Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Migration governance in South America: regional approaches versus national laws

Regional Consultative Processes (RCPs) have become the standard for multilateral migration policy discussion over the last two decades. RCPs are geographically bounded, non-binding meetings organized voluntarily by states and promoted by international organizations. Our chapter contributes to accumulating knowledge regarding the migration governance role of RCPs by investigating the South American Conference on Migration (CSM). We conduct a thematic analysis of CSM documents from its first annual meeting in 2000 until 2017 to find the most salient themes. We then examine migration-related legislation to uncover to what extent national laws incorporate regional discussion and accords. We find that although multilateral cooperation has created a set of common standards and practices, their domestic incorporation remains uneven. This chapter sheds light on the synergy between regional-level priorities and national-level laws, revealing a limitation of regional migration governance.
Law Abiding Diplomats: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets in Washington D.C.

Why people conform to social norms? Answering this question has important implications for economic development and institutional reforms. Posner (2000a, p. 3) argue that law and economics have no compelling answers. In this paper, we investigate the role of social norms in shaping people’s law abiding behavior. We analyze foreign diplomats’ compliance with local parking laws while they are stationed in Washington D.C. This is a natural setting to investigate people conformity to social norms since diplomatic immunity gives ample leeway to foreign diplomats to flout their host countries’ laws. Our empirical results are consistent with the recent literature indicating that the extent to which diplomats’ fellow citizens in their home countries observe the rule of law significantly affects diplomat’s conformity to social norms abroad. We contribute to the literature by highlighting three additional important factors that explain diplomat’s social norm conformity: i) the legal origin of legal system prevailing in diplomats’ home countries, ii) their colonial heritage, and iv) the affinity among diplomats’ home and host countries—measured using geographical proximity and military alliances with the U.S.
Centralized content delivery infrastructure exploiting resource pools : performance models and asymptotics

The Sanskrit hymm roughly translates as follows: Guru symbolizes the universal principles of creation, existence, and evolution; salutations to that guru who embodies the very essence of reality. I am fortunate to find a guru in my advisor Prof. Gustavo de Veciana. I gladly acknowledge his contributions in development of this thesis. I have greatly benefited from his scientific acumen, clarity of thoughts, and extraordinary perception of what are the right questions. If not for his patience and constant support, I would likely not have persisted the ups and downs of PhD research and life. I thank Prof. François Baccelli for being a mentor and a role model. His steadfast knowledge and mathematical perspective on engineering problems has influenced me greatly. Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai, for being a constant source of enthusiasm and for exposing me to the wonderful world of concentration inequalities. and several other faculty members at UT who have influenced me in many ways through their excellent courses and several interesting discussions.nath and Bikash K. Dey at IIT Bomaby for providing me with solid research foundations prior to my PhD tenure and always being there as a source of guidance. My stay at Austin has been exciting and fun thanks to my friends. Special thanks to Avik and Anamika for being all-weather friends, for organizing wonderful trips and movies, and for teaching me how to drive. I will remember with fondness the intense discussions with Ankit, Pravesh, Sarabjot, and Srinadh; they have something to debate on all topics under the sun and never seem to get tired. Jiaxiao Zheng has been a very helpful cubicle-mate and a patient listener for several technical discussions. Sreangsu and Suriya, thank you for taking away countless hours from my research time, the distractions were a pleasure and an added motivation to visit lab regularly. I have made so many friends at Austin, who are all so kind that I am sure they will forgive me for not listing them here. We consider a centralized content delivery infrastructure where a large number of storage-intensive files are replicated across several collocated servers. To achieve scalable delays in file downloads under stochastic loads, we allow multiple servers to work together as a pooled resource to meet individual download requests. In such systems basic questions include: How and where to replicate files? How significant are the gains of resource pooling over policies which use single server …
Data governance maturity assessment tool: A design science approach

De nos jours, les donnees sont devenues des atouts strategiques puisqu’elles permettent desormais aux organisations de decouvrir de nouvelles tendances ainsi que de developper une connaissance plus approfondie de leurs clients et de leurs partenaires, ainsi que de l’environnement et des marches dans lesquels elles operent. Pour gerer correctement leurs donnees, les organisations s’appuient sur un cadre de gouvernance des donnees (CGD) qui definit les processus, les politiques, les pratiques et les structures necessaires pour orchestrer et optimiser la collecte, le stockage, l’utilisation et la diffusion de donnees en tant qu’atouts organisationnels. Cependant, la plupart des organisations ne parviennent pas a mettre en place un CGD adapte a leurs besoins puisqu’elles ignorent le niveau de maturite de leurs pratiques de gestion des donnees et ne savent donc pas par ou commencer lors de la mise en œuvre d’un CDG. Afin d’aider les organisations a evaluer leurs operations par rapport aux meilleures pratiques en gouvernance des donnees et de les aider a developper, deployer et/ou ameliorer leur CGD en fonction de leurs principales lacunes, le present article developpe, a l’aide d’une approche de la recherche en science du design, un outil d’evaluation de la maturite de la gouvernance des donnees. L’artefact propose, qui comprend 11 dimensions et 72 questions, permet aux organisations d’evaluer ou elles se situent en matiere de gouvernance des donnees et, ainsi, de mieux definir et hierarchiser les objectifs, le contenu et les activites de leurs initiatives en gouvernance des donnees.
Evaluating Word Sense Induction and Discrimination Systems

The goal of this task is to allow for comparison across sense-induction and discrimination systems, and also to compare these systems to other supervised and knowledgebased systems. In total there were 6 participating systems. We reused the SemEval2007 English lexical sample subtask of task 17, and set up both clustering-style unsupervised evaluation (using OntoNotes senses as gold-standard) and a supervised evaluation (using the part of the dataset for mapping). We provide a comparison to the results of the systems participating in the lexical sample subtask of task 17.
Research of Ranking Algorithm Based on Information Quantity and Entropy in Meta Search Engine

The meta search engine collects results from many search engines,using a certain way to treat the results and then returning back to the users.Reranking the results will directly affect the performance of meta search engine.This paper was based on information quantity and entropy which are used in communication field then presented a calculation algorithm——information related degree(IRD),after a particular amendment to the IRD algorithm,this paper also proposed a merging algorithm combMul.The above algorithms were applied to the meta search engine,and MRR precision was used to evaluate the algorithm.The MRR precision data show that IRD algorithm is even better compared with a widely used sorting algorithm——Borda.
Research and Implementation of File Transparent Encryption Technology Based on Android

Transparent encryption technology has been widely used in Windows now. However,it still needs some time in Android. Aiming at the increasingly prominent security problem of cellphone data,design a file transparent encryption system based on Android,on the basis of an analysis and comparison of Hook transparent encryption technology and Driver transparent encryption technology. In order to be different from traditional encryption systems used in cellphone,the authentication is shift to the course of Android's screen-unlocking,thus encryption efficiency and user experience are improved. The whole system design scheme as well as design methods of each model is described,and give the key technologies and important realization methods for internal core module. Test results show that this system can realize the transparent encryption of a cellphone's applications and files effectively with good encryption efficiency and user experience.
Geological Disaster Risk Evaluation System Based on BP Neural Network and GIS

This paper analyzes the theoretical feasibility that establish a Geological Disaster Risk Evaluation System based on BP neural network and GIS,and discusses the system design ideas and architecture.The system plays powerful management of spatial information visualization and analysis functions of GIS,and makes it available of the depicting the nonlinear phenomena by BP neural network to the assessment processing of debris flow regional hazard,actualizes the visualization management of geological disaster regional hazard evolution.
A methodology to improve the performance of extracting information from financial documents

The Information Extraction (IE) technology retrieves the most relevant, context sensitive, and specific pieces of information from unstructured documents and presents it in a structured format. The IE problem is very difficult for several reasons. First of all, there is no clear boundary of the items to be retrieved. Secondly, information retrieval techniques, by using a bag of words and word statistics, may not suffice to retrieve most of the relevant information because of missing contexts. Thirdly, the direct use of some statistical techniques such as the use of Naive Bayes classifier or the use of Average Mutual Information performs well on document retrieval tasks, but these techniques are not directly applicable to the IE tasks. This study proposes an IE methodology that aims at extracting financial information of various NASDAQ listed companies with high precision and recall. The performance is improved partly by using a rule-based symbolic-learning model. A set of rules is learned by the simplest form of Tabu search algorithm. The results show that the application of the Tabu search algorithm with parts of speech tags improves precision and recall over the application of other methods and resources. The output of the learned model is further analyzed by a statistical method called "Max-Strength" to improve the precision of the items extracted by the symbolic learning model. The strength of the methodology has been evidenced by its performance on the "Seminar Announcement" corpus that has been used by several well known systems.
Optimal Insurance Under Rank-Dependent Expected Utility

Abstract We re-visit the problem of optimal insurance design under Rank-Dependent Expected Utility (RDEU) examined by Bernard et al. (2015), Xu (2018), and Xu et al. (2018). Unlike the latter, we do not impose the no-sabotage condition on admissible indemnities, that is, that indemnity and retention functions be nondecreasing functions of the loss. Rather, in a departure from the aforementioned work, we impose a state-verification cost that the insurer can incur in order to verify the loss severity, hence automatically ruling out any ex post moral hazard that could otherwise arise from possible misreporting of the loss by the insured. We fully characterize the optimal indemnity schedule and discuss how our results relate to those of Bernard et al. (2015) and Xu et al. (2018). We then extend the setting by allowing for a distortion premium principle, with a distortion function that differs from that of the insured, and we provide a characterization of the optimal retention in that case.
Why Shared Bikes of Free-Floating Systems Were Parked Out of Order? A Preliminary Study based on Factor Analysis

Free-floating bicycle-sharing systems are an important component of sustainable transport. China’s bicycle-sharing schemes have experienced ups and downs in the past three years, and there are a lot of related studies, but there are relatively few studies on the causes of disorderly parking of shared bikes. In this study, an open questionnaire is used to widely collect the causes of the disorderly parking of shared bicycles from users. Through factor analysis, six factors and 32 criteria for the causes of disorderly parking are constructed. Factor 1 ‘supervision and management of enterprises’; factor 2 ‘supervision and management of users’; factor 3 ‘parking space’; factor 4 ‘guidance of parking shared bikes’; factor 5 ‘user self-discipline’; factor 6 ‘operation and maintenance’. It requires the cooperation of multiple parties to solve the problem of disorderly parking of shared bicycles.
Political instability and corporate social responsibility: the case of Egypt

Purpose This paper aims to examine the impact of political uncertainty and instability caused by the 2011 Egyptian revolution on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of Egyptian firms. The study provides empirical evidence to support the link between political instability, financial performance, stock market uncertainty and CSR in the post-revolution context of Egypt. Design/methodology/approach Data on CSR practices in Egypt were collected through a survey of Egyptian firms and content analysis of annual reports from publicly traded firms. The final survey sample consisted of 99 listed Egyptian companies. Structural equation modeling was performed to examine the relationship between the variables of this study. Findings The results of the study show that political instability is perceived to have a significant positive effect on the CSR practices of Egyptian firms. The results also reveal that the financial performance of firms is perceived not to be affected by the political instability after the 2011 Revolution as opposed to stock market uncertainty, which is perceived to be significantly affected. However, financial performance and stock market uncertainty have a significant positive influence on the CSR practices of Egyptian firms. Originality/value This paper capitalizes institutional theory to capture the complex interactions between organizations and their external institutional environments. Previous studies tackling CSR in unstable political environments in the African context focused on countries with prolonged periods of violent conflict and on more localized forms of conflicts. Yet, little is known about CSR during the occurrence of different types of political instabilities in other African countries.
The cost-efficiency carbon pricing puzzle

Any global temperature target can be translated into an intertemporal carbon budget and its associated cost-efficient carbon price schedule. Following Hotelling’s rule, the growth rate of this price should be equal to the interest rate. It is therefore a puzzle that cost-efficiency IAM models yield carbon prices that increase at an average real growth rate around 7% per year. This carbon pricing puzzle suggests that their abatement trajectories are not intertemporally optimized. Using an intertemporal asset pricing approach, I show that the uncertainties surrounding economic growth and future abatement technologies can partially solve this puzzle. I calibrate a simple two-period version of the model by introducing infrequent macroeconomic catastrophes a la Barro in order to fit the model with observed assets pricing in the economy. I show that marginal abatement costs and aggregate consumption are positively correlated, implying a positive carbon risk premium and an efficient growth rate of expected carbon prices larger than the interest rate. From this numerical exercise, I recommend a growth rate of expected carbon price around 3.75% per year (plus inflation). This means that most cost-efficient climate models largely underestimate the efficient carbon price in the short run. I also show that the rigid carbon budget approach to cost-efficiency carbon pricing implies a large uncertainty surrounding the future carbon prices that support this constraint. Green investors are compensated for this risk by a large risk premium embedded in the growth rate of expected carbon prices.
Market-Based Monetary Policy Uncertainty

Uncertainty about future policy rates plays a crucial role for the transmission of monetary policy to financial markets. We demonstrate this using event studies of FOMC announcements and a new model-free uncertainty measure based on derivatives. Over the ‘FOMC uncertainty cycle’ announcements systematically resolve uncertainty, which then gradually ramps up again. Changes in monetary policy uncertainty around FOMC announcements—often due to forward guidance—have pronounced effects on asset prices that are distinct from the effects of conventional policy surprises. The level of uncertainty determines the magnitude of financial market reactions to surprises about the path of policy rates.
Why do auditors fail? What might work? What won’t?†

Auditing failures and scandals have become commonplace. In response, reformers (including the Kingman Review in the U.K. and a recent report of the U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority) have proposed a variety of remedies, including prophylactic bans on auditors providing consulting services to their clients in the belief that this will minimize the conflicts of interest that produce auditing failures. Although useful, such reforms are already in place to a considerable degree and may have reached the point of diminishing returns. Moreover, this strategy does not address the deeper problem that clients (or their managements) may not want aggressive auditing, but rather prefer a deferential and perfunctory audit. If so, auditors will realize that they are marketing a ‘commodity’ service and cannot successfully compete based on their quality of services. Rationally, they would respond to such a market by seeking to adopt a cost-minimization strategy, competing by reducing the cost of their services and not investing in new technology or higher-priced personnel. What could change this pattern? Gatekeepers, including auditors, serve investors, but are hired by corporate management. To induce gatekeepers to better serve investors, one needs to reduce the ‘agency costs’ surrounding this relationship by making gatekeepers more accountable to investors. This might be accomplished through litigation (as happens to some degree in the U.S.), but the U.K. and Europe have rules that discourage collective litigation. Thus, a more feasible approach would be to give investors greater ability to select and remove the auditor. This paper proposes a two part strategy to this end: (1) public ‘grading’ of the auditor by the audit regulator in an easily comparable fashion (and with a mandatory grading curve), and (2) enabling a minority of the shareholders (hypothetically, 10%) to propose a replacement auditor for a shareholder vote. It further argues that both activist shareholders and diversified shareholders might support such a strategy and undertake it under different circumstances. Absent such a focus on agency costs, however, reformers are likely only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Data Mining with SPSS Modeler: Theory, Exercises and Solutions

Introducing the IBM SPSS Modeler, this book guides readers through data mining processes and presents relevant statistical methods. There is a special focus on step-by-step tutorials and well-documented examples that help demystify complex mathematical algorithms and computer programs. The variety of exercises and solutions as well as an accompanying website with data sets and SPSS Modeler streams are particularly valuable. While intended for students, the simplicity of the Modeler makes the book useful for anyone wishing to learn about basic and more advanced data mining, and put this knowledge into practice.
Present Research Situation and Expectation of the Ultrasound Extraction

Ultrasound Extraction is the new technology that attracts much attention in the department of separation and extraction in recent years.Compared with SE,MAE,SFE and so on,it demonstrates the enormous superiority in many aspects.In this article the technology principle of ultrasound extraction,the characteristic,the function and the effect which produces with the medium,the present situation of the application research,and forecasted the development direction of this technical were introduced.
MULTEXT-East free lexicons 4.0

The MULTEXT-East morphosyntactic lexicons have a simple structure, where each line is a lexical entry with three tab-separated fields: (1) the word-form, the inflected form of the word; (2) the lemma, the base-form of the word; (3) the MSD, the morphosyntactic description of the word-form, i.e., its fine-grained PoS tag, as defined in the MULTEXT-East morphosyntactic specifications. This submission contains the freely available MULTEXT-East lexicons, while a separate submission (http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1042) gives those that are available only for non-commercial use.
Elements of econometrics

This classic text has proven its worth in university classrooms and as a tool kit in research--selling over 40,000 copies in the United States and abroad in its first edition alone. Users have included undergraduate and graduate students of economics and business, and students and researchers in political science, sociology, and other fields where regression models and their extensions are relevant. The book has also served as a handy reference in the "real world" for people who need a clear and accurate explanation of techniques that are used in empirical research.Throughout the book the emphasis is on simplification whenever possible, assuming the readers know college algebra and basic calculus. Jan Kmenta explains all methods within the simplest framework, and generalizations are presented as logical extensions of simple cases. And while a relatively high degree of rigor is preserved, every conflict between rigor and clarity is resolved in favor of the latter. Apart from its clear exposition, the book's strength lies in emphasizing the basic ideas rather than just presenting formulas to learn and rules to apply.The book consists of two parts, which could be considered jointly or separately. Part one covers the basic elements of the theory of statistics and provides readers with a good understanding of the process of scientific generalization from incomplete information. Part two contains a thorough exposition of all basic econometric methods and includes some of the more recent developments in several areas.As a textbook, "Elements of Econometrics" is intended for upper-level undergraduate and master's degree courses and may usefully serve as a supplement for traditional Ph.D. courses in econometrics. Researchers in the social sciences will find it an invaluable reference tool.A solutions manual is also available for teachers who adopt the text for coursework.Jan Kmenta is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Statistics, University of Michigan.