Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
House-Price Crash and Macroeconomic Crisis: A Hong Kong Case Study

The crash of house prices has become an important feature of macroeconomic crisis. We argue that the crash of house prices driven by contractionary monetary policy is not only a reaction, but also accelerates and amplifies the fluctuations of major macroeconomic variables. The impulse response of consumption to the house price shock estimated from Bayesian VAR is of same level as that of investment in Hong Kong, which is distinct from the United States. Therefore, in this paper we conduct a case study of Hong Kong in the 1997-1998 financial crisis and quantitatively analyze the mechanism by developing a general equilibrium model incorporating financial accelerator in both household and entrepreneur sectors. In addition, we introduce real estate producers in order to modify the unrealistic mechanism in existing literature. After estimating the parameters with a combination of calibration and Bayesian method, the simulated impulse responses imply that our model can explain the co-movement of house prices, consumption and investment much better than alternative ones. Moreover, the results of variance decomposition show that interest rate shock can explain most of the house price fluctuations, and a substantial fraction of fluctuations in major macroeconomic variables.
Reactions of Methyl Perfluoroalkyl Ethers with Isopropyl Alcohol: Experimental and Theoretical Studies

The reaction of an isomeric mixture of the methyl perfluoroalkyl ether, C4F9OCH3 (Novec-7100), in the presence of isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and/or water has been studied by measuring the rate of product formation using an ion-selective electrode (ISE) for fluoride ion, Karl Fisher coulometric titrations for water, and 1H and 19F NMR spectroscopy for product identification and rate studies. The results showed the methyl perfluoroalkyl ether to be very stable with products forming at the rate of ∼1 ppm per year at a laboratory temperature of 20 °C. Measurements over the temperature range of 6° to 100 °C were made on samples aged for periods up to 1.8 years. Density functional theory calculations (DFT, B3LYP/6-31+G(d)) were employed to investigate different reaction pathways and formulate the probable reaction mechanism. The experimental enthalpy (ΔH⧧) and entropy (ΔS⧧) of activation were determined based on several different kinetic measurements. The ΔH⧧ values are in the range of 20–25 kcal/mol and the corre.
TAXATION AND FORMS OF ORGANISING BUSINESS ACTIVITIES

This paper takes sample tax regimes and tendencies from the developed countries in the EU-15 and the USA, and uses them to analyse the influence of taxation on the choice of organisational form of profit-oriented entities in Serbia. In order to understand how the procedure of taxation affects the sphere of business decision-making it is necessary to focus on the tax status of business losses and valorisation and the effects of the double taxation of dividends. The rule of successive deduction of losses ensures the fiscally transparent entity receives a tax saving in the form of a reduction of the present value of the total paid tax. Meanwhile the corporation is handicapped because it postpones loss deductions, that is, it postpones tax saving, which directly influences the level of the present value of saved tax. The global trend of gradually moving from the classical system towards shareholder relief provision, above all in the form of a reduced withholding tax rate on dividends, has two opposing features: it simplifies the tax procedure while neglecting the distributional aims (consequences) of taxation. The analysis of a particular practical example from the Serbian tax context enables us to draw a conclusion in relation to the relative taxes paid by entrepreneurs versus enterprises. The developed countries favour fiscally transparent entities, whereas Serbia allocates tax privileges to enterprises.
Detecting Events in Videos Using Semantic Analytics of Subtitles

Recently, television broadcasters such as the NRK and TV2 channels, have begun offering live internet television and movie archive along with their regular schedule, much like the known video archives such as Youtube and Vimeo. The amount of all television offered reduces the ability of the user to get an overview of the programs that are available at any given time, making the user will probably miss important events. Regular indexing engines for recommending does not generally work on media since it is hard to index media data. Tags and keywords describing a media file does only describe the whole file, making it difficult to use them for indexing and recommendation of specific scenes within the media. This thesis presents a text event detection system for discovering interesting events based on video subtitles. By performing textual analytics, our system is able to discover events that are not discoverable through regular syntactic search. We have, based on related work, extended algorithms used for discovering semantic relationships between different words. Also, we have experimented with several algorithm for capturing the essence of each sentence, relating the prominent sense of each sense towards the events. Our experiments illustrates how we can increase the accuracy of the algorithm used by performing a context exploration based on event keywords. The results shows that our system improved the base algorithm of the prototype by including more relevance methods like consecutive sentence similarity and similarity based on sentence internals.
The Impact of Socioeconomic Status on Second Grade Reading Levels

The purpose of this study is to examine if low SES students respond differently to Tier I and Tier II interventions than Non-Low SES students. The study also seeks to determine the effect Tier I and Tier II interventions have on a group of second grade students. Forty-four Tier I and Tier II Caucasian second grade students from a rural Ohio elementary school were included in this study. No significant differences were found between the reading levels of low-SES and Non-Low-SES students prior to or after implementation of RTI. Significant differences were found between the AIMSweb fall and winter benchmarks as a result of Tier I and Tier II interventions.
Enhancing Stability of Multi-Machine IEEE 9 Bus Power System Network Using PSS

: An electric power system is a network of electrical components which consists to supply, transfer, and use of electric power. Power system is also explained as grid which can be broadly divided into the generating system that supply the electrical power, the transmission system that carries the power from the generating centres to the load centres and the distribution system that feeds the power to nearby homes and industries. Power systems are designed to provide continuous power supply that maintains voltage stability. However, due to undesired events, such as lightning, accidents or any other unpredictable events, short circuits between the phase wires of the transmission lines or between a phase wire and the ground which may occur is called a fault. Due to occurring of a fault, one or more generators may be severely disturbed causing an imbalance between generation and demand. If the fault persists and is not cleared in a pre-specified time frame, it may cause severe damages to the devices which leads to a power loss and power sources. Therefore, protective equipment’s are installed to detect faults and clear and isolate faulted parts of the power system as quickly possible before the fault energy is propagated to the rest of the system.
Spatial Variability of Soil Erodibility Factor (K) of the USLE in North West of Iran

The soil erodibility factor varies spatially according to variations of some soil properties on the surface. This study was carried out to compare spatial variability of the soil erodibility factor as estimated and measured using the USLE. The study was conducted in an agricultural zone with an area of in 900 km 2 in Hashtrood, northwestern Iran. In the study area, 36 square grids with a dimension of 5 km were considered. In each grid, three unit plots were installed on the southern aspect with a slope of 9%. The soil erodibility factor was estimated using the USLE nomograph and measured as mean rate of soil loss from the unit plots per unit rainfall erosivity factor on an annual basis. The results indicated that the difference between the measured and estimated soil erodibility factor was significant (P< < < < 0.001) and correlation between the two was very poor with r 2 = 0.21. The spherical simulations were the best models to explain spatial variations of both the estimated and measured erodibility factors. The effective range of the spatial variations of the measured soil erodibility factor (2.43 km) was smaller than that in the estimated value (11.51 km). There was a considerable difference in the effective range (P< 0.001) of spatial variations between the estimated and measured soil erodibility factor on the study area. The map of the proportion of the estimated values to measured values of the soil erodibility factor was nearly uniform (between 7.4 and 9.6) on the study area. The study indicated that use of the USLE nomograph would considerably lead to over-estimation of the soil erodibility in the entire the study area.
REPERIO: A Flexible Architecture for Recommendation in an Industrial Context

In this chapter, the authors describe Reperio, a flexible and generic industrial recommender system able to deal with several kinds of data sources (content-based, collaborative, social network) in the same framework and to work on multi-platforms (Web service in a multi-user mode and mobile device in a mono-user mode). The item-item matrix is the keystone of the architecture for its efficiency and flexibility properties. In the first part, the authors present core functionalities and requirements of recommendation in an industrial context. In the second part, they present the architecture of the system and the main issues involved in its development. In the last part, the authors report experimental results obtained using Reperio on benchmarks extracted from the Netflix Prize with different filtering strategies. To illustrate the interest and flexibility of the architecture, they also explain how it is possible to take into account, for recommendations, external sources of information. In particular, the authors show how to exploit user generated contents posted on social networks to fill the item-item matrix. The process proposed includes a step of opinion classification.
An updated description of the strong-wind climate of South Africa

Wind constitutes the most critical environmental loading affecting the structural design of the built environment in South Africa. Over the years, several failures of buildings and structures due to wind actions have occurred, some of them resulting in loss of human lives, as well as significant financial losses (Goliger and Retief, 2002). These failures could be attributed to various factors e.g. improper design and/or construction, but also inadequate knowledge of the wind action; more specifically the wind characteristics at low elevations at a regional or local scale affecting the design of specific structures. The need for updating the environmental input into the process of determining wind loads for structural design was emphasised during the process of revising the South African Loading Code (Goliger 2007). The sparse distribution of climate stations, mainly located in large cities for the present wind maps (Milford 1985a & b) and the subsequent addition of several decades of observations provided the main motivation for a reassessment of the strong-wind climate for the region. A project was launched to obtain a comprehensive statistical description of the occurrence of high wind speeds for South Africa, which were based mainly on the available reliable wind data measured by the South African Weather Service (SAWS). It was intended that the results should form the basis for wind loading requirements in the future design codes for the built environment. This paper provides an outline of the process followed to compile the information that should serve as input for the determination of the characteristic wind speed across the country. The main aspects considered here are the physical conditions, the attributes of the strong-wind data, the statistical treatment of the data, the resulting quantile wind speed and the differences between the existing and new wind maps. In an accompanying paper at this conference the results of cluster analysis are presented, through which strong-wind generating mechanisms are characterised (Kruger et al., 2011b).
Did Malta’s Accession to the EU Raise its Potential Growth? : A Focus on the Foreign Workforce

This paper evaluates the impact on Malta’s potential output growth caused by increased migration. Administrative data show that the proportion of foreign workers has risen from 1.3% of the workforce in 2000 to 10.1% in 2014. While the bulk of these migrants are in managerial, professional, and technical occupations, there are a growing number in blue-collar occupations, along with clerical or auxiliary jobs. Migrant workers is concentrated in certain sectors, with half of them in (1) entertainment and recreation,(2) professional services and administrative support, and (3) hotels and restaurants. The estimates presented here suggest that from 2010 to 2014, foreign workers contributed annually to 0.6 percentage points of potential output growth, helping to boost it to an average of 2.5% per annum, one of the highest in the Euro area, and slightly above the average observed during the years immediately preceding Malta’s admission to the European Union.
Coping with the challenges of engineering smart product service systems - Demands for research infrastructure

Driven by innovations of information and communication technologies as well as increasingly demanding customer expectations on individualized products and services Smart Product Service Systems become success factors for any enterprise acting on a globalized market. Increasing product complexity on the one hand as well as flexible autonomous (re)configurations and adaptations throughout the entire product lifecycle on the other hand call for dedicated research methodologies on supporting the inter- and mulitdisciplinary engineering process. Active experimentation and simulation of typical Smart PSS lifecycle situations are key to developing new methodologies. The approach specifically fosters the integration of customers into all steps of the engineering process, which is again key to meeting the characteristically interdisciplinary requirements to Smart PSS. On this basis, the paper outlines the scientific concept of an Interdisciplinary Research Center on Engineering Smart Product Service Systems jointly funded by the federal government of Germany as well as the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Correlation Smile, Volatility Skew, and Systematic Risk Sensitivity of Tranches

In collateralized debt obligations and other securitized credit derivatives, the expected tranche payoffs depend heavily on the default correlations among the securities in the pool. Like volatility, correlation is not directly observable, but it is possible to infer it from the market price of a tranche. But unfortunately, also like volatility, these implied correlations don’t behave well. They should be equal across all of the tranches created from a given pool, but they never are. Instead, implied correlations exhibit the pattern known as correlation skew. In this article, Hamerle, Igl, and Plank consider two ways in which the real world departs from the assumptions of the Gaussian copula model. Different correlations extracted from different tranches is one, but the other departure is that investors require expected risk premia for bearing a security’s downside exposure. This is not the same as a (symmetrical) distaste for “volatility,” say, and it is reflected in an asymmetrical implied volatility skew exhibited by options on a bond issuer”s equity. The standard Gaussian copula model allows for the first effect, but not the second. In this article, the authors look at both. Their most successful model estimates downside risk premia from the risk-neutral probability densities extracted from the issuers’ equity options and then imposes a fixed and moderate degree of correlation. This combination captures market pricing very well for all of the tranches above the equity tranche.
A Joint Density of Interferometric and/or Polarimetric Images: Application to Change Detection

Polarimetric data of distributed scatterer can be fully characterised by the (3 ◊ 3) Hermitian positive definite matrix which follows a complex Wishart distribution under Gaussian assumption. A second observation in time will also follow Wishart distribution. Then, these observations are correlated or uncorrelated process over time related to the monitored objects. To not to make any assumption concerning their independence, the (6 ◊ 6) matrix which is also modelled as a complex Wishart distribution is used in this study to characterise the behaviour of the temporal polarimetric data. In particular, we derive a closed-form expression of the joint probability density function of two polarimetric data thus enabling the exact evaluation of the change detection performances. Regarding the proposed temporal polarimetric data distribution, we propose a new algorithm for evaluating the change detection with KL-divergence test. The KL-divergence is a distance measurement between two probability distributions. In our case, also the case of mutual information, it measures the dependency of two variables by calculating the distance between the probability density of joint distribution of polarimetric data and their marginal probability densities. We illustrate this new change detection algorithm is independent from the dimension of the system that it can be easily implemented to lower or higher multi-channel SAR systems.
Effect of Ethanol Extract Leaves of Nymphaea Lotus (Water Lily) on Fear and Anxiety Behaviour in Mice

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of the leave extract of Nymphaea lotus on neuro-behaviour using mice as experimental model on fear/anxiety. Twenty seven mice weighing between 20-29 g were randomly selected into A, B and C groups for the study. Prior to the assessment of these neurobehavioral parameters, the phytochemical screening of the plant and the LD50 were analyzed. The elevated plus maze was used to access anxiety/fear related behaviours. Our findings showed that N. lotus extract reduces fear/anxiety related behavior, this was so because, the time spent in the open arm was increased significantly (p<0.01 respectively) in the mice that were treated with the leave extract, the head dips showed similar results. However, the number of fecal boles, frequency of SAP and close arm duration were decreased in the mice treated groups compared to control (p<0.01 and p<0.05 respectively. In conclusion, the leaves of Nymphaea lotus may be responsible for the reduced level of anxiety and fear we found in the treated mice.
Students’ understanding of dot product as a projection in no-context, work and electric flux problems

In this article we investigate students’ understanding of dot product as a projection. In the first part, we compare students’ performance in three isomorphic multiple-choice problems: no-context, work and electric flux. We administered one of the three problems to 422 students who were in the process of completing required introductory physics courses. In the second part, we analyze the students’ ability to connect the physical concepts with the dot product’s formal representation. We carried out interviews with 14 students, in which they were asked to solve the same three isomorphic problems. Following the tests, we found a difference that was statistically significant: both physical context problems helped students select the projection interpretation option. However, the percentages of students that selected this option remained very low in the three problems. Moreover, during the interviews we noticed that students had serious difficulties in developing a coherent conceptual framework between the phy.
Predicting context specific enhancer-promoter interactions from ChIP-Seq time course data

16 We have developed a machine learning approach to predict context specific enhancer-promoter interactions using evidence from changes in genomic protein occupancy over time. The occupancy of estrogen receptor alpha (ERα), RNA polymerase (Pol II) and histone marks H2AZ and H3K4me3 were measured over time using ChIP-Seq experiments in MCF7 cells stimulated with estrogen. A Bayesian classifier was developed which uses the correlation of temporal binding patterns at enhancers and promoters and genomic proximity as features to predict interactions. This method was trained using experimentally determined interactions from the same system and was shown to achieve much higher precision than predictions based on the genomic proximity of nearest ERα binding. We use the method to identify a genome-wide confident set of ERα target genes and their regulatory enhancers genome-wide. Validation with publicly available GRO-Seq data demonstrates that our predicted targets are much more likely to show early nascent transcription than predictions based on genomic ERα binding proximity alone. 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
Strategy Typology in Turbulent Environment: Cases from the Korean Exporting Organizations

The study revisits Miles and Snow`s strategy typology to investigate the performance relationship with the strategic behavior. Where the most strategy typology researches discern the typology by the respondent`s survey such as choosing the best representative behavior for the organization, we developed the strategic typology by the organization`s behavior such as marketing strategy, research and development strategy and members` attitudes to the quality. The financial crisis in Korea has reestablished organizational behavior. The study emphasized the changing attitudes of strategy. The results demonstrate that prospector organizations outperform other strategic behavior organizations.
El banco de semillas en pastizales tropicales abandonados: fuente de regeneración o de invasión?

We assessed the availability of both pioneer and non-native species in the soil seed bank of old-growth forest and recently abandoned pasture, to evaluate whether the soil seed bank in these pastures represents a source of regeneration of species from adjacent old-growth forest or of invasion by non-native species. Our study was conducted at Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, Mexico. Soil samples were randomly collected from 6 sites in old-growth forest, and 6 sites in abandoned pastures. Seedlings from soil samples were identified and classified into pioneer, non-native (weeds/ graminoids), and other forest species. Pioneer species seeds were virtually absent in pastures, but represented ~30% of seeds in the forest. Non-native species comprised ~99% of the soil seed bank in pastures. In the forest, soil seed bank density of weeds and graminoids decreased with increasing distance (up to 4 km) from agricultural fields, and comprised up to 25% (Mean ± 1SE= 16 ± 7) of the seed bank. Our results show a near total elimination of pioneer species from the soil seed bank in pastures, and considerable invasion of the borders of the Montes Azules reserve by seeds of non-native species. Thus, in the region studied, the soil seed bank in abandoned pastures represents a source of invasion by non-native species into old-growth forest rather than a potential source of forest regeneration.