Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE MYTH OF THE RATIONAL MARKET

In view of the collapse of Wall Street giants that brought the world economy to its knees, it does not seem strange to find so many books devoted to the current financial crisis. Justin Fox’s The myth of the rational market is one of these books. But, even though the book touches on Wall Street, it is not about mishandlings on Wall Street, but about faults of University of Chicago, the bastion of the dominant theory of finance – efficient market theory. In other words, Justin Fox does not have a quarrel with the practice of finance but with its theory. The book does not criticize complex mathematical and statistical models, but the assumptions on which these models are based. As a result, the book is accessible to the wider public, and not just to finance/math geeks. It presents a historical development of the dominant theory of finance, how it came to dominate Wall Street, its flaws and ultimately its fall. The book is divided into five parts with 16 chapters, along with introduction and epilogue.
Bayesian methods for analysis of stock mixtures from genetic characters

Fisheries that exploit mixed stocks are very common, and their management oftentimes requires assessment of composition of the mixed catches (Begg et al., 1999). Multilocus genotypes of fi sh are a natural tag by which to infer their origins. The unknown proportions from stocks comprising a stock mixture, or its stock composition, can be estimated from genotype counts in a random sample of the stock-mixture individuals if relative frequencies (RFs) of the genotypes vary among the contributing stocks. Larger differences in genotypic RFs among stocks result in more accurate and precise stock composition estimates. The conditional maximum likelihood (CML) method (Fournier et al., 1984; Millar, 1987; Pella and Milner, 1987) has most commonly been used for stock-mixture analysis. Baseline samples drawn from the separate contributors are used in estimating the RFs of the observed stock-mixture genotypes in each stock. The CML stock composition estimate maximizes a likelihood function of the stock-mixture genotypes as if their RFs in the baseline stocks were known without error. The baseline multilocus genotype RFs determine the outcome of a stock-mixture analysis. Larger errors in these estimated RFs result in larger stock composition errors. Usually the variation in CML stock composition estimates from baseline and stock-mixture Bayesian methods for analysis of stock mixtures from genetic characters
Effects of Upconversion Nanoparticles on Polymerase Chain Reaction

Nanoparticles (NPs) are attractive materials owing to their physical and electrochemical properties, which make them extremely useful in diagnostic applications. Photon upconversion is the phenomenon where high-energy photons are emitted upon excitation of low-energy photons. Nucleic acids detection based on upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs), which display a high signal-to-noise ratio and no photobleaching, has been widely applied. We evaluated whether UCNPs can improve polymerase chain reaction (PCR) specificity and affect PCR amplification. The effects of UCNPs with a diameter size of 40, 70, and 250 nm were evaluated using 3 PCR kits (AccuPower PCR PreMix, AmpliTaq Gold 360 Master Mix, and HotStarTaq Plus Master Mix) and 3 real-time PCR kits (AccuPower GreenStar qPCR PreMix, SYBR Green PCR Master Mix, and QuantiTect SYBR Green PCR Kit). Quantum dots were used for comparison with the UCNPs. In the presence of an appropriate concentration of UCNPs, PCR specificity was optimized. UCNPs of 40-nm size improved PCR specificity more effectively than did UCNPs sized 70 or 250 nm. As the size and concentrations of the UCNPs were increased, PCR amplification was more severely inhibited. At lower annealing temperatures (25°C–45°C), addition of the 40 nm UCNP (1 µg/µL) to the PCR reagent produced specific PCR products without nonspecific sequence amplification. Therefore, UCNPs of different sizes, with different DNA polymerases used in the commercial kits, showed different inhibitory effects on PCR amplification. These results demonstrate that optimization of UCNPs, added to reaction mixtures at appropriate concentrations, can improve PCR specificity. However, the mechanism underlining UCNPs effect on PCR remains unclear and will require further investigation.
Using peer educator delivered seminars to improve the level of physical activity among older adults: a pilot investigation

Objectives: This research aimed to investigate the influence of peer educator delivered seminars to older adults on physical activity and exercise uptake, and whether improvements in activity levels and functional wellbeing follow. Design: Two part evaluation. Data are from a post-seminar survey that informed a process evaluation (Part 1 - Seminar) and a non-controlled prospective investigation (Part 2 - Cohort). Setting: Cohort data were collected from a regional community organisation and Seminar data at a number of meeting places for older adult organisations throughout Queensland. Participants: Seminar - 412 older adults, classified "Mostly third age" (> 65 years with average health), attended 23 seminars throughout the state. Cohort data were collected from nine adults (age 74.22 ± 4.43 years) at baseline and at two follow ups. Main outcome measures: Seminar satisfaction and intention to change data were collected by questionnaire post-seminars. Cohort data were collected for function, balance and quality of life pre-seminar, and four (PS1) and eight (PS2) weeks post. Results: Seminar data showed a raised awareness of the need for more movement, and an indication that individuals aimed to become more involved. For cohort, minutes per day sitting was significantly reduced at PS1 (p = 0.046) but not PS2, and a positive trend emerged for function and total METs-minutes per week. Conclusion: While further research is required, data suggest peer educator delivered seminars can have a positive impact on the intention to be active, and the activity levels and functional wellbeing of older adults. Peer educator delivered seminars may be a valuable complement to behaviour modification and social-ecological models in the drive towards seeing more adults become physically active.
Evolution, diversification, and expression of KNOX proteins in plants

The KNOX (KNOTTED1-like homeobox) transcription factors play a pivotal role in leaf and meristem development. The majority of these proteins are characterized by the KNOX1, KNOX2, ELK, and homeobox domains whereas the proteins of the KNATM family contain only the KNOX domains. We carried out an extensive inventory of these proteins and here report on a total of 394 KNOX proteins from 48 species. The land plant proteins fall into two classes (I and II) as previously shown where the class I family seems to be most closely related to the green algae homologs. The KNATM proteins are restricted to Eudicots and some species have multiple paralogs of this protein. Certain plants are characterized by a significant increase in the number of KNOX paralogs; one example is Glycine max. Through the analysis of public gene expression data we show that the class II proteins of this plant have a relatively broad expression specificity as compared to class I proteins, consistent with previous studies of other plants. In G. max, class I protein are mainly distributed in axis tissues and KNATM paralogs are overall poorly expressed; highest expression is in the early plumular axis. Overall, analysis of gene expression in G. max demonstrates clearly that the expansion in gene number is associated with functional diversification.
How to Act Knowing How Others Acted in the Same Circumstances: Some Experimental Evidence from the Ultimatum Game

Contemporary works, such as Lusk & Hudson's (2004), find that the greater knowledge regarding the possible results of the ultimatum game lead to results closer to the subgame perfect equilibrium. In this paper we seek to further this line of research beyond the fact of making the individuals aware of the game's purely strategical solution (the Nash Equilibrium). To this end, we use a scenario where the individuals are aware of the results obtained by previous players in the ultimatum game. Our results show that this knowledge doesn't necessarily lead to optimizing behavior (as in the standard solution), but, on the contrary, the heuristic rule of offering 50% strengthens.
Recidivism among paroled homicide offenders: an examination of the effects of incarceration, social bonds, and offender characteristics

The focus of this study is the sociological explanation of why some adult offenders recidivate while others do not. Specific deterrence (Beccaria, [1764] 1986; Bentham, [1789] 1961) and labeling (Lemert, 1967) theory predict that the severity of punishment has direct, although opposite effects on future criminal behavior. Alternatively, with their life course perspective, Sampson and Laub (1993) argue that it is more important to study the effects of informal mechanisms of social control on criminal behavior. The association between formal and informal mechanisms of social control and criminal behavior is examined with a sample of paroled homicide offenders. Most of these offenders will not recidivate, and follow-up periods vary extensively so survival analysis was chosen as the primary method of analysis. The most important finding in this study is that there is no evidence that longer periods of incarceration serve to deter offenders as predicted by specific deterrence theory. Instead, offenders who are incarcerated for longer periods of time are more likely to recidivate as predicted by Lemert's (1967) secondary deviance hypothesis. The results are partly explained by the fact that offenders who pose a higher risk of recidivating are incarcerated for longer periods of time. Limited support is found for Sampson and Laub's (1993) life course perspective. Married offenders are less likely to return to prison for any reason, but they are just as likely to be convicted of a property or violent crime while on parole. Level of education is not associated with the recidivism of offenders. Two policy issues are addressed in this study. First, homicide offenders present a very low risk of recidivism with 4 6% of offenders predicted to return to prison each year because they have been convicted of a property or violent offence. Secondly, risk assessment instruments are very effective at identifying homicide offenders who pose a higher risk of recidivism. The results show that the characteristics contributing to the recidivism of homicide offenders are not different from those associated with other types of offenders. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ii
CT and MRI Early Vessel Signs Reflect Clot Composition in Acute Stroke

Background and Purpose— The purpose of this study was to provide the first correlative study of the hyperdense middle cerebral artery sign (HMCAS) and gradient-echo MRI blooming artifact (BA) with pathology of retrieved thrombi in acute ischemic stroke. Methods— Noncontrast CT and gradient-echo MRI studies before mechanical thrombectomy in 50 consecutive cases of acute middle cerebral artery ischemic stroke were reviewed blinded to clinical and pathology data. Occlusions retrieved by thrombectomy underwent histopathologic analysis, including automated quantitative and qualitative rating of proportion composed of red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells, and fibrin on microscopy of sectioned thrombi. Results— Among 50 patients, mean age was 66 years and 48% were female. Mean (SD) proportion was 61% (±21) fibrin, 34% (±21) RBCs, and 4% (±2) white blood cells. Of retrieved clots, 22 (44%) were fibrin-dominant, 13 (26%) RBC-dominant, and 15 (30%) mixed. HMCAS was identified in 10 of 20 middle cerebral artery stroke cases with CT with mean Hounsfield Unit density of 61 (±8 SD). BA occurred in 17 of 32 with gradient-echo MRI. HMCAS was more commonly seen with RBC-dominant and mixed than fibrin-dominant clots (100% versus 67% versus 20%, P=0.016). Mean percent RBC composition was higher in clots associated with HMCAS (47% versus 22%, P=0.016). BA was more common in RBC-dominant and mixed clots compared with fibrin-dominant clots (100% versus 63% versus 25%, P=0.002). Mean percent RBC was greater with BA (42% versus 23%, P=0.011). Conclusions— CT HMCAS and gradient-echo MRI BA reflect pathology of occlusive thrombus. RBC content determines appearance of HMCAS and BA, whereas absence of HMCAS or BA may indicate fibrin-predominant occlusive thrombi.
Fiber-reinforced soft robotic anthropomorphic finger

Robotic fingers have attracted considerable attentions of researchers from multidisciplinary fields. Most of the existing devices apply rigid components such as springs, joints, gears etc., to achieve the locomotor performance of the human finger. However, high-cost, complexity hold back their practical application. Meanwhile, the material properties of these rigid components are significantly different from the biological tissues to bring in considerable risk and difficulty in human-robot interaction. In this paper, a novel soft robotic anthropomorphic finger was presented, which was purely made of low cost soft hyperelastic materials (around 1.5 dollars) and was pneumatically actuated. The morphology of the robotic finger was a replica of an adult-human finger. The chambers, fiber orientation and the skin layers were designed in concert therefore to achieve human finger-like movement. The kinematic and dynamic model of the soft robotic finger were built based on experimental empirical method. While operating underwater, DPIV experiments revealed that the underwater pinch performance of a two-finger gripper prototype is significantly affect by the position relative to the gripped object.
On Preserving Private Geosocial Networks against Practical Attacks

GeoSocial Networks (GSNs) are becoming increasingly popular due to its power in providing high-performance and flexible service capabilities. More and more internet users have accepted this innovative service model. However, although GSNs have great business value for data analysis by integrated with location information, it may seriously compromise users' privacy in publishing the GSN data. In this paper, we study the identity disclosure problem in publishing GSN data. We first discuss the attack problem by considering location-based properties as background knowledge, and then formalize an attack model, named (k, m)-anonymity. Then we propose a complete solution to achieve (k, m)-anonymization to prevent the released data from the attack. We also take data utility into consideration by defining specific information loss metrics. The performances of the methods have been validated by the real-world data.
Interactive Physical Simulation on Multi-core and Multi-GPU Architectures. (Simulations Physiques Interactives sur des Architectures Multi-Core et Multi-GPU)

Interactive physical simulation is a key component of realistic virtual environments. However, the amount of computations as well as the code complexity grow quickly with the variety, number and size of the simulated objects. During this thesis we studied the different ways to improve interactivity, with the constraint of minimizing the impact in the simulation code. We started by developing a new approach to collision detection between deformable bodies that allows deep intersections. Experiments show that this approach is fast and more robust than traditional proximity-based collisions, allowing physical simulations to employ large time steps. To take profit of multi-core machines, we propose a parallelization approach that relies on a task parallelism. Prior to running a simulation step, we extract a task dependency graph that is partitioned to define the task distribution between processors. This approach has a low impact on physics algorithms as parallelism is mainly extracted from the coordination code. Finally we extended our works multi-CPU and multi-GPU architectures. Using these resources efficiently in a seamless way is a challenging issue. We propose a parallelization scheme for dynamically balancing work load between multiple CPUs and GPUs. We rely on a two level scheduling associating a traditional task graph partitioning and a work stealing guided by processor affinity and heterogeneity. These criteria are intended to limit inefficient task migrations between GPUs, the cost of memory transfers being high, and to favor mapping small tasks on CPUs and large ones on GPUs to take advantage of heterogeneity.
A new family of mathematical models describing the human growth curve—Erratum: Direct calculation of peak height velocity, age at take-off and associated quantities

A new family of mathematical functions to fit longitudinal growth data was described in 1978. The ability of researchers to directly use parameters as estimates of age at peak height velocity resulted in them overlooking the possibility of directly calculating these quantities after model estimation. This erratum has corrected three mistakes in the original manuscript in the direct calculation of peak height velocity and age at take-off and has implemented the solutions in a STATA program which directly calculates the estimates, standard errors and confidence intervals for age, height and velocity at peak height velocity.
Advances in flash memory SSD technology for enterprise database applications

The past few decades have witnessed a chronic and widening imbalance among processor bandwidth, disk capacity, and access speed of disk. According to Amdhal's law, the performance enhancement possible with a given improvement is limited by the amount that the improved feature is used. This implies that the performance enhancement of an OLTP system would be seriously limited without a considerable improvement in I/O throughput. Since the market debut of flash memory SSD a few years ago, we have made a continued effort to overcome its poor random write performance and to provide stable and sufficient I/O bandwidth. In this paper, we present three different flash memory SSD models prototyped recently by Samsung Electronics. We then show how the flash memory SSD technology has advanced to reverse the widening trend of performance gap between processors and storage devices. We also demonstrate that even a single flash memory drive can outperform a level-0 RAID with eight enterprise class 15k-RPM disk drives with respect to transaction throughput, cost effectiveness and energy consumption.
Amino Acid Content of Rabbit Acrosomal Proteinase and Its Similarity to Human Trypsin

Rabbit acrosomal proteinase from epididymal spermatozoa of 44 male rabbits was purified by subcellular fractionation, sucrose density gradient centrifugation, and electrofocusing; the specific activity of the purified product was 20,047 units per milligram, a value similar to that observed for pancreatic trypsins from various sources. The molecular weight determined from the amino acid analyses and ultracentrifugation was about 22,000. This rabbit acrosomal proteinase showed great similarity to pancreatic trypsin, especially to human pancreatic trypsin, both in the number of individual amino acids and in the total number of residues. This similarity was confirmed by an antigenic cross reaction between rabbit antiserum to bovine pancreatic trypsin with human, rabbit, rhesus monkey, and bull acrosotnal proteinase.
Non-CNF QBF Solving with QCIR

While it is empirically confirmed folklore that conjunctive normal form (CNF) is not the ideal input format for QBF solvers, most tool developers and therefore also the users focus on formulas in this restricted structure. One important factor for establishing non-CNF solving is the input format. To overcome drawbacks of available formats, the QCIR format has recently been presented. The QCIR format is a circuit-based input format for quantified Boolean formulas which supports structure sharing. In contrast to previous formats, the representation is very compact, yet still easy to parse and to read for the human user. In this paper, we analyze the QCIR format in detail and provide tools and benchmarks which, we hope, will make its usage attractive and motivate tool developers to support this format as well as users to formulate their encodings in this format.
Stack Caching Using Split Data Caches

In most embedded and general purpose architectures, stack data and non-stack data is cached together, meaning that writing to or loading from the stack may expel non-stack data from the data cache. Manipulation of the stack has a different memory access pattern than that of non-stack data, showing higher temporal and spatial locality. We propose caching stack and non-stack data separately and develop four different stack caches that allow this separation without requiring compiler support. These are the simple, window, and prefilling with and without tag stack caches. The performance of the stack cache architectures was evaluated using the Simple Scalar toolset where the window and prefilling stack cache without tag resulted in an execution speedup of up to 3.5% for the MiBench benchmarks, executed on an out-of-order processor with the ARM instruction set.
Algorithms for Matrix Completion by

We consider collaborative filtering methods for matrix completion. A typical approach is to find a low rank matrix that matches the observed ratings. However, the corresponding problem has local optima. In this thesis, we study two approaches to remedy this issue: reference vector method and trace norm regularization. The reference vector method explicitly constructs user and item features based on similarities to reference sets of users and items. Then the learning task reduces to a convex regression problem for which the global optimum can be obtained. Second, we develop and analyze a new algorithm for the trace-norm regularization approach. To facilitate smooth primal optimization, we introduce a soft variational trace-norm and analyze a class of alternating optimization algorithms. We introduce a scalable primal-dual block coordinate descent algorithm for large sparse matrix completion. The algorithm explicitly maintains a sparse dual and the corresponding low rank primal solution at the same time. Preliminary empirical results illustrate both the scalability and the accuracy of the algorithm. Thesis Supervisor: Tommi S. Jaakkola Title: Professor
On finding narrow passages with probabilistic roadmap planners

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Social, ethical and legal considerations raised by the discovery and patenting of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes

The discovery of the BRCA1 gene had an immediate and profound impact on medical practice by providing a means to assess and manage breast and ovarian cancer risk in individuals and their families carrying a mutation in the gene. The patenting of BRCA1 and then BRCA2 (another cancer-predisposing gene) by Myriad Genetics Inc. raised controversial ethical and legal issues relating to access and research, and its enforcement caused growing discontent. In the USA, the validity of the patents on the isolated BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes was challenged in court. After a four-year legal battle, the US Supreme Court invalidated both patents. This commentary reviews the discovery of these cancer-predisposing genes from the perspective of one of the co-discoverers of BRCA1. It also discusses the socio-ethical impact of the patenting of BRCA1 and BRCA2 and the legal implications of the US Supreme Court's decision.