Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of settlement procedures on day-of-the-week effects: evidence from the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange

Using daily data from 1983 to 1993 for the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange Composite Index (KLSI) we examine the day-of-the-week effect. Our initial findings indicate that there is a marginally significant negative Monday effect (in keeping with US studies) and a significant positive Wednesday and Thursday effect for the whole period. We consider a number of possible explanations for these results including the impact of: "closed market effects"; the "time zone hypothesis"; "market size" and "price"; the "January Effect"; and the possibility of "mismeasured risk". However, we believe that the most likely cause of the seasonal effects documented between 1983 and 1993, can be traced to the pre-1990 settlement procedures on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange since we find that after this date nearly all of the seasonal variation in daily stock returns disappears. Thus we highlight in this paper the importance of considering the microstructure of financial markets in empirical tests of apparent market anomalies. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.
The Hazards of Volatility Diversification

Recent research advocates volatility diversification for long equity investors. It can even be justified when short-term expected returns are highly negative, but only when its equilibrium return is ignored. Its advantages during stock market crises are clear but we show that the high transactions costs and negative carry and roll yield on volatility futures during normal periods would outweigh any benefits gained unless volatility trades are carefully timed. Our analysis highlights the difficulty of predicting when volatility diversification is optimal. Hence insitutional investors should be sceptical of studies that extol its benefits. Volatility is better left to experienced traders such as speculators, vega hedgers and hedge funds.
The Welfare State and the Employment Problem

Social security, provision of public sector services, job security legislation, minimum wages and centrally regulated (bargained) relative wages are important elements of the modern welfare state -- each designed, often quite successfully, to enhance economic security and to redistribute income. The consequences of these policies for the unemployment issue are the topic of this paper.
Disparities and diversities among female‐headed households in rural Malawi after 20 years of economic liberalization

Using data from a survey carried out in six tobacco growing villages across Malawi in 2004–5, this paper summarizes some main differences found in subsistence production and income levels between male- and female-headed households and the disparities among female-headed households in the light of economic liberalization policies of the past two decades. The disadvantaged position of female-headed households in terms of land and labour endowment, together with the high cost of inputs since the structural adjustment programmes and removal of subsidies since the 1980s has prevented poorer female-headed households not only from attaining maize self-sufficiency, but also from engaging in high-return agriculture such as tobacco production. Although livelihood diversification is adopted by both male- and female-headed households, many female-headed households still depend on low-entry-barrier activities such as agricultural waged labour and are unable to break out of the poverty cycle. However, female-headed households are a heterogeneous category and factors such as the availability of nonfarm income opportunities, social networks to access labour and capital, land acquisition through flexible applications of patrilineal inheritance rules, and the existence of formal channels for credit and informal tobacco trading have enabled some to improve agricultural productivity and achieve high incomes.
A transaction costs approach to purchasing portfolio management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretically sound and empirically tested classification system composed of purchasing strategic categories as a basis for purchasing portfolio models.Design/methodology/approach – An international, cross‐industry survey has been designed to assess the characteristics and corresponding strategies of the purchasing categories.Findings – The paper operationalises the constructs derived from previous scientific contributions related to purchasing portfolio management and transaction cost economics (TCE) to empirically test the purchasing portfolio. In total, four different types of strategic categories have been identified, and distinctive competitive priorities have been found.Research limitations/implications – Managers might be able to identify different types of purchasing strategic categories, whose characteristics drive specific purchasing strategies. Longitudinal data and more extensive tests of the characteristics of each category might contribute .
Employee performance management culture and system features in higher education: relationship with employee performance management satisfaction

Little is known about the satisfaction with employee performance management systems in higher education institutions. In this study, we contribute to this field by focussing on the alignment features of employee performance management systems, on communication related to these systems and on control tightness in the academic unit. An important contribution to the literature is the adoption of an integrated approach to employee performance management in higher education institutions. Employee performance management system features and satisfaction result from a survey to which 589 employees of a Flemish University contributed. Separate estimations are done for different tenure types of academics. The estimation results show that a higher level of internally consistent employee performance management systems, more communication and tighter control are associated with higher academic employee performance management satisfaction. The study also reveals that employee performance management satisfaction depends on the tenure type, suggesting that a diversified employee performance management policy should be considered in universities.
Movement Preparation and Motor Intention

This paper addresses the functional anatomy of movement representation. We have used associative visuomotor tasks with instructed delays to elicit motor preparatory activity. We regard such activity, when independent from transient stimulus-locked responses, as a likely candidate for the neural basis of movement representation (M. Jeannerod, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action. Blackwell, Oxford, 1997). In a first event-related fMRI experiment, we found that preparing to move according to arbitrary visuomotor associations relies not only on parietofrontal circuitry, but also on portions of the posterior superior temporal sulcus. In a separate behavioral experiment, we discarded the hypothesis that such activities were confounded by working memory processes. In a second imaging experiment, we have further defined the relative contributions of these parietal, premotor, and temporal areas to the preparatory process and their involvement in motor representations. We conclude that posterior parietal cortex is interested in evaluating the potential motor significance of sensory stimuli, irrespectively of the likelihood of providing a response ("motor intention"). Conversely, preparatory activity in frontal premotor regions appears to be a function of the probability of a subsequent movement. Finally, on the basis of the present and published data, we suggest that posterior temporal cortex might be involved in the extraction of contextual and intentional cues during goal-oriented behavior.
How to quantify uncertainty and variability in life cycle assessment: the case of greenhouse gas emissions of gas power generation in the US

This study quantified the contributions of uncertainty and variability to the range of life-cycle greenhouse gas (LCGHG) emissions associated with conventional gas-fired electricity generation in the US. Whereas uncertainty is defined as lack of knowledge and can potentially be reduced by additional research, variability is an inherent characteristic of supply chains and cannot be reduced without physically modifying the system. The life-cycle included four stages: production, processing, transmission and power generation, and utilized a functional unit of 1 kWh of electricity generated at plant. Technological variability requires analyses of life cycles of individual power plants, e.g. combined cycle plants or boilers. Parameter uncertainty was modeled via Monte Carlo simulation. Our approach reveals that technological differences are the predominant cause for the range of LCGHG emissions associated with gas power, primarily due to variability in plant efficiencies. Uncertainties in model parameters played a minor role for 100 year time horizon. Variability in LCGHG emissions was a factor of 1.4 for combined cycle plants, and a factor of 1.3 for simple cycle plants (95% CI, 100 year horizon). The results can be used to assist decision-makers in assessing factors that contribute to LCGHG emissions despite uncertainties in parameters employed to estimate those emissions.
Scalable Angular Discriminative Deep Metric Learning for Face Recognition

With the development of deep learning, Deep Metric Learning (DML) has achieved great improvements in face recognition. Specifically, the widely used softmax loss in the training process often bring large intra-class variations, and feature normalization is only exploited in the testing process to compute the pair similarities. To bridge the gap, we impose the intra-class cosine similarity between the features and weight vectors in softmax loss larger than a margin in the training step, and extend it from four aspects. First, we explore the effect of a hard sample mining strategy. To alleviate the human labor of adjusting the margin hyper-parameter, a self-adaptive margin updating strategy is proposed. Then, a normalized version is given to take full advantage of the cosine similarity constraint. Furthermore, we enhance the former constraint to force the intra-class cosine similarity larger than the mean inter-class cosine similarity with a margin in the exponential feature projection space. Extensive experiments on Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW), Youtube Faces (YTF) and IARPA Janus Benchmark A (IJB-A) datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the mainstream DML methods and approach the state-of-the-art performance.
Morphological Evidence for Direct Interaction between Arcuate Nucleus Neuropeptide Y (NPY) Neurons and Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone Neurons and the Possible Involvement of NPY Y1 Receptors1.

Neuropeptide Y (NPY) neurons in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus (ARH) have been shown to play an important role in modulating LH secretion. One mechanism by which the ARH NPY system may regulate LH secretion is by modulating GnRH neuronal function. Thus, the present study examined whether the ARH NPY system provided direct input to GnRH cell bodies in the preoptic area (POA), as well as to their nerve terminals in the median eminence (ME). The possible involvement of the NPY Y1 receptor subtype in mediating the effects of NPY was also investigated. Lactating rats were used in these studies because they have increased hypothalamic NPY content, especially in the ARH/ME areas, making it easier to detect NPY fibers and terminals. The anterograde tracer, Phaseolus vulgaris leucoagglutinin (PHA-L), was iontophoresed into the ARH of lactating rats; and triple-label immunofluorescence was performed, with the aid of confocal microscopy, to visualize NPY, PHA-L, and GnRH. GnRH cell bodies were found scatter.
A Scalable Approach to Modeling Cascading Risk in the MDAP Network

Abstract : The overarching goal of our multi-year research agenda is to proactively model the non-linear cascading effects of interdependencies in Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP) networks. We use this to identify the associated data acquisition challenges so that appropriate governance mechanisms can then be isolated. In this paper, we describe our progress towards a scalable, automated approach for extracting and analyzing the data in the form of Selected Acquisition Reports (SAR) and Defense Acquisition Executive Summaries documents of a network of MDAPs to support a decision-theoretic risk prediction model. Automation is necessitated by the volume and complexity of the data. We will discuss the role of topic modeling, image extraction, and identification of topological features of the MDAP network in this approach.
The Sensor Kinase TodS Operates by a Multiple Step Phosphorelay Mechanism Involving Two Autokinase Domains*

Expression of the Pseudomonas putida tod operon, which encodes enzymes for toluene metabolism, takes place from the PtodX promoter and is mediated by the TodS/TodT two component system. The sensor kinase TodS has a complex domain arrangement containing two functional modules, each harboring a sensor- and an autokinase domain and separated by a receiver domain. Based on site-directed mutagenesis of phosphoaccepting His-190, Asp-500, and His-760 and in vitro transphosphorylation experiments with recombinant TodS fragments, we show that TodS uses a multiple step phosphorelay mechanism to activate TodT. Toluene binding stimulates exclusively phosphorylation of His-190, which is followed by phosphotransfer to Asp-500 and subsequently to His-760 prior to phosphorylation of TodT Asp-57. Mutation of His-190, Asp-500, and H760A prevented up-regulation of toluene-mediated stimulation of TodT transphosphorylation in vitro and reduced in vivo expression of PtodX to the basal level. Calorimetric studies support that TodT binds to the C-terminal kinase module with a KD of ∼200 nm and 1:1 stoichiometry. This is the first report of a multiple step phosphorelay mechanism of a sensor kinase that involves two autokinase domains.
Strategic interventions of management accountants: everyday practice of British and German brewers

A popular stereotype has it that German firms are somehow 'long-term strategically oriented' and British firms focus on short-term financial gain. Analysing ethnographic material from British and German brewers, this paper explores how management accountants in the two countries conceive of their relationship with processes of strategic formulation and how they seek to mobilize strategic arguments in their day-to-day contacts with operational management. The focus of this study is not on the strategy debates which one might expect among senior management, but on routine interaction between management accountants and managers in which the mundane events of organizational life are made to happen in the name of loftier 'strategic' priorities. From observations of such interaction and management accountants' reflections on them, contrasting ways of integrating management accounting expertise with operational knowledge of the firm are suggested for the British and German brewers studied. Those contrasts are developed by drawing on the relationship between time and the possibility for strategic intervention more generally.
Preventing Tragedy: Balancing Physicians' Ethical Obligations to Patients and the Public

ABSTRACT The recent shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) suggest that an increased reliance upon the medical community to support public health violence prevention efforts may be warranted. As physicians are called upon to support these efforts, they must effectively balance their obligations to promote public safety with their traditional obligations to promote the best interests of their individual patients. To meet these concurrent ethical obligations, physicians' participation in public health violence prevention should seek to improve public safety without compromising the care of patients or exposing individuals to undue harm. Physicians should, therefore, report to the appropriate authorities those patients who are at risk of committing violent acts toward the public, but should only disclose the minimal amount of information that is necessary to protect the public. Moreover, physicians should also recommend the separation of violent individuals from the community at large when necessary to improve public safety while advocating for the provision of appropriate treatment measures to improve the patients' well-being. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2007;1(Suppl 1):S38–S42)
Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society

Introduction to the Second Edition Basic Concepts and Themes Government and Governmentality An Analytics of Government Analyzing Regimes of Government Genealogy and Governmentality Genealogy and Government Liberalism, Critique and 'the Social' Neo-Liberalism and Foucault Dependency and Empowerment: Two Case Studies Dependency Empowerment Conclusion Pastoral Power, Police and Reason of State Pastoral Power Reason of State and Police Conclusion Bio-Politics and Sovereignty Bio-Politics Sovereignty and the Governmentalization of the State Liberalism Economy Security Law and Norm Society and Social Government Authoritarian Governmentality The Illiberality of Liberal Government Bio-Politics, Race and Non-Liberal Rule Neo-Liberalism and Advanced Liberal Government Society, Freedom and Reform Advanced Liberal Government A Post-Welfarist Regime of the Social Risk and Reflexive Government Two Approaches to Risk Risk and Reflexive Modernization Insurance and Government Reflexive Government International Governmentality Foucault and the International Building on Foucault Conclusion: 'Not Bad. but Dangerous' Postscript to the Second Edition: The Crisis of Neo-Liberal Governmentality?
Emerging Financial Markets and Early U.S. Growth

Studies of early U.S. growth traditionally have emphasized real-sector explanations for an acceleration that by many accounts became detectable between 1815 and 1840. Interestingly, the establishment of the nation's basic financial structure predated by three decades the canals, railroads, and widespread use of water and steam-powered machinery that are thought to have triggered modernization. We argue that this innovative and expanding financial system, by providing debt and equity financing to businesses and governments as new technologies emerged, was central to the nation's early growth and modernization. The analysis includes a set of multivariate time series models that relate measures of banking and equity market activity to measures of investment, imports and business incorporations from 1790 to 1850. The findings offer support for our hypothesis of finance-led' growth in the U.S. case. By implication, the interest today in improving financial systems as a means of fostering sustainable growth is not misplaced.
Direct quantitation of the number of individual penicillin-binding proteins per cell in Escherichia coli

The penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) are a set of enzymes that participate in the terminal stages of bacterial peptidoglycan assembly. As their name implies, these proteins also covalently bind and are inhibited by beta-lactam antibiotics. Although many studies have examined the relative binding affinities of a number of beta-lactam antibiotics, a surprisingly small number of studies have addressed the absolute numbers of each of the PBPs present in the bacterial cell. In the present study, the PBP values initially reported in Escherichia coli almost 20 years ago by B. G. Spratt (Eur. J. Biochem. 72:341-352, 1977) were refined. The individual PBPs from a known number of bacteria radiolabeled with [3H]benzylpenicillin were separated by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The radioactive bands were located, excised, and quantitatively extracted from the gel slices. The radioactivity was measured by scintillation counting, and the absolute disintegrations per minute were calculated. From the specific activity of the labeled penicillin, the absolute disintegrations per minute, and the CFU per milliliter, a determination of the number of each of the PBPs per cell was made. The measurements were performed on multiple samples to place statistical limits on the numbers obtained. The values for the individual PBPs found in E. coli deviated in several ways from the previously reported observations. Of particular significance is the higher number of molecules of PBP 2 and 3 observed, since these PBPs are known to participate in cell morphogenesis. The PBP content in both rich Luria broth medium and M9 minimal medium was determined, with the slower-growing cells in minimal medium possessing fewer of the individual PBPs per cell.
Treatment of bacterial vaginosis: what we have and what we miss

Introduction: The disturbing, foul-smelling discharge of bacterial vaginosis (BV) is a nuisance to women. Treatment possibilities for BV are limited and only achieve complete cure in 65 to 85% of cases. In most women, the condition relapses within weeks to months after treatment. Areas covered: In search of new therapeutic actions to cure, prevent or delay recurrences of BV, PubMed and web of science were searched for papers with i) decent study layout, ii) proper statistics, iii) comparison group (placebo or standard treatment) and iv) language English, French, Dutch or German. The following keywords were used: bacterial vaginosis and treatment or management or therapy or prophylaxis or prevention. Results were grouped in treatment categories and were discussed. Expert opinion: Clindamycin and metronidazole are the standard drugs for BV. As other antibiotic and acidifying treatments are progressively being studied, like tinidazole, rifaximin, nitrofuran, dequalinium chloride, vitamin C and lactic acid, more options have become available for switching therapy, combining therapies and long-term prophylactic use to prevent recurrences. Further studies are needed. Also, adjuvant therapy with probiotics may have a significant role in improving efficacy and in preventing recurrences. However, it is unlikely that probiotics will replace antibiotherapy.
Data fusion-based real-time hand gesture recognition with Kinect V2

Hand gesture recognition is an important topic in human-computer interaction. However, most of the current methods are complicated and time-consuming, which limits the use of hand gesture recognition in real-time circumstances. In this paper, we propose a data fusion-based hand gesture recognition model by fusing depth information and skeleton data. Because of the accurate segmentation and tracking with Kinect V2, the model can achieve real-time performance, which is 18.7% faster than some of the state-of-the-art methods. Based on the experimental results, the proposed model is accurate and robust to rotation, flip, scale changes, lighting changes, cluttered background, and distortions. This ensures its use in different real-world human-computer interaction tasks.
Champagne: A Web Tool for the Execution of Crowdsourcing Campaigns

We present Champagne, a web tool for the execution of crowdsourcing campaigns. Through Champagne, task requesters can model crowdsourcing campaigns as a sequence of choices regarding different, independent crowdsourcing design decisions. Such decisions include, e.g., the possibility of qualifying some workers as expert reviewers, or of combining different quality assurance techniques to be used during campaign execution. In this regard, a walkthrough example showcasing the capabilities of the platform is reported. Moreover, we show that our modular approach in the design of campaigns overcomes many of the limitations exposed by the major platforms available in the market.