Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exchange Trading Rules and Stock Market Liquidity

This paper examines stock exchange trading rules for market manipulation, insider trading and broker agency conduct across countries and over time for 42 stock exchanges around the world. Some stock exchanges have extremely detailed rules which explicitly prohibit specific manipulative practices, while others use less precise and broadly framed rules. We create new indices for market manipulation, insider trading and broker-agency conduct based on the specific provisions in the exchange trading rules of each stock exchange. We show differences in exchange trading rules over time and across markets significantly affect trading activity.
Quantitative Assessment of Walking Activity after Total Hip or Knee Replacement*

Accumulating data suggest that the amount of use, and not simply the duration in situ, influences the wear and survival of total joint replacements. An electronic, digital pedometer was used to record the number of steps taken by 111 non-randomized volunteers who had had at least one total hip or knee replacement. The patients averaged 4988 steps per day, which extrapolates to approximately 0.9 million cycles per year for each joint of the lower extremity. Average activity ranged widely from 395 to 17,718 steps per day, an approximately forty-five-fold difference. The most active patient walked more than 3.5 times the average number of steps per day. Age was significantly associated with activity (p = 0.048), but there was a high degree of variability (standard deviation, 3040 steps per day). Patients who were less than sixty years old walked 30 per cent more on average than those who were sixty years old or more (p = 0.023). Men walked 28 per cent more on average than women (p = 0.037), and men who were less than sixty years old walked 40 per cent more on average than the rest of the patients (p = 0.011). These data indicate that individual differences in the activity of the patient can be a substantial source of variability in rates of polyethylene wear in vivo. The pedometer is an inexpensive investigational tool with many potential applications, including standardizing wear measurements of joint replacements on the basis of gait cycles rather than time. This quantitative approach may provide prognostic information regarding the survival of joint prostheses. Pedometer data may also be useful for quantitative assessment of walking ability in outcome studies.
Sustaining the Fight: A Cross-Sectional Time-Series Analysis of Public Support for Ongoing Military Interventions

What determines a democratic public's willingness to tolerate the human and material costs of sustaining ongoing military operations to victory? Athough much literature has addressed the factors that affect public attitudes toward the use of military force, few studies adopt either a theoretical perspective or a research method explicitly designed to answer this question. In particular, existing research tends to focus on the costs of war fighting, while ignoring both the tangible and intangible costs of withdrawing from a foreign military engagement. I argue that many of the factors that the public uses to estimate the cost of prosecuting a war—troop strength requirements, whether or not troops are engaged in ground combat and, most importantly, casualties—are also measures of the extent of a state's commitment to achieving its war aims. If the public treats the cost of the state's military commitment simply as an expense , support for sustaining an operation should decrease as the cost of commitment increases. If, however, citizens have a tendency to see military commitments as investments that put the country's reputation on the line or can only be redeemed if the state is victorious in the war, an increase in commitment could actually strengthen the public's determination to sustain the fight. Employing a cross-sectional time-series design with data from 12 U.S. and British military interventions, I explore whether the costs of continuing to prosecute a war or the costs of withdrawing have a greater effect on public willingness to sustain ongoing military operations. The results suggest that public concern about the costs of withdrawing from a conflict can be a more important determinant of willingness to persevere than sensitivity to the costs of war fighting. As a result, there is a considerable disconnect between what the public claims it would support in hypothetical scenarios and the types of military operations the public actually shows a willingness to sustain once they are underway.
FDI and the Export Performance of Chinese Indigenous Firms: a Regional Approach

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on the export performance of Chinese indigenous firms. A panel data analysis is employed using data across 29 provinces over the 1985–99 period. Owing to the exceptionally uneven distribution of FDI, the analysis compares the impact of FDI on all provincial exports and exports of indigenous firms over the three macro-regions of China. While the findings of the empirical analysis should be viewed with caution, they do show that FDI has less influence on the export performance of indigenous firms than on all firms (foreign and indigenous). The findings imply that linkages between the foreign and domestic sectors need to be improved if FDI is to be a vehicle for improving the competitiveness of domestic firms. Alternatively, policies may have to be directed towards the indigenous firms themselves to enhance their export performance.
Two novel point mutations in the long‐range SHH enhancer in three families with triphalangeal thumb and preaxial polydactyly

Spatio‐temporal expression of sonic hedgehog (SHH) is driven by a regulatory element (ZRS) that lies 1 Mb upstream from SHH. Point mutations within the highly conserved ZRS have been described in the hemimelic extra toes mouse and in four families with preaxial polydactyly [Lettice et al., 2003 ]. Four North American Caucasian families were identified with autosomal dominant triphalangeal thumb. DNA from 20 affected and 36 unaffected family members was evaluated by sequence analysis of a 774‐bp highly conserved ZRS contained within LMBR1 intron 5. Mutations within ZRS were identified in three of four families. In pedigree A and C, a novel A/G transition was identified near the 5′ end of ZRS at bp 739 that segregated with disease or carrier status. Pedigree A, described previously [Dobbs et al., 2000 ], is a large family with 19 affected members who exhibit a milder phenotype, including predominantly triphalangeal thumbs and low penetrance (82%) relative to other families. Pedigree C is a small family with two affected family members with triphalangeal thumb, and one affected with both triphalangeal thumb and preaxial polydactyly. A novel C/G mutation at bp 621 was identified in pedigree B that segregated with the disease in all four affected individuals who manifested both preaxial polydactyly and triphalangeal thumb. Both mutations alter putative Cdx transcription factor binding sites. Mutations within ZRS appear to be a common cause of familial triphalangeal thumb and preaxial polydactyly. A genotype/phenotype correlate is suggested by pedigree A, whose mutation lies near the 5′ end of ZRS; this family demonstrates a higher rate of nonpenetrance and milder phenotype. However, modifier genes may be contributing to the milder phenotype in this family. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Autophagy-related Protein 32 Acts as Autophagic Degron and Directly Initiates Mitophagy*

Background: Atg32 is a transmembrane protein essential for mitochondria autophagy in yeast. Results: Atg32 harbors a module that is crucial for interactions with Atg8 and Atg11, and can even promote other organelle autophagy. Conclusion: Atg32 acts as a direct initiator at early stages of mitochondria autophagy. Significance: This might be a common molecular feature in mitochondria autophagy conserved from yeast to humans. Autophagy-related degradation selective for mitochondria (mitophagy) is an evolutionarily conserved process that is thought to be critical for mitochondrial quality and quantity control. In budding yeast, autophagy-related protein 32 (Atg32) is inserted into the outer membrane of mitochondria with its N- and C-terminal domains exposed to the cytosol and mitochondrial intermembrane space, respectively, and plays an essential role in mitophagy. Atg32 interacts with Atg8, a ubiquitin-like protein localized to the autophagosome, and Atg11, a scaffold protein required for selective autophagy-related pathways, although the significance of these interactions remains elusive. In addition, whether Atg32 is the sole protein necessary and sufficient for initiation of autophagosome formation has not been addressed. Here we show that the Atg32 IMS domain is dispensable for mitophagy. Notably, when anchored to peroxisomes, the Atg32 cytosol domain promoted autophagy-dependent peroxisome degradation, suggesting that Atg32 contains a module compatible for other organelle autophagy. X-ray crystallography reveals that the Atg32 Atg8 family-interacting motif peptide binds Atg8 in a conserved manner. Mutations in this binding interface impair association of Atg32 with the free form of Atg8 and mitophagy. Moreover, Atg32 variants, which do not stably interact with Atg11, are strongly defective in mitochondrial degradation. Finally, we demonstrate that Atg32 forms a complex with Atg8 and Atg11 prior to and independent of isolation membrane generation and subsequent autophagosome formation. Taken together, our data implicate Atg32 as a bipartite platform recruiting Atg8 and Atg11 to the mitochondrial surface and forming an initiator complex crucial for mitophagy.
Tunneling injection quantum-dot lasers with polarization-dependent photon-mediated carrier redistribution and gain narrowing

A theoretical and experimental study of a particular transverse-electric (TE) mode lasing mechanism of a tunneling injection InP quantum-dot (QD) laser is reported. In the experiment, the TE mode lasing action takes place at the first excited state of InP biaxially compressively strained QDs. This QD state is coupled to the ground state of two tensile-strained InGaP quantum wells (QWs) although the tensile-strained QW structure favors the transverse-magnetic (TM) polarization light emission. The measured TE and TM modal gain spectra show a typical QW gain evolution behavior at low injection currents, which can be theoretically modeled by the quasi-equilibrium of carrier distribution. When the injection current is increased near threshold, a TE gain narrowing and a simultaneous TM gain pinning are observed in the measured modal gain spectra, which cannot be explained via the quasi-equilibrium model. We propose a polarization-dependent photon-mediated carrier redistribution in the QD-coupled-QW structure to explain this TE and TM gain evolution behavior. When the injection current is just below threshold, the strong carrier depletion via stimulated emission due to coupling between the InP QD and InGaP QW states plays an important role in carrier redistribution, which depends on the optical transition energy and polarization. This concept of the polarization-dependent photon-mediated carrier redistribution explains the TE gain narrowing and TM gain pinning behavior. In addition, a coupled rate equation model is established, and the calculated polarization power ratio based on the coupled rate equations explains the experimental observation.
Contracting out by Urban Governments

In this article the author seeks to provide a review of the recent literature on contracting out for urban government services in the United States. The review is selective in that the author focuses on analytical frameworks of the contracting out decision, the efficiency argument, empirical efficiency, and cost studies, as well as other considerations such as accountability, equity, and tax consequences. He concludes by wondering whether the common conclusion about the benefits of contracting out urban government services may at times have been exaggerated.
Modeling the Uncertainty in Finger-Vein Authentication by the Gaussian Mixture Model

The robustness and uniqueness of finger-vein makes it an ideal biometric feature for personal authentication. General finger-vein authentication methods consist of two parts, feature extraction and feature matching. Finger-vein images captured by infrared device are subject to uncertainties caused by various temperature, irregular illumination and finger posture deformation. Uncertainties cause severe artifacts, which make the extracted features unsatisfying and hard to match. We try to alleviate the problem during matching by modeling the extracted features as Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). In the proposed method, given two feature maps of finger-vein, we first model inputs as GMM using the normal distribution transform, and then minimize the distance between two GMMs based on gradient descent, lastly we output the possibility that two feature maps belong to one person. To show its superiority, we replace conventional feature matching schemes with proposed method and test the performance gain based on two kinds of finger-vein features: finger-vein trajectory and finger-vein skeleton. Experimental results on the RATE dataset show that the proposed method is superior to the conventional methods in precision.
Evaluating Hadoop Clusters with TPCx-HS

The growing complexity and variety of Big Data platforms makes it both difficult and time consuming for all system users to properly setup and operate the systems. Another challenge is to compare the platforms in order to choose the most appropriate one for a particular application. All these factors motivate the need for a standardized Big Data benchmark that can help the users in the process of platform evaluation. Just recently TPCx-HS [1][2] has been released as the first standardized Big Data benchmark designed to stress test a Hadoop cluster. The goal of this study is to evaluate and compare how the network setup influences the performance of a Hadoop cluster. In particular, experiments were performed using shared and dedicated 1Gbit networks utilized by the same Cloudera Hadoop Distribution (CDH) cluster setup. The TPCx-HS benchmark, which is very network intensive, was used to stress test and compare both cluster setups. All the presented results are obtained by using the officially available version [1] of the benchmark, but they are not comparable with the officially reported results and are meant as an experimental evaluation, not audited by any external organization. As expected the dedicated 1Gbit network setup performed much faster than the shared 1Gbit setup. However, what was surprising is the negligible price difference between both cluster setups, which pays off with a multifold performance return.
Does the stock market react to unexpected inflation differently across the business cycle?

I find that nominal equity returns respond to unexpected inflation more negatively during contractions than expansions. In particular, returns on firms with lower book-to-market ratio, or of medium size, demonstrate strong asymmetric correlations with unexpected inflation across the business cycle. The cross-sectional correlations of returns on book-to-market and size portfolios with unexpected inflation mostly reflect the heterogeneous factor loadings of these portfolios on one of the Fama–French factors, namely, the excess market return. By examining the cyclical responses to unexpected inflation of the three primitive forces which determine stock prices: the discount rate, the expected growth rate of real activity and the equity risk premium, I find that changes in expected real activity and the equity premium, signalled by unexpected inflation, are important in explaining the asymmetric responses of the stock market to unexpected inflation across the business cycle.
A Case of Gentamicin Accentuated Hearing Loss

GEXTAMICIX, a member of the Streptomyces family of basic antibiotics, was first isolated by Weinstein and his associates in 1963. In common with the other antibiotics of this family, neomycin, streptomycin, kanamycin, viomycin and framycetin, it was shown by Weinstein et al. (1963) to produce vestibular damage in rats and dogs when given in large doses. Since that date, ototoxicity with labyrinthine damage has been described in a number of patients (Jao and Jackson, 1964; Brayton and Louria, 1964; Bulger et al., 1963 and Sweedler et al., 1963). This paper reports a case of gentamicin accentuated deafness in a patient on chronic intermittent haemodialysis.
Modeling strategic performance management of automobile manufacturing enterprises

Purpose – This paper aims to present strategic performance management modeling of the Indian automobile manufacturing enterprises. This will help to understand the hierarchical structure and linkages of different strategic factors related to enterprise performance in a better way. Automobile manufacturing industry is one of the top industries in India. It is of paramount importance to identify the strategic factors and their linkages to understand the strategic performance management issues better. Design/methodology/approach – Flexible strategy game-card, an evolving performance management framework, has been taken as the basis for the development of a strategic performance management model. Thematic content analysis is used to analyze semi-structured interviews and for identifying strategic factors related to performance. Total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) is used to develop the hierarchical structure of these performance strategic factors. Case-lets and statistical analysis are used to furth.
Predicting Firm Financial Distress: A Mixed Logit Model

Over the past three decades the literature on financial distress prediction has largely been confined to simple multiple discriminant analysis, binary logistic or probit analysis, or rudimentary multinomial logit models (MNL). There has been a conspicuous absence of modeling innovation in this literature as well as a failure to keep abreast of important methodological developments emerging in other fields of the social sciences. In particular, there has been no recognition of major advances in discrete choice modeling over the last 15 years, which has increasingly relaxed behaviorally questionable assumptions associated with the independently and identically distributed errors (IID) condition and allowed for observed and unobserved heterogeneity. In contrast to standard logit, the mixed logit model fulfils this purpose and provides a superior framework for explanation and prediction. We explain the theoretical and econometric underpinnings of mixed logit and demonstrate its empirical usefulness in the con.
Experimental Investigation on Ignition Performance of LESS Combustor

In the design of next-generation civil aviation gas turbine combustors, there is high demand to improve the efficiency of combustion technology to decrease the amount of fuel consumed and to reduce the emissions in an effort to lessen the environmental impacts. This paper introduces a novel, ultra-low emissions combustor, namely L ow E mission S tirred S wirl (LESS) combustor, employing the lean premixed prevaporized (LPP) approach. The LESS combustor is a single annular layout. Its dome is comprised of two stages — the pilot stage and the main stage. The pilot stage is a typical swirl cup design which uses a pressure swirl atomizer with dual counter-rotating radial swirlers to atomize the fuel and form a diffusion flame, and is located in the centerline of the combustion chamber. The main stage surrounding coaxially the pilot stage includes one annulus as premixer and 14 plain orifice atomizers with 14 small dual counter-rotating radial swirlers arranged uniformly on the dome of the annulus, which lead to the main premixed flame. Five different igniter locations are chosen according to the CFX-simulated non-reacting flow field of a simplified mainstage combustor. Only the pilot pressure swirl atomizer is operated in the present ignition performance tests. The model combustor is a single module rectangular combustor with normal inlet temperature and normal inlet pressure. Under the test conditions of air pressure drop of 0.5%–9%, the ignition performance of the model LESS combustor is analyzed. The lean lightoff fuel/air ratio (LLO FAR), characterizing the ignition performance of a combustor, is investigated herein. In addition, the effects of igniter locations and pilot fuel nozzles on LLO FAR are studied. Specific to the LESS combustor, the igniter location has minor effect on the LLO FAR values. However, as expected, the combustor dome pressure drop and attendant reference velocity along with spray SMD impact LLO FAR. Furthermore, CFX-simulated results of the flow field, spray characteristics, and gas-liquid interactions under the typical condition of combustor operation are presented and discussed to provide insight into the ignition processes and performance. © 2011 ASME
Diode-type CdTe strip and linear array detectors for gamma-ray detection and imaging

Diode-type CdTe detectors were fabricated in two different approaches for gamma-ray detection and imaging applications. The first type is a monolithic one-dimensional (1-D) detector with segmented n-type strips formed on the p-like CdTe crystal wafer. N-type strips were formed by diffusing indium using an excimer laser annealing process. In another approach, single element diode-type detectors were fabricated by growing an iodine-doped epitaxial layer on the p-like CdTe crystal in a metalorganic chemical vapor deposition system working at a low substrate temperature. A 1-D linear array detector was then developed by mounting a number of such small element detectors in a row. Both types of detectors exhibited good diode-like property with suppressed leakage currents in the reverse bias direction, which enabled us to apply a high electric field on the detectors in order to improve their performance. Nuclear detection tests performed at room temperature using /sup 57/Co and /sup 241/Am radioisotopes showed improved and uniform spectral responses from both types of detectors. Details about the detector fabrication and the spectral results that demonstrate the imaging and spectroscopy capabilities of these detectors are presented.