Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Betting the House * Ò scar

Is there a link between loose monetary conditions, credit growth, house price booms, and financial instability? This paper analyzes the role of interest rates and credit in driving house price booms and busts with data spanning 140 years of modern economic history in the advanced economies. We exploit the implications of the macroeconomic policy trilemma to identify exogenous variation in monetary conditions: countries with fixed exchange regimes often see fluctuations in short-term interest rates unrelated to home economic conditions. We use novel instrumental variable local projection methods to demonstrate that loose monetary conditions lead to booms in real estate lending * This work is part of a larger project kindly supported by a research grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) administered by UC Davis. Schularick thanks the Volkswagen Foundation for generous financial support. We are indebted to Katharina Knoll who permitted us to use her cross-country database of historical housing prices. We thank participants in the International Seminar on Macroeconomics in Riga, Latvia for useful comments and suggestions. We are particularly grateful to Early Elias, Helen Irvin and Niklas Flamang for outstanding research assistance. All errors are ours. ** Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco; and Department of Economics, University of California, Davis (oscar.jorda@sf.frb.org; ojorda@ucdavis.edu). # Department of Economics, University of Bonn; and CEPR (moritz.schularick@uni-bonn.de). ## Department of Economics and Graduate School of Management, University of California, Davis; NBER; and CEPR (amtaylor@ucdavis.edu). The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, its Council of Advisers, or the Board of Directors. and house prices bubbles; these, in turn, materially heighten the risk of financial crises. Both effects have become stronger in the postwar era.
Potential Benefits of the National Reform Agenda

The Productivity Commission released its research paper into the 'Potential Benefits of the National Reform Agenda' in February 2007. The research paper which investigated the potential economic and revenue impacts of a National Reform Agenda (NRA) found that the NRA has the potential to significantly raise national output and incomes in Australia. The main purpose of the study was to help governments better understand the scale and distribution of the reforms' anticipated broad economic and fiscal impacts. There are three streams to the National Reform Agenda: human capital, competition and regulatory reform. The Commission was asked to provide estimates of: the economic benefits potentially available from implementing proposed reforms and outcome objectives; and the total revenue benefits expected to accrue to the Australian Government and each of the State and Territory governments from the potential economic benefits generated by the NRA. The Commission found that reforms aimed at improving productivity and efficiency in energy, transport and related infrastructure and reducing the regulatory burden on business, if fully implemented, could increase GDP in time by up to around $17 billion or nearly 2 per cent. If the potential for a 5 per cent improvement in the productivity of health service delivery was realised, this would result in resource savings of around $3 billion and increase GDP by some 0.4 per cent. Human capital reforms targeting health promotion and disease prevention, education and training, and work incentives could potentially yield even larger gains. The Commission found that all jurisdictions would receive increased tax revenues flowing from reform induced growth. For the competition and regulatory reform streams, Governments' combined net revenues could rise by as much as $5 billion. Potential net revenue outcomes are more speculative for the 'human capital' reforms.
Visual-inertial odometry algorithms on the base of thermal camera

A trajectory building based on a camera data is one of the most popular tasks in the field of machine vision. In particular, this task appears when it is necessary to navigate in the absence of signals from global navigation systems such as GLONASS and GPS. In this work, study of existing methods of visual odometry for the flight trajectory restoration by shooting an infrared camera of the thermal range were conducted. To improve the accuracy, it is proposed to use the data from inertial sensors. As a result, it is shown that the proposed solution allows to successfully solve the problem of trajectory reconstruction.
Architecture of a Commercialized Search Engine Using Mobile Agents

Shopping Search Engine (SSE) implies a unique challenge for validating distinct items available online in market place. For sellers, having a user finding relevant search results on top is very difficult. Buyers tend to click on and buy from the listings which appear first. Search engine optimization devotes that goal to influence such challenges. In current shopping search platforms, lots of irrelevant items retrieved from their indices; e.g. retrieving accessories of exact items rather than retrieving the items itself, regardless the price of item were considered or not. Also, users tend to move from shoppers to another searching for appropriate items where the time is crucial for consumers. In our proposal, we exploit the drawbacks of current shopping search engines, and the main goal of this research is to combine and merge multiple search results retrieved from some highly professional shopping sellers in the commercial market. Experimental results showed that our approach is more efficient and robust for retrieving a complete list of desired and relevant items with respect to all query space.CCS CONCEPTSInformation systems - Commercial-specific retrieval
Discussion Paper Series Number 151 Contagion through Learning

We study learning in a large class of complete information normal form games. Players continually face new strategic situations and must form beliefs by extrapolation from similar past situations. We characterize the long-run outcomes of learning in terms of iterated dominance in a related incomplete information game with subjective priors. The use of extrapolations in learning may generate contagion of actions across games even if players learn only from games with payoffs very close to the current ones. Contagion may lead to unique long-run outcomes where multiplicity would occur if players learned through repeatedly playing the same game. The process of contagion through learning is formally related to contagion in global games, although the outcomes generally differ.
Effect of Self-Efficacy and Behaviour Changes in Diet on Health Related Quality of Life Among Middle-Aged Women

In the present times the main cause of mortality worldwide are diseases that could be prevented with appropriate nutrition, regular physical exercise, and a healthy lifestyle that comprises of leisure time, stress management, and personal and environmental care [1]. Self efficacy is ones belief in his or her abilty to complete a future task or solve a future problem [2]. According to Luszczynska and schwarzer self-efficay is one’s in one’s ability to succeed in specific conditions and also supported [3]. Omrad also define that selfefficacy as the extend or strength of ones belief in one’s own ability to completed task and reach goals [4]. This study has shown an impact to behaviour change. Self-efficacy correlates positively with success in all areas of personal endeavour, and it can help overweight patients become more self-reliant [5]. The tools used for this study was short form health survey questionnaire (SF36). The theory used was Social Cognitive Theory and Self-efficacy by Bandurs [6]. Self-efficacy play a major role in behaviour changes on each individual especially in maintaining healthy diet in approching to goals, tasks and challenges. Therefore choosing the right food and cutting a few hundred calories a day from our diet, can increase the chances to live longer with a more prolific life [7]. Studies on elderly have now created interest among researchers and a lot of attention has been given to studies pertaining to nutrient intake among this special group. Progressive decline in energy, lean body mass and protein intake are also associated with aging [8].
Evolutionary visual software analytics

[ES]El desarrollo y mantenimiento de sistemas de software involucran a un gran numero de complejos procesos que se extienden por largos periodos de tiempo (en algunos casos 10 anos o mas), e implican a grupos de personas (e.g., programadores y administradores de proyectos) que pueden encontrarse en diferentes paises. Por lo cual quienes participan en esos procesos requieren de herramientas que les faciliten la comprension de los sistemas, sus componentes y las relaciones que se establecen entre estos en el tiempo. La comprension de los sistemas adquiere una relevancia especial cuando se toma en cuenta la rotacion de personal en las organizaciones y la frecuente ausencia de documentacion tecnica de los sistemas. Por lo tanto, en esta tesis se llevo a cabo un analisis detallado sobre las necesidades que tienen los programadores y administradores de proyectos, se hizo un mapeo sistematico de literatura y una revision detallada de literatura; y se efectuo una encuesta sobre el uso de herramientas de visualizacion en la industria de software y departamentos de informatica en la comprension de los sistemas. Con base en los resultados obtenidos de las actividades anteriores, se realizo la definicion y descripcion del proceso de aplicacion de la Analitica Visual a la Evolucion de Software (el cual recibio el nombre de Evolutionary Visual Software Analytics). La validacion del proceso mencionado se llevo a cabo en tres etapas. En la primera etapa se diseno una arquitectura con el fin de verificar que mediante el seguimiento de la descripcion del proceso es posible disenar herramientas de Analitica Visual para facilitar la comprension de la evolucion de los sistemas de software. En la segunda etapa se valido la arquitectura mediante la implementacion de Maleku (una herramienta basada en dicha arquitectura). En la tercera etapa, se verifico la utilidad y usabilidad de Maleku en la comprension de la evolucion de sistemas de software por medio de varios casos de uso, un caso de estudio y un estudio de usabilidad. Los resultados finales de este trabajo permitieron comprobar que la aplicacion de la Analitica Visual a la Evolucion de Software, usando el proceso descrito en esta investigacion, puede contribuir con el desarrollo y mantenimiento de software al facilitar la comprension de los sistemas, y por tanto, las preguntas de investigacion de esta tesis fueron respondidas y los objetivos planteados se cumplieron.
A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON SEGMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION IN BREAST MRI IMAGING

Background: Breast cancer is the type of cancer that develops from cells in the breast tissue. The breast cancer is leading cancer in women. One in every eight to nine women has breast cancer at some point during their lifetime. Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Technology is getting more important to assist radiologists not only to detect breast cancer tumor but also to interpret lesioned regions. The CAD, as a second reader in the clinic, improves the classification of malignant and benign lesions. On the other hand, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a highly recommended test for detecting and monitoring breast cancer tumors and interpreting lesioned regions since it has an excellent capability for soft tissue imaging. In MRI image analysis, the segmentation images are important objective because accurate measurement of the delineation of the regions of interest (ROI) is critical for the breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Herein, by using MRI scans, we propose a semi-automated CAD system prototype to assist radiologists in detecting breast cancer tumors and interpreting lesioned regions. The prototype, first, pre-processes the raw selected suspicious region to reduce the noises and to reveal the structure. Later, using Expectation Maximization (EM), the prototype segments the pre-processed region. After that, we use the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for providing efficient multi-resolution sub and decomposition of signals. Then Random Forest Algorithm is used for feature selection. Finally, Naive Bayes, Linear Discriminant Analysis and C4.5 Decision Tree Algorithms are used to classify the features of the ROI in the diagnosis analysis. We tested the prototype CAD on 105 patients, among them, 53 are benign and 52 malign. 80% of the images are allocated for training and 20% of images reserved for testing. The CAD classified 20 patients correctly in case of 5 fold cross-validation. Only one patient is misclassified. The computer-aided diagnosis system with the C4.5 has accuracy 95.24%. Furthermore, C4.5 classifies the breast cancer tumors better than Naive Bayes and Linear Discriminant Analysis. We tested the prototype CAD on 105 patients, among them, 53 are benign and 52 malign. The computer-aided diagnosis system with the C4.5 has accuracy 95.24%. Furthermore, C4.5 classifies the breast cancer tumors better than Naive Bayes and Linear Discriminant Analysis.
Vision and Improved Learned-Trajectory Replay for Assistive-Feeding and Food-Plating Robots

Food manipulation offers an interesting frontier for robotics research because of the direct application of this research to real-world problems and the challenges involved in robust manipulation of deformable food items. In this work, we focus on the challenges associated with robots manipulating food for assistive feeding and meal preparation. This work focuses on how we can teach robots visual perception of the objects to manipulate, create error recovery and feedback systems, and improve on kinesthetic teaching of manipulation trajectories. This work includes several complete implementations of food manipulation robots for feeding and food plating on several robot platforms: a SoftBank Robotics Pepper, a Kinova MICO, a Niryo One, and a UR5.
MNC strategies to limit knowledge spillovers : How subsidiaries manage their knowledge source breadth to decrease spillovers

The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the speed at which knowledge flows from foreign to domestic firms. The focus is not on whether a knowledge spillover occurs, but on the time an MNC subsidiary? s knowledge takes to spread in the surroundings. Filling the gap in the literature regarding spillover speed in International Business by means of the insights from Innovation Studies, with particular reference to the literature on search, we propose a conceptual model where the speed of local knowledge diffusion is influenced by the technology sourcing strategies of subsidiaries. We then test our model using a database covering 1394 US patents from foreign MNC subsidiaries in the semiconductors sector. We find that not only does the breadth of the set of subsidiary knowledge sources slow down local knowledge diffusion, but the delay is mainly related to the diversity of global and internal sources used by the subsidiary, hinting at strategies that MNCs can use to further protect their knowledge
Studying activity and toxicity of different TNF-alpha inhibitors in controlling patients with active ulcerative colitis

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a long-term disorder that associated with overactivation of immunoinflammatory system, ending with ulcer in the large intestine. This study aimed to compare the activity and toxicity of different TNF-alpha inhibitors in a sample of Iraqi patients having active ulcerative colitis. Fifty patients with refractory ulcerative colitis were randomly distributed to either group I (n = 25): on adalimumab injection (160/80 mg) or group II (n = 25): on infliximab injection (5 mg/kg) along the term of induction. Clinical remission was considered as the primary subjective parameter, while clinical response, mucosal healing, and subscores of mild status were regarded as secondary subjective parameters. Fractional Mayo score, inflammatory bowel disease questionnaire (IBDQ), and safety profile were also evaluated. A 24% versus 28% patients were in clinical remission for those receiving adalimumab and infliximab, respectively (p > 0.05), while 48% versus 52% patients were in clinical response for those receiving adalimumab and infliximab, respectively (p > 0.05), and 40% of patients acquired mucosal healing for both adalimumab and infliximab arms (p > 0.05). Scores of physician assessment and rectal bleeding was shown to be markedly higher in infliximab patients (p < 0.05), while those of stool frequency was found to be higher in adalimumab patients (p < 0.05). No significant difference was observed between two arms in the fractional Mayo score and IBDQ index (p > 0.05). Both of the studied biological agents were well-tolerated. As conclusion, the two different TNF-alpha inhibitors were comparable in their clinical remission and safety profile for subjects with active ulcerative colitis.
The Study into Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks within the Framework of Analysis of Software Vulnerabilities

Nowadays, web applications are one of the most popular types of target of evaluation within the framework of the information security certification. The relevance of the study of web applications vulnerabilities during information security certification is due to the fact that web technologies are actively used while producing modern information systems, including information systems critical from the information security point of view, and on the other hand carrying out basic attacks on such information systems do not require violators of high technical competence, since data on typical vulnerabilities and attacks, including the attacking tools are heavily represented in publicly available sources of information, and the information systems themselves are usually available from public communication networks. The paper presents the results of a study of the security of web applications that are target of evaluation within the framework of certification for information security requirements against cross-site requests forgery attacks. The results of systematization and generalization of information about the cross-site requests forgery attacks and security controls used by web application developers are presented. The results of experimental studies of 10 web applications that have passed certification tests against information security requirements are presented. The results of experimental studies have shown that most developers do not pay enough attention to protection from cross-site request forgery attack - 7 out of 10 web applications tested have been vulnerable to this type of attack. Based on the results of processing the results of experimental studies, the distribution of security controls used in web applications and identified vulnerabilities by programming languages were obtained. Recommendations regarding the protection of web applications against cross-site request forgery attack for developers planning to certify their software are formulated.
Selective and macro editing SETTING CUT OFF SCORES FOR SELECTIVE EDITING IN STRUCTURAL BUSINESS STATISTICS : AN AUTOMATIC PROCEDURE USING SIMULATION STUDY

1. At the present time, Insee is implementing a new system for the production of structural business statistics (see reference [1] for further details), called Esane (Enquêtes Structurelles ANnuelles d'Entreprises). This reengineering goes along with several methodological changes compared to the former one, in particular with regard to data editing. Indeed, the new data editing process puts great emphasis on selective editing, with the double objective to improve statistical quality and to reduce manual control burden. The new implemented selective editing method relies mainly on local scores, and as usual, the most delicate point is to tune thresholds allowing to determine which units have to be checked manually, and which units can be edited in an automatic way. As several thousands of thresholds are to be determined, we have implemented an automatic procedure for selecting them, based on simulation using last survey’s data.
Conflict of Clinical and Public Health Viewpoint in Colorectal Screening

Mortality rates from colorectal cancer are dramatically high, therefore the reduction by population screening as a public health measure is considered as one of the priorities of national public health programmes worldwide. In Hungary, in the beginning a humanspecific immunological test was applied in “model programmes” as a screening tool, to detect the occult blood in the stool; compliance was 32% on average. However, the objectives of the model programmes have not been achieved, because – among other reasons – debates on method of choice and the strategy to follow have divided the professional public opinion. In this paper, the debated issues are critically discussed, being convinced that – at present –population screening seems to be the most promising way to alleviate the burden of colorectal cancer.
12 CO 2 Laser and MicroFluidics

Microfluidic chips have attracted significant attention over the past decade due to their wide range of potential applications in the biomedical and chemical analysis field such as drug delivery, Point of care diagnostics (Jakeway et al, 2004), flow cytometry (Fu LM et al 2004; Chen & Wang, 2009; Lin et al, 2009), polymerize chain reaction (Suna et al, 2007; Sun & Kwok, 2006; Hsieh et al, 2009), electrophoresis (Fu et al, 2007, 2009) and many other applications.
Implementation of a novel basement membrane invasion assay using mesenteric tissue

Metastasis accounts for nearly 90% of all cancer associated mortalities. A hallmark of metastasis, and more prominently in malignancies of epithelial origin such as in the pancreas, breast and liver, is invasion of the basement membrane (BM). Aggressive malignant tumour cells, empowered by the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition program, lose their E-cadherin mediated cell-cell adhesion and adopt a mesenchymal phenotype leading to invasion of the BM. While various in vitro assays have been developed to address questions regarding the invasiveness of tumours with relation to the BM, most fail to recapitulate a physiologically accurate cell-membrane interface. One of the most commonly used models is a reconstituted gel matrix made from BM extract of the Engelbreth-Holm-Swarm tumour in mice. Commonly known as Matrigel, this 3D gel matrix has been widely used across a multitude of in vitro assays. However, apart from being expensive, it has been shown to influence cell behaviour. Here we introduce a novel 3D in vitro assay that uses the mouse mesenteric tissue as a mimic for the epithelial BM. We describe a simple, cost-effective protocol for extraction and setup of the assay, and show that the mesentery is a physiologically accurate model of the BM in its key components – type IV collagen, laminin-1 and perlecan. Furthermore, we introduce a novel quantification pipeline, Q-Pi, which allows the 3D reconstruction, visualisation and quantification of invasion at a cellular level. Overall, we demonstrate that the mesentery-based invasion assay provides a physiologically accurate tool to investigate BM invasion.