Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intergenerational Risk Sharing and Long-Run Labor Income Risk ∗

The inability of future generations to share risk with current ones causes financial markets to be incomplete en thus inefficient. By using its financial reserves efficiently, a pension fund is able to transfer current equity risk to future generations, thereby alleviating the ”biological” trading constraint that is faced in financial markets. This paper examines how comovements in stock and labor markets affect the gains from intergenerational risk sharing. If stock and labor markets move together in the long run, the human wealth of unborn generations becomes highly correlated with stock returns, which reduces their risk appetite. I show that shifting risk into the future is not optimal anymore once the long-run dynamics of labor income are taken into account. The risk bearing capacity of a pension fund is dramatically decreased if it is unattractive for risk to be transferred to future generations. The results in this paper provide an economic rationale for a tight solvency regime, that requires pension funds to recover from their losses in a short time-period.
Journal of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Medication errors of nurses in the emergency department

Patient safety is one of the main concepts in the field of healthcare provision and a major component of health services quality. One of the important stages in promotion of the safety level of patients is identification of medication errors and their causes. Medical errors such as medication errors are the most prevalent errors that threaten health and are a global problem. Execution of medication orders is an important part of the treatment and care process and is regarded as the main part of the nurses’ performance. The purpose of this study was to explore the medication error reporting rate, error types and their causes among nurses in the emergency department. In this descriptive study, 94 nurses of the emergency department of Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex were selected based on census in 2010-2011. Data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of two parts: demographic information, and types and causes of medication errors. After confirming content-face validity, reliability of the questionnaire was determined to be 0.91 using Cronbach's alpha test. Data analyses were performed by descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. SPSS-16 software was used in this study and P values less than 0.05 were considered significant. The mean age of the nurses was 27.7 ± 3.4 years, and their working experience was 7.3 ± 3.4 years. Of participants 46.8% had committed medication errors in the past year, and the majority (69.04%) had committed the errors only once. Thirty two nurses (72.7%) had not reported medication errors to head nurses or the nursing office. The most prevalent types of medication errors were related to infusion rates (33.3%) and administering two doses of medicine instead of one (23.8%). The most important causes of medication errors were shortage of nurses (47.6%) and lack of sufficient pharmacological information (30.9%). This study showed that the risk of medication errors among nurses is high and medication errors are a major problem of nursing in the emergency department. We recommend increasing the number of nurses, adjusting the workload of the nursing staff in the emergency department, retraining courses to improve the staff’s pharmacological information, modification of the education process, encouraging nurses to report medical errors and encouraging hospital managers to respond to errors in a constructive manner in order to enhance patient safety
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Cc by a Framework for Implementing Realistic Custom Network Topology in Mininet

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging technology which enables the separation of control plane and the data plane in the networking infrastructure. Communication between the SDN controller and the network elements can be achieved using the Openflow switching protocol. Using Openflow the controller can create/modify the entries in the flow tables of switches which in turn can define the working of underlying networks. Mininet provides a simple and useful network test-bed for the development of Openflow applications and experimental network infrastructure. The default version of Mininet allows creation of few pre-defined topologies such as single, linear, tree etc. To create a custom topology, lot of programming effort is required in Mininet software. The goal of the proposed work is to develop a new framework for the creation of custom topology very easily without any programming. The new framework also enables the users to create separate IP subnets, the networks with different link parameters such as Bandwidth, Latency, Packet loss etc. Thus researchers can test their ideas and protocols using this new test bed. People working on Data Center Technology research can also make use of this framework. Experimental implementation shows that the modification made to the default version of Mininet does not affect the performance noticeably.
Compressive tomographic radar imaging with total variation regularization

We consider the problem of compressive imaging of a three-dimensional (3D) scene using multiple observations collected from parallel baselines, formed by monostatic sensors moving in space. In particular, we present a novel iterative imaging method based on the Omega-K algorithm with edge-preserving 3D total variation (TV) regularization. The method combines joint processing of multi-baseline data with TV minimization in a computationally efficient way, thus enabling high-resolution imaging of the reflectivity map of the scene. We demonstrate the potential of our method through numerical evaluations on simulated data with noise.
A comparative study of ANN and FES for predicting of cutting forces and tool tip temperature in turning

In this study, fuzzy expert system (FES) and artificial neural network (ANN) models are designed for the estimation of cutting forces in turning operations. On designed models, cutting forces and experimental temperature data obtained from different cutting conditions were used in process of turning. Cutting forces at different cutting conditions and temperature values can be estimated with the help of developed models. The results obtained with these models, compared with the experimental data. The regression values were found as 0.99505 between the Experiment-FES and, 0.9888 between Experiment-ANN in the analysis. As a result, the both artificial intelligence (AI) methods have made successful modeling, but it's seen that, realized FES model has more successful results than the ANN model in the process of estimation of cutting forces.
Facial width-to-height ratio relates to dominance style in the genus Macaca

Background. Physical, visual, chemical, and auditory cues signalling fighting ability have independently evolved in many animal taxa as a means to resolve conflicts without escalating to physical aggression. Facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR, i.e., the relative width to height of the face) has been associated with dominance-related phenotypes both in humans and in other primates. In humans, faces with a larger fWHR are perceived as more aggressive. Methods. We examined fWHR variation among 11 species of the genus Macaca. Macaques have been grouped into four distinct categories, from despotic to tolerant, based on their female dominance style. Female dominance style is related to intra- and inter-sexual competition in both males and females and is the result of different evolutionary pressure across species. We used female dominance style as a proxy of intra-/inter-sexual competition to test the occurrence of correlated evolution between competitive regimes and dominance-related phenotypes. fWHR was calculated from 145 2D photographs of male and female adult macaques. Results. We found no phylogenetic signal on the differences in fWHR across species in the two sexes. However, fWHR was greater, in females and males, in species characterised by despotic female dominance style than in tolerant species. Discussion. Our results suggest that dominance-related phenotypes are related to differences in competitive regimes and intensity of inter- and intra-sexual selection across species.
Multi-distribution deep belief network for speech synthesis

Deep belief network (DBN) has been shown to be a good generative model in tasks such as hand-written digit image generation. Previous work on DBN in the speech community mainly focuses on using the generatively pre-trained DBN to initialize a discriminative model for better acoustic modeling in speech recognition (SR). To fully utilize its generative nature, we propose to model the speech parameters including spectrum and F0 simultaneously and generate these parameters from DBN for speech synthesis. Compared with the predominant HMM-based approach, objective evaluation shows that the spectrum generated from DBN has less distortion. Subjective results also confirm the advantage of the spectrum from DBN, and the overall quality is comparable to that of context-independent HMM.
The impact of organic friction modifiers on engine oil tribofilms

Organic friction modifiers (OFMs) are important additives in the lubrication of machines and especially of car engines where performance improvements are constantly sought-after. Together with zinc dialkyldithiophosphate (ZDDP) antiwear additives, OFMs have a predominant impact on the tribological behaviour of the lubricant. In the current study, the influence of OFMs on the generation, tribological properties and chemistry of ZDDP tribofilms has been investigated by combining tribological experiments (MTM) with in situ film thickness measurements through optical interference imaging (SLIM), Alicona profilometry and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. OFMs and antiwear additives have been found to competitively react/adsorb on the rubbing ferrous substrates in a tribological contact. The formation and removal (through wear) of tribofilms are dynamic processes which result from the simultaneous interaction of these two additives with the surface of the wear track. By carefully selecting the chemistry of OFMs, the formulator can achieve lubricants that generate ZDDP antiwear films of optimum thickness, morphology and friction according to the application-specific requirements.
Circulant search algorithm for the construction of QC-LDPC codes

A circulant permutation search algorithm is present in this paper, which can be employed to search appopriate circulant permutation to construct QC-LDPC codes with desired girth. The algorithm is based on a tree expansion mechanism and a select-and-discard procedure. By proposed method, a practical (3, 4) code with code length n=37368 and girth g=18 is constructed. The experiment shows that the codes construct in this paper have large girth and minimum distance, and the bit error rate performance over AWGN channels is excellent.
Affordances of Collaborative Software Design Planning for Elementary Students' Science Talk

Although educational research and practice has found many benefits of long-term and complex design activities, an issue of growing concern is that students might lose sight of science learning while diverting their attention to design aesthetics, collaborative management, and technology. A question is whether or not science is actually separate from these aspects; it may be that science permeates the design environment and is thus contexted within these other activities. To investigate this possibility we followed a classroom of 33 students, divided into 7 teams, and we examined their science discussions as they planned for creating instructional software designs. Specifically, we investigated which conversational contexts gave rise to science talk. We found that a focus on the fine-grained details of the instructional science designs themselves and the contributions of more design-experienced students played an important role in the sophistication of the science content in the planning discussions. In examining less productive contexts for science talk, we found that a conversational focus in planning discussions on collaboration and software issues, as well as the science focus of the software designs, impacted the quality of science integration. In our discussion, we address the issue of which design contexts afford opportunities for richer discourse and the implications for other project-based design activities.
Market Movements and Investors ’ Reaction to Earnings News

The literature suggests that investors’ reaction to news is sensitive to the market’s condition. We investigate whether investors react differently to the same earnings news when the market continues in the same state versus when it transitions to a different state. The results show that investors react less aggressively to positive earnings news when the market continues advancing (declining) than when it transitions to a declining (advancing) state. Concerning negative news, investors’ reactions are the same (stronger) when the market continues advancing (declining) compared to when it transitions to a declining (advancing) state. These results suggest that the string of news is important in determining investors’ reaction to earnings news when the market continues in the same state, while the effect of market transitions on investor overconfidence drives reactions during market transitions. EFM Classification: 180, 320
Social Indicators Research Series

This series aims to provide a public forum for single treatises and collections of papers on social indicators research that are too long to be published in our journal Social Indicators Research. Like the journal, the book series deals with statistical assessments of the quality of life from a broad perspective. It welcomes research on a wide variety of substantive areas, including health, crime, housing, education, family life, leisure activities, transportation, mobility, economics, work, religion and environmental issues. These areas of research will focus on the impact of key issues such as health on the overall quality of life and vice versa.An international review board, consisting of Ruut Veenhoven, Joachim Vogel, Ed Diener, Torbjorn Moum and Wolfgang Glatzer, will ensure the high quality of the series as a whole.Available at 25% discount for International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS). For membership details please contact: ISQOLS; e-mail: isqols@mail.vt. edu Editors: Ed Diener, University of Illinois, Champaign, USA; Wolfgang Glatzer, J.W. Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Torbjorn Moum, University of Oslo, Norway; Mirjam A.G. Sprangers, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Joachim Vogel, Central Bureau of Statistics, Stockholm, Sweden; Ruut Veenhoven, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Radio Flares and the Magnetic Field Structure in Gamma-Ray Burst Outflows

The magnetic field structure in γ-ray burst (GRB) outflows is of great interest, as it can provide valuable clues that might help pin down the mechanism responsible for the acceleration and collimation of GRB jets. The most promising way of probing this magnetic field structure is through polarization measurements of the synchrotron emission from the GRB ejecta, which includes the prompt γ-ray emission and the emission from the reverse shock. Measuring polarization in γ-rays with current instruments is extremely difficult: so far there is only one claim of detection (a very high degree of linear polarization in GRB 021206), which, despite the favorable conditions, remains highly controversial and is probably not real. The emission from the reverse shock that propagates into the ejecta as it is decelerated by the ambient medium peaks in the optical on a timescale of tens of seconds (the so-called optical flash) and dominates the optical emission up to about 10 minutes after the GRB. Unfortunately, no polarization measurements of this optical emission have been made to date. However, after the reverse shock finishes crossing the shell of GRB ejecta, the shocked ejecta cools adiabatically and radiates at lower and lower frequencies. This emission peaks in the radio after about 1 day and is called the "radio flare. " We use VLA data of radio flares from GRBs to constrain the polarization of this emission. We find only upper limits for both linear and circular polarization. Our best limits are for GRB 991216, for which we find 3 σ upper limits on the linear and circular polarization of 7% and 9%, respectively. These limits provide interesting constraints on existing GRB models. Specifically, our results are hard to reconcile with a predominantly ordered toroidal magnetic field in the GRB outflow together with a "structured" jet, where the energy per solid angle drops as the inverse square of the angle from the jet axis, as is expected in models in which the outflow is Poynting flux dominated.
Measuring the effectiveness of automatic parallelization in SUIF

This paper presents both an experiment and a system for inserting run-time dependence and privatization testing. The goal of the experiment is to measure empirically the remaining opportunities for exploiting loop-level parallelism that are missed by state-of-theart parallelizing compiler technology. We perform run-time testing of data accessed within all candidate loops not parallelized by the compiler to identify which of these loops could safely execute in parallel for the given program input. This system extends the Lazy Privatizing Doall (LPD) test to simultaneously instrument multiple loops in a nest. Using the results of interprocedural array dataflow analysis, we avoid unnecessary instrumentation of arrays with compile-time provable dependences or loops nested inside outer parallelized loops. We have implemented the system in the Stanford SUIF compiler and have measured programs in three benchmark suites.
Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children : What do potential users think?

Luke Wood, Hagen Lehmann, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Ben Robins, Austen Rayner, and Dag Syrdal, ‘Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children: What do potential users think? ’, paper presented at the 50th Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, 1 April 2014 – 4 April 2014, London, UK.
Implementing a Flexible Compensation Mechanism for Business Processes in Web Service Environment

Web services have been emerging as a promising technology for business process integrations. Due to their long-duration and loosely coupled properties, Web service based applications require transactional support beyond traditional transactions. Some Web service standards have been proposed to deal with the transaction aspect of Web service applications. Compensation is a commonly used mechanism in these standards for backward recovery. However, the compensation mechanism usually adopted is too fixed and cannot satisfy the various requirements of different applications. In this paper, we first analyse the compensation protocol of current standards. Then we enrich the protocol by allowing flexible compensation and extend our proposed multiple-compensation mechanism in Web service environment. The implementation of the extended compensation mechanism is discussed and the incorporation of the mechanism into current standards is also addressed
Asphericity in Supernova Explosions from Late-Time Spectroscopy

Core-collapse supernovae (CC-SNe) are the explosions that announce the death of massive stars. Some CC-SNe are linked to long-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and are highly aspherical. One important question is to what extent asphericity is common to all CC-SNe. Here we present late-time spectra for a number of CC-SNe from stripped-envelope stars and use them to explore any asphericity generated in the inner part of the exploding star, near the site of collapse. A range of oxygen emission-line profiles is observed, including a high incidence of double-peaked profiles, a distinct signature of an aspherical explosion. Our results suggest that all CC-SNe from stripped-envelope stars are aspherical explosions and that SNe accompanied by GRBs exhibit the highest degree of asphericity.
An extension of the adaptive Quasi-Harmonic Model

In this paper, we present an extension of a recently developed AM-FM decomposition algorithm, which will be referred to as the extended adaptive Quasi-Harmonic Model (eaQHM). It was previously shown that the adaptive Quasi-Harmonic Model (aQHM) [1] is an efficient AM-FM decomposition algorithm with applications in speech analysis. In this paper, we show that a simple extension of the aQHM algorithm to include not only frequency but also amplitude adaptation results in higher performance in terms of Signal-to-Reconstruction-Error Ratio (SRER). To support our hypothesis, eaQHM is tested both on synthetic signals and on a subset of the ARCTIC database of speech. Overall, compared with aQHM, eaQHM improves the SRER by more than 2 dB, on average.
Development of a new type of passively adaptive compliant gripper

Purpose – Passively compliant underactuated mechanisms are one way to obtain the gripper which could accommodate to any irregular and sensitive grasping object. The purpose of the underactuation is to use less active inputs than the number of degrees of freedom of the gripper mechanism to drive the open and close motion of the gripper. Another purpose of underaction is to reduce the number of control variables. Design/methodology/approach – The underactuation can morph shapes of the gripper to accommodate different objects. As a result, the underactuated grippers require less complex control algorithms. The fully compliant mechanism has multiple degrees of freedom and can be considered as an underactuated mechanism. Findings – This paper presents a new design of the adaptive underactuated compliant gripper with distributed compliance. The optimal topology of the gripper structure was obtained by optimality criteria method using mathematical programming technique. Afterwards, the obtained model was improve.
TRAFFIC SIGN RECOGNITION USING SCALE INVARIANT FEATURE TRANSFORM AND SVM

TSR (Traffic sign recognition) has been studied for realizing drivers assisting system and automated navigation and is an important studied field in ITS (Intelligent traffic system). In this paper, a recognition method of traffic signs separated from real image was studied. Images were divided into several categories according to the actual weather, distance and angle of view etc. SIFT was firstly used to detect keypoints and describe them because the SIFT(Scale Invariant Feature Transform) features were invariant to image scale and rotation and were robust to changes in the viewpoint and illumination. And then the Bag-of-words method was applied to recognition. Finally, the SVM(Support vector machine) approach was used in classification. As shown by the experiment results, the proposed method is effective. * Xiaoguang HU , Ph.D candidate, majors in pattern recognition,GIS and computer vision etc. Michael.hu. 07@gmail.com.