Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What drives heterogeneity in foreign exchange rate expectations: insights from a new survey

Foreign exchange rate expectations play a central role in virtually all monetary models for the open economy. Therefore, it is extremely important to gain empirical insights into the expectations formation process. In this paper, we use a unique disaggregated data set to model the expectations of the Yen|USD exchange rate of about 50 leading foreign exchange rate professionals. The survey includes not only exchange rate projections but also expectations regarding macroeconomic fundamentals, like GDP growth, inflation, and interest rates. Different expectations of fundamentals can lead to different views of exchange rate dynamics. Using panel models, we are able to confirm the heterogeneity of exchange rate expectations often detected in previous studies. More important, we provide strong evidence regarding the likely source of heterogeneity. In line with forward looking models for the exchange rate, expected fundamentals have a substantial impact on exchange rate expectations, thereby challenging the backward looking evidence from previous studies. However, the heterogeneity in the expectations of macroeconomic fundamentals is not sufficient to explain the heterogeneity in exchange rate expectations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The reliability and validity of the Diabetes Family Responsibility Questionnaire, in a sample of Swedish children with Type 1 diabetes and their parents

Study background: The Diabetes Family Responsibility Questionnaire (DFRQ) is a self-report questionnaire developed to measure family sharing of responsibility for diabetes treatment tasks. The Swedish version of the DFRQ is currently being used in an ongoing family intervention study at The Queen Silvia Children´s hospital. Testing the reliability and validity of the instrument in a Swedish population is an important work in raising the quality of its contribution to research. Aim: The overall aim of the study was to assess the psychometric properties of the DFRQ in a Swedish sample of children, mothers and fathers. A second aim was to bring fathers into the sample and to evaluate whether there are any differences in how mothers and fathers perceive family sharing of responsibility for diabetes treatment tasks. Methods: 159 inhouse patients, 8-18 years, from two diabetes centres, and their parents, participated in the study. The DFRQ was administered by postal mail to the families. Internal consistency of the scale was measured with Cronbach’s alpha and its concurrent validity was evaluated using bivariate correlations. Independent t -tests were performed to test for differences between mother- and father reports. The study was reviewed and approved by the Regional Ethical Review Board. Results: The Diabetes Family Responsibility Questionnaire exceeded the criteria for satisfactory internal consistency for the child-, mother- and father reports with a-values ranging from . 87 to . 90. Furthermore, children and parents reported that the child assumed greater responsibility for diabetes management tasks with increasing age, thus confirming concurrent validity of the instrument. Conclusion: In summary the study concludes that the Swedish version of the DFRQ can be utilized as a valuable tool both in a research setting and in clinical practice.
Gas migration through cement slurries analysis: A comparative laboratory study

Cementing is an essential part of every drilling operation. Protection of the wellbore from formation fluid invasion is one of the primary tasks of a cement job. Failure in this task results in catastrophic events, such as blow outs. Hence, in order to save the well and avoid risky and operationally difficult remedial cementing, slurry must be optimized to be resistant against gas migration phenomenon. In this paper, performances of the conventional slurries facing gas invasion were reviewed and compared with modified slurry containing special gas migration additive by using fluid migration analyzer device. The results of this study reveal the importance of proper additive utilization in slurry formulations. The rate of gas flow through the slurry in neat cement is very high; by using different types of additives, we observe obvious changes in the performance of the cement system. The rate of gas flow in neat class H cement was reported as 36000 ml/hr while the optimized cement formulation with anti-gas migration and thixotropic agents showed a gas flow rate of 13.8 ml/hr.
Random Fatigue Analysis of Drill-Strings in Frequency Domain

Predicting fatigue damage induced by vibrations is of benefit to oil and gas industry. In this paper a spectral method is developed to estimate the damage of vibration, including both deterministic and random vibration, on the fatigue life of drillstrings. The drill-string is first modeled by the continuous parameter method with two vibration modes: axial and torsional. After the vibration response is obtained, the equivalent stress spectra are calculated for any position along the drill-string, based on maximum shear stress fatigue failure criterion. The fatigue life of the drill-string at arbitrary position is then estimated by the developed spectral methods
Effect of oxalic acid on rumen function and microbiota in sheep fed a low quality diet

Oxalic acid is a potentially toxic compound present in many plants that can be consumed by ruminants in some less-favoured areas. However, consequences of its consumption on the rumen function and microbiota remain unclear. Five ewes receiving low quality grass hay were daily dosed 0.6 mmol of oxalic acid/kg body weight through a rumen cannula for 14 days. On days 0 (before starting the dosing), 4, 7 and 14 of administration, alfalfa hay and barley straw were in situ incubated, and samples of rumen digesta were collected throughout the day (0, 3, 6 and 9 h after morning meal). The rumen bacterial community was studied using the terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) technique. Oxalic acid administration reduced the dry matter disappearance of alfalfa hay on days 7 and 14 and of barley straw on day 7. Neither pH values nor total volatile fatty acid concentrations were affected. Nevertheless, ammonia and butyrate concentrations were reduced and molar proportions of acetic and propionic acids were increased. Although oxalic acid did not modify rumen bacterial diversity, it altered the structure of the community and the relative frequencies of a number of TR-fragments over the total peak area. Most of these changes were reversed at the end of the experiment (on day 14). Therefore, despite the slight negative effect on ruminal degradation, the lack of a clear detrimental effect on rumen fermentation and the recovery of the initial values in some parameters suggest an adaptation of the ruminal microbiota within 2 weeks.
An atomistic-based continuum theory for carbon nanotubes : analysis of fracture nucleation

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) display unique properties and have many potential applications. Prior theoretical studies on CNTs are based on atomistic models such as empirical potential molecular dynamics (MD), tight-binding methods, or 8rst-principles calculations. Here we develop an atomistic-based continuum theory for CNTs. The interatomic potential is directly incorporated into the continuum analysis through constitutive models. Such an approach involves no additional parameter 8tting beyond those introduced in the interatomic potential. The atomistic-based continuum theory is then applied to study fracture nucleation in CNTs by modelling it as a bifurcation problem. The results agree well with the MD simulations. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Morphophysiological and biochemical changes in tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) under combined salinity and deficit irrigation stresses

Water salinity and drought are the major abiotic stresses limiting turf grass growth. On the other hand, shortage of water resources and salinity of water and soil in the arid and semi-arid zones such as Iran, are the restricting factors in developing lawn turf grasses. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the combined effects of water salinity and deficit irrigation on tall fescue (Festuca arundinaceaSchreb.). This study was conducted under outdoor conditions in a completely randomized design with factorial arrangements. Treatments included four water salinity levels (0.5, 3, 6 and 9 dS .m -1 ) and three deficit irrigation regimes (50%, 75% and 100% FC) with five replicates under outdoor conditions. Results indicated a rise in the ion leakage, and soluble sugar and proline concentration and a decrease in visual quality, shoot length, leaf area and fresh and dry weights of shoot, leaf relative water content (RWC), leaf chlorophyll content and photosynthetic rate and starch content with an increase in the levels of both stresses. Antioxidant enzymes, superoxide dismutase (SOD, EC 1.15.1.1), and catalase (CAT, EC 1.11.1.6) showed higher activity under moderate drought or water salinity conditions; however, this parameter decreased at higher levels of these salinity stresses. Practically, based on the results of the present study , tall fescue could be grown under moderate levels of the combined stresses of water shortage and salinity without considerable damage to the plant at the physiological and/or biochemical level. This is the first report on applying the combined stresses of water and salinity on an important agricultural crop.
Trace hydrogen in Verneuil-grown corundum and its colour varieties; an IR spectroscopic study

IR spectra of Verneuil-grown colourless corundum, rose to deep red ruby, blue, «amethyst»- and «alexandrite»-coloured sapphire show a distinct variability in the region of the OH stretching fundamental. Hydrogen, bonded to oxygen, varies from approximately 1 to 3.5 ppm. Extremely pleochroic and narrow OH bands are centered at 3310, 3230 and 3185 cm −1 . The OH dipoles are oriented perpendicular to the c-axis. Assuming vacancies in the cation lattice, OH is coordinated to two Al atoms forming «groups» of face-sharing Al 2 (OH)O 8 -double octahedra
Earnings Management and Gender Diversity in the Board of Directors and Audit Committee

Mark Mulder (s4083938) Supervisor: S. Zubair Date: 26-06-2017 Radboud University Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relation between earnings management and gender diversity in the board of directors and audit committee. Based on prior literature, hypotheses as support are formulated. Earnings management is investigated by both real and accrual-based earnings management. Running several multiple regressions find a relation between gender diversity in the audit committee and real earnings management. Further evidence suggests that having a chairwoman influence the level of earnings management. Consistent with prior research, this thesis find that board size is negative related to accrual-based earnings management. No support is found for the relation between gender diversity and both real and accrual-based earnings management.
SMS: A Framework for Service Discovery by Incorporating Social Media Information

With the explosive growth of services, including Web services, cloud services, APIs and mashups, discovering the appropriate services for consumers is becoming an imperative issue. The traditional service discovery approaches mainly face two challenges: 1) the single source of description documents limits the effectiveness of discovery due to the insufficiency of semantic information; 2) more factors should be considered with the generally increasing functional and nonfunctional requirements of consumers. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, called SMS, for effectively discovering the appropriate services by incorporating social media information. Specifically, we present different methods to measure four social factors (semantic similarity, popularity, activity, decay factor) collected from Twitter. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) model is applied to mine semantic information of services from meta-data of Twitter Lists that contains them. In addition, we assume the target query-service matching function as a linear combination of multiple social factors and design a weight learning algorithm to learn an optimal combination of the measured social factors. Comprehensive experiments based on a real-world dataset crawled from Twitter demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework SMS, through some compared approaches.
ICT in education in Portugal : a review of 15 years of research

ICT in education has developed in Portugal since mid 70s. Although it was integrated in teacher education curricula, a definite impulse in the field can be traced to the beginning of the post-graduation teacher training courses in the end of the 80s. Many research studies in the field have developed since then. Nevertheless, there has neither been a systematic survey of the research studies being carried out so far, nor a meticulous analysis of its contents and evolution. However we know that such work is needed if we want ICT in education domain to be recognised by other educational partners and departments in Portugal. This has been the main goal of the project we present here: 460 Portuguese papers which were published between 1985 and 2000 were analysed. More than a simple portrait of what has been and is now ICT in education in our country, we believe that the analysed data point out interesting cues that should promote ‘food for thought’ and a wide debate among all our research community.
Optimal Monetary Policy in a Simple Distorted Economy

In this paper I search for an optimal configurations of parameters for variants of the Taylor rule by using an Accurate Second-Order Welfare based method within a fully microfounded Dynamic Stochastic model, with price rigidities, without capital accumulation. Money is inserted via a transaction cost function, price rigidities are modelled via quadratic cost of price adjustment. A version of the model with distortionary taxation is also explicitly tested. The model is solved up to Second Order solution. Optimal rules are obtained by maximizing a conditional welfare measure, differently from what has been done in the current literature. Optimal monetary policy functions turn out to be characterized by inflation targeting parameter lower than in empirical studies. In general, the optimal values for moentary policy parameters depend from the degree of nominal rigidities and from the role of fiscal policy. When nominal rigidities are higher, optimal monetary policy becomes more aggressive towards infla on. With a tigther fiscal policy, optimal monetary policy turns out to be less inflation-aggressive. Moreover, the results show that relying conditional welfare measure avoids the problems related with first-order or unconditional welfare measures. Impulse Response functions based on second order model solution show a non-aef ne pattern when the economy is hit by shocks of different magnitude.
Management Accounting Research and Structuration Theory: A Critical Realist Critique

Abstract The article extends the critique of structuration theory from a critical realist perspective, in particular by demonstrating how its theoretical shortcomings are manifest in management accounting research. Examining of one of the most cited structuration-based accounting studies and other more recent structuration-based accounting studies, the article highlights what accounting researchers who have embraced a structuration lens may have ignored. It also demonstrates why accounting researchers could not get a better theoretical purchase out of structuration. We find that a critical realist account provides a far more in-depth account of budgeting changes and is likely to avoid the problems encountered in using a structuration theoretical lens. The article has important implications for accounting researchers as it demonstrates that analytical dualism instead of duality has much better potential to offer deeper understanding of accounting changes.
Plasma Treatment of Graphene Oxide

Plasma treatment of graphene oxide (GO) is of interest for many applications such as gas sensors, flexible electrodes, biological applications, supercapacitors, batteries, etc. Plasma treatment is a high-tech process of processing materials in combination with efficiency, economy and environmental friendliness. At the same time, plasma treatments can lead to an increase in the defectiveness of the surface of GO. Therefore, it is important to know how the treatment in various gas media affects the properties of GO. This is necessary for the correct selection of processing parameters in order to reduce the negative impact of plasma treatment. The review presents the results of experimental studies of the effect of plasma in gases of oxygen, nitrogen, ammonia, sulfur hexafluoride, carbon tetrafluoromethane, hydrogen and methane on the properties of GO. Plasma treatments were used for the functionalization, reduction, doping of graphene oxide, and also for the obtaining GO from graphene by oxidation in oxygen plasma. The effects of plasma treatment are largely determined by the type of ions used and processing conditions: plasma power, processing time and temperature, pressure, as well as the location of the samples in the reaction chamber and their distance from the plasma ignition zone.
Analysis of Forest Fires by means of Pseudo Phase Plane and Multidimensional Scaling Methods

Forest fires dynamics is often characterized by the absence of a characteristic length-scale, long range correlations in space and time, and long memory, which are features also associated with fractional order systems. In this paper a public domain forest fires catalogue, containing information of events for Portugal, covering the period from 1980 up to 2012, is tackled. The events are modelled as time series of Dirac impulses with amplitude proportional to the burnt area. The time series are viewed as the system output and are interpreted as a manifestation of the system dynamics. In the first phase we use the pseudo phase plane (PPP) technique to describe forest fires dynamics. In the second phase we use multidimensional scaling (MDS) visualization tools. The PPP allows the representation of forest fires dynamics in two-dimensional space, by taking time series representative of the phenomena. The MDS approach generates maps where objects that are perceived to be similar to each other are placed on the map forming clusters. The results are analysed in order to extract relationships among the data and to better understand forest fires behaviour.
Using reinforcement learning to learn relevance ranking of search queries

Sandupatla, Hareesh. M.S., Purdue University, May 2016. Using Reinforcement Learning to Learn Relevance Ranking of Search Queries. Major Professor: Mohammad Al Hasan. Web search has become a part of everyday life for hundreds of millions of users around the world. However, the effectiveness of a user’s search depends vitally on the quality of search result ranking. Even though enormous efforts have been made to improve the ranking quality, there is still significant misalignment between search engine ranking and an end user’s preference order. This is evident from the fact that, for many search results on major search and e-commerce platforms, many users ignore the top ranked results and click on the lower ranked results. Nevertheless, finding a ranking that suits all the users is a difficult problem to solve as every user’s need is different. So, an ideal ranking is the one which is preferred by the majority of the users. This emphasizes the need for an automated approach which improves the search engine ranking dynamically by incorporating user clicks in the ranking algorithm. In existing search result ranking methodologies, this direction has not been explored profoundly. A key challenge in using user clicks in search result ranking is that the relevance feedback that is learnt from click data is imperfect. This is due to the fact that a user is more likely to click a top ranked result than a lower ranked result, irrespective of the actual relevance of those results. This phenomenon is known as position bias which poses a major difficulty in obtaining an automated method for dynamic update of search rank orders. In my thesis, I propose a set of methodologies which incorporate user clicks for dynamic update of search rank orders. The updates are based on adaptive random-
Safety and Efficacy of Pegylated Interferon Alfa-2a for the Treatment of Hepatitis C in Patients with Major Thalassemia

Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is the most common transfusion transmitted disease in poly-transfused patients worldwide. In this study we aimed to evaluate the effects of pegylated interferon alfa-2a (PEG-IFN A-2a) in reducing serum ALT and eradicating serum hepatitis C virus (HCV) RNA in HCV infected polytransfused thalassemic patients. Materials and Methods: A cohort of 51 HCV-RNA positive thalassemic patients were enrolled to our study and received 180 μg PEG-IFN A-2a once-weekly for 48 weeks. The primary end point was sustained virological response (SVR). The secondary outcome was normalization of ALT. Patient safety was assured by monthly, and if needed, weekly laboratory assessment and visits. Results: Of 52 patients, 42 participants completed the treatment schedule. A sustained virological response (SVR) was attained in 22/51 (43%) cases. Among non-responders or relapsers to previous HCV antiviral therapy, 9/27 (33%) attained an SVR. Five patients died during treatment and 3 subjects discontinued the therapy because of adverse effects. Adverse events were generally mild, and laboratory abnormalities were rare. Conclusion: A course of 48-week PEG-IFN A-2a monotherapy is effective in eradicating HCV-RNA during treatment. But about one third of thalassemic patients would relapse within 6 months of treatment schedule completion, in whom combination therapy is needed.
Measurements on freshly-deposited surfaces of two platinum tailings dams

As part of an investigation of possible water-saving measures at Anglo Platinum’s Mogalakwena Mine in Limpopo, South Africa, a study was made of conditions on the wet beaches of two adjacent tailings dams, each serving a separate plant on the mine. For one of the dams, a special catamaran was designed and constructed to enable the full length of wet beaches to be accessed and sampled immediately after a layer of tailings had been deposited. For the other dam, the wet beach was accessed using conveyor belting and scaffold planks. The length of the beaches was 400 m on the first dam, and 200 m on the second, sampled at 50 m intervals. The parameters reported in this paper, for both beaches were: The surface water contents shortly after deposition have been used to establish the relative density of the settled, decanted tailings and its variation down the beach. Combined with the decant and drainage flows, the calculated and actual water recoveries from both dams have also been established.