Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perceptual transparency from image deformation

Significance The perception of liquids, particularly water, is a vital sensory function for survival, but little is known about the visual perception of transparent liquids. Here we show that human vision has excellent ability to perceive a transparent liquid solely from dynamic image deformation. No other known image cues are needed for the perception of transparent surfaces. Static deformation is not effective for perceiving transparent liquids. Human vision interprets dynamic image deformation as caused by light refraction at the moving liquid’s surface. Transparent liquid is well perceived from artificial image deformations, which share only basic flow features with image deformations caused by physically correct light refraction. Human vision has a remarkable ability to perceive two layers at the same retinal locations, a transparent layer in front of a background surface. Critical image cues to perceptual transparency, studied extensively in the past, are changes in luminance or color that could be caused by light absorptions and reflections by the front layer, but such image changes may not be clearly visible when the front layer consists of a pure transparent material such as water. Our daily experiences with transparent materials of this kind suggest that an alternative potential cue of visual transparency is image deformations of a background pattern caused by light refraction. Although previous studies have indicated that these image deformations, at least static ones, play little role in perceptual transparency, here we show that dynamic image deformations of the background pattern, which could be produced by light refraction on a moving liquid’s surface, can produce a vivid impression of a transparent liquid layer without the aid of any other visual cues as to the presence of a transparent layer. Furthermore, a transparent liquid layer perceptually emerges even from a randomly generated dynamic image deformation as long as it is similar to real liquid deformations in its spatiotemporal frequency profile. Our findings indicate that the brain can perceptually infer the presence of “invisible” transparent liquids by analyzing the spatiotemporal structure of dynamic image deformation, for which it uses a relatively simple computation that does not require high-level knowledge about the detailed physics of liquid deformation.
Site‐specific cytomorphology of disseminated PC‐3 prostate cancer cells visualized in vivo with fluorescent proteins

Circulating tumor cells (CTC) may reach multiple organ sites. However, CTC seeding and growth in distant organs is not random. Each metastatic site may contain a specific subpopulation of the original metastatic tumor capable of growing at that site. The fluorescent orthotopic prostate cancer model (PC‐3‐GFP) model was used for immunomagnetic capture of CTC. The captured CTC were efficiently cultivated in vitro. PC‐3‐GFP cells were also isolated from various metastatic sites, grown in vitro and examined under fluorescence microscopy. The differential morphology was compared of primary tumor cells, CTC and disseminated (DTC) from multiple metastatic sites, from nude mice with orthotopic PC‐3‐GFP. The cultured captured CTC and DTC from various organs have distinctive morphologies. Distinct cancer cell morphologies were observed at different metastatic sites as well as among CTC. The distinct morphologies were maintained during in vitro culture. The results demonstrate extensive tumor heterogeneity that could account for the widely different behavior of cancer cells in a single tumor. Further hetereogeneity testing would be a big promise for personalizing the cancer treatment in the future. Diagn. Cytopathol. 2013. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Location and Global Network Structure of Maritime Advanced Producer Services

Within research on world cities, much attention has been paid to advanced producer services (APS) and their role within both global urban hierarchies and network formation between cities. What is largely ignored is that these APS provide services to firms operating in a range of different sectors. Does sector-specific specialisation of advanced producer services influence the economic geography of corporate networks between cities? If so, what factors might explain this geographical pattern? This paper investigates these theoretical questions by empirically focusing on those advanced producer services related to the port and maritime sector. The empirical results show that the location of AMPS is correlated with maritime localisation economies, expressed in the presence of shipowners and port-related industry as well as APS in general, but not by throughput flows of ports. Based upon the findings, policy recommendations are addressed.
Abnormal Audit Fees and Audit Quality: The Importance of Considering Managerial Incentives in Tests of Earnings Management

SUMMARY: Are high audit fees a signal that the auditor exerted more effort or a signal that the auditor may be losing her independence? Prior literature offers conflicting evidence. In this paper, we reexamine the issue on a sample of clients who have both the incentive and the ability to use discretionary accruals to meet or beat the consensus earnings forecast. We find a negative relationship between the level of abnormal audit fees paid by the client and the likelihood of using discretionary accruals to meet or beat the consensus analyst forecast. The evidence is consistent with the notion that abnormal audit fees are indicative of greater effort on the engagement. In other words, the results suggest a positive relationship between abnormal audit fees and audit quality. We show that the conflicting evidence in prior research was caused by research designs that did not consider the incentives of the manager. JEL Classifications: M42; M41. Data Availability: All data are available from public sources quo.
Automatic Person Identification in Camera Video by Motion Correlation

Person identification plays an important role in semantic analysis of video content. This paper presents a novel method to automatically label persons in video sequence captured from fixed camera. Instead of leveraging traditional face recognition approaches, we deal with the task of person identification by fusing information from motion sensor platforms, like smart phones, carried on human bodies and extracted from camera video. More specifically, a sequence of motion features extracted from camera video are compared with each of those collected from accelerometers of smart phones. When strong correlation is detected, identity information transmitted from the corresponding smart phone is used to identify the phone wearer. To test the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method, extensive experiments are conducted which achieved impressive performance.
Implicit Employment Contracts: The Limits of Management Reputation for Promoting Firm Productivity

ABSTRACT Implicit employment contracts are a common way to motivate firm productivity but also require that employees trust management to be fair when allocating postproduction firm resources between employees and owners. We use an experiment to study the problem of motivating firm productivity, which depends on levels of owner investment and employee productive effort, when managers have an incentive to favor the owner's interests over those of the employee. Drawing on research in psychology and behavioral economics, we argue that reputation concerns can more effectively promote firm productivity when manager compensation is relatively insensitive to how much the owner is allocated after production occurs. Consistent with our predictions, we find that reputation concerns lead to greater firm productivity and higher payoffs for all firm members, but only when manager pay is relatively insensitive to the owner's ex post allocation. In addition to offering testable empirical implications, our theory and results are important because they can help explain why executive compensation is, in practice, surprisingly insensitive to owner returns. Copyright (c), University of Chicago on behalf of the Accounting Research Center, 2009.
Detection of subsurface non-metallic objects using stepped frequency continuous wave ground penetrating radar

In the paper, several aspects of using stepped frequency continuous wave signal in a ground penetrating radar were discussed. Radar was operating in 750–3000 MHz bandwidth, with 563 frequency steps. Test objects included non-metallic object made from wood and plastic, as well as soil with different value of permittivity, all buried at 10–15 cm.
Mutual Responsiveness of Biofuels, Fuels and Food Prices

We propose a new approach to analyze relationships and dependencies between price series. For the biofuels markets and the related commodities, we study their mutual responsiveness, which can be understood as price cross-elasticities. Several methodological caveats are uncovered and discussed. We find that both ethanol and biodiesel prices are responsive to their production factors as well as their substitute fossil fuels (ethanol with corn, sugarcane and the US gasoline; and biodiesel with soybeans and German diesel). Responsiveness of all significant pairs increased remarkably during the food crisis of 2007/2008. Causality tests further show that price changes in producing factors lead the changes in biofuels, yet for some price levels, the direction is reversed.
Conflict, Agency, and Gambling for Resurrection: The Principal-Agent Problem Goes to War

The problem of ensuring that chief executives act in accordance with the wishes of their constituency is particularly acute in the area of foreign intervention where the head of state can be expected to possess substantial information advantages. This paper presents a formal analysis of strategies that can be used to deter overly passive and overly aggressive executives and a discussion of their side effects. The typically large amount of uncertainty means that the constituency must base its decision to retain an executive on the outcome of a conflict and not on its apparent ex ante advisability. This uncertainty imposes a cost on the constituency, who may remove an effective, "innocent" executive unnecessarily, and it also imposes a cost on the well-meaning executive, who may be removed from office after making the best possible decision in a difficult case. The mechanism necessary to deter executive adventurism also causes the paradoxical "gambling for resurrection" effect, in which an unsuccessful war that a well-informed principal would terminate is continued because cessation would, given the current state of the world, cause the agent to be removed from office.
Dynamic boundary feedback of a pendulum coupled with a viscous damped wave equation

In this paper, we consider a dynamic feedback problem of a pendulum coupled with a viscous damped wave equation. We show that the system operator generates a C0-semigroup of contractions in the energy state space, and the system is well-posed. By giving the asymptotic expressions of the eigenvalues of the system, we know that they all locate in the left hand side of the complex plane. It follows that the C0-semigroup generated by the system operator achieves strong stability when the feedback gain is real.
The threshold effect of the urban‐rural income disparity on real economic growth in China

鉴于我国的城乡二元结构， 本文使用泰尔指数度量和刻画我国的城乡收入差距及其变化特征。 同时， 本文设定了非线性阈值协整模型， 以揭示我国改革开放以来城乡收入差距与实际经济增长的长期非线性关系。 结果表明， 长期非线性阈值关系在泰尔指数为0.100（阈值）处发生机制转移：1978‐1991年， 我国城乡收入差距对实际增长的长期效应为正；1992‐1999年， 收入差距对实际增长的效应由正向负平滑转换；1999年后， 我国城乡收入差距对实际经济增长产生阻滞作用， 且负效应呈逐年增加趋势。 * This paper is financially supported by the National Science Foundation of China, Grant 70571026. Given China's dual urban‐rural structure, this paper employs the Theil index for measuring and depicting China's urban‐rural income disparity and its characteristics. Furthermore, this paper specifies a nonlinear threshold cointegration model to reveals a nonlinear relationship between the urban‐rural income gap and real economic growth over a long period since reform and opening up in China. Our results show that the regime switch of the long‐term nonlinear threshold relationship takes place at the 0.100 (threshold value) of the Theil index. From 1978 to 1991, the long‐term effect of the urban‐ rural income disparity on China's economic growth was positive; between 1992 and 1999, there was a smooth transition to a negative effect; and from 1999 on, the negative effect has been increasing year by year. Income disparity now has the effect of retarding China's real economic growth.
Euclidean Position Estimation of Static Features Using a Moving Uncalibrated Camera

In this paper, a novel Euclidean position estimation technique using a single uncalibrated camera mounted on a moving platform is developed to asymptotically recover the 3-D Euclidean position of static object features. The position of the moving platform is assumed to be measurable, and a second object with known 3-D Euclidean coordinates relative to the world frame is considered to be available a priori. To account for the unknown camera calibration parameters and to estimate the unknown 3-D Euclidean coordinates, an adaptive least squares estimation strategy is employed based on prediction error formulations and a Lyapunov-type stability analysis. The developed estimator is shown to recover the 3-D Euclidean position of the unknown object features despite the lack of knowledge of the camera calibration parameters. Numerical simulation results along with experimental results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Europe in Search of Political Order

This book could well have been titled Europe in Search of Further Research. It identifies key theoretical questions raised by the current state of the European Union: Can the different dimensions of EU politics be incorporated within a single theory of institutional change? How can the need for democratic legitimation of the Union be reconciled with its requirement of considerable bureaucratic organisation? To what extent is the institutional status quo of the EU a product of intentional choice? These questions, considered with acuity, are posed as critiques of the existing literature rather than in an attempt to develop answers. There is much to be learned from the exercise, and the book will be particularly useful for doctoral students. Those looking for a fully-fledged institutional alternative to instrumentalist accounts of the EU, however, may find themselves wishing the author had asked fewer questions and provided more answers. The volume’s subtitle conveys the scope of its ambition: ‘An institutional perspective on unity/diversity, citizens/their helpers, democratic design/historical drift, and the co-existence of orders. ’ Olsen’s institutional perspective, well known from his work with James March, ‘assumes that rule-following is a more fundamental logic of action than action based on the continuous calculation of expected utility’ (p. 100). His preferred metaphor is that of constitutional gardening, which he counterposes to constitutional choice (instrumentally rational) and constitutional drift (evolutionarily adaptive). ‘Constitutional gardeners . have some long-term normative standards that make it possible to recognize constitutional weeds and to turn incremental reforms into a unified, coherent constitution’ (p. 207). How this approach might come together as an empirically researchable project is most clearly elucidated in chapter 4, ‘A Prelude to an Institutional Account’. If rule-following is the lodestar of institutionalism, then it becomes crucial to understand the process of reinterpretation ‘of what the rules of appropriate behavior are, how concrete situations are to be understood, and how to map rules onto individual cases’ (p. 109). Citing Frank Schimmelfennig’s work on the (re)definition of acceptable behaviour towards candidates for EU enlargement, Olsen shows how framing of acceptable behaviour can trump narrow standards of interest calculation at given moments of time, thus offering a tantalising view of how the institutionalist research programme can generate new insights into processes of institutional change. Yet the difficulty of empirically applying Olsen’s tenets of institutional change is often vexing. One central debate about the EU is the extent, cause, and solution of its democratic deficit. Olsen makes a series of points about both the democratic deficit (chapter 5) and its relationship to the Brussels bureaucracy (chapters 6 and 11). Here is the terrain on which institutionalist analysis should have the surest footing, as West European Politics, Vol. 31, No. 3, 624 – 638, May 2008
Monetary models of exchange rates and sweep programs

Numerous studies find that monetary models of exchange rates cannot beat a random walk model. Such a finding, however, is not surprising given that such models are built upon money demand functions and traditional money demand functions appear to have broken down in many developed countries. In this article, we investigate whether using a more stable underlying money demand function results in improvements in forecasts of monetary models of exchange rates. More specifically, we use a sweep-adjusted measure of US monetary aggregate M1 which has been shown to have a more stable money demand function than the official M1 measure. The results suggest that the monetary models of exchange rates contain information about future movements of exchange rates, but the success of such models depends on the stability of money demand functions and the specifications of the models.
Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Physical Illness: Findings from the General Population

Objective: To determine in a general population sample the differential impact on physical health of exposure to traumatic experiences and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Trauma exposure and PTSD have been associated with physical illness in specific populations, such as veterans. Methods: Medical histories including cardiovascular, endocrine, pulmonary, and other chronic diseases were obtained from 3171 adults living in the community. They were administered the PTSD module of the Structured Clinical Interview for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM-IV), and were assigned to three groups: no trauma (n = 1440); trauma, but no PTSD (n = 1669); and trauma with subsequent PTSD (n = 62). Results: After adjustments for sociodemographic factors, smoking, body mass index, blood pressure, depression, and alcohol use disorders, subjects with trauma history had higher odds ratios (ORs) for angina pectoris and heart failure (OR = 1.2; 95% Confidence Interval [CI] = 1.1–1.3), stroke (OR = 1.2; 95 CI = 1.0–1.5), bronchitis, asthma, renal disease, and polyarthritis (ORs between 1.1and 1.3) compared with nontraumatized participants. The PTSD positive subsample had increased ORs for angina (OR = 2.4; 95% CI = 1.3–4.5), heart failure (OR = 3.4; 95% CI = 1.9–6.0), bronchitis, asthma, liver, and peripheral arterial disease (ORs, range = 2.5–3.1). Conclusions: Our findings suggest a strong association between PTSD and cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases. Particular diagnostic and treatment attention should be paid to physical illness in PTSD positive patients in primary care, medical, and mental health settings. PTSD = posttraumatic stress disorder; SHIP = Study of Health in Pomerania; MMSE = Mini Mental State Examination; CID-S = Composite International Diagnostic-Screener; AUD = alcohol use disorder; BMI = body mass index; SPSS = Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.
Interorganizational Mobility within the U.S. Federal Government: Examining the Effect of Individual and Organizational Factors

Interorganizational mobility can make a positive contribution both organizationally and government-wide. Using data from the U.S. Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, this article seeks to provide a better empirical understanding of the determinants of interorganizational mobility within the U.S. federal government. A specific analytical framework is used, as the intention to take another job within the federal government is nested in the intention to leave the current organization. The results highlight that gender, minority status, length of service, and promotion are determinants of interorganizational mobility within the U.S. federal government.
CURRENCY UNIONS AND POLICY DOMAINS

According to the pre-crises consensus there are separate domains for monetary and scal stabilization in a currency union. While the common monetary policy takes care of union-wide uctuations, scal policies should be tailored to meet country-specic conditions. This separation is no longer optimal, however, if monetary policy is constrained by an eective lower bound on interest rates. Specically, we show that in this case there are benets from coordinating scal policies across countries. By coordinating on a common scal stance, policy makers are able to stabilize union-wide activity and The situation in future unions could even be circular â€“ without the advantages that exist in currency unions of financial stability, larger efficient markets, and integrated markets, individual countries might have great difficulty in meeting the convergence criteria to enter a union where large, efficient, and integrated markets exist. Â The GCC just established a Monetary Council in Riadh to organize preparations for a union. The GCC countries have pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar as a step toward creating the union. African Community (EAC): Five countries in East Africa actively working to build a currency union (Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi). Southern African Development Community (SADC): This group is working to create a currency union by 2016.
A randomized neural network for data streams

Randomized neural network (RNN) is a highly feasible solution in the era of big data because it offers a simple and fast working principle in processing dynamic and evolving data streams. This paper proposes a novel RNN, namely recurrent type-2 random vector functional link network (RT2McRVFLN), which provides a highly scalable solution for data streams in a strictly online and integrated framework. It is built upon the psychologically inspired concept of metacognitive learning, which covers three basic components of human learning: what-to-learn, how-to-learn, and when-to-learn. The what-to-learn selects important samples on the fly with the use of online active learning scenario, which renders our algorithm an online semi-supervised algorithm. The how-to-learn process combines an open structure of evolving concept and a randomized learning algorithm of random vector functional link network (RVFLN). The efficacy of the RT2McRVFLN has been numerically validated through two real-world case studies and comparisons with its counterparts, which arrive at a conclusive finding that our algorithm delivers a tradeoff between accuracy and simplicity.
The Need to Investigate Greek Students' Experiences in British Universities: The Use of Ethnography in the Identification of Such a Need

The growth in international students coming to the United Kingdom has well been documented, but little research has been undertaken into the implications for specific national cohorts, particularly with regard to students form Greece. There is lack of research into the nature and persistence of issues faced by such students. This article presents the results of the initial interviews, which were held in order to decide the parameters of the research and to understand the sort of issues, which it would be helpful to investigate further. The article also underlines the importance of ethnographic perspectives in the identification of research questions in research. Greek students, Ethnographic research, semi-structured interviews, support mechanisms, British Universities