Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing a Theoretical Model of Mortgage Demand on United Kingdom Data Number 1 2004 Testing a Theoretical Model of Mortgage Demand on United Kingdom Data

Mortgage demand is a little understood and under researched aspect of the financial behaviour of households. This paper empirically tests the basic results of Brueckner’s model of mortgage demand (Brueckner, 1994) on United Kingdom mortgage market data. The choice of mortgage instrument is used to identify impatient debt maximisers and patient borrowers who borrow at intermediate levels. Thus the research confirms the conditions under which households will use the largest possible mortgage and the circumstances under which savings are invested in the property. A unique contribution of the work is the estimation of mortgage demand equations corrected for endogenous housing demand, for a single housing finance system, where borrows face different opportunity costs of equity in their owner occupied property, allowing a purer test of the theoretical model.
Developing an Instrument to Capture Multifaceted Visitor Experiences: The DoVE Adjective Checklist

Abstract Understanding visitor experiences is an important focus for visitor research in attractions such as museums, zoos, and heritage sites because the visitor experience is the core product of the interaction between the visitor and the activities, events, and environments they encounter. This article describes the development of an instrument designed to capture multiple facets of the visitor experience using a simple and unobtrusive adjective checklist. The checklist has been tested and used at a range of attractions, including museums, art galleries, science centers, zoos, and aquariums. The instrument allows visitors’ responses to the experiential offerings of each site to be captured and graphically displayed, as well as providing individual measures on 15 dimensions. The instrument can be used to support further research and theory development as well as exhibit design and evaluation. Examples of such applications are discussed.
Iterative Reweighted Least Squares approach to interference alignment

This paper investigates the interference alignment (IA) solution for a K-user static flat-fading multiple input multiple output (MIMO) interference channel. Optimal users' precoders and postcoders are designed through a rank constraint rank minimization (RCRM) framework with IA conditions inserted within the constraints and the cost function of a complex matrix optimization problem. With RCRM formulation, the interference is forced to span the lowest dimensional subspace possible, under the condition that the useful signal subspaces span all available spatial dimensions. Using the recent advances in matrix completion theory and low rank matrix recovery theory, we propose an Iterative Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) approach to IA. Through this approach, we provide an adequate relaxation for the rank function which in some cases attain the same results obtained using the standard nuclear norm with lower elapsed time per iteration and lower number of iterations and in some cases perform better than any of the previous approaches.
Designing a PCA-based Collaborative Visual Analytics System

In visual analytics, collaboration is viewed as a knowledge sharing process that helps people perform analytical reasoning tasks effectively. In this paper, we present a collaborative visual analytics tool, iPCA-CE, that supports interactive data analysis using principal component analysis (PCA) on a tabletop display. We define three data analysis scenarios that are addressed when designing the collaborative data analysis system. With the system, users are able to collaboratively analyze data, share ideas or knowledge, and divide their work-load.
Economics of depletable resources: market forces and intertemporal bias. [Introduction of Market Imperfection Function]

A theoretical model is developed of the extraction patterns of a non-renewable resource in order to examine the effects of various market forces caused by intertemporal allocations of known reserves. The extent of the original reserve limits the total quantity of the resource that can be extracted over time. The model is conducted with all parties cognizant of the quantities they control, the related costs of extraction, future price trends, and future government actions. A purely competitive market is found to support optimal allocations, while percentage depletion allowances are found to encourage over-extraction. The direction of bias as a result of price controls requires further data. Monopolies can lead to current under-use or over-use, which will determine future availability. Over-use can also result from insecure imported sources unless appropriate tariffs are imposed. A market imperfection function concept is used to derive these results. 16 references. (DCK)
Concurrent number cruncher: a GPU implementation of a general sparse linear solver

A wide class of numerical methods needs to solve a linear system, where the matrix pattern of non-zero coefficients can be arbitrary. These problems can greatly benefit from highly multithreaded computational power and large memory bandwidth available on graphics processor units (GPUs), especially since dedicated general purpose APIs such as close-to-metal (CTM) (AMD–ATI) and compute unified device architecture (CUDA) (NVIDIA) have appeared. CUDA even provides a BLAS implementation, but only for dense matrices (CuBLAS). Other existing linear solvers for the GPU are also limited by their internal matrix representation. This paper describes how to combine recent GPU programming techniques and new GPU dedicated APIs with high performance computing strategies (namely block compressed row storage (BCRS), register blocking and vectorization), to implement a sparse general-purpose linear solver. Our implementation of the Jacobi-preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm outperforms by up to a factor of 6.0 × leading-edge CPU counterparts, making it attractive for applications which are content with single precision.
limate change impacts on nesting and internesting leatherback sea urtles using 3 D animated computational fluid dynamics and finite olume heat transfer eter

Shifting suitable range limits under global warming will threaten many species. Modeling and mapping these potential range shifts is important for conservation. As global warming will introduce new sets of abiotic conditions, predictive empirical niche models may not perform well and the best method to model a specie’s projected range shifts may be to model their fundamental niche with a biophysical mechanistic niche model. However, this class of model requires many physiological parameters that are difficult to measure for species not easily kept in captivity. It is also difficult to estimate these parameters for marine species given the interactions among their in-water motion, metabolism, and heat transfer. To surmount these difficulties, we use our previously verified novel technique combining 3D digital design, computational fluid dynamics, and finite volume heat transfer modeling to find animal core temperatures. We then use this method to build a fundamental niche map for internesting and nesting leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea). With these niche maps we analyze three main nesting areas. We show that global warming poses a large overheating risk to leatherbacks in Southeast Asia, a slight risk to leatherbacks in the West Atlantic and a low risk to leatherbacks in the East Atlantic. We also show that the impact may be less on leatherbacks that shift their nesting location or who are smaller. Methods such these are important to produce efficiently and economically accurate maps of regions that will become inhospitable to species under global warming conditions.
The Relationship Between Plasma Osteoprotegerin and Endothelium-Dependent Arterial Dilation in Type 2 Diabetes

Osteoprotegerin is a recently identified inhibitor of bone resorption. Recent studies indicate that osteoprotegerin also acts as an important regulatory molecule in the vasculature. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between plasma osteoprotegerin levels and endothelium-dependent arterial dilation in type 2 diabetic patients. The study subjects included 40 newly diagnosed type 2 diabetic patients and 46 healthy subjects. All patients were given insulin therapy for 6 months. Plasma osteoprotegerin concentration was measured in duplicate by a sandwich enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay method, and high-resolution ultrasound was used to measure brachial artery diameter at rest, after reactive hyperemia, and after sublingual glyceryltrinitrate. The plasma osteoprotegerin level in patients before treatment was 3.36 ± 0.32 ng/l, which was significantly higher than that in control subjects (2.38 ± 0.25 ng/l, P < 0.001). After 6 months of treatment, osteoprotegerin levels decreased markedly (2.83 ± 0.34 ng/l, P < 0.001). Flow-mediated endothelium-dependent arterial dilation in patients before treatment was 3.21 ± 0.52%, which was significantly lower than that in control subjects (4.46 ± 0.56%, P < 0.01), and it improved markedly after 6 months of treatment (4.03 ± 0.49%, P < 0.01). In multivariate analysis, osteoprotegerin was significantly associated with endothelium-dependent arterial dilation, fasting blood glucose (FBG), HbA1c (A1C), and ultrasensitive C-reactive protein (CRP) at baseline (P < 0.01). The absolute changes in osteoprotegerin showed significant correlation with changes in endothelium-dependent arterial dilation, FBG, A1C, and CRP in diabetic patients during the course of treatment (P < 0.01). This study shows that plasma osteoprotegerin levels are elevated in newly diagnosed diabetic patients and are significantly associated with endothelial function.
A Network Model of Organization Formation

This paper presents a network model of organization formation and builds upon theories of social and socioeconomic exchange. The model explains the transformation of exchange relationships from a set of relatively simple, often single-dimensional dyadic exchanges into a dense set—a network—of stable, multidimensional and multilayered interorganizatlonal exchange relationships. The model details three stages of entrepreneurial networking activity which are used to secure the critical economic and non-economic resources needed to start a business: (1) Focusing on the essential dyads; (2) Converting dyadic ties to socioeconomic exchanges; and (3) Layering the exchanges with multiple exchange processes. In all three stages, there is an iterative process which involves the exploration, screening and selective use of network dyads to match the business definition of the emerging firm. Organization formation results from the crystallization of stable, committed, revenue-generating, inter-organizational exchange relationships which extend beyond the earlier idiosyncratic and personalized relationships of the entrepreneur. A network model of organization formation appreciates the social embeddedness of economic relationships and the multidimensional nature and content of business relationships.
Econometric Models and Causality Relationships Between Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing Production in MOROCCO, TUNISIA and other Northern African Countries, 1950-2000

This article presents a general view of economic development in the countries of Magreb, analyzing the impact of manufacturing and imports on economoic growth and cycles, by means of cross correlations, Grangers´s causality analysis and dynamic models: for each country and for a panel of 4 Northern African countries. The analysis shows that these countries have low levels of trade among them and that they could improve their economic development with more industrial production and trade, both among themselves and with other areas as the Mediterranean countries of European Union. The EU agreements with Magreb are focused to foster free trade between North and South Mediterranean. Although this policy could be positive for development is not enough and EU should in our view have a more positive role to foster economic and educational cooperation with those countries in order to increase their income per inhabitant and their levels of employment. The alternative to the lack of cooperation policies could be the increase of disparities with EU and emigration pressures from Northern Africa towards most prosperous countries.
A Low-Dimensional Model for Chaos in Open Fluid-Flows

A forced Landau–Stuart equation is studied in order to derive a low‐dimensional model describing the temporal behavior of a paradigm open flow, the two‐dimensional forced cylinder wake. Numerical results from the model exhibit several characteristics of circle maps, and compare qualitatively to previous experimental results for an oscillating cylinder wake. The low‐dimensional model is also shown to reduce to a circle map in the limit of small forcing amplitudes. Observation of circle map dynamics in the forced Landau–Stuart equation strengthens the conjecture that globally unstable fluid flows are amenable to a dynamical systems approach focusing on the study of low‐dimensional iterative maps. The established connection between the Landau–Stuart equation and the circle map unifies certain aspects of spatiotemporal stability and low‐dimensional chaos theory.
The Survival of the European Welfare State

Part I: European welfare states in perspective 1. Introduction: growth, adjustments and survival of European welfare states Stein Kuhnle and Matti Alestalo 2. The declining resistance of welfare states to change? Kees Van Kersbergen Part II: National welfare state reforms in the 1990s: comparative and case studies 3. Nordic welfare states in the 1990s: institutional stability, signs of divergence Pal Eitrheim and Stein Kuhnle 4. The Finnish welfare state in the 1990s: a long-term perspective Matti Alestalo 5. Welfare crisis and beyond: Danish welfare policies in the 1980s and 1990s Jorgen Goul Andersen 6. Exploring the sustainable limits of public expenditure in the British welfare state Richard Parry 7. Welfare without work? Divergent experiences of reform in Germany and the Netherlands Anton Hemerijck, Philip Manow and Kees Van Kersbergen 8. Implementing major welfare state reforms: a comparison of France and Switzerland - a new-institutionalist approach Francois-Xavier Merrien and Giuliano Bonoli 9. The Spanish development of Southern European welfare Luis Moreno 10. Reconstructing the welfare state in Southern Europe Maurizio Ferrera Part III: Towards consolidated European welfare states? 11. The treaty on European Union and its revision: sea change or empty shell for European social policies? Gerda Falkner 12. Models for Europe? The lessons of other institutional designs Francis G. Castles 13. The future of the universal welfare state: an institutional approach Bo Rothstein 14. European welfare lessons of the 1990s Stein Kuhnle
A Survey on using Ant-Based techniques for clustering

In this article, we survey ant-based data-clustering techniques. Ant-based techniques, in the computer sciences, are designed those who take biological inspirations on the behavior of these social insects. Dataclustering techniques are classification algorithms that have a wide range of applications, from Biology to Image processing and Data presentation. Since real life ants do perform clustering and sorting of objects among their many activities, we expect that an study of ant colonies can provide new insights for clustering techniques.
R E V Ie W a Rt I C L E

Integrating differentiation and cancer: The Nkx3.1 homeobox gene in prostate organogenesis and carcinogenesis Abstract Several tissue-specific regulatory genes have been found to play essential roles in both organogenesis and carcinogenesis. In the prostate, the Nkx3.1 homeo-box gene plays an important role in normal differentiation of the prostatic epithelium while its loss of function is an initiating event in prostate carcinogen-esis in both mouse models and human patients. Thus, the Nkx3.1 homeobox gene provides a paradigm for understanding the relationship between normal differentiation and cancer, as well as studying the roles of homeobox genes in these processes. Here, we review recent findings concerning the roles of Nkx3.1 in development and discuss how its normal function is disrupted in processes of early prostate carcinogenesis.
Cellular and humoral immunity of virus-induced asthma

Asthma inception is associated with respiratory viral infection, especially infection with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and/or human rhinovirus (HRV), in the vast majority of cases. However, the reason why RSV and HRV induce the majority of bronchiolitis cases during early childhood and why only a small percentage of children with RSV- and HRV-induced bronchiolitis later develop asthma remains unclear. A genetic association study has revealed the important interaction between viral illness and genetic variants in patients with asthma. Severe RSV- and HRV-induced bronchiolitis may be associated with a deficiency in the innate immune response to RSV and HRV. RSV and HRV infections in infants with deficient innate immune response and the dysfunction of regulatory T cells are considered to be a risk factor for the development of asthma. Sensitization to aeroallergens, beginning in the first year of life, consistently predisposes children to HRV-induced wheezing illnesses, but the converse is not true. Some evidence of virus specificity exists, in that allergic sensitization specifically increased the risk of wheezing in individuals infected with HRV, but not RSV. Administration of Palivizumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody that targets the A antigenic site of the Fusion-protein of RSV, decreases the risk of hospitalization in high-risk infants and the risk of recurrent of wheezing. However, palivizumab did not have any effect on subsequent recurrent wheezing in children with a family history of atopy. These findings suggest that infection with RSV and infection with HRV might predispose individuals to recurrent wheezing through an atopy-independent and an atopy-dependent mechanism, respectively. Respiratory virus-induced wheezing illnesses may encompass multiple sub-phenotypes that relate to asthma in different ways.
Introduction to China’s CWMT2008 Machine Translation Evaluation

This paper presents an overall introduction to the CWMT2008 evaluation and focuses on its two new metrics: BLEU-SBP (Chiang et al., 2008) and linguistic check-point method (Zhou et al., 2008). BLEU-SBP is a revised BLEU with strict brevity penalty. Our experiments validated BLEU-SBP’s effectivity in resolving the nondecomposability problem of both NIST-BLEU and IBMBLEU at sentence level. Linguistic checkpoint method (LCM) is a linguistic diagnostic evaluation method based on automatically constructed linguistic check-points, and our evaluation indicates that this method can be used to evaluate the capability of an MT system in translating various linguistic phenomena, and revealed good correlations between BLEU score and LCM scores in most tasks. With the aid of these metrics, we disclosed some detailed performance differences between statistical MT systems and rulebased MT systems. In addition, through the study on some practical cases we suggest that the high BLEU score doesn’t necessarily mean high translation adequacy.
Improving the Blood Pressure Control With the ProActive Attitude of Hypertensive Patients Seeking Follow-up Services

AbstractProactive attitude of hypertensive patients seeking follow-up services (FUS) lies at the core of self-efficacy. However, few evidence have shown the activeness of seeking FUS in the context of blood pressure control among hypertensive patients. Improvements in follow-up visits may not just by services itself cause better control of blood pressure among hypertensive patients, rather due to the patient's pro-active attitude of the patient in seeking FUS.A cross-sectional study was carried out in selected rural regions of China to explore the association between blood pressure control and sociodemographic and economic variables and activeness of hypertensive patients in seeking FUS. The primary clinical outcome for this study was blood pressure control (systolic blood pressure <140 mmHg or diastolic blood pressure <90 mmHg)Out of the total 2321 participants with hypertension aged 35 years or older participated in this survey. Number of proactive FUS seekers were 3.17 times greater than those of passive seekers (odds ratio [OR] = 3.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 2.56–3.93, P < 0.001). In all subgroups, hypertensive patients who were seeking FUS actively were more likely to control blood pressure better than those seeking FUS passively.Proactive attitude of seeking follow-up services can improve blood pressure control among hypertensive patients.
Attention switching during interruptions

The primary role of attention is in the control of action. A model of attention is presented. The model takes the entire Norman & Shallice's theory into account and mainly concentrates on the interactions between contention scheduling and supervisory attentional system. An AI agent is imported as an implemental approach for the model. Simulations are chosen based on different cases to demonstrate how the model reacts to random interruptions while executing a routine action.
Direct Sensing of Thrust and Velocity for a Quadrotor Rotor Array

Trajectory tracking of micro UAVs requires accurate thrust and velocity estimates. High-quality motion control of quadrotors typically employs accurate high-speed optical sensing indoors. However, these measurements are not available outdoors, and GPS is unreliable and inadequate for performance motion control. We have developed small embedded force sensors that mount between a micro UAV's airframe and motors—forces generated by the rotors are measured as they are transmitted to the rigid body of the aircraft. The direct force measurements can be directly integrated with a model of the mapping between aircraft motion and induced rotor forces. From this, the translational velocities of the rotors relative to the local wind can be measured, and thus the overall velocity of the aircraft can be inferred. We have assembled a proof-of-concept quadrotor platform with all four rotors fitted with force sensors, and demonstrate accurate measurement of a quadrotor's lateral velocity during prescribed motions using the onboard force sensors. The vertical velocity measurement was found to be insensitive.
A Spatial and Temporal Autoregressive Local Estimation for the Paris Housing Market

This original study examines the potential of a spatiotemporal autoregressive Local (LSTAR) approach in modelling transaction prices for the housing market in inner Paris. We use a data set from the Paris Region notary office (“Chambre des notaires d’Ile-de-France”) which consists of approximately 250,000 transactions units between the first quarter of 1990 and the end of 2005. We use the exact X -- Y coordinates and transaction date to spatially and temporally sort each transaction. We first choose to use the spatiotemporal autoregressive (STAR) approach proposed by Pace, Barry, Clapp and Rodriguez (1998). This method incorporates a spatiotemporal filtering process into the conventional hedonic function and attempts to correct for spatial and temporal correlative effects. We find significant estimates of spatial dependence effects. Moreover, using an original methodology, we find evidence of a strong presence of both spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the model. It suggests that spatial and temporal drifts in households socio-economic profiles and local housing market structure effects are certainly major determinants of the price level for the Paris Housing Market.