Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investor opinion divergence and post-repurchase announcement stock price drift

This study examines whether investor opinion divergence is a significant determinant of post-repurchase abnormal returns. We examine the effect using abnormal trading turnover (ATO) ratio as a proxy for investor opinion divergence. While the OLS regression results show that investor opinion divergence is not related to post-repurchase performance, the quantile regression results show that the effect of investor opinion divergence on post-repurchase performance is not homogeneous across various quantile levels of post-repurchase performance. We find a positive relation between ATO ratio and post-repurchase performance for firms with lower-to-middle performance groups. For firms with middle-to-higher post-repurchase performance, pre-repurchase stock undervaluation is a key determinant of the post-repurchase performance.
Measuring the Size and Impact of Public Cash Support for Children in Cross-National Perspective

The authors suggest a new comprehensive measure of support given through tax benefit systems to families with children. Using microsimulation techniques, this accounts for all provisions contingent on the presence of children, while usually only gross child/family benefits are considered. The authors use EUROMOD, the European Union tax-benefit microsimulation model, to quantify the support for children and analyze its impact on household incomes and child poverty for 19 countries. The authors find that the conventional approach underestimates on average the total amount of support for children by about one fifth. Furthermore, the differences between two measures vary considerably across countries and are, therefore, critical for cross-national comparisons.
Lamin A/C-promoter interactions specify chromatin state–dependent transcription outcomes

The nuclear lamina is implicated in the organization of the eukaryotic nucleus. Association of nuclear lamins with the genome occurs through large chromatin domains including mostly, but not exclusively, repressed genes. How lamin interactions with regulatory elements modulate gene expression in different cellular contexts is unknown. We show here that in human adipose tissue stem cells, lamin A/C interacts with distinct spatially restricted subpromoter regions, both within and outside peripheral and intra-nuclear lamin-rich domains. These localized interactions are associated with distinct transcriptional outcomes in a manner dependent on local chromatin modifications. Down-regulation of lamin A/C leads to dissociation of lamin A/C from promoters and remodels repressive and permissive histone modifications by enhancing transcriptional permissiveness, but is not sufficient to elicit gene activation. Adipogenic differentiation resets a large number of lamin-genome associations globally and at subpromoter levels and redefines associated transcription outputs. We propose that lamin A/C acts as a modulator of local gene expression outcome through interaction with adjustable sites on promoters, and that these position-dependent transcriptional readouts may be reset upon differentiation.
Structural characterization of interactions between transactivation domain 1 of the p65 subunit of NF-κB and transcription regulatory factors

Abstract p65 is a member of the NF-κB family of transcriptional regulatory proteins that functions as the activating component of the p65–p50 heterodimer. Through its acidic transactivation domain (TAD), p65 has the capacity to form interactions with several different transcriptional regulatory proteins, including TFIIB, TFIIH, CREB-binding protein (CBP)/p300 and TAFII31. Like other acidic TADs, the p65 TAD contains two subdomains (p65TA1 and p65TA2) that interact with different regulatory factors depending on the target gene. Despite its role in controlling numerous NF-κB target genes, there are no high-resolution structures of p65TA1 bound to a target transcriptional regulatory factor. In this work, we characterize the interaction of p65TA1 with two factors, the Tfb1/p62 subunit of TFIIH and the KIX domain of CBP. In these complexes, p65TA1 transitions into a helical conformation that includes its characteristic ΦXXΦΦ motif (Φ = hydrophobic amino acid). Structural and functional studies demonstrate that the two binding interfaces are primarily stabilized by three hydrophobic amino acids within the ΦXXΦΦ motif and these residues are also crucial to its ability to activate transcription. Taken together, the results provide an atomic level description of how p65TA1 is able to bind different transcriptional regulatory factors needed to activate NF-κB target genes.
The interaction of public and private capital: a study of 20 OECD members

This article addresses the interaction of public and private capital stocks. We show for most developed countries that there is a long-term equilibrium relation between public and private capital. We find that imbalances in the relation of public and private capital are most likely to be corrected through a public capital adjustment. Private capital tends towards weak exogeneity. The evidence presented suggests that public investment is more likely to be enticed by private investment rather than serve to crowd out private investment activity.
China Trade Policy Review: A Political Economy Approach

Chinese trade policy has experienced great reversal in the year of 2008. A series of constraining measures taken previously have been loosened eventually. We investigate this situation using a political economy approach. Unlike in democratic countries, where interest groups play a crucial role in trade policy change, in China, given the political reality, leaders will and trade partners pressure are the determinant factors. We call this top-down and outside-in trade policy. Actually the idea of harmonious society and scientific development emphasised by top leaders in October 2006 paved the road for the following trade policy adjustment: i.e. reducing tax rebate, limiting processing trade, compressing the catalogue for foreign investment, etc. However, with the shock of a global financial tsunami, these measures get coastal areas relying on foreign trade heavily into trouble. The economic downturn in Pearl River Delta even astonished the decision-making body, calling on a quick reversal in foreign trade policy. If interest groups had been allowed to express their demand formally and adequately from the very start, the cycle of taking up first but giving up last in policy design would have not taken place. In other words, the bottom-up and inside-out trade policy should be more stable. Although flexibility is necessary in the face of uncertainty, frequent and discretionary trade policy change usually produces effects of pro-government not pro-market. This is unfavourable for the transformation in China. The constraining trade policy in mid-2007 to mid-2008 has been a part of the governments desire to seek healthier development. However, with the inside and outside surroundings getting worse, the structural adjustment (long-run objective) has had to concede to the economic growth (short-run objective).
A Generalized Knowledge Production Function

This paper presents a generalized production model based on the knowledge production function. The model allows the relationships between corporate competitiveness strategy, innovation, efficiency, productivity growth and outsourcing to be investigated at the firm level in a number of steps. First, in reviewing recent developments of researches on the above relationships, provide discussion on data and the methods of measuring these variables. Second, depending on availability of information, different measures are transferred into single multidimensional index of corporate strategy using principal component analysis. Third, stochastic frontier production function and factor productivity analysis are used to estimate the efficiency and factor productivity growth at the firm level. Fourth, the causal relationships between the five variables of interest are established and modelled. Finally, given the direction of causality, the implications of the findings for estimation of the relationship are discussed. For the empirical analysis we use Swedish firm-level innovation survey data covering both manufacturing and service sectors.
Urban Plants as Genetic Reservoirs or Threats to the Integrity of Bushland Plant Populations

Abstract: Remnant plants in urban fringes and native plants in gardens have the potential to contribute to the conservation of threatened plants by increasing genetic diversity, effective size of populations, and levels of genetic connectedness. But they also pose a threat through the disruption of locally adapted gene pools. At Hyams Beach, New South Wales, Australia, four bushland stands of the rare shrub, Grevillea macleayana McGillivray, surround an urban area containing remnant and cultivated specimens of this species. Numbers of inflorescences per plant, fruits per plant, and visits by pollinators were similar for plants in urban gardens and bushland. Urban plants represented a substantial but complex genetic resource, displaying more genetic diversity than bushland plants judged byHe, numbers of alleles per locus, and number of private alleles. Of 27 private alleles in urban plants, 17 occurred in a set of 19 exotic plants. Excluding the exotic plants, all five stands displayed a moderate differentiation (FST= 0.14 ± 0.02), although the urban remnants clustered with two of the bushland stands. These patterns may be explained by high levels of selfing and inbreeding in this species and by long‐distance dispersal (several seeds in the urban stand were fathered by plants in other stands). Genetic leakage (gene flow) from exotic plants to 321 seeds on surrounding remnant or bushland plants has not occurred. Our results demonstrate the conservation value of this group of urban plants, which are viable, productive, genetically diverse, and interconnected with bushland plants. Gene flow has apparently not yet led to genetic contamination of bushland populations, but high levels of inbreeding would make this a rare event and difficult to detect. Remnant plants in urban gardens could successfully contribute to recovery plans for endangered and vulnerable species.
A preliminary study on missing data imputation in evolutionary fuzzy systems of subgroup discovery

In real-life data, a loss of information is frequent in data mining due to the presence of missing values in the attributes. Missing values can occur due to problems in the manual data entry procedures, equipment errors or incorrect measurements. The presence of missing values in attributes conditions the results obtained by any knowledge extraction approach. Specifically, this problem could lead in subgroup discovery to a loss of quality of results obtained by subgroups on measures such as sensitivity, confidence, significance or unusualness. This paper presents an experimental study to analyse the effect of different missing data imputation mechanisms within subgroup discovery algorithms based on evolutionary fuzzy systems presented throughout the literature. The analysis is carried out with a large number of data sets obtained from KEEL repository. Among all the imputation techniques, the imputation method K-Nearest Neighbour outstands as the best option. In summary, if experts need to analyse a problem with a high percentage of missing values they must use this imputation method in order to treat data in a correct way and also to obtain a meaningful descriptive knowledge. In addition, results also show that the evolutionary fuzzy system with the best results is the algorithm NMEEF-SD in the missing values scenario.
Person following based on Haar-like feature and HOG feature in indoor environment

In order to follow people in indoor environment, an approach for person detection and following is proposed based on Haar-like feature and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature for a service robot. The Haar-like feature detector based on Adaptive Boost (Adaboost) Cascade algorithm is applied to detect the human face when human faces the service robot, in which the HOG feature detector based on Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm is used to detect and follow human side-by-side or back to the camera. Several experiments are implemented with PR2 robot to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show this method has high accuracy and precision in detecting person.
Task-Specific Representation Learning for Web-Scale Entity Disambiguation

Named entity disambiguation (NED) is a central problem in information extraction. The goal is to link entities in a knowledge graph (KG) to their mention spans in unstructured text. Each distinct mention span (like John Smith, Jordan or Apache) represents a multi-class classification task. NED can therefore be modeled as a multitask problem with tens of millions of tasks for realistic KGs. We initiate an investigation into neural representations, network architectures, and training protocols for multitask NED. Specifically, we propose a task-sensitive representation learning framework that learns mention dependent representations, followed by a common classifier. Parameter learning in our framework can be decomposed into solving multiple smaller problems involving overlapping groups of tasks. We prove bounds for excess risk, which provide additional insight into the problem of multi-task representation learning. While remaining practical in terms of training memory and time requirements, our approach outperforms recent strong baselines, on four benchmark data sets.
Measurement of the postruminal digestibility of crude protein by the bag technique in cows.

A new method has been developed which permits the crude protein digestibility of feedstuffs in the intestine of cattle to be measured with little effort in terms of samples and experimental work. It consists of welding 0.4 . 0.8 g of the feedstuff (particle size: 125 . 1000 micron) into polyamide fabric bags (25 X 40 mm) which are inserted via cannulae into the digestive tracts of fistulated cows from the abomasum/duodenum to the ileum or from the abomasum/duodenum to the faeces. The mean retention time of the bags in the animal was 8.5 +/- 2.7 h from the abomasum to the end of the ileum and (13.3 +/- 1.9 h from the abomasum to the faeces. Up to 15 bags per day and cow may be used. The random error of the method is 1.3% (absolute) when the measurements are performed on two animals using two bags each. Intestinal digestibilities of over 90% were measured for concentrate proteins (except linseed meal) and of 72 . 95% for forage proteins. Post-ruminal digestion was virtually finished at the end of the small intestine.
IncucyteDRC: An R package for the dose response analysis of live cell imaging data

We present IncucyteDRC, an R package for the analysis of data from live cell imaging cell proliferation experiments carried out on the Essen Biosciences IncuCyte ZOOM instrument. The package provides a simple workflow for summarising data into a form that can be used to calculate dose response curves and EC50 values for small molecule inhibitors. Data from different cell lines, or cell lines grown under different conditions, can be normalised as to their doubling time. A simple graphical web interface, implemented using shiny, is provided for the benefit of non-R users. The software is potentially useful to any research group studying the impact of small molecule inhibitors on cell proliferation using the IncuCyte ZOOM.
Ontogenetic Scaling of Metabolism, Growth, and Assimilation: Testing Metabolic Scaling Theory with Manduca sexta Larvae

Metabolism, growth, and the assimilation of energy and materials are essential processes that are intricately related and depend heavily on animal size. However, models that relate the ontogenetic scaling of energy assimilation and metabolism to growth rely on assumptions that have yet to be rigorously tested. Based on detailed daily measurements of metabolism, growth, and assimilation in tobacco hornworms, Manduca sexta, we provide a first experimental test of the core assumptions of a metabolic scaling model of ontogenetic growth. Metabolic scaling parameters changed over development, in violation of the model assumptions. At the same time, the scaling of growth rate matches that of metabolic rate, with similar scaling exponents both across and within developmental instars. Rates of assimilation were much higher than expected during the first two instars and did not match the patterns of scaling of growth and metabolism, which suggests high costs of biosynthesis early in development. The rapid increase in size and discrete instars observed in larval insect development provide an ideal system for understanding how patterns of growth and metabolism emerge from fundamental cellular processes and the exchange of materials and energy between an organism and its environment.
Recognizing emotions on the basis of keystroke dynamics

The article describes a research on recognizing emotional states on the basis of keystroke dynamics. An overview of various studies and applications of emotion recognition based on data coming from keyboard is presented. Then, the idea of an experiment is presented, i.e. the way of collecting and labeling training data, extracting features and finally training classifiers. Different classification approaches are proposed to be tested: universal vs. individual models, multiclass vs. two-class. The obtained results reveal which of these approaches are appropriate for the given task. The individual two-class models turn out to be the most accurate.
An exploration of the importance of the strategy used to identify gentrification

Urban scholars have described the importance of gentrification in major cities across the USA since the 1970s. While there is consensus that gentrification shaped social and physical aspects of neighbourhoods, scholars have yet to agree on how gentrified neighbourhoods should be identified. Owing to the lack of consensus, gentrification was measured in a variety of ways, which greatly influenced the neighbourhoods studied in previous research and potentially the findings of research that assessed the importance of gentrification for other neighbourhood outcomes. The current study contributes to this debate by applying and comparing two census-based strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods with a qualitative neighbourhood selection strategy derived from The New York Times to New York City neighbourhoods for the span of years from 1980 to 2009. Results confirm that each of the strategies identified different neighbourhoods and that qualitative strategies for identifying gentrified neighbourhoods may overlook areas that experienced similar changes to those more widely recognised as gentrified. Given these findings, additional analyses assessed which census-based neighbourhood selection strategy better represented the neighbourhoods perceived by The New York Times, a major media outlet that shaped discourse on gentrification in the USA, as having experienced gentrification.
Learning Adaptive Hidden Layers for Mobile Gesture Recognition

This paper addresses two obstacles hindering advances in accurate gesture recognition on mobile devices. First, gesture recognition performance is highly dependent on feature selection, but optimal features typically vary from gesture to gesture. Second, diverse user behaviors and mobile environments result in extremely large intra-class variations. We tackle these issues by introducing a new network layer, called an adaptive hidden layer (AHL), to generalize a hidden layer in deep neural networks and dynamically generate an activation map conditioned on the input. To this end, an AHL is composed of multiple neuron groups and an extra selector. The former compiles multi-modal features captured by mobile sensors, while the latter adaptively picks a plausible group for each input sample. The AHL is end-to-end trainable and can generalize an arbitrary subset of hidden layers. Through a series of AHLs, the great expressive power from exponentially many forward paths allows us to choose proper multi-modal features in a sample-specific fashion and resolve the problems caused by the unfavorable variations in mobile gesture recognition. The proposed approach is evaluated on a benchmark for gesture recognition and a newly collected dataset. Superior performance demonstrates its effectiveness.
Broadband design method of SIW directional couplers

This paper treats two-fold symmetrical SIW directional couplers with simple structure and broadband characteristics. The proposed directional coupler consists of a rectangular cavity connected four input/output ports at its corner, and several metallic posts inserted within the cavity in order to obtain a desired property. By optimizing the circuit structure, broadband characteristics can be obtained for several directional couplers with a coupling coefficient of 0dB or 3dB. In analysis and design, SIW circuits are treated as waveguide circuits filled with dielectric material, and applied to the H-plane planar circuit approach, the segmentation method, and short-circuiting of fictitious ports. Finally, we demonstrate the validity of this design procedure by em-simulations and measurement of fabricated couplers including microstrip line to SIW transitions.
The WTO, marketing and innovativeness capabilities of Vietnamese firms

Purpose – This study aims to explore the impact of Vietnamese firms' expectations of opportunities provided by the World Trade Organization (WTO) – expected WTO opportunities – on their marketing and innovativeness capabilities, and subsequently, on business performance.Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of 323 Vietnamese firms in Ho Chi Minh City, a model incorporating expected WTO opportunities, marketing and innovativeness capabilities, and business performance by means of structural equation modeling was tested.Findings – It was found that expected WTO opportunities had positive impacts on both marketing and innovativeness capabilities. Further, marketing and innovativeness capabilities underlie business performance of Vietnamese firms.Research limitations/implications – A key limitation of this study is the examination of the impact of expected WTO on only two firm capabilities: marketing and innovativeness. There might be several other firm capabilities that may be affected by expected WTO.
All-glass extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer thermo-optic coefficient sensor based on a capillary bridged two fiber ends.

An all-glass extrinsic Fabry-Perot interferometer (EFPI) is demonstrated for thermal-optic coefficient (TOC) of water, glycerol, and their mixture (volume ratio of 1:1). The compensation for the thermal expansion of Fabry-Perot (FP) cavity is realized by assembling a glass capillary and optical fibers through a CO2 laser welding. The thermal responses of EFPIs are tested in air at different cavity lengths of 578.6 μm, 911.7 μm, and 1520.3 μm, respectively. The corresponding refractive index errors induced by thermal expansion of FP cavity are negligible, which are demonstrated to be 4.33×10-6 RIU/°C, 4.13×10-6 RIU/°C, and 3.45×10-6 RIU/°C when temperature increases from 20.03°C to 60.78°C. The thermal-optic coefficients of water, glycerol, and their mixture are measured to be -1.5×10-4 RIU/°C, -2.3×10-4 RIU/°C, and -2.0×10-4 RIU/°C, respectively. Our study suggests a potential use of this sensor for TOC measurements of liquids with the advantages of low costs and robustness.