Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Term Structure, Latent Factors and Macroeconomic Data: A Local Linear Level Model

This paper applies a local linear level model to European yields using the state space methodology to structural equation models in order to obtain an unobserved state vector containing the level, slope and seasonal component of the yields. In addition, this has been performed by differentiating money markets from capital markets’ yields. Also an affine term structure model has been calibrated using the estimated level, slope and seasonality from the local linear level model. It is shown that both, the local level model as well as the no-arbitrage approach, perform quite well in replicating the yields. The model also shows that there is strong evidence of macroeconomic effects influencing the level, the slope and the seasonal components common to a set of yields (the yield curve). However, this paper shows that there is weak evidence of yields influencing European macroeconomic variables. This could be interpreted as the central bank and markets responding to macroeconomic releases, which is observed in yield movements, but there is weak evidence of yield innovations influencing the macroeconomy.
An efficient parallel algorithm for evaluating join queries on heterogeneous distributed systems

Owing to the fast development of network technologies, executing parallel programs on distributed systems that connect heterogeneous machines became feasible but we still face some challenges: Workload imbalance in such environment may not only be due to uneven load distribution among machines as in parallel systems but also due to distribution that is not adequate with the characteristics of each machine. In this paper, we present a new parallel join algorithm for heterogeneous distributed architectures based on an efficient dynamic data distribution and task allocation which makes it insensitive to data skew and ensures perfect balancing properties during all stages of join computation. The performance of this algorithm is analyzed using the scalable and portable BSP (Bulk Synchronous Parallel) cost model. We show that our algorithm guarantees optimal complexity and near linear speed-up while reducing communication and disk input/output costs to a minimum.
Towards a Lightweight Framework for Privacy Preserving P2P XML Databases

The problem of securing XML databases is rapidly gaining interest for both academic and industrial research. It becomes even more challenging when XML data are managed and delivered according to the P2P paradigm, as malicious attacks could take advantage from the totally-decentralized and untrusted nature of P2P networks. Starting from these considerations, in this paper we propose the guidelines of a distributed framework for supporting (i) secure fragmentation of XML documents into P2P XML databases by means of lightweight XPath-based identifiers, and (it) the creation of trusted groups of peers by means of "self-certifying" XPath links that exploit the benefits of well-known fingerprinting techniques
Terminology, Taxonomy, and Facilitation of Motor Learning in Clinical Practice: Protocol of a Delphi Study

Background Facilitating motor learning in patients during clinical practice is complex, especially in people with cognitive impairments. General principles of motor learning are available for therapists to use in their practice. However, the translation of evidence from the different fields of motor learning for use in clinical practice is problematic due to lack of uniformity in definition and taxonomy of terms related to motor learning. Objective The objective of this paper was to describe the design of a Delphi technique to reach consensus on definitions, descriptions, and taxonomy used within motor learning and to explore experts’ opinions and experiences on the application of motor learning in practice. Methods A heterogeneous sample of at least 30 international experts on motor learning will be recruited. Their opinions regarding several central topics on motor learning using a Delphi technique will be collected in 3 sequential rounds. The questionnaires in the 3 rounds will be developed based on the literature and answers of experts from earlier rounds. Consensus will be reached when at least 70% of the experts agree on a certain topic. Free text comments and answers from open questions on opinions and experiences will be described and clustered into themes. Results This study is currently ongoing. It is financially supported by Stichting Alliantie Innovatie (Innovation Alliance Foundation), RAAK-international (Registration number: 2011-3-33int). Conclusions The results of this study will enable us to summarize and categorize expert knowledge and experiences in a format that should be more accessible for therapists to use in support of their clinical practice. Unresolved aspects will direct future research.
MoveMine: mining moving object databases

With the maturity of GPS, wireless, and Web technologies, increasing amounts of movement data collected from various moving objects, such as animals, vehicles, mobile devices, and climate radars, have become widely available. Analyzing such data has broad applications, e.g., in ecological study, vehicle control, mobile communication management, and climatological forecast. However, few data mining tools are available for flexible and scalable analysis of massive-scale moving object data. Our system, MoveMine, is designed for sophisticated moving object data mining by integrating several attractive functions including moving object pattern mining and trajectory mining. We explore the state-of-the-art and novel techniques at implementation of the selected functions. A user-friendly interface is provided to facilitate interactive exploration of mining results and flexible tuning of the underlying methods. Since MoveMine is tested on multiple kinds of real data sets, it will benefit users to carry out versatile analysis on these kinds of data. At the same time, it will benefit researchers to realize the importance and limitations of current techniques as well as the potential future studies in moving object data mining.
Impaired insulin secretion in perfused pancreases isolated from offspring of female rats fed a low protein whey-based diet.

CONTEXT Insufficient maternal protein intake has been postulated to cause impaired fuel metabolism and diabetes mellitus in adult mammalian progeny, but the mechanism remains unclear. OBJECTIVE To investigate the effect of a maternal low protein whey-based diet during pregnancy and lactation on pancreatic function and skeletal muscle glucose metabolism in the offspring. ANIMALS Sprague-Dawley rats: 8 mothers and 46 offspring. DESIGN Female rats were fed throughout pregnancy and lactation with otherwise-complete isoenergetic diets sufficient (20% whey protein; control: n=3) or insufficient (5% whey protein; low-protein: n=5) in whey protein. From weaning all offspring ate control diet. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Food intake and weight gain were measured for both mothers and offspring, and in vitro functional studies of endocrine pancreas and skeletal muscle were performed on offspring at 40 and 50 days of age, respectively. RESULTS Food intake (P=0.004) and weight gain (P=0.006) were lower in low protein than control mothers during early gestation. Offspring of low protein mothers had significant lower body weight from 5 to 15 days of age, although there was no significant difference in food consumption. Glucose, arginine- and glucose/arginine-stimulated insulin secretion from perfused pancreases isolated from low protein offspring were decreased by between 55 and 65% compared with control values. Studies in skeletal muscle demonstrated no difference in insulin sensitivity between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS Dietary whey protein insufficiency in female rats during pregnancy and lactation can evoke major changes in insulin secretion in progeny, and these changes represent a persistent functional abnormality in the endocrine pancreas.
Robust albedo estimation from a facial image with cast shadow

Albedo estimation from a facial image is crucial for various computer vision tasks such as 3D morphable model fitting, shape recovery and illumination-invariant face recognition, but it has not been addressed well. This paper describes how albedo can be estimated from the combined use of image intensity and facial depth information even if the image is under general, unknown light with cast shadow. In order to estimate the albedo map, we formulate the albedo estimation problem as a linear programming using 1-norm under the assumption that the surface of a face has a constant albedo. The proposed method is simple and the experiment results show that the proposed approach gives better albedo estimation than other methods.
A Pairwise Key Pre-distribution Scheme Based on Prior Deployment Knowledge

Still, the security problems remain one of the major barriers somehow preventing the complete utilization of wireless sensor networks (WSN) technology. Securing the communication channel through encrypting messages sent between nodes grow to be a must. Message encryption using the public key cryptosystems [1] in WSN is infeasible due to its constrained resources. A random key pre-distribution scheme [2] is of popular approaches that perfectly securing a WSN and conserving its resources. The random key pre-distribution scheme or its enhanced editions is applied with assumptions of no prior deployment knowledge. The paper proposes a scheme that uses prior deployment knowledge in terms of the energy level carried by each node for modifying the polynomial pool based key pre-distribution scheme proposed in [3]. The paper shows that the node energy level observation can be used to control the creation and the selection of polynomial keys hold by this node. For the purpose of evaluating the proposed scheme it's applied on the A3 protocol as one of known topology control protocols [4]. The proposed scheme avoids the unnecessary key assignment and it reduces the number of active nodes per topology construction that positively reflects on the performance of the whole WSN.
Medial superior olive in the free-tailed bat: response to pure tones and amplitude-modulated tones.

In mammals with good low-frequency hearing and a moderate to large interear distance, neurons in the medial superior olive (MSO) are sensitive to interaural time differences (ITDs). Most small mammals, however, do not hear low frequencies and do not experience significant ITDs, suggesting that their MSOs participate in functions other than ITD coding. In one bat species, the mustached bat, the MSO is a functionally monaural nucleus, acting as a low-pass filter for the rate of sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) stimuli. We investigated whether the more typical binaural MSO of the MExican free-tailed bat also acts as an SAM filter. We recorded from 60 MSO neurons with their best frequencies covering the entire audiogram of this bat. The majority revealed bilateral excitation and indirect evidence for inhibition (EI/EI; 55%). The remaining neurons exhibited reduced inputs, mostly lacking ipsilateral inputs (28% I/EI; 12% O/EI; 5% EI/O). Most neurons (64%) responded with a phasic discharge to pure tones; the remaining neurons exhibited an additional sustained component. For stimulation with pure tones, two thirds of the cells exhibited monotonic rate-level functions for ipsilateral, contralateral, or binaural stimulation. In contrast, nearly all neurons exhibited nonmonotonic rate-level functions when tested with SAM stimuli. Eighty-eight percent of the neurons responded with a phase-locked discharge to SAM stimuli at low modulation rates and exhibited low-pass filter characteristics in the modulation transfer function (MTF) for ipsilateral, contralateral, and binaural stimulation. The MTF for ipsilateral stimulation usually did not match that for contralateral stimulation. Introducing interaural intensity differences (IIDs) changed the MTF in unpredictable ways. We also found that responses to SAMs depended on the carrier frequency. In some neurons we measured the time course of the ipsilaterally and contralaterally evoked inhibition by presenting brief frequency-modulated sweeps at different ITDs. The duration and timing of inhibition could be related to the SAM cutoff for binaural stimulation. We conclude that the response of the MSO in the free-tailed bat is created by a complex interaction of inhibition and excitation. The different time constants of inputs create a low-pass filter for SAM stimuli. However, the MSO output is an integrated response to the temporal structure of a stimulus as well as its azimuthal position, i.e., IIDs. There are no in vivo results concerning filter characteristics in a "classical" MSO, but our data confirm an earlier speculation about this interdependence based on data accessed from a gerbil brain slice preparation.
An Asian emission inventory of anthropogenic emission sources for the period 1980-2020

We developed a new emission inventory for Asia (Regional Emission inventory in ASia (REAS) Version 1.1) for the period 1980–2020. REAS is the first inventory to integrate historical, present, and future emissions in Asia on the basis of a consistent methodology. We present here emissions in 2000, historical emissions for 1980–2003, and projected emissions for 2010 and 2020 of SO 2 , NO x , CO, NMVOC, black carbon (BC), and organic carbon (OC) from fuel combustion and industrial sources. Total energy consumption in Asia more than doubled between 1980 and 2003, causing a rapid growth in Asian emissions, by 28% for BC, 30% for OC, 64% for CO, 108% for NMVOC, 119% for SO 2 , and 176% for NO x . In particular, Chinese NO x emissions showed a marked increase of 280% over 1980 levels, and growth in emissions since 2000 has been extremely high. These increases in China were mainly caused by increases in coal combustion in the power plants and industrial sectors. NMVOC emissions also rapidly increased because of growth in the use of automobiles, solvents, and paints. By contrast, BC, OC, and CO emissions in China showed decreasing trends from 1996 to 2000 because of a reduction in the use of biofuels and coal in the domestic and industry sectors. However, since 2000, Chinese emissions of these species have begun to increase. Thus, the emissions of air pollutants in Asian countries (especially China) showed large temporal variations from 1980–2003. Future emissions in 2010 and 2020 in Asian countries were projected by emission scenarios and from emissions in 2000. For China, we developed three emission scenarios: PSC (policy success case), REF (reference case), and PFC (policy failure case). In the 2020 REF scenario, Asian total emissions of SO 2 , NO x , and NMVOC were projected to increase substantially by 22%, 44%, and 99%, respectively, over 2000 levels. The 2020 REF scenario showed a modest increase in CO (12%), a lesser increase in BC (1%), and a slight decrease in OC (−5%) compared with 2000 levels. However, it should be noted that Asian total emissions are strongly influenced by the emission scenarios for China.
Multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Bangui, Central African Republic

We investigated multidrug-resistant (MDR) Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in Bangui, Central African Republic. We found 39.6% with the same spoligotype and synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism in the mutT1 gene. However, strains had different rpoB mutations responsible for rifampin resistance. MDR strains in Bangui may emerge preferentially from a single, MDR-prone family.
Enabling the blind to see gestures

Human discourse is an embodied activity emerging from the embodied imagery and construction of our talk. Gesture and speech are coexpressive, conveying this imagery and meaning simultaneously. Mathematics instruction and discourse typically involve two modes of communication: speech and graphical presentation. Our goal is to assist Individuals who are Blind or Severely Visually Impaired (IBSVI) to access such instruction/communication. We employ a haptic glove interface to furnish the IBSVI with awareness of the deictic gestures performed by the instructor over the graphic in conjunction with speech. We present a series of studies spanning two years where we show how our Haptic Deictic System (HDS) can support learning in inclusive classrooms where IBSVI receive instruction alongside sighted students. We discuss how the introduction of the HDS was advantageous to all parties: IBSVI, instructor, and sighted students. The HDS created more learning opportunities, increasing mutual understanding and promoting greater engagement.
Facial Affect and Interpersonal Affiliation: Displays of Emotion During Relationship Formation in Social Anxiety Disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) often involves difficulty developing relationships. Facial expressions are important in relationship formation, but data are limited regarding facial display production among persons with SAD during social interaction. The current study compared facial displays of individuals diagnosed with SAD (n = 41) to control participants (n = 24) as they interacted with a confederate; confederates and observers then rated their desire for future interaction with participants. Automated software used the Facial Action Coding System to classify displays. During portions of the interaction that involved listening to partners, the SAD group smiled less frequently and less intensely than controls, and less smiling was associated with others’ lower desire for future interaction with participants. Diminished positive facial affect in response to interaction partners may disrupt relationship formation in SAD and may serve as an effective treatment target.
Optimal channel assignment and power allocation for dual-hop multi-channel multi-user relaying

We consider the problem of jointly optimizing channel pairing, channel-user assignment, and power allocation in a single-relay multiple-access system. The optimization objective is to maximize the weighted sum-rate under total and individual power constraints on the transmitters. By observing the special structure of a three-dimensional assignment problem derived from the original problem, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm based on continuity relaxation and dual minimization. The proposed method is shown to be optimal for all relaying strategies that give a concave rate function in terms of power constraints.
Aged and Recent Market Betas in Securities Pricing

[This version of the paper now starts with a note that explains why we have effectively decided not to pursue this research direction further, as well as material that discusses why it is better to use stocks than preformed portfolios in asset-pricing tests. ]Instead of computing only one five-year market-beta, we compute one recent beta from 1 month to 2 years ago, and one aged market beta from 2 to 10 years ago, both using daily stock returns. We find that the aged beta has a positive influence on stock returns, consistent with standard hedging concerns. The recent beta has a negative influence on stock returns, whose cause is less clear. The evidence suggests that it is due to a novel factor, possibly behavioral or attention related. Previous research had failed to find that market-beta matters, primarily because ordinary market-betas combine these two opposing forces and because betas based on monthly stock returns are too weak. The importance of the two separate betas increases if we control for the Fama-French factors.
Nonlinear Parametric Hidden Markov

In previous work 4], we extended the hidden Markov model (HMM) framework to incorporate a global parametric variation in the output probabilities of the states of the HMM. Development of the parametric HMM was motivated by the task of simultaneoiusly recognizing and interpreting gestures that exhibit meaningful variation. With standard HMMs, such global variation confounds the recognition process. In this paper we extend the parametric HMM approach to handle nonlinear (non-analytic) dependencies of the output distributions on the parameter of interest. We show a generalized expectation-maximization (GEM) algorithm for training the parametric HMM and a GEM algorithm to simultaneously recognize the gesture and estimate the value of the parameter. We present results on a pointing gesture, where the nonlinear approach permits the natural azimuth/elevation parame-terization of pointing direction.
Morphological Attribute Profiles for the Analysis of Very High Resolution Images

Morphological attribute profiles (APs) are defined as a generalization of the recently proposed morphological profiles (MPs). APs provide a multilevel characterization of an image created by the sequential application of morphological attribute filters that can be used to model different kinds of the structural information. According to the type of the attributes considered in the morphological attribute transformation, different parametric features can be modeled. The generation of APs, thanks to an efficient implementation, strongly reduces the computational load required for the computation of conventional MPs. Moreover, the characterization of the image with different attributes leads to a more complete description of the scene and to a more accurate modeling of the spatial information than with the use of conventional morphological filters based on a predefined structuring element. Here, the features extracted by the proposed operators were used for the classification of two very high resolution panchromatic images acquired by Quickbird on the city of Trento, Italy. The experimental analysis proved the usefulness of APs in modeling the spatial information present in the images. The classification maps obtained by considering different APs result in a better description of the scene (both in terms of thematic and geometric accuracy) than those obtained with an MP.
An Efficient Topological Structure for Application Specific Network on Chip Synthesis

Application specific network on chip (ASNOC) architecture is more promising than regular network on chip architecture (NoC). Development of technology increases the complexity in IC manufacturing which may vary the power consumption, increase the size and latency period. NoC topology was generated using Xpipe compiler for determining area, power and time for a particular module which is having limitations in determination. In this paper, NoC topology is generated using atlas tool which will increase performance and also the determinations of constraints are effective. The routing is performed by XY routing algorithm and wormhole flow control. In NoC topology generation, the value of power, area and latency are predetermined.
Tourism and cultural commons in the Ecuadorian Amazon

ABSTRACT Tourism is among the largest global market forces driving both environmental and sociocultural change, and indigenous peoples residing in biodiverse regions are particularly vulnerable to this change. As indigenous people engage with global markets, questions arise regarding how different forms of tourism privilege particular indigenous knowledge, and how local communities proactively leverage their knowledge to improve the social and environmental outcomes of tourism. The aim of this ethnographic case study in the region around Misahuallí, Ecuador is to provide a thick description of the tourism-related social, cultural, and environmental changes being faced by this indigenous community, itself a microcosm of the challenges being faced by indigenous communities across the globe. Common pool resource theory and the concepts of subtractability and non-excludability are invoked to analyze the ways that tourism influences the management of traditional cultural knowledge, and alternatively, how this knowledge influences the ways that tourism manifests in the local community. This novel application of traditional ecological knowledge and common pool resource theory to tourism research provides a critical link between these theories, and it extends existing analyses of tourism’s influence on common pool environmental resources to common pool cultural resources, in this case, traditional knowledge in Kichwa communities.