Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of the choice of VaR models on the level of regulatory capital according to Basel II

The Basel II framework allows the calculation of the capital requirements for market risk with Value-at-Risk models. Since no special model is prescribed in the framework, banks may use simple models with questionable assumptions concerning their underlying distributions. Our numerical analysis reveals that simple VaR models that perform noticeably worse than comparable simple models with more realistic assumptions may lead to a lower level of regulatory capital for banks. For this reason, banks have a major incentive to implement bad models. This is obviously contrary to the interests of regulatory authorities.
Economic and Productivity Growth in Canadian Industries

Most OECD economies, including that of Canada, experienced a slowdown in economic growth from the 1961–1973 period to the 1973– 1988 period, and to the 1988–1995 period. Consequently, progress in the standard of living, as measured by GDP per capita, also slowed down in most OECD countries over the three subperiods. This paper analyses the sources of output growth in 122 industries and in the private business sector to gain an additional perspective on the slowdown of the Canadian economy. We adopt the constant-quality indexes of capital and labor inputs introduced by Dale W. Jorgenson and Zvi Griliches (1967) and later used extensively in Jorgenson et al. (1987), Jorgenson (1995a, b), and Jorgenson and Eric Yip (2000) to identify the sources of growth. These measures allow us to take into account the changing composition of the labor force and the capital stock. At the industry level, we adjust for capital quality by aggregating the capital stock across five asset types by means of the rental prices of capital rather than the asset prices of capital. The use of rental prices allows us to incorporate differences in depreciation rates and tax treatment across different asset types for each industry. At the same time, we combine hours worked by each type of worker using the share of labor compensation to reflect labor quality. At the aggregate level, we apply the same framework by aggregating the capital stock across different asset types and hours worked across different types of workers. A number of studies have compared Canada’s economic growth performance with that of its competitors using this framework (Chrysostom Dougherty, 1991; Dougherty and Jorgenson, 1997; Jorgenson and Yip, 2000). However, this is the first attempt at using this framework to assess Canada’s economic performance at the industry level.
Family Control, Regulatory Environment, and the Growth of Entrepreneurial Firms: International Evidence

Manuscript Type. Empirical. Research Issue. We investigate the joint effects of family control and the regulatory environment on entrepreneurial growth through the lens of socio‐emotional wealth (SEW) theory. Research Findings. Taking into consideration both economic and non‐economic goals of entrepreneurial firms, measured by sales growth and employment growth respectively, we find that, compared to their non‐family‐controlled counterparts, family‐controlled firms tend to have lower sales growth rates, but higher employment growth rates. Furthermore, less favorable regulatory environments reduce both sales and workforce growth rates to a greater extent for family‐controlled firms than for non‐family‐controlled firms. Theoretical/Academic Implications. We add to the corporate governance and family business management literature by documenting that the regulatory environment moderates the corporate governance effect of family control on the economic and non‐economic goals of family‐controlled firms. The findings also contribute to the family business management literature by enriching and providing strong evidence in favor of the SEW theory through our exploration of the moderating role that macro‐governance plays in the family control‐SEW relation. This research also makes contributions to the entrepreneurship literature, laying a foundation for future empirical studies on entrepreneurial growth by separating its economic from its non‐economic dimensions. Practitioner/Policy Implications. Our findings provide practical implications for both policy makers and entrepreneurs. They not only help entrepreneurs better understand growth strategies in various macro‐governance settings, but also provide governments and policymakers with potential policy implications to encourage entrepreneurial and economic growth. Policies that improve the macro‐governance environment can help family firms to prosper by contributing to their economic and non‐economic growth, both of which are important for economic development.
Lean production and TQM: Complementary or Contradictory Driving Forces of Innovation Performance?

As a set of tools and standards, Total Quality Management (TQM) tends to focus on individual processes to improve the productivity and efficiency of organizations. For the same objective, many organizations adapt the Lean production system in their strategies to eliminate waste and reduce the non-value-adding activities. Thus, organizations are looking for innovative ways to achieve more with fewer resources. Yet, innovations are restricted because the process of generating new ideas and making effective decisions is limited to just a few people, and no broad employee participation is achieved, resulting in the waste of intellectual talent. This paper aims to discuss the impact of both Lean production and TQM on innovation performance. In addition, it presents a conceptual model to understand this relationship, supported by literature review from recent studies. This discussion provides insights into more specific features related to Human Relations Management and Improvement Strategies that can be utilized to advance the intellectual capabilities at any organization, thereby providing chances of successful innovation performance.
Vasopressin innervation of the mouse (Mus musculus) brain and spinal cord

The neuropeptide vasopressin (AVP) has been implicated in the regulation of numerous physiological and behavioral processes. Although mice have become an important model for studying this regulation, there is no comprehensive description of AVP distribution in the mouse brain and spinal cord. With C57BL/6 mice, we used immunohistochemistry to corroborate the location of AVP‐containing cells and to define the location of AVP‐containing fibers throughout the mouse central nervous system. We describe AVP‐immunoreactive (‐ir) fibers in midbrain, hindbrain, and spinal cord areas, which have not previously been reported in mice, including innervation of the ventral tegmental area, dorsal and median raphe, lateral and medial parabrachial, solitary, ventrolateral periaqueductal gray, and interfascicular nuclei. We also provide a detailed description of AVP‐ir innervation in heterogenous regions such as the amygdala, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and ventral forebrain. In general, our results suggest that, compared with other species, the mouse has a particularly robust and widespread distribution of AVP‐ir fibers, which, as in other species, originates from a number of different cell groups in the telencephalon and diencephalon. Our data also highlight the robust nature of AVP innervation in specific regulatory nuclei, such as the ventral tegmental area and dorsal raphe nucleus among others, that are implicated in the regulation of many behaviors. J. Comp. Neurol. 519:2434–2474, 2011. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
PMHT Approach for Multi-Target Multi-Sensor Sonar Tracking in Clutter

Multi-sensor sonar tracking has many advantages, such as the potential to reduce the overall measurement uncertainty and the possibility to hide the receiver. However, the use of multi-target multi-sensor sonar tracking is challenging because of the complexity of the underwater environment, especially the low target detection probability and extremely large number of false alarms caused by reverberation. In this work, to solve the problem of multi-target multi-sensor sonar tracking in the presence of clutter, a novel probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracker (PMHT) approach based on the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is proposed. The PMHT can efficiently handle the unknown measurements-to-targets and measurements-to-transmitters data association ambiguity. The EKF and UKF are used to deal with the high degree of nonlinearity in the measurement model. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the target tracking performance in a cluttered environment greatly, and its computational load is low.
Performance and strategic changes of SMEs in the Korean electronic parts industry: a dynamic strategic group approach

This study empirically examines the patterns and performance consequences of strategic changes of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in response to environmental changes based on longitudinal data from 102 Korean electronic parts SMEs from 1990 to 2001. The dynamic analysis of strategic groups in the Korean electronic parts SMEs shows that four to five different strategic patterns (subcontractor, production-focus, market-focus, innovator, and market-diversified groups) with significant performance differences emerged depending on the period. For instance, the innovator group outperformed the subcontractor group in terms of return on sales. The production-focus group (which exhibited a relatively higher performance level in the early 1990s) gradually deteriorated in profitability in the late 1990s. Subsequently, a substantial number of SMEs (25% of sample firms on average) have attempted to shift their strategic configurations with different performance consequences. These results imply that given the rapid technological development in the industry and changes in the global production network with the emergence of Chinese competitors, Korean SMEs should focus on technological innovations to maintain their competitive position by relentlessly enhancing their technological development capabilities rather than production capabilities.
Voluntary Corporate Disclosure by Swedish Companies

Sweden is of interest because of the rapid growth in the Stockholm Stock Exchange and because of the country's disproportionate number of multi-national enterprises. This paper reports on the extent of voluntary disclosure in the corporate annual reports of unlisted and listed Swedish companies. A wide-ranging definition of voluntary disclosure is adopted because of the flexibility of approach accepted in Sweden. This should not be construed that Swedish accounting is largely unregulated, rather it reflects a problem of interpretation of what constitutes generally accepted accounting principles in Sweden. In addition, the paper assesses whether there is a significant association between a number of independent variables and the extent of disclosure.
A distributed approach for retrieving spatial data in GIS

Data and interactions with data are becoming less dependent on centralized systems today. Particularly, when peer- to-peer (P2P) networks are widely used, many distributed methods are applied in different researches. The data in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are multi-dimensional, scattered and complex data. Those special traits make it difficult for spatial data to be retrieved in traditional methods. In this paper, a distributed approach for retrieving spatial data - RSD- CAN, over P2P networks, is presented to enhance the efficiency and improve performance in dealing with spatial data.
Perceptions of Carer Burden: Differences Between Individuals With an Eating Disorder and Their Carer

Carer burden in eating disorders is considerable, but to date no research has examined carer burden from the perspective of the person with an eating disorder. The current brief report assessed carer burden with a short questionnaire, as perceived by 20 matched pairs of sufferers and their carers. Those with an eating disorder significantly underestimated the overall burden experienced by their carer, particularly in relation to nutritional difficulties and conflict within the family. Domains where carers and sufferers had high agreement may be useful in facilitating collaborative involvement between sufferers and carers in treatment, such as multi-family therapy.
Vision-Based 3D Articulated Pose Tracking Using Particle Filtering and Model Constraints

We describe a probabilistic approach for 3D upper body pose tracking by fusing depth, color and underlying body constraints. Existing tracking algorithms can be roughly divided into model-free and model-based methods. Probabilistic assembly of parts falls into model-free category. An important advantage of this technique is that pose can be estimated independently at each frame, allowing estimation for rapid movements, but most such approaches only get 2D tracking results. The use of an explicit model is the most widely investigated methodology, but often suffers from high computational costs. In this paper, we employ particle filtering to get candidate body parts with salient features, integrate probabilistic assembly of parts with model constraints to get the best pose configuration. Experimental results show that our approach can robustly track human motion even when hands move rapidly or self-occlusion exists, and can also automatically initialize and recover from tracking failure.
Chronic Exposure to Bisphenol A Exacerbates Dental Fluorosis in Growing Rats

Enamel defects resulting from environmental conditions and way of life are public health concerns because of their high prevalence. Because their etiology is unclear, the aim of this study was to analyze the various forms of enamel hypomineralization, and to characterize the genes involved in this process to determine the mechanisms involved in disruptions of amelogenesis. We used bisphenol A (BPA) and fluoride as models; both are commonly encountered in human populations and utilized in dentistry. Wistar rats were chronically exposed to 5 μg/kg/day BPA from day 1 of gestation to day 65 after birth (P65) and 5 mM fluoride from P21 to P65. Resulting enamel defects were comparable to the human enamel pathologies molar incisor hypomineralization (MIH) and dental fluorosis (DF) respectively, and were more severe in rats exposed to both agents than to each agent alone. Large‐scale transcriptomic analysis of dental epithelium showed a small group of genes the expression of which was affected by exposure to BPA or NaF. Among the most modulated, many are directly involved in amelogenesis (Amelx, Enam, Klk4, Mmp12, Slc26a4, and Slc5a8), and can be regrouped as forming the “hypomineralization enameloma. ” Each of these gene expression perturbations may contribute to enamel defects. Exposure to BPA weakens enamel, making it more prone to generate frequent mineralization defects MIH and DF. Our study identifies hypomineralization genes that may enable the use of dental enamel as an early marker of exposure to environmental toxicants because of its unique ability to retrospectively record ameloblast pathophysiology. © 2016 American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
Tag-Aware Personalized Recommendation Using a Hybrid Deep Model

Recently, many efforts have been put into tag-aware personalized recommendation. However, due to uncontrolled vocabularies, social tags are usually redundant, sparse, and ambiguous. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network approach to solve this problem by mapping the tag-based user and item proﬁles to an abstract deep feature space, where the deep-semantic similarities between users and their target items (resp., irrelevant items) are maximized (resp., minimized). To ensure the scalability in practice, we further propose to improve this model’s training efﬁciency by using hybrid deep learning and negative sampling. Experimental results show that our approach can signiﬁ-cantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines in tag-aware personalized recommendation ( 3 . 8 times better than the best baseline), and that using hybrid deep learning and negative sampling can dramatically enhance the model’s training efﬁciency (hundreds of times quicker), while maintaining similar (and sometimes even better) training quality and recommendation performance.
Dependence analysis between foreign exchange rates : a semi-parametric copula approach

Not only currencies are assets in investor's portfolio, central banks use them for implementing economic policies. This implies existence of some type of dependence pattern among the currencies. We investigate such patterns among daily Deutsche Mark (DM) (Euro later), UK Sterling (GBP) and the Japanese Yen (JPY) exchange rate, all considered against the US Dollar during various economic conditions. To overcome the short-comings of misspecification, normality and linear dependence for such time series, a exible semi-parametric copula methodology is adopted where the marginals are non-parametric but the copula is parametrically specified. Dependence is estimated both as a constant and time-varying measure. During the Pre-Euro period, we nd slightly more dependence when both DM (Euro)/USD and GBP/USD jointly appreciate as compared to joint depreciation, especially in the late 90s. Such results are reversed for GBP/USD and JPY/USD in the early 90s. Post-Euro, DM (Euro)/USD and GBP/USD exhibit stronger dependence when they jointly appreciate, which could indicate preference for price-stability in EU zone. Whereas the dependence of JPY/USD with both DM (Euro)/USD and GBP/USD is stronger when they jointly depreciate, this could imply preference for export competitiveness among the countries. In the beginning of Recent-Crisis period, DM (EURO)/USD and GBP/USD show more dependence when they jointly depreciate, but later we see the similar tendency for these currencies to be related more when they jointly appreciate. Such measures of asymmetric dependence among the currencies provide vital insight into Central banks preferences and investors portfolio balancing.
Adaptive radius species based particle swarm optimization for multimodal optimization problems

Multimodal optimization problem always has several peaks that are all optima of the problem. A promising approach to deal with such kind of problem should locate the peaks as many as possible (e.g., all the peaks) and should obtain high accuracy in each peak. The species-based particle swarm optimization (SPSO) divides the population into several subpopulations. Each subpopulation is gathered around a neighborhood best called species seed within the radius r, trying to locate different peaks. It does well in some low-dimensional multimodal optimization problems. However, the parameter r, which is associated with the efficiency and the accuracy of the algorithm, must be specified by the users. This makes SPSO very difficult for users to determine how much the parameter r should be. In this paper, a method of adaptively choosing radius r in SPSO is proposed, termed as adaptive SPSO (ASPSO). The experimental results show that the performance of ASPSO is more effective and accurate than standard SPSO in dealing with low-dimensional multimodal optimization problems.
Galactomannan Antigenemia in Pediatric Oncology Patients With Invasive Aspergillosis

Background: Diagnosing invasive aspergillosis is difficult but might be improved by detection of circulating galactomannan. Although galactomannan antigenemia has been well studied in the detection of invasive aspergillosis in adult patients, little is known about the expression of circulating galactomannan in immunocompromised children with invasive aspergillosis. Methods: We studied the expression of galactomannan antigen by enzyme immunoassay (EIA) in 990 serum samples from 56 pediatric oncology patients (ages 3 months to 18 years) of whom 17 had proven or probable invasive aspergillosis defined by the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer-Mycoses Study Group criteria. Any sample with a galactomannan EIA Galactomannan index value of ≥0.5 was considered positive. Results: At least 1 serum sample was positive for 11 of 17 pediatric oncology patients (65.7% sensitivity, 95% confidence interval: 38.3–85.7) with invasive aspergillosis. Galactomannan EIA was positive in 99 of 304 samples from patients with proven or probable invasive aspergillosis, and 7 of 686 (1.0%) samples from 39 control subjects resulted in a positive galactomannan EIA result. At least 1 sample tested positive in 5 of the 39 controls (12.8%, 95% confidence interval: 4.3–27.4). No significant association between accuracy and patient age was observed. Among the 7 evaluable galactomannan-positive patients with IA, the galactomannan EIA produced a positive result before clinical or radiographic evidence of infection in 6 cases, with a lead-time to diagnosis ranging from 1 day to 34 days (median: 10 days). In the remaining case, a positive galactomannan was observed on the same day as diagnosis by non-EIA methods. Conclusions: The presence of circulating galactomannan is predictive of invasive aspergillosis in most pediatric oncology patients. Galactomannan antigenemia may precede clinical, microbiologic, or radiographic evidence of invasive aspergillosis.
Do shocks have a persistent impact on consumption?

This article uses rural Malawian data to study the long-run impact of two household shocks (sickness and death) and two community shocks (floods and drought) on household per capita consumption. Little work has been done in this area, but understanding these shocks and the extent to which households can insulate themselves against these shocks is important in understanding how households in developing countries remain in a poverty trap. Results indicate that drought and sickness have negative short-term effects on consumption level, but do not have significant long-run effects. This suggests that rural Malawian households are able to shield themselves from the persistent negative impacts of these shocks on consumption levels but are unable to self-insure against the short-run impact.
Validity of simplified Shockley-Read-Hall statistics for modeling carrier lifetimes in crystalline silicon

The Shockley-Read-Hall model, in its simplest and most common form, is often used to describe both injection- and temperature-dependent carrier lifetime measurements. Such lifetime modeling has provided the basis for novel, ultra-sensitive spectroscopic techniques for the study of recombination centres in crystalline silicon. However, this approximate model is only valid when the density of recombination centres is small enough to avoid trapping effects, which cause distortions in the excess mobile carrier concentrations. In this work, the simplified Shockley-Read-Hall model is compared with a more general solution of the continuity equations that takes account of carrier trapping. This comparison leads to an expression for the upper limit on the recombination centre density for which the simplified Shockley-Read- Hall model remains accurate. The limit depends not only on the dopant density, but also on the energy level and electron and hole capture cross-sections for a given type of recombination centre. The results allow experimental conditions that do not invalidate the use of the simplified Shockley-Read-Hall model to be determined.