Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Overview of Clustering Methods in The Financial World

This paper reviews the widely used clustering methods: K-mean, MST, and the hierarchical approach, along with its application in financial fields. Specifically, it includes a discussion of the application in credit scoring, stock market, portfolio selection, and trading strategy. Moreover, significant challenges and future research directions are also being identified. It is founded that clustering could have wide application in varied financial fields, however, challenges might be solved by future in-depth research. This paper aims at helping other researchers to select the best-fit algorithms to conduct their research and provide an analytical base for people who have an interest in this topic. Additionally, business analysts and quantitative researchers might be able to leverage the insights.
Non–perturbative aspects of physics beyond the Standard Model

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the four major experiments set up along its 27 kilometers of circumference (ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb), have recently started to explore the high–energy frontier at p s = 8 TeV, and will move to even higher energy in just about 2 years. The aim of physics searches at LHC experiments was to complete the picture of the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particles with the discovery of the Higgs boson and to look for specific signatures of models extending the current understanding of particle interactions, at zero and non–zero temperature. In 2012, the o cial discovery of the Higgs boson, the only missing particle of the Standard Model, was announced by ATLAS and CMS. Other important results include the measurement of rare decay modes in heavy quarks systems, and indications of CP violation in charm decays by LHCb. Signatures of beyond the Standard Model (BSM) physics are currently being looked for in the experimental data, and this often requires the knowledge of quantities that can be computed only with non–perturbative methods. This thesis focuses on some possible extensions of the SM and the analysis of interesting physical observables, like masses or decay rates, calculated using non– perturbative lattice methods. The approach followed for the main part of this work is to model BSM theories as e↵ective field theories defined on a lattice. This lattice approach has a twofold advantage: it allows us to explore non– renormalizable gauge theories by imposing an explicit gauge–invariant cuto↵ and it allows us to go beyond perturbative results in the study of strongly interacting systems. Some of the issues of the SM that we will try to address include, for example, the hierarchy problem and the origin of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking (DEWSB). We investigate non–perturbatively the possibility that the lightness of the mass for an elementary scalar field in a four–dimensional quantum field theory might be due to a higher–dimensional gauge symmetry principle. This idea fits in the
Experimental investigation on seismic behaviors of precast concrete shear walls with sleeve grouting defects

The grouted sleeve connector is one of the most widely used connections in precast concrete shear wall structures. Due to the technology limit of the assembly workers, the sleeve grouting often has defects, which could significantly weaken their practical performance. Only considering the effect of defects on the bearing capacity of the sleeve connector cannot simulate the effect of defects in actual engineering. To this end, an experiment was carried out to investigate the seismic performance of precast concrete shear walls with sleeve grouting defects. Four full-scale precast concrete shear walls with different defect levels of insufficient grouting were designed and tested under cyclic loads. The development of concrete cracking, failure mode, hysteresis features, load-bearing capacity, stiffness degradation, structural ductility and energy-dissipation capacity are analyzed to reveal the influence of the sleeve grouting defects on precast concrete shear walls. The test results indicated that with the increase of the defect level, the opening gap between the bottom of the wall and the top of the foundation beam widened, and the failure mode changed from tensile fracture of reinforcing steel bar to anchorage failure of the tensile reinforcement on the defective side. Meanwhile, as the level of grouting defects increased, the bearing capacity decreased, and the specimen failed prematurely. The effect of the grouting defects on cracking load was minor, while they had a significant influence on the yield bearing capacity, peak bearing capacity and ultimate bearing capacity. The experimental results also indicated that the grouting defects caused the weakening of the stiffness, ductility and energy dissipation of the precast concrete shear walls. The presented work could be used for defect prevention and evaluation of precast concrete shear walls with sleeve grouting defects.
Bank Concentration and Bank Stability during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Objectives: The banking sector has been impacted more negatively by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, bank concentration and capitalization stabilize banking systems during times of crisis. This study evaluated the monthly financial reports of all commercial banks in Indonesia to investigate the joint impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and bank concentration on bank stability. Moreover, this study was conducted to determine whether adequate capitalization could enhance the positive effect of the interaction between COVID-19 and bank concentration during the pandemic. Methods/Analysis: Using 108 commercial banks between March 2020 and May 2021, data were analyzed using the fixed-effects estimator with heteroskedasticity and within-panel serial correlations for robust standard errors. Several robustness checks were performed to ensure that the results were accurate and consistent. Findings: Subsequently, the impact of the pandemic and bank concentration was determined to be significant and adverse, though their interplay was strong enough to promote bank stability. This highlights the importance of adequate capitalization in enhancing the beneficial effects of the interaction between COVID-19 and bank concentration on bank stability. Novelty /Improvement: Hence, these ﬁndings contribute to the literature on bank stability and have important policy implications for the banking sector during this pandemic.JEL Classifications: E51, G20, G21. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2022-SPER-018 Full Text: PDF
The relationship between the Dark Triad and attitudes towards feminism. Personality and Individual Differences.

The Dark Triad traits are considered a male-centric framework of personality with women generally scoring lower on narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Research has examined the drivers behind this relationship attributing effects mostly to biological or evolutionary reasons with less work understanding environ- mental factors. To date, no research has examined the relationship between the Dark Triad and attitudes towards feminism. Three hundred and forty-three participants completed self-report measures of the Dark Triad and feminist attitudes. Results reported no differences between men and women on feminist attitudes, but men scored higher on the Dark Triad. Multiple linear regression indicated a negative association between the Dark Triad and feminist attitudes with all three traits significantly negatively contributing to the model. In all cases, this effect was stronger in men. These findings suggest that whilst men and women hold similar feminist atti- tudes, Dark Triad traits may facilitate a disregard for feminism.
Policy Response After the Great Financial Crisis

The Great Financial Crisis was the worst financial crisis since World War II, which plunged the global economy into a full-blown and sustained recession. This paper tries to explain the smooth but slow recovery after the crisis in the U.S. by evaluating the effectiveness and impact of three prime policy responses, including Quantitative Easing (QE), Forward Guidance (FG), and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). It is found that 1) QE helped the U.S. overcome the crisis by providing liquidity and stimulating consumption and investment, but some limitations made it not as effective as expected, which partly accounts for the slow recovery; 2) FG was helpful to the recovery through its explicit policy interpretation and additional information on economic conditions, but its impact was quite implicit and easily disturbed or overlapped by other policies; 3) the critical support of the TARP helped rebuild market confidence and reverse the deteriorating economic situation, but it created potential risks and shifted the pain from the present to the future.
Licium Barbarum cultivated in Italy: Chemical characterization and nutritional evaluation

Goji berries are the most cultivated fruit crop in Asian countries as they contain many nutrients and health-promoting bioactive compounds. These health-promoting properties have recently stimulated the interest of food and nutraceutical industries in Europe, so this crop has spread within Italy, which has become the largest European producer. Several works on the chemical composition and biological activities of Chinese goji berries are available. In this review, the chemical and the nutritional profile of goji berries from Licium barbarum spp. cultivated in Italy are reported.
Variable-rate multi-stage vector quantization for image coding

A hierarchical approach to encoding of images using vector quantization (VQ) is described which allows VQ of large blocks with a tolerable computational complexity and permits progressive image reconstruction at bit rates as low as 0.3 bit/pixel. The technique used, multi-stage hierarchical VQ (MSHVQ), is a successive approximation approach for quantization that is based on recursive decomposition of larger image blocks into smaller subblocks. The encoder of MSHVQ consists of several stages, each of which encodes the quantization error generated from the previous stage. Digital decimation and interpolation techniques are used to convert between different vector dimensions in the higher level stages and to reduce the otherwise highly noticeable blocking effect in the reconstructed image. Variable-rate encoding increases the compression efficiency by allocating greater resolution to high-detail regions and provides a perceptually more consistent image quality throughout all areas of the decoded image. Experimental results show that MSHVQ yields a significantly improved image quality over conventional VQ of equivalent complexity. <<ETX>>
A content and URL analysis‐based efficient approach to detect smishing SMS in intelligent systems

Smishing is a combined form of short message service (SMS) and phishing in which a malicious text message or SMS is sent to mobile users. This form of attack has come to be a severe cyber‐security difficulty and has triggered incredible monetary losses to the victims. Many antismishing solutions for mobile devices have been proposed till date but still, there is a lack of a full‐fledged solution. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient approach that analyzes text content and uniform resource locator (URL) presented in the SMS. We have integrated the URL phishing classifier with the text classifier to improve accuracy as some of the SMS contain the URL with no text or much less text. To find out rare words in a report, depending upon the frequency of term (TF) and the reciprocal of document frequency TF‐inverse document frequency (IDF), a weighting framework TF‐IDF is used. We have used two data sets for both text as well as for URL phishing classifier and used a synthetic minority oversampling technique to balance the training data. The voting classifier simply merges the findings of each classifier passed into it and predicts the output on the basis of voting. In proposed approach integrating KNN, RF, and ETC can detect smishing messages with a 99.03% accuracy and 98.94% precision rate which is relatively efficient compared with existing ones like SmiDCA model which has the given accuracy of 96.40% using Random Forest classifier in BFSA, Feature‐Based it has an accuracy of 98.74% and 94.20% true positive rate and Smishing Detector it shows an overall accuracy of 96.29%.
The Dynamic Feedback Matrix Control for Multidimensional Chaotic Systems

Multidimensional chaotic systems are difficult to control because of their nonlinearity and coupling relationship among state variables. We present the error feedback matrix for nonlinear systems, which contains coupling information of state variables and updates online according to the gradient descent method. The error feedback matrix is similar to the state feedback matrix for linear systems, however, the former is time‐varying and converges to a constant matrix. Using the coupling relationship, we give a simple controller only by a few elements of the matrix and present whole matrix control and partial matrix control. Finally, we apply these schemes to a three‐dimensional Henon system and make mathematical analysis and simulation experiments, which verify the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.
The forgotten structure of Ikalanga relatives

Demuth and Harford (1999) contend that in Bantu relatives, the verb raises from I-C if the relative morpheme is a bound morpheme while the subject remains in spec-IP resulting in subject –verb inversion. Ikalanga, a Bantu language spoken in Botswana has no subject verb inversion in relatives although the relative morpheme appears to be a bound morpheme. This observation challenges the conclusion reached in Demuth and Harford (1999). This raises the question, What then is the structure of the relative clause in languages like Ikalanga and Luganda? This paper argues that Ikalanga relative clauses differ from other Bantu relative clauses in that the projection that houses the relative feature (RelP) projects below TP while in Bantu languages where subject verb inversion is observed such as Shona it projects higher than TP. Thus, the variation in the structures of Bantu relative clauses can be accounted for if we understand that there is a parametric variation in the position in which RelP projects; lower than TP or higher than TP.
Stochastic Inoculum, Biotic Filtering and Species-Specific Seed Transmission Shape the Rare Microbiome of Plants

A plant’s health and productivity is influenced by its associated microbes. Although the common/core microbiome is often thought to be the most influential, significant numbers of rare or uncommon microbes (e.g., specialized endosymbionts) may also play an important role in the health and productivity of certain plants in certain environments. To help identify rare/specialized bacteria and fungi in the most important angiosperm plants, we contrasted microbiomes of the seeds, spermospheres, shoots, roots and rhizospheres of Arabidopsis, Brachypodium, maize, wheat, sugarcane, rice, tomato, coffee, common bean, cassava, soybean, switchgrass, sunflower, Brachiaria, barley, sorghum and pea. Plants were grown inside sealed jars on sterile sand or farm soil. Seeds and spermospheres contained some uncommon bacteria and many fungi, suggesting at least some of the rare microbiome is vertically transmitted. About 95% and 86% of fungal and bacterial diversity inside plants was uncommon; however, judging by read abundance, uncommon fungal cells are about half of the mycobiome, while uncommon bacterial cells make up less than 11% of the microbiome. Uncommon-seed-transmitted microbiomes consisted mostly of Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Bacteriodetes, Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes, which most heavily colonized shoots, to a lesser extent roots, and least of all, rhizospheres. Soil served as a more diverse source of rare microbes than seeds, replacing or excluding the majority of the uncommon-seed-transmitted microbiome. With the rarest microbes, their colonization pattern could either be the result of stringent biotic filtering by most plants, or uneven/stochastic inoculum distribution in seeds or soil. Several strong plant–microbe associations were observed, such as seed transmission to shoots, roots and/or rhizospheres of Sarocladium zeae (maize), Penicillium (pea and Phaseolus), and Curvularia (sugarcane), while robust bacterial colonization from cassava field soil occurred with the cyanobacteria Leptolyngbya into Arabidopsis and Panicum roots, and Streptomyces into cassava roots. Some abundant microbes such as Sakaguchia in rice shoots or Vermispora in Arabidopsis roots appeared in no other samples, suggesting that they were infrequent, stochastically deposited propagules from either soil or seed (impossible to know based on the available data). Future experiments with culturing and cross-inoculation of these microbes between plants may help us better understand host preferences and their role in plant productivity, perhaps leading to their use in crop microbiome engineering and enhancement of agricultural production.
Complex sine-Gordon Equation in Coherent Optical Pulse Propagation

It is shown that the McCall-Hahn theory of self-induced transparency in coherent optical pulse propagation can be identified with the complex sine-Gordon theory in the sharp line limit. We reformulate the theory in terms of the deformed gauged Wess-Zumino-Witten sigma model and address various new aspects of self-induced transparency.
Dexamethasone and Doxycycline Doped Nanoparticles Increase the Differentiation Potential of Human Bone Marrow Stem Cells

Non-resorbable polymeric nanoparticles (NPs) are proposed as an adjunctive treatment for bone regenerative strategies. The present in vitro investigation aimed to evaluate the effect of the different prototypes of bioactive NPs loaded with zinc (Zn-NPs), doxycycline (Dox-NPs) or dexamethasone (Dex-NPs) on the viability, morphology, migration, adhesion, osteoblastic differentiation, and mineralization potential of human bone marrow stem cells (hBMMSCs). Cell viability, proliferation, and differentiation were assessed using a resaruzin-based assay, cell cycle analysis, cell migration evaluation, cell cytoskeleton staining analysis, Alizarin Red S staining, and expression of the osteogenic-related genes by a real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). One-Way ANOVA and Tukey’s test were employed. The resazurin assay showed adequate cell viability considering all concentrations and types of NPs at 24, 48, and 72 h of culture. The cell cycle analysis revealed a regular cell cycle profile at 0.1, 1, and 10 µg/mL, whereas 100 µg/mL produced an arrest of cells in the S phase. Cells cultured with 0.1 and 1 µg/mL NP concentrations showed a similar migration capacity to the untreated group. After 21 days, mineralization was increased by all the NPs prototypes. Dox-NPs and Dex-NPs produced a generalized up-regulation of the osteogenic-related genes. Dex-NPs and Dox-NPs exhibited excellent osteogenic potential and promoted hBMMSC differentiation. Future investigations, both in vitro and in vivo, are required to confirm the suitability of these NPs for their clinical application.
Probiotic as a Potential Gut Microbiome Modifier for Stroke Treatment: A Systematic Scoping Review of In Vitro and In Vivo Studies

Background: Pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic treatments for stroke are essential but can be costly or harmful, whereas probiotics are a promising alternative. This scoping review aimed to synthesize the in vitro and in vivo evidence of probiotics on stroke-related neurological, biochemical, and histochemical outcomes. Methods: A systematic review was conducted in PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Central Register of Clinical Trials (CENTRAL) up to 7 May 2021. Titles and abstracts were screened and assessed by two independent reviewers. The initial screening criteria aimed to include studies using probiotics, prebiotics, and symbiotics both in vitro and in vivo for the prevention and/or treatment of stroke. Results: Of 6293 articles, 4990 passed the initial screen after excluding duplication articles, of which 36 theme-related full texts were assessed and 13 were included in this review. No in vitro studies passed the criteria to be included in this review. Probiotics can ameliorate neurological deficits and show their anti-inflammation and anti-oxidative properties. Decreased loss of cerebral volume and inhibition of neuronal apoptosis were revealed in histopathological evidence. Conclusions: There are potential cognitive benefits of probiotic supplementation, especially among animal models, on decreasing cerebral volume, increasing neurological score, and decreasing the inflammatory response. However, further investigation is needed to validate these conclusions in various populations.
Accounting for preference heterogeneity for high occupancy toll lanes in a Canadian city: a latent class approach

ABSTRACT We investigate traveler preference heterogeneity for high occupancy toll (HOT) roads in Calgary, Canada. We employ a set of latent class discrete choice models that allows for within-class heterogeneity to be captured. This is the first use of latent class models to understand lane choice along a freeway with managed lanes. The use of a latent class structure is justified based on both an improvement in overall fit relative to conventional models and the capacity of this model to provide behavioral insights into preference heterogeneity. The proposed latent class structure captures several interesting trends, including an inversion between travel time and travel cost elasticities across different classes. Using the approach of inferring lifestyles and mobility styles from class membership several interesting trends are established. The finding of high degrees of time sensitivity relative to cost sensitivity amongst certain segments of the population has implications for setting an optimal toll price.
Winners or losers? Using Twitter to evaluate how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the images of political leaders in Italy

ABSTRACT This work focuses on the consequences of Covid-19 for the public images of political leaders as they emerge from Twitter discourses in Italy. To that end, the research investigates the tweets of Italian citizens about the pandemic in 2020 to understand whether the messages related to the virus can provide helpful information to track support for politicians. These goals are relevant because we know little about how the images of political leaders change in times of crisis, and Italy has been one of the countries most affected by the pandemic. The threat of the virus and the search for protection should increase confidence in the Prime Minister and foster the ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect. However, as the debate on the virus dominated posts on Twitter, populist leaders opposing the Government could have taken advantage of the emergency to criticize the Government and thus gain support. Further, there are various political parties in the country, including right-wing mainstream and populist parties. Moreover, populists are both in the opposition and in government. We find that the images of politicians are shaped according to their stances relating to the pandemic and the ideas they promote. As expected, right-wing populists tried to use Twitter to criticize the Government but were often criticized for being ‘political looters’. Fear of the pandemic boosted confidence in the Prime Minister and his coalition. To understand these results, both context and the actor’s position are critical elements when studying public opinion through social media communication.