Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sovereign default and renegotiation: recovery rates, interest spreads and credit history

Emerging countries that have defaulted on their debt repayment obligations in the past are more likely to default again in the future than are non-defaulters with the same debt-to-GDP ratio. This paper explains this stylized fact within a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework that explicitly models renegotiations between a defaulting country and its creditors. Quantitative analysis of the model reveals that the equilibrium probability of default for a given debt-to-GDP level is weakly increasing with the number of past defaults, consistent with empirical observations. The equilibrium of the model also accords with an additional observed trend: a country for which default terms require less than a 100 percent recovery rate tends to pay a higher rate of return (relative to a risk-free rate) on debt that is issued subsequently than do defaulting countries that agree to a full recovery rate.
Diminished Vision in Healthy Aging Is Associated with Increased Retinal L-Type Voltage Gated Calcium Channel Ion Influx

Extensive evidence implicates an increase in hippocampal L-type voltage-gated calcium channel (L-VGCC) expression, and ion influx through these channels, in age-related cognitive declines. Here, we ask if this “calcium hypothesis" applies to the neuroretina: Is increased influx via L-VGCCs related to the well-documented but poorly-understood vision declines in healthy aging? In Long-Evans rats we find a significant age-related increase in ion flux through retinal L-VGCCs in vivo (manganese-enhanced MRI (MEMRI)) that are longitudinally linked with progressive vision declines (optokinetic tracking). Importantly, the degree of retinal Mn2+ uptake early in adulthood significantly predicted later visual contrast sensitivity declines. Furthermore, as in the aging hippocampus, retinal expression of a drug-insensitive L-VGCC isoform (α1D) increased – a pattern confirmed in vivo by an age-related decline in sensitivity to L-VGCC blockade. These data highlight mechanistic similarities between retinal and hippocampal aging, and raise the possibility of new treatment targets for minimizing vision loss during healthy aging.
Multi-objective resource allocation in full-duplex SWIPT systems

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation algorithm design for full-duplex simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (FD-SWIPT) systems. The considered system comprises a FD radio base station, multiple single-antenna half-duplex (HD) users, and multiple energy harvesters equipped with multiple antennas. We propose a multi-objective optimization framework to study the trade-off between uplink transmit power minimization, downlink transmit power minimization, and total harvested energy maximization. The considered optimization framework takes into account heterogeneous quality of service requirements for uplink and downlink communication and wireless power transfer. The non-convex multi-objective optimization problem is transformed into an equivalent rank-constrained semidefinite program (SDP) and solved optimally by SDP relaxation under certain general conditions. The solution of the proposed framework results in a set of Pareto optimal resource allocation policies. Numerical results unveil an interesting trade-off between the considered conflicting system design objectives and reveal the improved power efficiency facilitated by FD in SWIPT systems compared to traditional HD systems.
The Diffusion of Policy Perceptions: Evidence from a Structural Topic Model

: Policy diffusion occurs when policies in one unit (e.g., states, cantons, cities) are influenced by the prior adoption of policies in other units. Although numerous studies have convincingly shown that policy adoption is a function of previous adoptions in other units, they have, with very few exceptions, generally ignored a crucial step in the diffusion process—namely, how political units perceive the policies that they are considering adopting. This policy perception plays a crucial role in linking the actions of previous units with the potential actions in other units. In this paper we focus on the link between prior adoptions and policy perceptions, both by identifying the mix of perceptions and by examining the link between prior adoptions and policy perceptions. We study these perceptions in the area of restrictions on smoking in U.S. states. Our analysis draws upon an original dataset of almost half a million articles published in thirty American newspapers between 1996 and 2014 and uses structural topic models to estimate how smoking bans have been perceived and how perceptions changes as a function of policy adoption in nearby states. We find that many of the most prominent topics are indeed a function of prior policy adoptions in other states. Abstract Policy diffusion occurs when policies in one unit (e.g., states, cantons, cities) are inﬂuenced by the prior adoption of policies in other units. Although numerous studies have convincingly shown that policy adoption is a function of previous adoptions in other units, they have, with very few exceptions, generally ignored a crucial step in the diffusion process—namely, how political units perceive the policies that they are considering adopting. This policy perception plays a crucial role in linking the actions of previous units with the potential actions in other units. In this paper we focus on the link between prior adoptions and policy perceptions, both by identifying the mix of perceptions and by examining the link between prior adoptions and policy perceptions. We study these perceptions in the area of restrictions on smoking in U.S. states. Our analysis draws upon an original dataset of almost half a million articles published in thirty American newspapers between 1996 and 2014 and uses structural topic models to estimate how smoking bans have been perceived and how perceptions changes as a function of policy adoption in nearby states. We ﬁnd that many of the most prominent topics are indeed a function of prior policy adoptions in other states.
A correlated shadowing model for urban wireless networks

This paper presents an analytically tractable stochastic geometry model for urban wireless networks, where the locations of the nodes and the shadowing are highly correlated and different path loss functions can be applied to line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links. Using a distance-based LOS path loss model and a blockage (shadowing)-based NLOS path loss model, we are able to derive the distribution of the interference observed at a typical location and the joint distribution at different locations. When applied to cellular networks, this model leads to tractable expressions for the coverage probability (SINR distribution). We show that this model captures important features of urban wireless networks, which cannot be analyzed using existing models. The numerical results also suggest that even in the presence of significant penetration loss, ignoring the NLOS interference can lead to erroneous estimations on coverage. They also suggest that allowing users to be associated with NLOS BSs may provide a non-trivial gain on coverage.
AUTOMSv2 results for OAEI 2012

This paper presents AUTOMSv2 effort towards building a tool for the automated alignment of domain ontologies. The developed tool is a result of our motivation to rebuild AUTOMS tool (presented in OAEI 2006) by putting together a) a well-known, widely used and continuously evolving/maintained alignment framework b) the synthesis of state-of-the-art alignment methods, c) a modern approach of synthesizing methods using profiling and configuration strategies, and d) multilingual support. The aim of this experience was not to compete with other tools in precision and recall but to re-develop AUTOMS using the above mentioned technologies and methods. Nevertheless, AUTOMSv2 obtained satisfactory results when compared with tools of OAEI 2011 and 2011.5 campaigns.
Performance Evaluation of a MANET Testbed in Heterogeneous Environment: Experimental Results

In recent years, the wireless networks are becoming popular because of new wireless devices such as mobile PCs and Smart phones, which have low cost and high performance. As a result, a lot of test beds for MANETs have been proposed and implemented. In this work, we implement a MANET test bed and present two experimental models to evaluate its performance. As routing protocol, we use Optimized Link State Routing Daemon (OLSRd). We investigate the performance of the network in a mixed horizontal and vertical scenario, which is implemented in both indoor and outdoor environment. Experimental results show that in general the performance is decreased for 3 and more hops. However, the addition of mobile nodes bring some oscillations in throughput, but improves the average performance.
Understanding the Service Life Cycle of Android Apps: An Exploratory Study

The fast growing use of the Android platform has been accompanied with an increase of malwares in Android applications. A popular way in distributing malwares in the mobile world is through repackaging legitimate apps, embedding malicious code in them, and publishing them in app stores. Therefore, examining the similarity between the behavior of malicious and normal apps can help detect malwares due to repacking. Malicious apps operate by keeping their operations invisible to the user. They also run long enough to perform their malicious tasks. One way to detect malicious apps is to examine their service life cycle. In this paper, we examine the service life cycle of apps. We extract various features of app services. We use these features to classify over 250 normal and malicious apps. Our findings show that malicious apps tend to use services to do their malicious operation and have no communication with the other components of the app, whereas the services in normal apps are usually bound to other components and send messages to notify users about the operations they perform. The results of this exploratory study can be used in the future to design techniques for detecting malicious apps using the classification of their service features.
Simulation des Einsatzhärtens und Abschätzung der Dauerfestigkeit einsatzgehärteter Bauteile

Die vorliegende Arbeit besitzt zwei Schwerpunkte. Zum einen wird das Einsatzharten von Bauteilen basierend auf vorhandenen Materialmodellen simuliert. Zum anderen wird ein Konzept zur Abschatzung der Dauerfestigkeit einsatzgeharteter Bauteile vorgestellt, in dem wesentliche Ergebnisse der Warmebehandlungssimulation als neue Ausgangsgrosen verwendet werden. Damit konnte erstmals ein geschlossenes werkstoffmechanisches Dauerfestigkeitskonzept fur einsatzgehartete Bauteile erarbeitet werden. Fur die Analyse beliebiger Bauteilgeometrien ist eine Implementation der Materialmodelle in die FEM notwendig. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde das FE-Programm ABAQUS verwendet. Speziell fur dieses FE-Programm wurde innerhalb dieser Arbeit das Subroutine-System ANTRI zur Simulation des Einsatzhartens und Abschatzung der Dauerfestigkeit fur einsatzgehartete Bauteile entwickelt. Zur Verifikation des Subroutine-Systems ANTRI wurden experimenteller Ergebnisse aus der Literatur herangezogen. Fur alle untersuchten Beispiele wurde eine sehr gute Ubereinstimmung zwischen experimentell ermittelten Daten und simulierten Daten festgestellt.
The space of interactions in neural network models

The typical fraction of the space of interactions between each pair of N Ising spins which solve the problem of storing a given set of p random patterns as N-bit spin configurations is considered. The volume is calculated explicitly as a function of the storage ratio, alpha =p/N, of the value kappa (>0) of the product of the spin and the magnetic field at each site and of the magnetisation, m. Here m may vary between 0 (no correlation) and 1 (completely correlated). The capacity increases with the correlation between patterns from alpha =2 for correlated patterns with kappa =0 and tends to infinity as m tends to 1. The calculations use a saddle-point method and the order parameters at the saddle point are assumed to be replica symmetric. This solution is shown to be locally stable. A local iterative learning algorithm for updating the interactions is given which will converge to a solution of given kappa provided such solutions exist.
The readiness of various communities for the implementation of restorative justice in the community setting: A perspective of community organization

The method of community organization can be used to implement restorative justice within the community. This study aimed at understanding whether members from seven communities in Malaysia would assume responsibility for restorative justice initiatives, accept various elements of restorative justice, and welcome offenders back into the community. The findings are mixed. Some community members believed that the community setting may offer resources for offender rehabilitation that the criminal justice system does not have; others raised concerns over various limitations such that communities may not be equipped to deal with criminal cases.
Compiler Controlled Cache Placement

This paper considers a novel approach for supporting parallel accesses to a data cache. We explore the possibility of explicitly managing cache accesses using a static compile-time analysis. First we perform a limit study on dynamic instruction traces to discover an upper bound on the amount of memory parallelism that is exploitable at compile time. Then we introduce compiler controlled split caches, or cc-split caches, and discuss our initial implementation. Our results suggest this architecture has potential, but we question whether moving complexity from the hardware to software is a profitable trade-off in this case.
The Effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program on Student Achievement After Three Years

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly-funded vouchers to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line, allowing them to enroll in participating private schools. Established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012. This report examines the experimental effects of using an LSP scholarship to enroll in one’s first choice private school on student achievement in the three years following the program’s expansion. Large negative achievement effects in the first year of the program appear to have been followed by improvement in the second and third years. Based on our primary analytic sample, the effects of the LSP on English Language Arts (ELA) are positive and math are negative in Year 3, but neither is statistically significant. These results are partially reflective of declining statistical power and appear to be influenced by the return of students to public schools for whom the program was not working. Subgroup analyses indicate that students with lower ELA scores at baseline realized statistically significant achievement gains in ELA from the program, while students applying to the earlier elementary grades experienced large achievement losses from the program in math.
Forest-Based Translation

Among syntax-based translation models, the tree-based approach, which takes as input a parse tree of the source sentence, is a promising direction being faster and simpler than its string-based counterpart. However, current tree-based systems suffer from a major drawback: they only use the 1-best parse to direct the translation, which potentially introduces translation mistakes due to parsing errors. We propose a forest-based approach that translates a packed forest of exponentially many parses, which encodes many more alternatives than standard n-best lists. Large-scale experiments show an absolute improvement of 1.7 BLEU points over the 1-best baseline. This result is also 0.8 points higher than decoding with 30-best parses, and takes even less time.
Budding Yeast: An Ideal Backdrop for In vivo Lipid Biochemistry

Biological membranes are non-covalent assembly of lipids and proteins. Lipids play critical role in determining membrane physical properties and regulate the function of membrane associated proteins. Budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae offers an exceptional advantage to understand the lipid-protein interactions since lipid metabolism and homeostasis are relatively simple and well characterized as compared to other eukaryotes. In addition, a vast array of genetic and cell biological tools are available to determine and understand the role of a particular lipid in various lipid metabolic disorders. Budding yeast has been instrumental in delineating mechanisms related to lipid metabolism, trafficking and their localization in different subcellular compartments at various cell cycle stages. Further, availability of tools and enormous potential for the development of useful reagents and novel technologies to localize a particular lipid in different subcellular compartments in yeast makes it a formidable system to carry out lipid biology. Taken together, yeast provides an outstanding backdrop to characterize lipid metabolic changes under various physiological conditions.
Learning Constructive Primitives for Online Level Generation and Real-time Content Adaptation in Super Mario Bros

Procedural content generation (PCG) is of great interest to game design and development as it generates game content automatically. Motivated by the recent learning-based PCG framework and other existing PCG works, we propose an alternative approach to online content generation and adaptation in Super Mario Bros (SMB). Unlike most of existing works in SMB, our approach exploits the synergy between rule-based and learning-based methods to produce constructive primitives, quality yet controllable game segments in SMB. As a result, a complete quality game level can be generated online by integrating relevant constructive primitives via controllable parameters regarding geometrical features and procedure-level properties. Also the adaptive content can be generated in real time by dynamically selecting proper constructive primitives via an adaptation criterion, e.g., dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). Our approach is of several favorable properties in terms of content quality assurance, generation efficiency and controllability. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can generate controllable yet quality game levels online and adaptable content for DDA in real time.
Stochastic model of TCP and UDP traffic in IEEE 802.11b/g

IEEE 802.11 networks have been widely explored since last decade and IEEE802.11g was proposed to increase the data rate of wireless networks up to 54Mbps which ensure backward capability with IEEE802.11b. The main goal of increasing the data rate is to handle high data rate traffic. Many studies have been conducted to analyze the performance of wireless networks using Quality of service constrains. However there are limited studies which try to understand the behavior of TCP traffic while UDP is present. The IEEE 802.11 family has a standard mechanism to handle TCP and UDP traffic without consideration of traffic priorities. In the presence of UDP traffic, the TCP cause high delay and saturation. In this paper we embedded the Bianchi's Markov chain model with our packet fragmentation technique to reduce the saturation impact on TCP traffic while UDP is present. We have analyzed the throughput for IEEE802.11b/g considering response times and packet retransmission. The theoretical results are validated by simulation and it is observed that the TCP packet rate is improved by using our proposed approach.
Image Data Compression for Covariance and Histogram Descriptors

Covariance and histogram image descriptors provide an effective way to capture information about images. Both excel when used in combination with special purpose distance metrics. For covariance descriptors these metrics measure the distance along the non-Euclidean Riemannian manifold of symmetric positive definite matrices. For histogram descriptors the Earth Mover's distance measures the optimal transport between two histograms. Although more precise, these distance metrics are very expensive to compute, making them impractical in many applications, even for data sets of only a few thousand examples. In this paper we present two methods to compress the size of covariance and histogram datasets with only marginal increases in test error for k-nearest neighbor classification. Specifically, we show that we can reduce data sets to 16% and in some cases as little as 2% of their original size, while approximately matching the test error of kNN classification on the full training set. In fact, because the compressed set is learned in a supervised fashion, it sometimes even outperforms the full data set, while requiring only a fraction of the space and drastically reducing test-time computation.
Interference management with partial uplink/downlink spectrum overlap

Simultaneous reuse of spectral resources by uplink and downlink, denoted as in-band full duplex (FD) communication, is promoted to double the spectral efficiency when compared to its half-duplex (HD) counterpart. Interference management, however, remains challenging in FD cellular networks, especially when high disparity between uplink and downlink transmission powers exists. The uplink performance can be particularly deteriorated when operating on channels that are simultaneously occupied with downlink transmission. This paper considers a cellular wireless system with partial spectrum overlap between the downlink and uplink. The performance of the system becomes, therefore, a function of the overlap fraction, as well as the power levels of both the uplink and downlink transmissions. The paper considers the problem of maximizing an overall network utility to find the uplink/downlink transmission powers and the spectrum overlap fraction between the uplink and downlink spectrum in each cell, and proposes solving the problem using interior point method. Simulations results confirm the vulnerability of the uplink performance to the FD operation, and show the superiority of the proposed scheme over the FD and HD schemes. The results further show that explicit uplink and downlink performance should be considered for efficient design of cellular networks with overlapping uplink/downlink resources.
Interacting with Huge Hierarchies : Beyond Cone

This paper describes an implementation of a tool for visualizing and interacting with huge information hierarchies. Existing systems for visualizing huge hierarchies using cone trees \break down" once the hierarchy to be displayed exceeds roughly 1000 nodes, due to increasing visual clutter. This paper describes a system called fsviz which visualizes arbitrarily large hierarchies while retaining user control. This is accomplished by augmenting cone trees with several graphical and interaction techniques: usage-based ltering, animated zooming, hand-coupled rotation, sh-eye zooming, coalescing of nodes, texturing, eeective use of colour for depth cueing, and the applications of dynamic queries. The fsviz system also improves upon earlier cone tree visualization systems through a more elaborate node layout algorithm. This algorithm enhances the usefulness of cone tree visualization for large hierarchies by all but eliminating clutter.