Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rational expectations and forward exchange market efficiency

This paper is concerned with testing the hypothesis that expectations in the foreign exchange market are rational, as has been assumed in recent asset market approaches to exchange rate determination. The relationship between the rational expectations hypothesis and the notion of forward market efficiency is discussed and the latter is used as a means of testing for rationality. Evidence is presented which is largely consistent with the market efficiency–rational expectations hypotheis.
Perceptions of family caregivers’ psychosocial behavior when communicating with spouses who have Alzheimer's disease

The literature for caregivers of persons with Alzheimer 's disease (AD) notes the importance of attending to the linguistic and psychosocial dimensions of communication. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between psychosocial aspects of caregivers’ behavior and communication outcomes for persons with AD and their spousal caregivers. In the first part of the study, we selected 40 segments of audio-recorded conversations between persons with AD and their spouses. We then asked 20 healthy seniors who were not caregivers to listen to and read the conversation segments and evaluate each segment along four psychosocial dimensions. They were also asked to independently rate how smooth the communication was in each segment. We hypothesized that when caregivers’ speech is perceived to be respectful, caring, not controlling, and/or it ascribes competence to their spouses, it would be associated with more effective communication. Our results supported these hypotheses in that communication was more likely to be rated higher in smoothness when the content and manner of caregivers’ speech were perceived to have positive psychosocial qualities. The findings have implications for training caregivers on effective psychosocial behavior when interacting with persons who have AD.
Adolescents' food habits: results of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey

The present study describes food habits in adolescents in thirty-five countries and regions (European countries/regions, Israel, Canada and the USA), based on the food-frequency questions from the cross-sectional Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey of the year 2001–2. A total of 162 305 pupils of 11, 13 or 15 years of age completed an anonymous standardised questionnaire on health and lifestyle factors during one school hour. Large differences in food habits between countries were found: the consumption frequency of fruit varied from on average 2·8 to 5 d/week, the consumption of vegetables varied from on average 2·4 to 5·5 d/week, the consumption of soft drinks varied from 2·1 to 5 d/week and sweet consumption from 2·6 to 5 d/week. Methodological problems in comparing between countries are discussed. Nonetheless, the results indicate a need for national and international health promotion programmes to improve adolescents' food habits.
Initial public offerings: an asset allocation decision based on nonnormal returns

This study analyses whether the inclusion of initial public offering (IPO) stocks as part of an optimal asset allocation strategy can reduce the systematic risk of an investment portfolio. The asset allocation framework takes account of nonnormality of returns from a universe of eight asset classes using 240 monthly returns between January 1992 and December 2011. AR-GJR-GARCH models resolve the tail dependence and heteroscedasticity in the return series. Generalized Pareto distributions help to fit the heavy-tailed return distributions, while copula functions help to calibrate the dependence structure between the asset returns. The optimization algorithm persistently includes IPO stocks as part of an optimal asset allocation strategy. Their portfolio inclusion reduces the conditional value-at-risk and improves the risk-return trade-off.
Review of random forest classification techniques to resolve data imbalance

In this current age, numerous ranges of real word applications with imbalanced dataset is one of the foremost focal point of researcher's inattention. There is the enormous increment of data generation and imbalance within dataset. Processing and knowledge extraction of huge amount of imbalanced data becomes a challenge related with space and time necessities. Generally there is a list of an assortment of factual humanity applications which deals with unequal data sample division in to number of classes. Due to this division of data either of class goes into majority or minority with comparably less data count. This outnumbering of data sample in either of one class directs towards the handling of minority class and target on remarkable reduction in error rate. The standard learning methods do not directly focus on this type of classes. Random Forest Classification (RFC) is an ensemble approach that utilizes a number of classifiers to work together in order to identify the class label for unlabeled instances. This approach has proved its high accuracy and superiority with imbalanced datasets. This classifier provides various techniques to resolve class imbalance problem. This paper summarizes, the literature survey from 2000 to 2016 of various techniques related to RFC to resolve class imbalance. Specifically Weighted Random Forest (WRF), Balanced Random Forest (BRF), Sampling (Under Sampling (US)) and Down Sampling (DS), Cost Sensitive Methods have been adapted more to till date. The limitation of this numerous literature is researchers can focus on dynamic integration techniques to resolve class imbalance and increase robustness and versatility of classification.
Geographic information use in weakly-supervised deep learning for landmark recognition

The successful deep convolutional neural networks for visual object recognition typically rely on a massive number of training images that are well annotated by class labels or object bounding boxes with great human efforts. Here we explore the use of the geographic metadata, which are automatically retrieved from sensors such as GPS and compass, in weakly-supervised learning techniques for landmark recognition. The visibility of a landmark in a frame can be calculated based on the camera's field-of-view and the landmark's geometric information such as location and height. Subsequently, a training dataset is generated as the union of the frames with presence of at least one target landmark. To reduce the impact of the intrinsic noise in the geo-metadata, we present a frame selection method that removes the mistakenly labeled frames with a two-step approach consisting of (1) Gaussian Mixture Model clustering based on camera location followed by (2) outlier removal based on visual consistency. We compare the classification results obtained from the ground truth labels and the noisy labels derived from the raw geo-metadata. Experiments show that training based on the raw geo-metadata achieves a Mean Average Precision (MAP) of 0.797. Moreover, by applying our proposed representative frame selection method, the MAP can be further improved by 6.4%, which indicates the promising use of the geo-metadata in weakly-supervised learning techniques.
Assessing the Determinants of High-Growth Manufacturing Firms in Italy

Abstract Few firms grow rapidly, but their contribution to employment growth is often impressive. The main purpose of this paper is to analyse both the external and internal factors that can affect the probability of being a high-growth firm (HGF) in Italy. We found that HGFs are, on average, young firms and are present in different industries, but the role of demand is important to understanding their performance at the sectoral level. Moreover, our findings show that financial constraints and profitability are not associated with the probability of being a HGF. HGFs, on average, are characterised by high productivity, but only when growth is measured in terms of sales. The most original results of this study concern the endogenous determinants of rapid growth, which have yet to be adequately examined in the literature. First, we found that the concentration of ownership is important for HGFs that experienced rapid growth in their sales. Second, the quality of human capital is a strong point for firms experiencing rapid employment growth.
PLD1 rather than PLD2 regulates phorbol-ester-, adhesion-dependent and Fcγ-receptor-stimulated ROS production in neutrophils

The signalling lipid phosphatidic acid (PA) is generated by the hydrolysis of phosphatidylcholine (PC), which is catalysed by phospholipase D (PLD) enzymes. Neutrophils, important cells of the innate immune system, maintain the body's defence against infection. Previous studies have implicated PLD-generated PA in neutrophil function; these have relied heavily on the use of primary alcohols to act as inhibitors of PA production. The recent development of isoform-selective small molecule inhibitors and the generation of a knockout mouse model provide us with accurate tools to study the role of PLDs in neutrophil responses. We show that PLD1 is a regulator of phorbol-ester-, chemoattractant, adhesion-dependent and Fcγ-receptor-stimulated production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in neutrophils. Significantly we found that this role of PLD is isoform specific: the absence of PLD2 does not negatively affect these processes. Contrary to expectation, other functions required for an efficient immune response operate effectively in Pld2-deficient neutrophils or when both isoforms are inhibited pharmacologically. We conclude that although PLD1 does have important regulatory roles in neutrophils, the field has been confused by the use of primary alcohols; now that gold standard Pld-knockout mouse models are available, previous work might need to be reassessed.
Finance, management faulted for technology lag

U.S. corporate research directors are usually a quiet lot, reluctant to publicly say anything critical of their presidents, financial officers, and boards of directors. But when the National Science Board, the policymaking group for the National Science Foundation, asked these research directors to speak out on why their technology was on the whole inferior to Japan's, they removed the lid and let go. Their verdict: U.S. industry's technological leadership is eroding and it isn't because of bad federal policies or bad technology. Instead, they think essentially that the corporate system they work under lacks "a strategic vision" and too often succumbs to Wall Street pressures to show profit quickly and regularly. One respondent charged that the large institutional shareholders engaged in crass "betting" rather than in the nobler acts of "investing. " While the findings themselves may be common knowledge today, the outspokenness is a new, innovative turn for that segment of the corporate social structure.
Legislative Professionalism and Incumbent Reelection: The Development of Institutional Boundaries

It is well established that legislators from highly professionalized bodies are more likely to win reelection than members of less professionalized legislatures. We find that the effect of professionalization on incumbent electoral success is far more pervasive. As the level of professionalism of a legislature increases, the effects of external political and economic forces (such as coattails from higher level elections and national economic conditions) on a legislator's chances for reelection diminish in strength. This implies that legislative professionalization promotes institutionalization by establishing boundaries that insulate members from external shocks. We reach these conclusions by specifying and testing a district-level model of state legislative election outcomes, using as dependent variable the probability that an incumbent will win reelection. The model is estimated with probit using data for more than 42,000 state legislators from 1970 to 1989.
Early manifestations and first-contact incidence of schizophrenia in different cultures: A preliminary report on the initial evaluation phase of the WHO Collaborative Study on Determinants of Outcome of Severe Mental Disorders

Synopsis In a context of a WHO collaborative study, 12 research centres in 10 countries monitored geographically defined populations over 2 years to identify individuals making a first-in-lifetime contact with any type of ‘helping agency’ because of symptoms of psychotic illness. A total of 1379 persons who met specified inclusion criteria for schizophrenia and other related non-affective disorders were examined extensively, using standardized instruments, on entry into the study and on two consecutive follow-ups at annual intervals. Patients in different cultures, meeting the ICD and CATEGO criteria for schizophrenia, were remarkably similar in their symptom profiles and 49% of them presented the central schizophrenic conditions as defined by CATEGO class S+. However, the 2-year pattern of course was considerably more favourable in patients in developing countries compared with patients in developed countries, and the difference could not be fully explained by the higher frequency of acute onsets among the former. Age- and sex-specific incidence rates and estimates of disease expectancy were determined for a ‘broad’ diagnostic group of schizophrenic illness and for CATEGO S+ cases. While the former showed significant differences among the centres, the differences in the rates for S+ cases were non-significant or marginal. The results provide strong support for the notion that schizophrenic illnesses occur with comparable frequency in different populations and support earlier findings that the prognosis is better in less industrialized societies.
Chase trainer exercise program in athlete with unilateral Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS)

We investigated the effects of modified preprogrammed training mode Chase Trainer from Balance Trainer (BT3, HurLab, Tampere, Finland) on athlete who experienced unilateral Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS). Twenty-seven athletes with mean age= 14.23 ±1.31 years, height = 164.89 ± 7.85 cm, weight = 56.94 ± 9.28 kg were randomly assigned to two groups: experiment (EG; n = 14) and injured (IG; n = 13). EG performed a series of Chase Trainer program which required them to shift their body weight at different directions, speeds and angle of leaning twice a week for duration of 8 weeks. The static postural control and perceived pain level measures were taken at baseline, after 6 weeks and 8 weeks of training. There was no significant difference in any of tested variables between EG and IG before and after 6-week the intervention period. However, after 8-week of training, the postural control (eyes open) and perceived pain level of EG improved compared to IG (p<0.05). The postural control with eyes closed of EG improved (p<0.05) but the values were not significantly different compared to IG after training. The results suggest that using Chase Trainer exercise program it is possible to improve individual postural control and decreased perceived pain level in athlete with unilateral Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome (PFPS).
Circumscribed interests in adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A look beyond trains, planes, and clocks

Adolescence is a unique developmental period, characterized by physical and emotional growth and significant maturation of cognitive and social skills. For individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), it is also a vulnerable period as cognitive and social skills can deteriorate. Circumscribed interests (CIs), idiosyncratic areas of intense interest and focus, are a core symptom of ASD that may be associated with social development. Yet, relatively little is known about the expression of CIs in adolescents with ASD. Many studies investigating CIs have used images depicting items of special interest; however, it is not clear how images should be customized for adolescent studies. The goal of this study was to gain insight into the types of images that may be appropriate for studies of CIs in adolescents with ASD. To this end, we used a mixed methods design that included, 1) one-on-one interviews with 10 adolescents (4 with ASD and 6 TD), to identify categories of images that were High Autism Interest (‘HAI’) or High Typically Developing Interest (‘HTD’), and 2) an online survey taken by fifty-three adolescents with ASD (42 male) and 135 typically developing (TD) adolescents (55 male) who rated how much they liked 105 ‘HAI’ and ‘HTD’ images. Although we found a significant interaction between ‘HAI’ and ‘HTD’ categories and diagnosis, neither group significantly preferred one category over the other, and only one individual category ('Celebrities') showed a significant group effect, favored by TD adolescents. Males significantly preferred ‘HAI’ images relative to females, and TD adolescents significantly preferred images with social content relative to adolescents with ASD. Our findings suggest that studies investigating affective or neural responses to CI-related stimuli in adolescents should consider that stereotypical ASD interests (e.g. trains, gadgets) may not accurately represent individual adolescents with ASD, many of whom show interests that overlap with TD adolescents (e.g. video games).
The central rôle of T‐cells in allergic sensitization and IgE regulation

Abstract The atopic phenotype develops on the basis of a genetic predisposition. Several candidate genes and chromosomal regions have been recently identified that may play a role in the development of allergic sensilization and total IgE production, including genes encoding MHC and T‐cell receptor (TCR) molecules, cytokines and others. Genetic predisposition triggers and immunological dysregulation which is controlled by CD4+ T‐cells. (Specialized) antigen presenting cells process and present allergenic peptides (T‐cell epitopes) on MHC class II molecules to T‐cells that recognize MHC plus peptide using the TCR. Cognate and non‐cognate interaction results in T‐cell activation. Selective stimulation of the allergen specific T‐cells is the result of allergen‐specific sensitization. These T‐cells are characterized by (simultaneous) production of IL‐3, IL‐4, IL‐5 (and may be IL‐13). These cytokines control the production of IgE by B cells and play a critical role in the activation and differentiation of effector cells of the allergic response (such as eosinophils and mast cells). In additon to MHC‐TCR interaction and cytokine production, ligation of CD40 and CD40L represents an additional requirement for the production of functional IgE molecules. Immediate hypersensitivity responses are characterized by an early phase response (triggered by many mediators released from effector cells following allergen exposure. IgE cross‐linking and activation of signal transduction pathways) and a late phase response that is mediated to a large extend by the influx of T‐cells and effector cells into the site of allergic inflammation. Deliniation of the immunological mechanisms that result in allergic sensitization will contribute to the development of specific immunomodulatory strategies aimed to prevent the development of allergies.
Is the Tourism Sector Supportive of Economic Growth? Empirical Evidence on Romanian Tourism

This paper studies the long-run relationships between tourism expansion and economic growth in Romania during the period 1988–2009. The empirical evidence highlights the nature of causal relationships, if any, between domestic travel and tourism spending, internal travel and tourism consumption, the gross domestic product annual growth rate and the real exchange rate. The paper uses the cointegration method and Granger causality analysis based on the vector error correction model (VECM) and impulse functions. The findings suggest that there are Granger causality relationships running from tourism expansion to economic growth, which sustains the tourism-led growth hypothesis (TLGH). These results emphasize the need for more consistent tourism development plans and strategies to be implemented at national and regional levels by the governmental authorities.
Suppression of Clostridium difficile in the Gastrointestinal Tracts of Germfree Mice Inoculated with a Murine Isolate from the Family Lachnospiraceae

ABSTRACT The indigenous microbial community of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract determines susceptibility to Clostridium difficile colonization and disease. Previous studies have demonstrated that antibiotic-treated mice challenged with C. difficile either developed rapidly lethal C. difficile infection or were stably colonized with mild disease. The GI microbial community of animals with mild disease was dominated by members of the bacterial family Lachnospiraceae, while the gut community in moribund animals had a predominance of Escherichia coli. We investigated the roles of murine Lachnospiraceae and E. coli strains in colonization resistance against C. difficile in germfree mice. Murine Lachnospiraceae and E. coli isolates were cultured from wild-type mice. The ability of each of these isolates to interfere with C. difficile colonization was tested by precolonizing germfree mice with these bacteria 4 days prior to experimental C. difficile challenge. Mice precolonized with a murine Lachnospiraceae isolate, but not those colonized with E. coli, had significantly decreased C. difficile colonization, lower intestinal cytotoxin levels and exhibited less severe clinical signs and colonic histopathology. Infection of germfree mice or mice precolonized with E. coli with C. difficile strain VPI 10463 was uniformly fatal by 48 h, but only 20% mortality was seen at 2 days in mice precolonized with the Lachnospiraceae isolate prior to challenge with VPI 10463. These findings confirm that a single component of the GI microbiota, a murine Lachnospiraceae isolate, could partially restore colonization resistance against C. difficile. Further study of the members within the Lachnospiraceae family could lead to a better understanding of mechanisms of colonization resistance against C. difficile and novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment and prevention of C. difficile infection.