Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DETECTIVE: a decision tree based categorical value clustering and perturbation technique for preserving privacy in data mining

Data mining is a powerful tool for information discovery from huge datasets. Various sectors, including commercial, government, financial, medical, and scientific, are applying data mining techniques on their datasets that typically contain sensitive individual information. During this process the datasets get exposed to several parties, which can potentially lead to disclosure of sensitive information and thus to breaches of privacy. Several data mining privacy preserving techniques have been recently proposed. In this paper we focus on data perturbation techniques, i.e., those that add noise to the data in order to prevent exact disclosure of confidential values. Some of these techniques were designed for datasets having only numerical non-class attributes and a categorical class attribute. However, natural datasets are more likely to have both numerical and categorical non-class attributes, and occasionally they contain only categorical attributes. Noise addition techniques developed for numerical attributes are not suitable for such datasets, due to the absence of natural ordering among categorical values. In this paper we propose a new method for adding noise to categorical values, which makes use of the clusters that exist among these values. We first discuss several existing categorical clustering methods and point out the limitations they exhibit in our context. Then we present a novel approach towards clustering of categorical values and use it to perturb data while maintaining the patterns in the dataset. Our clustering approach partitions the values of a given categorical attribute rather than the records of the datasets; additionally, our approach operates on the horizontally partitioned dataset and it is possible for two values to belong to the same cluster in one horizontal partition of the dataset, and to two distinct clusters in another partition. Finally, we provide some experimental results in order to evaluate our perturbation technique and to compare our clustering approach with an existing method, the so-called CACTUS.
How Do Central Banks Talk

Much has changed over the last decade in the world of central banking. Most central banks now see low and stable inflation as their main, if not only, target and many have been granted unprecedented independence. Financial markets around the world have become considerably more integrated and, some say, prone to irrational exuberance. With more independence has come the need for more accountability and transparency. With the increased size and volatility of markets has come the need to carefully manage communication. Central bankers have delivered a high degree of price stability, but now communication is high on their list of concerns, while private bankers and the media devote ever more energy in outguessing the monetary authorities' next moves. These issues and more will be covered by this report, originally presented to a closed meeting of distinguished central and private-sector bankers, academics and representatives of major media, and revised in the light of their discussion.
Using Advanced Spatial Analysis to Create and Analyze the Prehistoric Environment of Pueblo III Tower Gallina Sites in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico USA

The prehistory of New Mexico, USA is often represented by three specific phases in cultural development: Pueblo I (700 – 900 AD), Pueblo II (900 – 1100 AD), and Pueblo III (1100 – 1300 AD). During the Pueblo III occupation a specific cultural group known as the “Gallina” began to define both the archaeological and cultural record with construction of towers, an architectural feature unique to this sub-set of people. Coupled with the enigmatic tower feature, the focus of this study is to explore the spatial component of archaeology using a relatively small population of fifteen Pueblo III Gallina tower sites in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Spatial analysis and geodatabase design/creation were used to demonstrate the capabilities of GIS as a comprehensive tool to aid in the analysis of archaeological data. As a result, a topographic model was created through the use of elevation, slope, and aspect rasters. The sites evaluated showcase the versatility of GIS in the study of archaeology, one that should be regarded as a powerful tool in all stages of archaeological evaluation and understanding.
Monetary and Financial Thinking in Europe - Evidence from Four Decades of SUERF

2003 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of SUERF. To mark this milestone, some time ago the Council of Management commissioned Professor Jean-Paul Abraham to write a commemorative report. His mandate was not to write a history of SUERF itself (that would be too self-indulgent) but to write a reflective review of European monetary arrangements and related issues as seen through the various activities (mainly Colloquia) of SUERF. A total of twenty three Colloquia volumes have been published to date on various aspects of European monetary and financial arrangements, banking and financial markets, globalisation and its implications, corporate governance, alternative financial structures of national financial systems, and monetary policy to mention but a few. Jean-Paul is eminently qualified to undertake this task and we are extremely grateful to him for taking on this herculean venture. Professor Abraham is a distinguished academic and has been a professional banker in his long and distinguished career. Jean-Paul is also a distinguished past President of SUERF (1994-1997). We judged that his perspectives, and his intimate knowledge and experience of SUERF and its activities, would be both interesting and valuable. SUERF Colloquia have been held in sixteen countries and have had a varied mix of speakers from central banks, the financial sector and academics. Over the last forty years there have, of course, been enormous changes in European and international monetary and financial arrangements, and the role of private markets and institutions. The report brings this out very well. What is particularly interesting in the report is how, almost irrespective of the topic of the Colloquium, certain common issues seem to emerge. Looking back, some of the 431 papers published in the SUERF Colloquium volumes have been very prescient and by people who have shaped events. Professor Abraham's report has been published to coincide with the SUERF seminar which was held at, and hosted by, the Banque de France in Paris on October 24th, 2003.
Methodology and Indicators of Economy‐wide Material Flow Accounting

This contribution presents the state of the art of economy‐wide material flow accounting. Starting from a brief recollection of the intellectual and policy history of this approach, we outline system definition, key methodological assumptions, and derived indicators. The next section makes an effort to establish data reliability and uncertainty for a number of existing multinational (European and global) material flow accounting (MFA) data compilations and discusses sources of inconsistencies and variations for some indicators and trends. The results show that the methodology has reached a certain maturity: Coefficients of variation between databases lie in the range of 10% to 20%, and correlations between databases across countries amount to an average R2 of 0.95. After discussing some of the research frontiers for further methodological development, we conclude that the material flow accounting framework and the data generated have reached a maturity that warrants material flow indicators to complement traditional economic and demographic information in providing a sound basis for discussing national and international policies for sustainable resource use.
Uncertain Productivity Growth and the Choice between FDI and Export

The underlying model analyzes the first time foreign market entry decision of a representative investor who can choose between export and FDI. The model combines the proximity-concentration trade-off framework with the real option methodology and sheds light on the effects of productivity growth. On the basis of a Geometric Brownian motion, three different productivity scenarios are considered (no growth, deterministic growth, uncertain growth) and opposed to each other. The introduction of productivity growth increases the likeliness of first time market entry through FDI. If the firm is confronted with uncertain productivity growth, market entry through FDI increases even further. Uncertainty is identified as a compounding force for the derived growth effects. The findings contribute to the static general equilibrium models which neglect intertemporal selection effects.
Salience and choice: Neural correlates of shopping decisions

Noninvasive brain imaging was used to observe 18 subjects, each making 90 choices of three brands on a virtual (video) supermarket visit. Package height provided a control for the main experiment. Brain activations in brand choice differed from those for height discrimination, and choice times were faster when one brand was more familiar. Brand choice appeared to involve silent vocalization. Decision processes took approximately 1 s and can be seen as two halves. The first period seems to involve problem recognition and here male brain patterns differed from female. The second half concerned the choice itself. No male/female differences were observed but a different pattern was evoked where one brand was familiar and the other two were not. The right parietal cortex was strongly activated in this case. This research pioneers new techniques using relatively few subjects and against a limited theoretical background. As such it must be classified as exploratory.
O conceito de produção na contabilidade social: uma contribuição crítica

This article discusses the theoretical foundations of the concept of production of ONU’s National Accounting System, demonstrating that it is constructed upon ad hoc formulations. To start with, the distinction between intermediate consumption and workers’ consumption at the working site seems arbitrary. Second, because public goods are not marketable, their inclusion in the productive sphere seems inconsistent. Third, considering commerce as a productive activity implies difficulties, such as identifying its product and its utility to consumers. In addition, it seems problematic to explain the origins of the gains of exchange, which requires the pre classical theory of profits of alienation, considered unacceptable even by neoclassical authors. Finally, neither the definition of financial intermediaries and real estate “services”, nor their revenues seem to be acceptable, since from a neoclassical perspective interests and ground rent are derived from joint production of labor, capital and land.
Logic-Based Access Control Policy Specification and Management

Recently there has been a great amount of attention to access control languages that can cover large, open, distributed and heterogeneous environments like the Web. These languages aim to be flexible and extensible, with enough features to capture expressive and distributed security policies. However, with expressive languages such as XACML or WS-Policy, users have problems understanding the overall effects and consequences of their security policies. Even the task of checking that the policy will not result in leakage of permissions to an unintended or unauthorized principal is tedious and error-prone when done manually. As a result, there has been a great amount of research on logic-based policy management that provides analysis services to help find inconsistencies/differences between access control policies. This paper provides an overview of the existing approaches for security (access control) policy analysis. The survey covers both language proposals that have formal semantics and provide algorithms for policy analysis out of the box, and formalizations of already existing policy languages (WS-Policy, XACML, XrML, ODRL) that provide a formal semantics and analysis services previously unavailable for the particular language.
Description Logics and Time

In this survey paper, we begin by reviewing brief history of Description Logics developed from classical logics, semantic network and frames in demand of knowledge representation. We then introduce the logic language ALC which is the basic form of description logic and some of its possible extensions. The usefulness of description logics for database will be briefly pointed out as well. Finally, we focus on the temporal extensions of ALC, ALCT . The dimension of point-based temporal logics and interval-based temporal logics will be introduced, respectively. And, the decidability and complexity of concept satisfiability problem in ALCT will be briefly discussed.
Efficacy of a psychoeducative group program for caregivers of demented persons living at home: a randomized controlled trial.

OBJECTIVES To test the efficacy of a psychoeducative group program for informal caregivers of persons with dementia. METHODS The study was a multicenter randomized controlled trial. Randomization was stratified according to sex and kinship. Participants randomized to the control group were referred to the traditional support groups. Participants in the study group had fifteen 2-hr weekly sessions focusing on stress appraisal and coping. Eligible participants (primary caregivers of community-dwelling persons with dementia) were blindly assessed before the randomization and after 16 weeks on the following measures: frequency and reactions to behavioral problems (primary outcome), burden, psychological distress, anxiety, perceived social support, and personal efficacy. RESULTS A total of 158 participants were randomized to the study (n = 79) and control (n = 79) groups in 12 successive waves. Results show that study participants presented a 14% decrease in their reactions to the behavioral problems of the care-receivers as opposed to a 5% decrease in the control group ( p =.04). The frequency of behavior problems also decreased ( p =.06), as did the cross-product frequency/reaction ( p =.02). There was no significant effect on the secondary outcome variables. DISCUSSION This is one of the first studies showing a significant effect of this type of support group program on the caregivers of participants with dementia.
7 Simulated Environment in Robot Soccer

In the last two decades the concept of multi-agent mobile systems has been observed in many computer simulations, laboratory examples and in some practical applications. Among such systems robot soccer has shown to be a very popular research game and has served as a perfect example of multi-agent systems in the last few years (Ferber, 1999; Moss & Davidsson, 2002; Stone & Veloso, 2000). In this work the mathematical background of the developed robot soccer simulator is presented. The main purpose of the simulator design procedure is to obtain a realistic simulator which would be used as a tool in the process of strategy and control algorithms design for real world robot soccer as well as for other mobile-robotics related topics. To assure transferability to the real system the obtained strategy algorithms have to be designed on a realistic simulator. The main motivation for robot soccer simulator development was to design and study multi-agent control and strategy algorithms in FIRA Middle or Large League MiroSot category (5 against 5 or 11 against 11 robots). However, on FIRA’s (Federation of International Robot Soccer Association) official website (www.fira.net) there exists a simulator for SimuroSot league, which could only be used in Middle League MiroSot (5 against 5 robots). A similar simulator was built by (Liang & Liu, 2002) where robot motion is simulated by dynamic model, collisions remaining oversimplified. There also exist a number of other simulator applications but not many papers are available. An important part of every realistic robot soccer simulator is collision modelling and simulation. Good mathematical background in rigid body collisions modelling and simulation could be found in (Baraf, 1997). Another useful contribution in the field of robotic simulator is (Larsen, 2001) where collisions are treated by spring-dumper approach rather than by impulse force only. The use of spring-dumper linkage in collisions makes velocities changes continuous, which is less problematic for simulation than discontinuous change of velocities (Fremond, 1995) obtained by impulse usage. However, spring and dumper coefficients are not easy to identify. Moreover, when observed from macroscopic time scale (as it is in simulation) collisions are indeed discontinuous events. Simulated robots should have a realistic shape, which should not be represented simply with a square (the real shape of the robot is not a square) otherwise the simulation of ball guidance and other collisions becomes unrealistic. Furthermore, some of the available robot soccer simulators do not treat collisions well, especially the collisions among robots (robot corners), collisions between robot and boundary and situations where the ball is in-between
Selection or Imitation?: Organizational Evolution in the Japanese Cotton Industry, 1905-1935

This paper explores the mechanisms by which the industrial organization of the Japanese cotton spinning industry changed over time, focusing on the rise and fall of the firms that integrated spinning and weaving processes. The basic idea is to decompose the change in the proportion of integrated firms into factors representing "selection" and "imitation" in an evolutionary sense. It was found that the factor which made the largest contribution differed between the growing phase and the declining phase of integrated firms. In the growing phase, imitation, namely the change in the attribute of the incumbent firms, was the major factor in the proportion change. On the other hand, in the declining phase, selection, in particular, birth rate, was the major factor, not only in the case where the proportion is measured in terms of firm number but also in terms of production.
Undecidability of bounded security protocols

Using a multiset rewriting formalism with existen-tial quantiication, it is shown that protocol security remains undecidable even when rather severe restrictions are placed on protocols. In particular, even if data constructors, message depth, message width, number of distinct roles, role length, and depth of encryp-tion are bounded by constants, secrecy is an undecidable property. If protocols are further restricted to have no new data (nonces), then secrecy is dexptime-complete. Both lower bounds are obtained by encoding decision problems from existential Horn theories without function symbols into our protocol framework. The way that encryption and adversary behavior are used in the reduction sheds some light on protocol analysis.
Male Reproductive Tract Development & Function Embryonic Development and Reproductive Tract Organogenesis-Overview-Development of Mullerian Duct vs. Duct Wolffian Duct Derivatives-Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS) Male Urogenital Tract Organogenesis-Prevention of Programmed Cell Death in the Wolf

Mammalian embryos initially develop progenitor tissues for both male and female reproductive tract organs, known as the Wolffian ducts and the Müllerian ducts, respectively. Ultimately, each individual develops a single set of male or female reproductive tract organs. Therefore, an essential step for sex differentiation is the regression of one duct and growth and differentiation of the other duct. In males, this requires Müllerian duct regression and Wolffian duct growth and differentiation. Müllerian duct regression is induced by the expression of Amh, encoding anti-Müllerian hormone, from the fetal testes. Subsequently, receptor-mediated signal transduction in mesenchymal cells surrounding the Müllerian duct epithelium leads to duct elimination. The genes that induce Amh transcription and the downstream signaling that results from Amh activity form a pathway. However, the molecular details of this pathway are currently unknown. A set of essential genes for AMH pathway function has been identified. More recently, transcriptome analysis of male and female Müllerian duct mesenchyme at an initial stage of regression has identified new genes that may mediate elimination of the Müllerian system. The evidence taken together can be used to generate an initial gene regulatory network describing the Amh pathway for Müllerian duct regression. An Amh gene regulatory network will be a useful tool to study Müllerian duct regression, sex differentiation, and its relationship to environmental influences.
2 N ov 2 00 1 Penalized maximum likelihood for multivariate Gaussian mixture

In this paper, we first consider the parameter estimation of a multivariate random process distribution using multivariate Gaussian mixture law. The labels of the mixture are allowed to have a general probability law which gives the possibility to modelize a temporal structure of the process under study. We generalize the case of univariate Gaussian mixture in [1] to show that the likelihood is unbounded and goes to infinity when one of the covariance matrices approaches the boundary of singularity of the non negative definite matrices set. We characterize the parameter set of these singularities. As a solution to this degeneracy problem, we show that the penalization of the likelihood by an Inverse Wishart prior on covariance matrices results to a penalized or maximum a posteriori criterion which is bounded. Then, the existence of positive definite matrices optimizing this criterion can be guaranteed. We also show that with a modified EM procedure or with a Bayesian sampling scheme, we can constrain covariance matrices to belong to a particular subclass of covariance matrices. Finally, we study degeneracies in the source separation problem where the characterization of parameter singularity set is more complex. We show, however, that Inverse Wishart prior on covariance matrices eliminates the degeneracies in this case too. INTRODUCTION We consider a double stochastic process: • A discrete process (zt)t=1.T , with zt taking its values in the discrete set Z = {1.K}. • A continuous process (st)t=1.T which is white conditionally to the first process (zt)t=1.T and following a distribution: p(s|z) = f(s;ζz) In the following, without loss of generality of the considered model, we restrict the function f(.) to be a Gaussian: f(.|z) = N (μz,Rz). This double process is called in literature "Mixture model". When the hidden process z1.T is white, we have an i.i. d mixture model: p(s) = ∑ z pzN (μz, Rz) and when z1.T is Markovian, the model is called HMM (Hidden Markov Model). For application of these two models see [2] and [3]. Mixture models present an interesting alternative to non parametric modeling. By increasing the number of mixture components, we are able to approximate any probability density and the time dependence structure of the hidden process z1.T allows to take into account a correlation structure of the resulting process. In the following, for clarity of demonstrations, we assume an i.i. d. mixture model. CHARACTERIZATION OF LIKELIHOOD DEGENERACY We consider T observations (st)t=1.T of a random n-vector following a multivariate Gaussian mixture law: