Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study the impact of smile and tail dependence on the prices of European style bivariate equity and interest rate derivatives using Copulas and UVDD model

After the introduction of Black’s formula in 1973 numerous attempts have been made to price options more realistically, efficiently and consistently with market observations. Although smile effects can be incorporated into pricing European style bivariate options by following well-known methodologies, tail dependence is often neglected. This could be due to little need or interest to introduce tail dependence in pricing models and the great complexity introduced by adding this extra feature. But after the recent Credit Crisis, which started in 2007, various researchers and institutions are turning back-to-basics by understanding and revising the assumptions made within a model and trying to develop alternative ways to price more realistically the products which are more sensitive to joint behavior of underlying assets. The integration of new features into the existing models is also very demanding as it challenges the current market practices. This thesis seeks to develop a better understanding of tail dependence and also volatility smile by studying its impact on the prices of some selected Equity and Interest rate derivates, and comparing the results with the existing models. It also explores the ways to successfully integrate these features into the existing models and practices
WIRELESS NETWORK ( 3 G & 4 G )

Due to the increase in demand for speed, multimedia support and other resources, the wireless world is looking forward for a new generation technology to replace the third generation. This is where the fourth generation wireless communication comes into play. 4G wireless communication is expected to provide better speed, high capacity, lower cost and IP based services. The main aim of 4G wireless is to replace the current core technology with a single universal technology based on IP. Yet there are several challenges that inhibhit the progress of 4G and reasearchers throughout the world are contributing their ideas to solve these challenges. This project deals with understanding the features and challenges, the proposed architectural frameworks, multimedia support and multiple access schemes for 4G.
Transcription co-activator SAYP mediates the action of STAT activator

Jak/STAT is an important signaling pathway mediating multiple events in development. We describe participation of metazoan co-activator SAYP/PHF10 in this pathway downstream of STAT. The latter, via its activation domain, interacts with the conserved core of SAYP. STAT is associated with the SAYP-containing co-activator complex BTFly and recruits BTFly onto genes. SAYP is necessary for stimulating STAT-driven transcription of numerous genes. Mutation of SAYP leads to maldevelopments similar to those observed in STAT mutants. Thus, SAYP is a novel co-activator mediating the action of STAT.
A Dynamic Embedding Codec for Multiple Generations Compression

Wepresentanaudiocodecfor multiple,i.e.,cascaded, lossycompressionwithoutdegenerationof perceptual quality. Our codingschemeis basedon a previously reportedpsychoacousticembeddingstrategy which allows to transferencoding informationto all subsequent codecsin a cascade.In this paper , we developa new dynamicembeddingschemewhich allows anoptimalexploitationof a signal’s perceptual embeddingcapacity. As opposedto previousmethods,our approachallows to overcomeembeddingcapacityproblemsandpossiblesignaldistortions.Morover, it allows therealizationof a new embedding strategy which guaranteesthe perfectreconstructionof the first generationsignalafter an arbitrarynumberof encodingand decodingsteps. In the presentedMPEG-1 basedcodecimplementationsthe dynamicembeddingschemeis realizedby a specificbit reservoir technique.
Quality adjusted price indexes for discrete goods

This paper discusses the construction and computation of a quality adjusted price index when the commodities are differentiated products, such as different brands of automobiles and refrigerators. The method we focus on is an extension of Trajtenberg's approach. A key result obtained in the paper is that the evolution of the quality adjusted price index depends crucially on the fraction of consumers that do not purchase a variant of the product. The method is applied to data on automobile demand in Norway from 1994 to 2002. Both the Laspeyres index and the index based on hedonic regression yield lower estimates of the pricees from 1999 to 2002 than does the quality adjusted price index. This is mainly due to variations in the fraction of persons who purchase new automobiles.
Lower Bounds for the Size of Circuits of Bounded Depth in Basis F^; G

Preface The following is a translation of the preprint concerning the recent majority result by Razborov (to appear in Matematicheskie Zametki). It is my intent in this endeavor to be faithful to the original Russian text while illuminating details as required. Any additions that I make will be set oo in indented paragraphs and presented in a smaller type font. For example, This is an explicative comment on the text which was not contained in the original manuscript. In what follows, I have preserved the original notation, lemma and theorem ordering, and equation numbers. The ~ symbol is my own addition. I hope this presentation proves itself worthy of the original, and that those who read it gain a greater understanding of the result.
Formal Methods for Communication Services

We survey formal methods as they are applied to the development of communication services. We report on industrial and academic projects, consider different communication architectures and work related to the feature interaction problem. Based on our survey, the results reported in the literature and most importantly, on extensive discussions with industry, we investigate important industrial concerns and criticisms about the use of formal methods for the development of communication services. We report on a collaborative project between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Swisscom, Alcatel and Thomson in which these industrial concerns have been taken into account from the very beginning. The results of this project are currently being integrated into an industrial software development platform.
Role of shared information systems in distribution channels

Some manufacturers are reluctant to rationally share their Information Systems (ISs) with their dealers. Through a detailed case study analysis, we explore what could impel a manufacturer to overcome its reluctance by analysing its control problems (lack of direction; motivational; and personal limitations). We show that sharing ISs provides benefits derived from the collection of information in both quantity and quality that is in turn utilized by the manufacturer. It ensures that the manufacturer controls operations with proper information, seeing the market through dealers. Therefore, manufacturers could share ISs in order to proactively manage their distribution channels in a non-coercive way.
Neurokinin-1 Projection Cells in the Rat Dorsal Horn Receive Synaptic Contacts from Axons That Possess ␣ 2c -adrenergic Receptors

The ␣ 2C subclass of adrenergic receptor (␣ 2C-AR) mediates some of the antinociceptive actions of norepinephrine in the spinal cord. Axon terminals, which possess this receptor, are concentrated in the superficial dorsal horn and originate from spinal interneurons. We performed a series of combined tract-tracing and immunocytochemical studies to determine whether ␣ 2C-AR-immunoreactive axons target projection neurons that possess the neurokinin-1 (NK-1) receptor because such cells are likely to transmit nociceptive information to the brain. Spinomedullary neurons were labeled by stereotaxic injection of the B-subunit of cholera toxin (CTb) into the caudal ventrolateral medulla of three anesthetized adult rats. After 3 d, the animals were anesthetized again and fixed by perfusion. Sections were cut from midlumbar segments and reacted with antibodies to reveal ␣ 2C-ARs, CTb, and NK-1 receptors. Retrogradely labeled neurons possessing the NK-1 receptor (n ϭ 45) were examined with confocal microscopy to investigate their relationship with ␣ 2C-AR-immunoreactive axons. Numerous ␣ 2C-AR axons were apposed to cell bodies and proximal dendrites of cells in lamina I and also to distal dendrites that originate from labeled cell bodies in lamina III/IV. A combined confocal and electron microscopic method confirmed that these appositions were synaptic. Additional experiments showed that virtually all ␣ 2C-AR terminals in contact with labeled cells are also immunoreactive for the vesicular glutamate transporter 2 and therefore are glutamatergic. These data suggest that norepinephrine can modulate excitatory synaptic transmission from spinal interneurons to projection cells by acting at ␣ 2C-ARs. This could be one of the mechanisms that underlie the antinociceptive actions of norepinephrine.
A Comparison of Serial Simulation Frameworks for Simulation of Computer Architectures

The simulation of computer architecture is an important task in the development of new architectures. Ex-ploring novel architectures requires simulations which are ﬂexible, easy to produce, and high performance. The greater these characteristics, the more efﬁciently the de-sign space can be explored. A number of simulation frameworks exist which can assist the architect in creating new simulators. Four frameworks, CSIM, YACSIM, SystemC, and Enkidu are evaluated on the basis of ﬂexibility, productivity, and performance.
Helpmeet: The African American Pastor's Wife as an Extension of the Pastor in Pastoral Care and Counseling - A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study of the Ministry Helping Experiences of Black Pastors' Wives in Predominantly Black Churches

The position of pastor’s wife presents itself as a unique role. For the African American Pastor’s wife, this role takes on an even more interesting dynamic, considering the cultural back drop of the population many pastor’s wives serve. A hermeneutic phenomenological research study was conducted to understand the phenomena of helper among African American pastor’s wives who serve alongside their husbands in ministry, particularly in pastoral care and counseling. The study included a total of seven African American Pastors’ wives from the state of Texas. The pastors’ wives participated in structured interviews that were extensive in nature. Answering thirty-six questions with more than half being open-ended, the African American pastors’ wives in the study described their helping experiences serving alongside their husbands in ministry. The results of the study revealed that the concept of helper was deeply ingrained in the service of the majority of these women. Their helping and serving nature was facilitated by their desire to meet any potential need encountered in ministry. Their helping and serving revolved around a sense of being called by God to be a servant. Their driving force was found in their commitment to be a helpmate and the love they had for God, their husband’s, their congregation, and their church. The study’s results could be used to inform senior pastors and congregations on the need to verbalize and exemplify appreciation and celebration for the under-sung service of the pastor’s wife. The results of the study could also be a catalyst for the facilitation of financial provisions for resources that would assist the African American pastor’s wife in effectively helping and serving in the African American church.
Climate predictions of the twenty first century based on skill selected global climate models

A subset of global climate models from the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project 5 was used to explore the changes in temperature and rainfall under moderate and high climate change scenarios. We used downscaled model projections of daily minimum and maximum temperature and rainfall for the period 2040-2070 relative to the 1980-2010 reference period. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test (at 5 % level of significance) for differences among the three selected models in predicting the three variables under both climate change scenarios. Where significant differences were observed, we carried out multiple pair-wise comparison of the models using Dunnett's test. Overall, two of the three models showed insignificant differences (p˂0.05) in predicting minimum and maximum temperature while the other model deviated from the two. However, we identified a consistent warming trend across all the three models. The strength of global climate models in rainfall prediction was found to lie in their ability to simulate extremes, making the models relevant to sectors of the economy that are vulnerable to extreme rainfall such as drought and floods.
General rotating black holes in string theory: Greybody factors and event horizons

We derive the wave equation for a minimally coupled scalar field in the background of a general rotating five-dimensional black hole. It is written in a form that involves two types of thermodynamic variables, defined at the inner and outer event horizon, respectively. We model the microscopic structure as an effective string theory, with the thermodynamic properties of the left- and right-moving excitations related to those of the horizons. Previously known solutions to the wave equation are generalized to the rotating case, and their regime of validity is sharpened. We calculate the greybody factors and interpret the resulting Hawking emission spectrum microscopically in several limits. We find a U-duality-invariant expression for the effective string length that does not assume a hierarchy between the charges. It accounts for the universal low-energy absorption cross section in the general nonextremal case. {copyright} {ital 1997} {ital The American Physical Society}
The albedo properties of four clean stratocumulus clouds studied during the VOCALS-REX field campaign

Abstract. The VOCALS-REx field campaign which took place in 2008 used several platforms to investigate the persistent marine stratocumulus cloud deck off the Chilean and Peruvian coasts. VOCALS-UK was the UK component of the experiment, during which the FAAM BAe-146 aircraft gathered data in the stratocumulus cloud. It flew 13 research flights including investigations along 20° S transects. In this paper, the shortwave cloud albedo derived from the Cloud Droplet Probe is compared with the albedo measured from two shortwave radiometers. Four clean cloud segments were selected for investigation. The suitability of the δ-Eddington approximation as a method of calculating shortwave albedo is investigated and it is found to be acceptable (with a R 2 of 0.78) for solar zenith angles below 65 degrees.
A generalized Maxwell-slip friction model appropriate for control purposes

Under the increasing demand for more accurate high-performance motion systems, various friction models appropriate for control purpose of mechanical systems have been proposed. Most of these friction models formulate a heuristic dynamical model based on a few observed typical friction properties (e.g. a Stribeck curve for constant velocities and a hysteresis behaviour in presliding regime). This paper presents a novel friction model, called the generalized Maxwell-slip (GMS) model, appropriate for control purpose, based on a physically motivated friction model, i.e. a generic friction model which simulates the contact physics at asperity level. This paper compares the GMS model with some well-known existing models and shows that the novel model is capable of predicting accurately not only the presliding regime and Stribeck effect, but also friction lag, transition behavior, break-away force and the non-drifting ('stiction') property.
Sphingosine-1-phosphate receptors regulate individual cell behaviours underlying the directed migration of prechordal plate progenitor cells during zebrafish gastrulation

During vertebrate gastrulation, cells forming the prechordal plate undergo directed migration as a cohesive cluster. Recent studies revealed that E-cadherin-mediated coherence between these cells plays an important role in effective anterior migration, and that platelet-derived growth factor (Pdgf) appears to act as a guidance cue in this process. However, the mechanisms underlying this process at the individual cell level remain poorly understood. We have identified miles apart (mil) as a suppressor of defective anterior migration of the prospective prechordal plate in silberblick (slb)/wnt11 mutant embryos, in which E-cadherin-mediated coherence of cell movement is reduced. mil encodes Edg5, a sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) receptor belonging to a family of five G-protein-coupled receptors (S1PRs). S1P is a lipid signalling molecule that has been implicated in regulating cytoskeletal rearrangements, cell motility and cell adhesion in a variety of cell types. We examined the roles of Mil in anterior migration of prechordal plate progenitor cells and found that, in slb embryos injected with mil-MO, cells migrate with increased motility but decreased directionality, without restoring the coherence of cell migration. This indicates that prechordal plate progenitor cells can migrate effectively as individuals, as well as in a coherent cluster of cells. Moreover, we demonstrate that Mil regulates cell motility and polarisation through Pdgf and its intracellular effecter PI3K, but modulates cell coherence independently of the Pdgf/PI3K pathway, thus co-ordinating cell motility and coherence. These results suggest that the net migration of prechordal plate progenitors is determined by different parameters, including motility, persistence and coherence.
Supervised Hashing Based on the Dimensions’ Value Cardinalities of Image Descriptors

This letter presents a hashing method, in which the key idea is to exploit the discriminative power of image descriptors' dimensions' value cardinalities (DVC), that is, the number of distinct values that occur at the dimensions of the descriptors. DVC are an inherit characteristic of image descriptors, capable of boosting the search accuracy for approximate nearest neighbor search. However, previous DVC-based search strategies function in an unsupervised manner. To account for the fact that the semantic information of images can significantly leverage the search accuracy, this letter proposes an efficient supervised hashing strategy based on DVC. Given a set of training data, the proposed approach first calculates a consensus sparse matrix to consider both the DVC-based similarities and the sparse semantic information of images. Then, it formulates an objective function as a joint minimization problem, to jointly compute 1) the binary codes of the training data and 2) the projection matrix to map external queries to the Hamming space. The joint problem is solved via an efficient alternating optimization algorithm. Experiments on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over other state-of-the-art supervised hashing and DVC-based search strategies.
Towards Improving Synonym Options in a Text Modification Application

The Language Musesystem (LM) is an application that supports classroom teachers in text modification for middleand highschool learners who are non-native English speakers (NNES). The application performs linguistic analysis on classroom texts highlighting lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic features, indicating potential areas of linguistic complexity. One of the lexical feature options that LM offers are synonym candidates for words in a text. This study investigates how to improve the current synonym detection feature, using a distributional method that identifies similar words [Lin98, LC03] and WordNet. For single words and multi-word expressions, human judges annotated “acceptability” of synonym candidates from both resources. Humans attained high levels of agreement. Outcomes indicated that the distributional method and WordNet provide complementary options that together could provide improved resources.
Speech recognition of under-resourced languages using mismatched transcriptions

Mismatched crowdsourcing is a technique to derive speech transcriptions using crowd-workers unfamiliar with the language being spoken. This technique is especially useful for under-resourced languages since it is hard to hire native transcribers. In this paper, we demonstrate that using mismatched transcription for adaptation improves performance of speech recognition under limited matched training data conditions. In addition, we show that using data augmentation improves not only performance of monolingual system but also makes mismatched transcription adaptation more effective.
Using motion capture for interactive motion editing

Motion capture technology has been widely used for creating character motions. Motion editing is usually also required to adjust captured motions. Because character poses which include joint rotations, body positions, and orientations are high-dimensional data, it is difficult to manipulate character poses through a conventional mouse-based interface. We propose a motion editing system that uses a motion capture device. Our system can capture a motion and edit the captured motion using the same motion capture device. Our motion-capture-based interface can specify motion editing parameters such as time period, body part selection, end-effector position, pose, and motion segment. We conducted a user study to compare our system and conventional mouse-based motion editing system. The results showed that our interface is more efficient than the conventional interface.
Experimental Evaluation of a State-Of-The-Art Grounder

Many state-of-the-art declarative systems use a ground-and-solve approach, where the problem statement, expressed in a high-level language, is first grounded into a low-level representation. Next, a solver is used to search a solution for the low-level representation. In order to prevent a combinatorial blowup of the grounding, many intelligent techniques have been developed. In this paper we study in detail three such techniques (Lifted Unit Propagation, Grounding With Bounds, and Reduced Grounding) to get a better insight in their individual merits and their interactions. Our experiments take as benchmarks all the NP problems of the previous Answer Set Programming (ASP) competitions. The experiments are performed with IDP3 and all tools needed to run them are made publicly available. The first experiment discusses the impact of the three techniques on the "efficiency" of the grounding step, and on each other. In a second set of experiments we show that a reduction in the grounding size as a result of the application of these grounding techniques does not reduce the search space. We give an in-depth analysis of our results and discuss what this means for the development of grounding techniques for declarative systems.
Molecular cloning and characterization of OsLRK 1 encoding a putative receptor-like protein kinase from Oryza sati 6 a

A cDNA clone, OsLRK1, encoding a leucine-rich repeat receptor-like protein kinase was isolated from the immature panicles of rice. The OsLRK1 protein was composed of a leucine-rich extracellular ligand-binding domain, a membrane-spanning segment, and a cytoplasmic kinase domain. The OsLRK1 protein showed the highest sequence homology with Arabidopsis CLV1. The OsLRK1 transcript was present at a high level in immature panicles and at a low level in seedling shoots, immature seeds, and mature seeds, while no expression was detected in seedling roots and panicles at the heading stage. This expression pattern is similar to that of CLV1, which suggests that the rice clone may play a critical role in meristem development. The function of the rice OsLRK1 gene was studied by the transgenic approach. Antisense expression of OsLRK1 in rice plants resulted in increased numbers of flower organs, suggesting that the OsLRK1 gene is involved in floral meristem activity. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.