Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International and innovation activities of firms

The economic environment in which a firm operates is constantly changing. This thesis contains three essays to examine how firms adapt their innovation and international activities to a variety of external changes. The first paper, “Information Frictions and the Law of One Price: ‘When the States and the Kingdom became United’”, shows how information frictions affect the exporting behavior of merchants, exploiting a unique historical experiment: the transatlantic telegraph, established in 1866. Using a newly collected data set on cotton trade based on historical newspapers, I find that information frictions result in large and volatile deviations from the Law of One Price. There are also real effects, because exports respond to information about foreign demand shocks, and average exports increase after the telegraph and become more volatile. I provide a model in which exporters use the latest news about a foreign market to forecast expected selling prices when their exports arrive at the destination. Their forecast error is smaller and less volatile the more recent the available information. The welfare gains from the telegraph are estimated to be around 8% of annual export value. The second paper, “Survive another day: Using changes in the composition of investments to measure the cost of credit constraints” is joint work with Luis Garicano. We introduce a novel empirical strategy to measure the credit shocks that were triggered by the recent financial crisis: Theoretically, we show that credit shocks affect long term investments by more than short term ones. Credit shocks can then be measured within firms by the relative drop of long run relative to short run investments; using firm-times-year fixed effects to absorb idiosyncratic demand shocks. Using data on Spanish manufacturing firms we find that credit constraints are equivalent to an additional tax rate of around 11% on the longest lived investment. While the trade literature has established a positive impact of globalization on the productivity of firms, there is lacking consensus about the underlying mechanism at work: Trade theory focuses on a market access mechanism, but empirical papers point out that import competition matters as well. The third paper, “The roles of import competition and export opportunities for technical change”, conducts a “horse race” between the two mechanisms. Using Spanish firm level data, I find robust evidence that access to export markets leads to productivity increases, but only for firms that were already highly productive before. The evidence on import competition is weaker and very heterogeneous, pointing towards an omitted variable bias in earlier papers.
NenUFAR: Instrument description and science case

NenuFAR is both a giant extension of the LOFAR and a large standalone instrument in the low-frequency range (10-85 MHz). It was designed in Nançay with national and international collaboration. Antenna radiators were modeled on the LWA antenna design whereas preamplifiers were designed in France. Antennas will be distributed in 96 mini-arrays of 19 dual-polarized elements, densely covering a disk of 400 m in diameter. A few mini-arrays are expected to lie at distances of 2-3 km. A silent control-command system was designed, and the computer dialog with LOFAR defined. Receivers will include the LOFAR backend, a local beamformer and a local correlator. NenuFAR is in construction in Nançay and it was recently granted by the SKA office the official label of SKA pathfinder. Its exploitation will expand the scope of LOFAR scientific studies as well as permit new studies, preparing for SKA science. The NenuFAR concept has many points in common with GURT (the Giant Ukrainian Radio Telescope), with which it shares some technical studies, an its exploitation will benefit from a coordination with UTR-2. We describe the instrument, technical developments and science case.
BezelCopy: an efficient cross-application copy-paste technique for touchscreen smartphones

Copy-Paste (CP) operations on touchscreen smartphones are not as easy to perform as compared with similar operations on desktop computers. The smaller screen size and input area make both text selection and application switching more difficult to perform. To enable faster copy-paste on touchscreen smartphones, we introduce BezelCopy, a copy-paste technique that uses a bezel-swipe gesture to determine a rough area of interest in the document. Chosen text is magnified in a new panel to enable fast and precise selection. With the new panel, users can perform easy tap-and-drag gestures to select the exact content, and tap the application icon on the bottom of the panel to paste it to the target application. Users can further adjust the location of the pasted text in the target application using drag and drop. We conducted two experiments to compare the performance of BezelCopy with alternative approaches, and our results show that BezelCopy outperform existing copy-paste techniques for a number of commonly performed copy-paste tasks.
Pragma-based floating-to-fixed point conversion for the emulation of analog behavioral models

Design teams have embraced hardware verification accelerators that enable pre-silicon firmware development. However, emulation is inapplicable for large mixed signal designs. We introduce a methodology that allows for the reuse of analog behavioral models in verification accelerators. We provide a set of pragmas that allow real number models to be converted to fixed point and synthesized and introduce an approach for demonstrating the correctness of these models. We demonstrated this by emulating a large cellular modem within 3,000× the speed of real life, a 3,000,000× speedup over analog simulations, and a 120× speedup over RTL simulations.
A Model of Monetarism

The subsequent analysis provides a ‘model of monetarism’, summarizing the characteristic properties of monetarist reasoning. The focus is not on Friedman alone, but includes the contributions of Karl Brunner and Allan Meltzer, who - in contrast to Friedman - placed particular emphasis on the details of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. The following rational reconstruction integrates the major themes of monetarism into a unified framework, which allows me to check for internal consistency, and to evaluate the place of monetarism in the history of economic analysis. The paper investigates the qualitative difference between monetarist and Old Keynesian analysis. It is shown that without Friedman’s empirical proposition about the interest-elasticity of the money demand function, monetarism and IS-LM Keynesianism are qualitatively equivalent. In particular, the monetarist transmission mechanism does not support the monetarist propositions about the relative effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy. Friedman’s attempt to legitimate the return to one-equation macroeconomics is critically discussed (his restatement of the quantity theory of money), in particular his claim that the demand for real balances as a stable functional relationship is sufficient to refurbish the dictum that changes in nominal income are always and everywhere monetary phenomena.
Limited space oriented optimized storage protocol in autonomous mobile cloud

The autonomous mobile cloud could provide available storage services to cloud users in a localized geographical area. Maintaining the data persistence is a major challenge as mobile nodes always have limited storage space. In this paper, a limited space oriented optimized storage protocol is proposed and named as SLAMS protocol. It keeps K copies for each data block through periodic communications between mobile nodes and stores data block copies into those nodes which have larger free storage space. The protocol design of SLAMS are presented in detail. The simulation results show that, compared with current major solution Phoenix, our SLAMS protocol has less data loss rate, shorter time of convergence, and less overhead of data block storage. Besides, the SLAMS protocol could effectively increase the probability of K copies for each data block in case that mobile nodes have limited storage space.
Unifying consciousness with explicit knowledge

A. Abstract In this chapter we establish what it is for something to be implicit or explicit. The approach to implicit knowledge is taken from Dienes and Perner (1999), which relates the implicit-explicit distinction to knowledge representations. What it is for a representation to represent something implicitly or explicitly is defined and those concepts are applied to knowledge. Next we will show how maximally explicit knowledge is naturally associated with consciousness. We argue that each step in a hierarchy of explicitness is related to the unity of consciousness and that fully explicit knowledge should be associated with a sense of being part of a unified consciousness. New evidence indicating the extent of people's implicit or explicit knowledge in an implicit learning paradigm will then be presented. This evidence will indicate people can be consistently correct in dealing with a context-free grammar while lacking any knowledge that they have knowledge. 1. Introduction In this chapter we will show how an understanding of the nature of explicit knowledge helps show why consciousness should have an apparently unified character. We start by taking a representational theory of the mind, specifying how representations can have both explicit and an implicit content. When this approach is applied to what it is to have knowledge a hierarchy of ways in which knowledge can be explicit is produced. Each step in the hierarchy has relevance for the production and appreciation of a unified consciousness. Implicit knowledge-for example, the implicit knowledge produced by learning some artificial grammars-does not fully take part in this unity by virtue of its implicitness. We will end by considering a specific new experiment illustrating how knowledge of an artificial grammar can be shown to be implicit by our framework. That, at least, is the argument we now try to develop, starting from the beginning: The nature of representation. 2. The implicit and explicit content of representations In order to be clear about what has been implicitly or explicitly represented, we need a theory of what determines a representation's content. have turned to functional theories of representations, i.e. the content of a representation is determined by the functional role the representation plays. Previously we illustrated this approach with Dretske's (1988) account of representation: If A has the function of indicating B, then A represents B. For example, a bee dance has the function of indicating the location of nectar, so the dance represents the …
Interaction between Stock and Foreign Exchange Markets Under the Floating Regime: Evidence from Thailand

This paper explores the nature of the linkage between foreign exchange market and the Thai stock market using monthly data of exchange rate and stock prices during July 1997 to June 2010. The results from cointegration test in a bivariate framework show no long-run relationship between stock prices and nominal effective exchange rate. The noncausality test is thus employed to investigate the existence and direction of causality. It is found that there exists positive bidirectional causality between nominal effective exchange rate and stock prices. This evidence supports the flow-oriented theory, which indicates a positive linkage between stock prices and exchange rate. In addition, the results from a bivariate constant conditional correlation autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic model and the standard Granger causality test in multivariate framework indicate the existence of bidirectional causality between stock return and exchange rate return. Additionally, exchange rate return volatility does not cause stock return to decrease.
Empirical policy functions as benchmarks for evaluation of dynamic models

We describe a set of model-dependent statistical benchmarks that can be used to estimate and evaluate dynamic models of firms' investment and financing. The benchmarks characterize the empirical counterparts of the models' policy functions. These empirical policy functions (EPFs) are intuitively related to the corresponding model, their features can be estimated very easily and robustly, and they describe economically important aspects of firms' dynamic behavior. We calculate the benchmarks for a traditional trade-off model using Compustat data and use them to estimate some of its parameters. We present two Monte Carlo exercises, one that shows EPF-based estimation has lower average bias and lower variance than traditional moment-based estimation and another that shows EPF-based tests are better at detecting misspecification.
Feature Space Transformations in Document Clustering

Document clustering is a part of information retrieval, where documents written in natural language are being assigned to different groups based on some criteria. In the current case, documents with similar topics are collected. As there are many methods and additional noise filtering techniques to do this, this paper focuses on the composition of such transformations and on the comparison of the configurations build from a subset of these transformations as tiles of the whole procedure. 5 tile methods (term filtering, frequency quantizing, principal component analysis (PCA), term clustering and document clustering of course) are used. These are compared based on the maximal achieved F-measure and time consumption to find the best composition
Characterization of cDNA Encoding Resistance Gene-Like Sequences in Buchlo ’ dactyloides

1 Molecular Biotechnology  2006 Humana Press Inc. All rights of any nature whatsoever reserved. ISSN: 1073–6085/Online ISSN: 1559–0305/2006/34:X/000–000/$30.00 *Author to whom all correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed. 1Sabanci University, Biological Science and Bioengineering Program, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Science, Orhanlı, 34956, Tuzla/Istanbul, Turkey. E-mail: budak@sabanciuniv.edu. 2Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE 68583. Abstract Molecular Characterization of cDNA Encoding Resistance Gene-Like Sequences in Buchlo ’ dactyloides
Stereo-Vision-Based Pedestrian's Intention Detection in a Moving Vehicle

We present a method to detect starting, stopping and bending in intentions of pedestrians from a moving vehicle based on stereo-vision. The method focuses on urban scenarios where these pedestrian movements are common and may result in critical situations. Pedestrian intentions are determined by means of an image-based motion contour histogram of oriented gradient descriptor. It is based on silhouettes gathered from stereo data and does not require any compensation of appearance changes resulting from the ego-motion of a vehicle. Nevertheless, it covers small movements indicating a pedestrian's intention. A linear support vector machine with probabilistic estimates is used for classification. We evaluated our method on the publicly available Daimler Pedestrian Path Prediction Benchmark Dataset containing detections of a stateof-the-art pedestrian detector. We detect a pedestrian's stopping intention from 125 ms to 500 ms before standing still within an accuracy range of 80% to 100%. Bending in is detected from 320 ms to 570 ms after a first visible lateral body movement in the same accuracy range. The intention to cross the road from standing still (starting) is detected 250 ms after the first visible motion and, therefore, within the first step with an accuracy of 100%.
Using machine learning to infer constraints for product lines

Variability intensive systems may include several thousand features allowing for an enormous number of possible configurations, including wrong ones (e.g. the derived product does not compile). For years, engineers have been using constraints to a priori restrict the space of possible configurations, i.e. to exclude configurations that would violate these constraints. The challenge is to find the set of constraints that would be both precise (allow all correct configurations) and complete (never allow a wrong configuration with respect to some oracle). In this paper, we propose the use of a machine learning approach to infer such product-line constraints from an oracle that is able to assess whether a given product is correct. We propose to randomly generate products from the product line, keeping for each of them its resolution model. Then we classify these products according to the oracle, and use their resolution models to infer cross-tree constraints over the product-line. We validate our approach on a product-line video generator, using a simple computer vision algorithm as an oracle. We show that an interesting set of cross-tree constraint can be generated, with reasonable precision and recall.
Association of Basal Hyperglucagonemia with Impaired Glucagon Counterregulation in Type 1 Diabetes

Glucagon counterregulation (GCR) protects against hypoglycemia, but is impaired in type 1 diabetes (T1DM). A model-based analysis of in vivo animal data predicts that the GCR defects are linked to basal hyperglucagonemia. To test this hypothesis we studied the relationship between basal glucagon (BasG) and the GCR response to hypoglycemia in 29 hyperinsulinemic clamps in T1DM patients. Glucose levels were stabilized in euglycemia and then steadily lowered to 50 mg/dL. Glucagon was measured before induction of hypoglycemia and at 10 min intervals after glucose reached levels below 70 mg/dL. GCR was assessed by CumG, the cumulative glucagon levels above basal; MaxG, the maximum glucagon response; and RIG, the relative increase in glucagon over basal. Analysis of the results was performed with our mathematical model of GCR. The model describes interactions between islet peptides and glucose, reproduces the normal GCR axis and its impairment in diabetes. It was used to identify a control mechanism consistent with the observed link between BasG and GCR. Analysis of the clinical data showed that higher BasG was associated with lower GCR response. In particular, CumG and RIG correlated negatively with BasG (r = −0.46, p = 0.012 and r = −0.74, p < 0.0001 respectively) and MaxG increased linearly with BasG at a rate less than unity (p < 0.001). Consistent with these results was a model of GCR in which the secretion of glucagon has two components. The first is under (auto) feedback control and drives a pulsatile GCR and the second is feedback independent (basal secretion) and its increase suppresses the GCR. Our simulations showed that this model explains the observed relationships between BasG and GCR during a three-fold simulated increase in BasG. Our findings support the hypothesis that basal hyperglucagonemia contributes to the GCR impairment in T1DM and show that the predictive power of our GCR animal model applies to human pathophysiology in T1DM.
Symmetry Parameters of CSS Sources: Evidence of Fuelling?

Abstract The compact steep spectrum (CSS) and gigahertz peaked spectrum (GPS) sources are widely believed to be young radio sources, with ages ≤106 yr. If the activity in the nucleus is fuelled by the supply of gas, one might find evidence of this gas by studying the structural and polarisation characteristics of CSS sources and their evolution through this gas. In this paper we discuss some of the possible ‘smoking-gun’ evidence of this gas which may have triggered and fuelled the radio source.
The Associations between Various Ectopic Visceral Adiposity and Body Surface Electrocardiographic Alterations: Potential Differences between Local and Remote Systemic Effects

Background The associations between pericardial adiposity and altered atrial conduction had been demonstrated. However, data comparing differential effects of various body sites visceral adiposity on atrial and ventricular electrocardiographic alterations remains largely unknown. Methods and Results We assessed both peri-cardial fat (PCF) and peri-aortic visceral adiposity (TAT) using dedicated computed tomography (CT) software (Aquarius 3D Workstation, TeraRecon, San Mateo, CA, USA), with anthropometrics including body mass index (BMI) and biochemical data obtained. We further related PCF and TAT data to standardized 12-leads electrocardiogram (ECG), including P and QRS wave morphologies. Among 3,087 study subjects (mean age, 49.6 years; 28% women), we observed a linear association among greater visceral adiposity burden, leftward deviation of P and QRS axes, longer PR interval and widened QRS duration (all p<0.001). These associations became attenuated after accounting for BMI and baseline clinical co-variates, with greater PCF remained independently associated with prolonged QRS duration (β = 0.91 [95% CI: 0.52, 1.31] per 1-SD increase in PCF, p<0.001). Finally, both PCF and TAT showed incremental value in identifying abnormally high PR interval (>200ms, likelihood-ratio: 33.17 to 41.4 & 39.03 for PCF and TAT) and widened QRS duration (>100ms, likelihood-ratio: 55.67 to 65.4 & 61.94 for PCF and TAT, all X2 p<0.05) when superimposed on age and BMI. Conclusion We show in our data greater visceral fat burden may have differential associations on several body surface electrocardiographic parameters. Compared to remote adiposity, those surrounding the heart tissue demonstrated greater influences on altered cardiac activation or conduction, indicating a possible local biological effect.
How Good Delayed Acknowledgement Effects Rate-Based Pacing TCP over Multi-hop Wireless Network

The expansion of wireless network has been a very attractive area of research. Many researches focus on the performance of TCP over wireless environment. This paper presents the simulation analysis of rate-based pacing TCP with the delayed acknowledgement enable and disable strategies in the wireless multi-hop network. We find out how good the delayed acknowledgement (ACK) strategy affects rate-based pacing TCP-Reno (Reno-RBP) and rate-based pacing TCP-Vegas (Vegas-RBP) with respect to packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, round trip time measurement and throughput. Our comparative analysis shows that, although the impact of the delayed ACK strategy has a positive impact on Reno-RBP, it negatively affects Vegas-RBP in some situations.
Action-Affect Classification and Morphing using Multi-Task Representation Learning

Most recent work focused on affect from facial expressions, and not as much on body. This work focuses on body affect analysis. Affect does not occur in isolation. Humans usually couple affect with an action in natural interactions; for example, a person could be talking and smiling. Recognizing body affect in sequences requires efficient algorithms to capture both the micro movements that differentiate between happy and sad and the macro variations between different actions. We depart from traditional approaches for time-series data analytics by proposing a multi-task learning model that learns a shared representation that is well-suited for action-affect classification as well as generation. For this paper we choose Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines to be our building block. We propose a new model that enhances the CRBM model with a factored multi-task component to become Multi-Task Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (MTCRBMs). We evaluate our approach on two publicly available datasets, the Body Affect dataset and the Tower Game dataset, and show superior classification performance improvement over the state-of-the-art, as well as the generative abilities of our model.