolic traits. Participants with higher pNE showed significant (p < 0.05) differences in several traits, including increased BP and hypertension risk factors. Peak SGCD variant rs1835919 predicted elevated systemic vascular compliance, without changes in specifically myocardial traits. We used a chimeric‐regulated secretory pathway photoprotein (CHGA‐EAP) to evaluate the effect of SGCD on the exocytotic pathway in transfected PC12 cells; in transfected cells, expression of SGCD augmented CHGA trafficking into the exocytotic regulated secretory pathway. Thus, our investigation determined human NE secretion to be a highly heritable trait, influenced by common genetic variation within the SGCD locus. Circulating NE aggregates with BP and hypertension risk factors. In addition, coordinate NE and CHGB elevation by rs1835919 implicates exocytosis as the mechanism of release.
Should Preferences Count

As a normative discipline, welfare and therefore resource economics postulates that preferences should count in the allocation of resources. This postulate cannot be justified in relation to choice or to well-being. The normative qualities that attend choices-e.g., accountability, responsibility, commitment, and consent-explain why choices should count, but not preferences, which are not actions but theoretical entities constructed ad hoc from stipulated descriptions of behavior they are then said to explain. The satisfaction of preferences, moreover, has no demonstrable relation with any conception of welfare or well-being not simply defined in terms of it.
A Non-linear Filtering Approach to Stochastic Volatility Models with an Application to Daily Stock Returns

This paper develops a new method for the analysis of stochastic volatility (SV) models. Since volatility is a latent variable in SV models, it is difficult to evaluate the exact likelihood. In this paper, a non-linear filter which yields the exact likelihood of SV models is employed. Solving a series of integrals in this filter by piecewise linear approximations with randomly chosen nodes produces the likelihood, which is maximized to obtain estimates of the SV parameters. A smoothing algorithm for volatility estimation is also constructed. Monte Carlo experiments show that the method performs well with respect to both parameter estimates and volatility estimates. We illustrate the method by analysing daily stock returns on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Since the method can be applied to more general models, the SV model is extended so that several characteristics of daily stock returns are allowed, and this more general model is also estimated.
Delinquent behavior and emerging substance use in the MTA at 36 months: prevalence, course, and treatment effects.

OBJECTIVE To compare delinquent behavior and early substance use between the children in the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD (MTA; N = 487) and those in a local normative comparison group (n = 272) at 24 and 36 months postrandomization and to test whether these outcomes were predicted by the randomly assigned treatments and subsequent self-selected prescribed medications. METHOD Most MTA children were 11 to 13 years old by 36 months. Delinquency seriousness was coded ordinally from multiple measures/reporters; child-reported substance use was binary. RESULTS Relative to local normative comparison group, MTA children had significantly higher rates of delinquency (e.g., 27.1% vs. 7.4% at 36 months; p = .000) and substance use (e.g., 17.4% vs. 7.8% at 36 months; p = .001). Children randomized to intensive behavior therapy reported less 24-month substance use than other MTA children (p = .02). Random effects ordinal growth models revealed no other effects of initial treatment assignment on delinquency seriousness or substance use. By 24 and 36 months, more days of prescribed medication were associated with more serious delinquency but not substance use. CONCLUSIONS Cause-and-effect relationships between medication treatment and delinquency are unclear; the absence of associations between medication treatment and substance use needs to be re-evaluated at older ages. Findings underscore the need for continuous monitoring of these outcomes as children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder enter adolescence.
A Lintnerian Linear Accounting Valuation Model

This paper develops and tests a linear valuation accounting model based on Lintner's (1956) dividend model. Two test methodologies are employed on a firm-level time-series basis. First, abstracting from the nonlinear relationships among the parameters, the information dynamic and valuation equation are estimated by linear OLS and linear SUR. The estimated equations are evaluated by reference to the sign and value predictions of the model. Second, recognizing the underlying nonlinear relationships among the parameters, the Lintnerian system of equations is estimated by nonlinear OLS and nonlinear SUR. All parameters are estimated endogenously at the firm level, including each firm's cost of capital. The resulting parameter estimates are evaluated for statistical and, in the case of costs of capital, for economic significance. Results of the first (linear) methodology by and large confirm the validity of the Lintner model. The signs and values of the estimated coefficients are consistent with the predictions of the Lintner model except that the (mean) estimated book value coefficient in the price equation exceeds its theoretical upper bound. The results of the second (nonlinear) methodology are somewhat more problematic. Although the Lintner model yields statistically significant firm-level costs of capital, these estimates are not economically significant for the sample period.
Political rights, civil liberties, and the black market premium on foreign exchange: Evidence from developing countries

Abstract Investigating the impact of institutional factors on macroeconomic variables has gained momentum in recent years. In this paper we investigate the impact of political rights and civil liberties on the black market premium on foreign exchange. After taking account of other important determinants of the black market premium, we show that less political rights and less civil liberties result in a higher black market premium. The empirical results are based on cross-sectional and panel regressions using data from 63 developing countries over the period 1972–1998.
Filter Tests in Nasdaq Stocks

This study examines the performance of filter and dual moving-average crossover trading rules applied to Nasdaq stocks. We find that trading rules conditioned on a stock's past price history perform poorly, but those based on past movements in the overall Nasdaq Index tend to earn statistically significant abnormal returns. Since there is a high level of transaction costs in this market, these abnormal returns are generally not economically significant. However, there are indications that pursuing some of these strategies can be worthwhile in carefully selected subsets of stocks. Copyright 1999 by MIT Press.
Development of biotechnology clusters: the case of Daedeok Science Town, Korea

The development of biotechnology is particularly challenging to developing countries that must transform their manufacturing-based economies to knowledge-based ones despite the high development risk, lengthy development times, and technological dominance of a few developed countries. Some are implementing clusters to develop the biotechnology industry. In this study, we examined the emergence of the biotechnology cluster in Daedeok Science Town, Korea, through a social network analysis of collaborations in innovation; in addition, we examine the association of economic performance and the network properties of small start-ups in the Daedeok cluster. We conclude the report with policy implications for countries with an economic agenda to develop the biotechnology industry.
Laro: Lazy repartitioning for graph workloads on heterogeneous clusters

Distributed graph processing frameworks attempt to eliminate workload imbalance among computing nodes. However, this expectation is generally challenged by underlying heterogeneous nodes and fluctuating graph workloads at runtime. This paper proposes Laro, a graph processing system using dynamic graph repartitioning that collects the actual processing times from all nodes, then reconstructs a vertices distribution with minimal migration costs in every iteration. We manifest that the Variation Coefficient of processing times is a critical metric to quantitatively characterize the workload imbalance among nodes at each iteration. Laro also presents a lazy repartitioning algorithm to improve migration efficiency. Laro has been implemented by extending GPS, a popular repartitioning-featured graph processing system. Our evaluation using real-world graphs shows that, by achieving more balanced workload distributions at runtime, Laro derives maximal speedup of 1.82x and 1.41x over the static Skewed Hash and the dynamic GPS respectively.