Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Macroeconomics II Lecture notes (4) on: Dynamic macroeconomic models of real-financial interactions

This section describes a simplified version of the dynamic IS − LM model in Blanchard (1981), that extends this elementary macroeconomic scheme along two dimensions: (i) by considering dynamics, and (ii) by enlarging the set of financial markets beyond the traditional "money" and "bonds". In the model below, the latter extension is limited to the stock market. Stock prices have a forward-looking nature, since they incorporate agents’ expectations on the future course of the economy (particularly on the determinants of stock market returns: dividends, future stock prices, and interest rates). 1 The changes in stock prices (and, in extended versions of the model, in the prices of other financial assets such as longterm bonds) highlight the role of expectations as driving forces of real variables
Independent Control of Topography for 3D Patterning of the ECM Microenvironment

Biomimetic extracellular matrix (ECM) topographies driven by the magnetic‐field‐directed self‐assembly of ECM protein‐coated magnetic beads are fabricated. This novel bottom‐up method allows us to program isotropic, anisotropic, and diverse hybrid ECM patterns without changing other physicochemical properties of the scaffold material. It is demonstrated that this 3D anisotropic matrix is able to guide the dendritic protrusion of cells.
Risk in Perspective Valuing “ Lives Saved ” vs . “ Life-Years Saved ”

There is long-standing debate whether to count “lives saved” or “life-years saved” when evaluating policies to reduce mortality risk. Historically, the two approaches have been applied in different domains. Environmental and transportation policies have often been evaluated using lives saved, while life-years saved has been the preferred metric in other areas of public health including medicine, vaccination, and disease screening. For benefit-cost analysis, the monetary value of risk reductions can be calculated either by multiplying expected lives saved by the “value per statistical life” (VSL) or by multiplying expected life-years saved by the “value per statistical life-year” (VSLY).
Enticing the Global Gaze, The Contention for Urban Spatial Rights in China

Author(s): Solinger, Dorothy J. | Abstract: Taking the new urban poor as a focus, it is clear that the issue of “the right to the city” in China is bound up with the problem that the streets have become unfriendly to those doing informal work. This situation is the product of several changes in recent decades: principally, as the leadership became concerned with making the country fit into the global market, it engineered a program of mass layoffs in the late 1990s, disposing of workers who were less skilled and older than 35. At the same time, in an effort to bring in foreign capital, cities have become the captives of local governmental-business coalitions that emphasize orderly, modernized urban streetscapes. These developments have meant that even as the less qualified have been dismissed from positions of lifetime employment, they have also effectively been discouraged from earning an income through casual labor on the sidewalks. The upshot is that the poor have no real “right to the city” even when they desperately need one to survive.
Service Curves in Data Networks Analysis

Service curves, as introduced by Parekh and Gallager 12, 13] and later generalized by Cruz 7], provide a tool for the analysis of high-speed, integrated services data networks. Given constraints on the burstiness of the input into a network, service curves can be used to compute tight upper bounds for maximum delay and backlog. The purpose of this area-exam paper is to describe the service curves approach and to asses its usefulness in the analysis (and design) of data networks.
Sodium 4-phenylbutyrate ameliorates the effects of cataract-causing mutant gammaD-crystallin in cultured cells

Purpose gammaD-Crystallin (CRYGD) is a major structural lens crystallin and its mutations result in congenital cataract formation. In this study, we attempted to correct the altered protein features of G165fsX8 CRYGD protein with small chemical molecules. Methods Recombinant FLAG-tagged mutants (R15C, R15S, P24T, R61C, and G165fsX8) of CRYGD were expressed in COS-7 cells and treated with small chemical molecules with reported protein chaperoning properties (sodium 4-phenylbutyrate [4-PBA], trimethylamine N-oxide [TMAO], and glycerol and DMSO [DMSO]). Protein solubility in 0.5% Triton X-100 and subcellular distribution was examined by western blotting and immunofluorescence, respectively. Apoptosis was assayed as the percentage of fragmented nuclei in transfected cells. Expression of heat-shock proteins (Hsp70 and Hsp90) was examined by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis. Results Unlike WT and most mutants (R15C, R15S, P24T, and R61C) of CRYGD, G165fsX8 CRYGD was significantly insoluble in 0.5% Triton X-100. This insolubility was alleviated by dose-dependent 4-PBA treatment. The treatment relieved the mislocalization of G165fsX8 CRYGD from the nuclear envelope. Also, 4-PBA treatment reduced cell apoptosis and caused an upregulation of Hsp70. Conclusions 4-PBA treatment reduced the defective phenotype of mutant G165fsX8 CRYGD and rescued the affected cells from apoptosis. This could be a potential treatment for lens structural protein and prevent lens opacity in cataract formation.
Semantics Applied to Locate Services in the eGovernment Domain

The provision of solutions to fulfill requirements in the domain of eGovernment is a complex task. In order to achieve high quality services, a lot of features must be taken into account: accessibility, interoperability, usability, and so on. One of those features that must be beard in mind is the support for retrieving the desired service from any Public Administration. Citizens should be provided with tools to conduct their searches in a convenient manner for their needs. To achieve this high level goal, this paper proposes some artifacts: LifeEvents and AdministrativeServices. Those concepts are described using semantic tools, i.e., formal description techniques for knowledge in software environments. Besides, this technologies provides support for advanced recovery procedures as shown on the paper.
Are Cycle Accurate Simulations a Waste of Time?

Cycle-accurate simulation methods are necessarily slow. This slowness is only acceptable if the simulation results can be shown to have smaller error than other, faster, meth-ods of generating the same results. We use the SESC simulator as a representative of cycle-accurate simulation. We conﬁgure it to match an actual SGI MIPS R12000 system as closely as possible. We run the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmarks and compare simulated results against actual hardware performance counters. We ﬁnd that for CPI SESC diverges from actual hardware by 24.6% for integer benchmarks and 67.6% for ﬂoating point. We then use the Qemu DBI tool as the basis for a faster simulation environment. Qemu generates traces that are consumed by individual simulation processes that run concurrently on a CMP system. We ﬁnd that for CPI the results diverge from actual hardware by -1.8% for integer benchmarks and 26.3% for ﬂoating point. These Qemu results are obtained an order of magnitude faster than those found with SESC (and other popular simulators popular in academia, many of which are much slower). These results show that a re-evaluation of the tradeoffs of cycle-accurate simulations in the ﬁeld of computer architecture research could have merit. Furthermore, using multiple methods to validate a tool or to investigate a proposed architecture is simple good science .
Regression Techniques versus Discriminative Methods for Face Recognition

In the field of face recognition it is generally believed that ”state of the art” recognition rates can only be achieved when discriminative (e.g., linear or generalized discriminant analysis) rather than expressive (e.g., principal or kernel principal component analysis) methods are used for facial feature extraction. However, while being superior in terms of the recognition rates, the discriminative techniques still exhibit some shortcomings when compared to the expressive approaches. More specifically, they suffer from the so-called small sample size (SSS) problem which is regularly encountered in the field of face recognition and occurs when the sample dimensionality is larger than the number of available training samples per subject. In this type of problems, the discriminative techniques need modifications in order to be feasible, but even in their most elaborate forms require at least two training samples per subject. The expressive approaches, on the other hand, are not susceptible to the SSS problem and are thus applicable even in the most extreme case of the small sample size problem, i.e., when only one training sample per subject is available. Nevertheless, in this paper we will show that the recognition performance of the expressive methods can match (or in some cases surpass) that of the discriminative techniques if the expressive feature extraction approaches are used as multivariate regression techniques with a pre-designed response matrix that encodes the class-membership of the training samples. The effectiveness of the regression techniques for face recognition is demonstrated in a series of experiments performed on the ORL database. Additionally a comparative assessment of the regression techniques and popular discriminative approaches is presented.
Comparison of Diffusion MRI Acquisition Protocols for the In Vivo Characterization of the Mouse Spinal Cord: Variability Analysis and Application to an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Model

Diffusion-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) has relevant applications in the microstructural characterization of the spinal cord, especially in neurodegenerative diseases. Animal models have a pivotal role in the study of such diseases; however, in vivo spinal dMRI of small animals entails additional challenges that require a systematical investigation of acquisition parameters. The purpose of this study is to compare three acquisition protocols and identify the scanning parameters allowing a robust estimation of the main diffusion quantities and a good sensitivity to neurodegeneration in the mouse spinal cord. For all the protocols, the signal-to-noise and contrast-to noise ratios and the mean value and variability of Diffusion Tensor metrics were evaluated in healthy controls. For the estimation of fractional anisotropy less variability was provided by protocols with more diffusion directions, for the estimation of mean, axial and radial diffusivity by protocols with fewer diffusion directions and higher diffusion weighting. Intermediate features (12 directions, b = 1200 s/mm2) provided the overall minimum inter- and intra-subject variability in most cases. In order to test the diagnostic sensitivity of the protocols, 7 G93A-SOD1 mice (model of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) at 10 and 17 weeks of age were scanned and the derived diffusion parameters compared with those estimated in age-matched healthy animals. The protocols with an intermediate or high number of diffusion directions provided the best differentiation between the two groups at week 17, whereas only few local significant differences were highlighted at week 10. According to our results, a dMRI protocol with an intermediate number of diffusion gradient directions and a relatively high diffusion weighting is optimal for spinal cord imaging. Further work is needed to confirm these results and for a finer tuning of acquisition parameters. Nevertheless, our findings could be important for the optimization of acquisition protocols for preclinical and clinical dMRI studies on the spinal cord.
EUS-guided biliary drainage or enteroscopy-assisted ERCP in patients with surgical anatomy and biliary obstruction: an international comparative study

Background and study aims: How enteroscopy-assisted ERCP (e-ERCP) and endoscopic ultrasound-guided biliary drainage (EUS-BD) compare in patients with surgically altered upper gastrointestinal anatomy is currently unknown. The aims of this study were to compare efficacy and safety of both techniques and study predictors of these outcomes. Patients and methods: This was an international, multicenter comparative cohort study at 10 tertiary centers. Outcomes data included technical success (biliary access with cholangiography and stent placement [when indicated]), clinical success (resolution of biliary obstruction) and adverse events (AEs) (graded according to the ASGE lexicon). Results: A total of 98 patients underwent EUS-BD (n = 49) or e-ERCP (n = 49). Technical success was achieved in 48 (98 %) patients in the EUS-BD group as compared to 32 (65.3 %) patients in the e-ERCP group (OR 12.48, P = 0.001). Clinical success was attained in 88 % of patients in EUS-BD group as compared to 59.1 % in the e-ERCP group (OR 2.83, P = 0.03). Procedural time was significantly shorter in the EUS-BD group (55 min vs 95 min, P < 0.0001). AEs occurred more commonly in the EUS-BD group (20 % vs. 4 %, P = 0.01). However, the majority (90 %) of AEs were mild/moderate. Length of stay was significantly longer in the EUS-BD group (6.6 d vs. 2.4 d, P < 0.0001). Conclusions: EUS-BD can be performed with a higher degree of clinical efficacy and shorter procedure time than e-ERCP in patients with surgically-altered upper gastrointestinal anatomy. Whether or not this approach should be first-line therapy in this patient population is highly dependent on the indication for the procedure, the patient’s anatomy, and local practice and expertise.
Practical use of interactive tactile graphic display system at a school for the blind (2) *

The basic function of the interactive tactile graphic display system is that it enables blind persons to draw and erase tactile graphics directly on the tactile surface with the stylus. Besides that, the system can be used to play tactile games, which cannot be achieved by the use of current static tactile graphics, such as embossed print or swell paper
Incorporating User Input with Topic Modeling

Topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) can discover topics from a large collection of documents in an unsupervised fashion and thus is one of the most popular text analysis tool currently in use. However, when using it in practice, the topics discovered by topic model don’t always make sense to end users. The poor quality topics will substantially undermine a topic model system’s usability. Due to the unsupervised nature of topic model, this is difficult to incorporate user’s domain knowledge or feedback to the topic model. In this paper, we introduce a novel constrained LDA model, named cLDA, that is capable of incorporating user inputs in the form of document pairwise constraints. Document pairwise constraints can be document must-links and document cannot-links which represent the semantic similarity of documents. The effectiveness of the proposed cLDA model is shown in several aspects on a benchmark dataset.
Octree Based Representation and Volume Rendering of Three-Dimensional Medical Data Sets

In many clinical applications, interactive exploration of three dimension medical data sets is required, but the huge amount of computational time and storage space needed for rendering do not allow the visualization of large medical data sets by now. In this paper we present a new algorithm for rendering large medical data sets on standard PC. The key technique is a new representation method of large medical dataset based on an efficient octree data structure. First, the input data is converted into a compressed hierarchical octree representation. Then, a template-based raycasting scheme using shear-warp factorization for expediting parallel viewing of volume datasets is employed. The algorithm exploits the uniform shape, orientation and size of the "nonempty" octree blocks by building templates for ray/block intersections in the case of raycasting. Experiment results display that high quality human body interior images of a large dataset can be generated by the proposed approach on a standard PC platform fast.
A Complexity result for the pursuit-evasion game of maintaining visibility of a moving evader

In this paper we consider the problem of maintaining visibility of a moving evader by a mobile robot, the pursuer, in an environment with obstacles. We simultaneously consider bounded speed for both players and a variable distance separating them. Unlike our previous efforts [R. Murrieta-Cid et al., 2007], we give special attention to the combinatorial problem that arises when searching for a solution through visiting several locations. We approach evader tracking by decomposing the environment into convex regions. We define two graphs: one is called the mutual visibility graph (MVG) and the other the accessibility graph (AG). The MVG provides a sufficient condition to maintain visibility of the evader while the AG defines possible regions to which either the pursuer or the evader may go to. The problem is framed as a non cooperative game. We establish the existence of a solution, based on a k- Min approach, for the following givens: the environment, the initial state of the evader and the pursuer, including their maximal speeds. We show that the problem of finding a solution to this game is NP-complete.
Geometric Motion Planning Analysis for Two Classes of Underactuated Mechanical Systems

In this paper we generate gaits for two types of underactuated mechanical systems: principally kinematic and purely mechanical systems. Our goal is to specify inputs in the form of gaits, that is, a sequence of controlled shape changes of a multi-bodied mechanical system that when executed would produce a desired change in the unactuated position or orientation variables of the entire mechanical system. In other words, we want to indirectly control the unactuated degrees of freedom of the mechanical system utilizing a controlled “internal” shape change. More precisely, in this paper we develop a gait evaluation tool which easily measures the change of position, computed in a body-attached coordinate frame, due to any closed curve in the shape space. This evaluation tool is simple enough that we can use it to generate gaits or to design curves that move the mechanical system along a desired direction. Finally, we verify that this gait analysis technique applies to two seemingly different classes of mechanical systems, purely mechanical and principally kinematic systems, and unify the gait generation problem for both classes.
Model-order selection for analyzing correlation between two data sets using CCA with PCA preprocessing

This paper is concerned with determining the number of correlated signals between two data sets using canonical correlation analysis (CCA) when a principal component analysis (PCA) preprocessing step is performed for initial rank reduction. In signal processing applications, it is commonplace in scenarios with large dimensions, insufficient samples, or knowledge of low-rank underlying signals to extract the principal components of the data before correlation is analyzed. While there exist information-theoretic criteria to either determine the number of signals in a single data set or the number of correlated signals between two data sets, there has yet to be a treatment of the joint order estimation of the number of dimensions which should be retained through the PCA preprocessing and the number of correlated signals. We present the likelihood and information criteria for this scenario, along with some verifying simulations.
Using Optical Tweezers to Characterize Physical Tethers at Membrane Contact Sites: Grab It, Pull It, Set It Free?

Sparkes is funded by the Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2015-106) and the Science and Technology Funding Council (PM-1216), and by the BBSRC (BB/I006184/2) for some of the work reported herein. I would like to thank Prof Botchway and Dr Ward for insightful discussions regarding optical tweezers. Due to space restrictions, I would like to apologize to those whose work is not included herein.
Dynamic anti-windup synthesis for state delayed systems: an LMI approach

This paper addresses the dynamic anti-windup synthesis problem for state delayed linear control systems subject to saturating inputs. Based on the Projection Lemma and on a modified sector condition, it is shown that the rational full-order compensator synthesis problem is convex. The computation of the anti-windup compensator aiming at ensuring both ℒ2 input-to-state stability and internal stability of the closed-loop system are carried out from the solution of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). In this sense, results both in local (regional) an global contexts of stability are provided.
MobiGATE: a mobile gateway proxy for the active deployment of transport entities

Using gateway proxies is one important approach to facilitating adaptation across wireless and mobile environments. Importantly, augmented service entities deployed within the gateway proxy residing on the wired network can be composed and deployed to shield mobile clients from the effects of poor network characteristics. The usual approach to the static composition of service entities on the gateway proxy is to have these service entities interact with each other by explicitly invoking procedures on the named interface. The tight coupling of interfaces inhibits the flexible composition and adaptation of the service entities to the dynamic operating characteristics of wireless networks. We present a Mobile GATEway for the active deployment of transport entities or MobiGATE (pronounced as MobiGate) for short. MobiGATE is a mobile middleware framework that supports the robust and flexible composition of transport entities, known as streamlets. The flow of data traffic is subjected to processing by a chain of streamlets. Each streamlet encapsulates a service entity that serves to adapt the flow of traffic across the wireless network. To facilitate the dynamic reconfiguration of the streamlets, we advocate applying the concept of coordination as the unifying approach to composing these transport service entities. Importantly, MobiGATE delineates a clear separation of interdependency parts from the service-specific computational codes of those service entities by using a separate coordination language to describe the coordination among streamlet service entities. To this end, we have defined a compositional language called MobiGATE coordination language (MCL) that provides rich constructs to support the definition of compositions, with constrained type validation and checking.