Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gold as a Hedge for Inflation: An Event-Study of Abnormal Inflationary Periods in the Past Five Decades

Historically gold and inflation have had a weak positive correlation; therefore, gold has been considered an inflationary hedge and a “safe haven” in times of high inflation for investors. An event-study of five periods with deviant inflation in the past five decades were examined in this study to determine the abnormal return (AR) of gold in comparison to the U.S. stock market (S&P 500). These findings concluded a deviation in market perception regarding the inflationary hedge that gold has historically adhered to have. Specifically, the recent Russia-Ukraine conflict caused a large shift in investors' sentiment of investing into gold as a hedge, as the event window concluded significant negative abnormal returns. Simultaneously the U.S. experienced economic factors that would historically have caused gold prices to increase, yet the opposite occurred. Although the Ukraine conflict's final outcome is still unknown, early stage-data shows how gold could potentially not be considered a “safe haven” or an inflationary hedge today, given many dynamic factors ruling the world.
Entamoeba Histolytica-Pathogenic Protozoan of the Large Intestine in Humans

Entamoeba histolytica is a cosmopolitan, parasitic protozoan of human large intestine, which is a causative agent of amoebiasis. Amoebiasis manifests with persistent diarrhea containing mucus or blood, accompanied by abdominal pain, flatulence, nausea and fever. In some cases amoebas may travel through the bloodstream from the intestine to the liver or to other organs, causing multiple abscesses. Amoebiasis is a dangerous, parasitic disease and after malaria the second cause of deaths related to parasitic infections worldwide. The highest rate of infections is observed among people living in or traveling through the tropics. Laboratory diagnosis of amoebiasis is quite difficult, comprising of microscopy and methods of molecular biology. Pathogenic species Entamoeba histolytica has to be differentiated from other nonpathogenic amoebas of the intestine, so called commensals, that very often live in the human large intestine and remain harmless. Other intestinal commensals are Entamoeba dispar and Entamoeba moshkovskii, morphologically the same as pathogenic species Entamoeba histolytica sensu stricto. The differential diagnosis of these three amoebas is possible with detection of their DNA.
Almond hulls and citrus pulp can be used as supplementary feeds for dairy cows, but neither has any methane mitigation potential

There has been growing interest in the inclusion of almond hulls and citrus pulp in the diet of Australian dairy cows during summer when pasture availability is limited and digestibility is low. However, there is little information on the resulting milk production response. Thirty-two Holstein Friesian cows were offered one of three diets (lucerne hay, lucerne hay plus almond hulls, lucerne hay plus citrus pulp). Cows fed almond hulls had a lower mean milk yield than those on the other diets. Mean fat yields from cows did not differ between diets. Mean protein yields of cows fed almond hulls were lower than those of cows on the other diets. Methane yield (g/kg dry matter intake) from the cows did not differ between diets. Both almond hulls and citrus pulp can be fed to dairy cows as a partial replacement for high-cost purchased forage, but inclusion of almond hulls may be less desirable than citrus pulp due to reduced yields of milk and milk protein. Neither almond hulls nor citrus pulp exhibited any methane mitigation effect in dairy cows.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 10-6-2011 ALIGNMENT OF BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT AND BUSINESS RULES

Business process management and business rules management both focus on controlling business activities in organizations. Although both management principles have the same focus, they approach manageability and controllability from different perspectives. As more organizations deploy business process management and business rules management, this paper argues that these often separated efforts should be integrated. The goal of this work is to present a step towards this integration. We propose a business rule categorization that is aligned to the business process management lifecycle. In a case study and through a survey the proposed rule categories are validated in terms of mutual exclusivity and completeness. The results indicate the completeness of our main categorization and the categories’ mutual exclusivity. Future research should indicate further refinement by identifying rule
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) Summer 10-6-2011 IT CAPABILITIES IN ERP MAINTENANCE – A REVIEW OF THE ERP POST-IMPLEMENTATION LITERATURE

With the maturing use of ERP systems, the management of their post-implementation phase is receiving increased attention. There is a need to understand how to manage post-implementation activities like ERP maintenance. ERP maintenance is a critical IT service provided by IT organizations in the ERP post-implementation phase, including activities to support and extend existing ERP systems. The extant research has focused on tasks related to ERP maintenance, but it lacks studies that provide insights into capabilities required to perform ERP maintenance successfully. This paper aims to reduce this gap, reviewing IT-related tasks, success and risk factors in the ERP post-implementation literature. Based on this review, eight IT capabilities on the functional level of ERP maintenance are proposed. Integrating these findings with previous IT capability research, the link between the identified ERP maintenance capabilities and firm-wide IT capabilities is examined.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 5-2-2012 BUSINESS ANALYTICS : ENABLING STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT AND ORGANISATIONAL TRANSFORMATION

Business analytics systems can potentially create value and provide competitive advantage to organisations. We argue that business analytics systems can also enable alignment between business strategy and IT strategy and support organisational transformation. We explain how a data warehouse, standardised metrics and global reporting supported the strategic transformation of a diversified and multi-layered international mining company to a unified and integrated global organisation. We identify a number of factors critical to the success of the business analytics initiative and to strategic alignment and organisational transformation, including: the early definition of globally standard metrics and dimensions; a high quality technology infrastructure and high quality data; sustained senior management support together with strong leadership within the business analytics project; effective governance structures that support change management and continual renewal of business analytics capabilities; and hybrid people with a mix of technical, business and strong communication skills. A number of implications of the study are discussed and suggestions for future work are provided.
European Conference on Information Systems ( ECIS ) 2002 Knowledge Management Systems : The Role of Encouragement

Some organisations appear to be more successful than others at adopting and implementing Knowledge Management (KM) systems. In this paper, the authors investigate why this situation may occur through a case study analysis of two organisations that have implemented KM systems. In the first case, the authors consider why one supposedly technologically literate organisation experienced problems implementing what could be termed a ‘tried and tested’ technical solution. In the second, the authors consider a supposedly technologically illiterate organisation’s more positive experiences with a ‘state of the art’ application. The focus of the analysis is on the interplay amongst the organisational factors that inhibited and facilitated the KM projects. Our case analysis suggests that a key factor is the levels of encouragement/discouragement for the use of the system that occur and their source: the technology, the organisation or both.
Area and Energy Efficient Method Using AI for Noise Cancellation in Ear Phones

Adaptive filters are suitable for most of the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications such as channel equalization, noise cancellation, echo cancellation, channel estimation and system identification. Nowadays due to the advancement in semiconductor technology, the need for Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in compact devices is increased. The major idea behind this proposed work is to design an area and energy efficient novel adaptive filter suitable for in-ear headphones by combining Normalized Least Mean Square (NLMS) and Block LMS (BLMS). The proposed filter is designed and simulated using Xilinx ISE 13.2. The simulation results shows that the proposed design mitigates the unwanted noises in various frequency bands.
Covariability of Spring Snowpack and Summer Rainfall across the Southwest United States

Abstract Interannual fluctuations of observed summer rainfall across the monsoon region of the southwestern United States are analyzed to ascertain their spatial coherence and to test the hypothesis that antecedent spring snowpack anomalies may modulate the monsoon and exhibit an inverse correlation with summer rainfall anomalies. To characterize the spatial coherence of seasonal rainfall anomalies, an objective linear analysis of interannual variability is applied to climate divisional data across the Southwest. Three coherent subregions are identified, broadly representing rainfall anomalies across Arizona, eastern New Mexico/western Texas (the Southwest Plains), and most of New Mexico. Interannual fluctuations of summer rainfall in the New Mexico region exhibit a very significant negative correlation with a large-scale index of the antecedent 1 April snowpack over the southern U.S. Rocky Mountains during the 1961–90 climatic averaging period. This strong relationship seems to break down in the years be.
Research on Integrated Energy Day-Ahead Optimization Algorithm Considering Multiple Uncertainties

In view of the multiple uncertainties of the integrated energy system and the limitations of traditional robust optimization and stochastic optimization methods, considering the multiple uncertainties of renewable energy output, load forecasting and day-ahead electricity price forecasting such as photovoltaic, a distributed robust optimization algorithm based on Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence is adopted to establish an integrated energy day-ahead robust opportunity constrained optimization model with the lowest total operating cost as the objective function. Through convex approximation method, uncertainty transfer method and other methods, the established non convex and nonlinear robust opportunity constrained optimization model is derived into a deterministic linear optimization model that can be directly solved by using the linear solver. Finally, in the simulation analysis of numerical examples, the superiority of the proposed algorithm was verified through comparison with robust optimization and stochastic optimization results.
Theoretical Background

Definition Connectionism is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of cognition that integrates elements from the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, and Philosophy of Mind. As a theoretical movement in Cognitive Science, Connectionism suggests that cognitive phenomena can be explained with respect to a set of general information-processing principles, known as Parallel Distributed Processing (Rumelhart, Hinton and McClelland, 1986). From a methodological point of view, Connectionism is a framework for studying cognitive phenomena using architectures of simple processing units interconnected via weighted connections. These architectures present analogies to biological neural systems and are referred to as (Artificial) Neural Networks. Connectionist studies typically propose and implement neural network models to explain various aspects of cognition. The term Connectionism stems from the proposal that cognition emerges in neural network models as a product of a learning process which shapes the values of the weighted connections. Connectionism supports the idea that knowledge is represented in the weights of the connections between the processing units in a distributed fashion. This means that knowledge is encoded in the structure of the processing system, in contrast to the Symbolic approach where knowledge is readily shifted between different memory registers. Artificial Neural Networks are abstract models of biological neural systems. They consist of a set of identical processing units which are referred to as artificial neurons or processing units. Artificial neurons are interconnected via weighted connections. A great deal of biological complexity is omitted in artificial neural network models. For example, artificial neurons perform the simple function of discriminating between different levels of input activation. The detector model of the neuron (figure 1), is a crude approximation of the role of dendrites and synaptic channels in biological neurons. According to this model, each neuron receives a number of inputs from other neurons. The neuron integrates the inputs by computing a weighted sum of sending activation. Based on the value of the total input activation, an activation function (e.g., a threshold function) determines the level of the output activation of the neuron. The output activation is propagated to succeeding neurons
The Road Ahead: Advancing Interactions between Autonomous Vehicles, Pedestrians, and Other Road Users

While great strides have been taken in advancing the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), challenges abound in understanding and improving how Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will interact with and within society. Through this paper, the authors attempt to paint the picture of challenges unique to the study and advancement of interfaces between AVs and vulnerable road users (VRUs). In turn, these gaps in research highlight the opportunities for academia, industry, and public policy to collaborate and advance the state of the art of AV-VRU interaction, and the need for a dedicated forum for sharing insights across these various sectors.
Performance Analysis of Amplify-and- Forward Opportunistic Relaying in Rician Fading

This letter analyzes the performance of single relay selection cooperative wireless networks using amplify-and forward relaying. The network channels are modeled as independent, nonidentical, Rician distributed coefficients. We derive approximate formulas for the symbol error rate (SER) of the opportunistic relaying cooperative network. We first derive the PDF of the approximate value of the total SNR. Then, assuming M-PSK or M-QAM modulations, the PDF is used to determine the SER. For sufficiently large SNR, this letter derives the close-form average SER. The simplicity of the asymptotic results provides valuable insights into the performance of cooperative networks and suggests means of optimizing them. We also use simulation to verify the analytical results. Results show that the derived error rates are tight bounds particularly at medium and high SNR.
Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-positive breast cancer: which cytotoxic agent best complements trastuzumab’s efficacy in vitro?

Aim: To investigate the effects of trastuzumab in combination with either doxorubicin or geldanamycin on in vitro cell viability, cell cycling, apoptosis and relative HER-2 expression in HER-2-positive (SK-BR-3) and estrogen receptor-positive (MCF-7) breast adenocarcinoma models. Results: HER-2-rich SK-BR-3 cells demonstrated a greater sensitivity to the effects of doxorubicin than MCF-7 cells. Concurrent trastuzumab exposure resulted in a further reduction in cell viability. This decreased cell viability induced by doxorubicin was associated with activation of executioner caspases as well as with alterations in cell-cycle kinetics, primarily promoting S-phase accumulation. Doxorubicin had no effect on surface HER-2 density expression. Geldanamycin cell viability significantly greater in SK-BR-3 than MCF-7 cells, and was associated with G 2 cell-cycle accumulation. The addition of trastuzumab did not augment these effects. Geldanamycin promoted substantial reductions in relative surface HER-2 density in SK-BR-3 cells. Conclusion: The in vitro data supported the rationale for using doxorubicin in trastuzumab-based therapies. Therefore, despite the incidence of cardiotoxicity, doxorubicin could retain a fundamental role in treating HER-2-positive breast cancer. While geldanamycin is a potent cytotoxic agent, its concurrent use with trastuzumab requires further research into the transient or permanent nature of alterations in HER-2 status in cell progeny.
Topography and origin of the southern Rocky Mountains and Alvarado Ridge

Summary The southern Rocky Mountains of the western United States and their structural continuation southward to the Mexican border represent the crest of a bilaterally symmetrical, continental feature of large dimensions, the Alvarado Ridge. It is characterized by long, gentle topographic rises with systematic, concave-upward slopes on which elevation declines in a quasi-exponential manner. The rises were originally blanketed with clastic sediments, a few tens to hundreds of metres thick; their erosional source being at the ridge crest. The blanket on the E rise is well preserved and has been undisturbed for nearly 5 Ma, save for regional Neogene warping and local, near-crest faulting associated with uplift of the ridge. A comparative study of variations in regional elevation, gravity and crustal thickness suggest that the Alvarado Ridge and its rises are isostatically compensated and that almost none of the compensation involves an Airy crustal root. The flexural rigidity of the lithosphere is likewise believed to play but a minor role in the origin of the regional topography. Instead, the data are interpreted as confirming the hypothesis of distributed lithospheric thinning continuous and non-continuous in nature, and related thermotectonic uplift. Elevation of the ridge crest took place above the axis of an elongate, rapidly developing, asthenospheric bulge along which extensional strain in the shallow crust was limited to a central corridor only 150–200 km wide. The relatively low density and geometrical configuration of that bulge supports the topography. Heat-flow data in the region are in accord with this model.
Spatiotemporal stochastic simulation of monthly rainfall patterns in the United Kingdom (1980–87)

With few exceptions, spatial estimation of rainfall typically relies on information in the spatial domain only. In this paper, a method that utilizes information in time and space and provides an assessment of estimate uncertainty is used to create a gridded monthly rainfall dataset for the United Kingdom over the period 1980-87. Observed rainfall profiles within the region were regarded as the sum of a deterministic temporal trend and a stochastic residual component. The parameters of the temporal trend components established at the rain gauges were interpolated in space, accounting for their auto- and cross correlation, and for relationships with ancillary spatial variables. Stochastic Gaussian simulation was then employed to generate alternative realizations of the spatiotemporal residual component, which were added to the estimated trend component to yield realizations of rainfall (after distributional corrections). In total, 40 realizations of rainfall were generated for each month of the 8-yr period. The methodology resulted in reasonably accurate estimates of rainfall but underestimated in northwest and north Scotland and northwest England. The cause for the underestimation was identified as a weak relationship between local rainfall and the spatial area average rainfall, used to estimate the temporal trend model in these regions, and suggestions were made for improvement. The strengths of this method are the utilization of information from the time and space domain, and the assessment of spatial uncertainty in the estimated rainfall values.
First record of the Caucasus field mouse Apodemus ponticus Sviridenko, 1936 (Rodentia Muridae) from Iran

This study is the first record of six specimens of Apodemus ponticus Sviridenko, 1936 (Rodentia Muridae) from the Zagros Mountains, north western Iran. Four external features besides 13 linear measurements of the skull and 14 dental characters were measured. This species was identified by its extensive and well-marked boundary throat spot. In addition, A. ponticus shows morphometric characters including head and body length (mean= 90.86±2.54), length of bullae (mean = 6.34±0.11), breadth of bullae (mean = 4.77±0.12) and dental characters consisting of maxillary tooth row (mean = 3.85±0.06) and mandibular tooth row (mean = 3.90±0.05) which are different from the sympatric species A. witherbyi Thomas, 1902 . Based on our results, the distributional range of A. ponticus extends to oak forests of the Zagros Mountains, west Iran which is considered to be the easternmost boundary of its range.
Methodology to classify rice cultural types based on water regimes using multi-temporal RADARSAT-1 data

This study presents a methodology to classify rice cultural types based on water regimes using multi-temporal synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. The methodology was developed based on the theoretical understanding of radar scattering mechanisms with rice crop canopy, considering crop phenology and variation in water depth in the rice field, emphasizing the sensitivity of SAR to crop geometry and water. The logic used was the characteristic decrease in SAR backscatter that is associated with the puddled or transplanted field due to specular reflection for little exposure of crop, with increase in backscatter as the crop growth progresses due to volume scattering. Besides, the multiple interactions between SAR and vegetation/water also lead to an increase in backscatter as the crop growth progresses. Classification thresholds were established based on the information provided by each pixel in each image, the pixel's typical temporal behaviour due to crop phenology and changing water depth in rice field and their corresponding SAR signature. Based on this logic, the study site (i.e. South 24 Paraganas district, West Bengal) was classified into three major rice cultural types, namely shallow water rice (SWR; 5 cm ≤ water depth ≤ 30 cm), intermediate water rice (IWR; 30 cm ≤ water depth ≤ 50 cm) and deep water rice (DWR; water depth > 50 cm) during the kharif season. These three types represent most of the traditional rice-growing areas of India. The methodology was validated with the field data collected synchronously with the satellite passes. Classification results showed an overall accuracy of 98.5% (95.5% kappa coefficient) compared with a maximum-likelihood classifier (MLC) with an overall accuracy of 95.5% (84.2% of kappa coefficient) with 95% confidence interval. The relationship between field parameters, especially exposed plant height and water depth with SAR backscatter, was explored to design empirical models for each of the three rice classes. Significant relationships were observed in all the rice classes (coefficient of determination, R 2, value more than 0.85) even though they had similar growth profiles but varied with water depth. The two main conclusions drawn from this study are (i) the importance of multi-temporal SAR data for the classification of rice culture types based on water regimes and (ii) the advantages and flexibility of the knowledge-based classifier for classification of RADARSAT-1 data. However, being empirical, the approach needs modification according to the current rainfall pattern and rice-growing practice.