Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nonlinear Connections Between Realized Volatility and High / Low Range Information

In this paper we look at the relationship between daily realized volatility estimates using intraday data and range based estimates using daily high/low price range information. Several classical range based volatility estimators are compared with nonlinear functional forms in mapping range based information onto realized volatility measures. We find that the older range based estimators can be improved by using more generalized nonlinear functions of the high/low range information. We show that these nonlinearities form an important piece of information for understanding the dynamics of prices at high frequencies. We also show that these improved volatility estimates can be used in forecasting future variances and risk measures, and improve on the typical range estimators.
Improved electrothermal position sensing in MEMS with non-uniformly shaped heaters

For electrothermal MEMS position sensors, we introduce a non-uniform beam profile to enhance their sensitivity, linearity, and noise characteristics. Simulation results confirm that the proposed beam profile provides a more uniform temperature distribution compared to conventional electrothermal sensors with uniform beam cross sections. The effectiveness of the proposed sensor compared to a conventional design is experimentally verified by fabricating and testing an electrostatic SOI MEMS nanopositioner equipped with both types of sensors.
A Decomposable Branching Process in a Markovian Environment

A population has two types of individuals, with each occupying an island. One of those, where individuals of type 1 live, offers a variable environment. Type 2 individuals dwell on the other island, in a constant environment. Only one-way migration is possible. We study then asymptotics of the survival probability in critical and subcritical cases.
A Low Ripple Current Mode Voltage Doubler

Experimental results of a fully integrated low ripple charge pump voltage converter are presented. The pump is a current mode voltage doubler with a novel parasitic capacitance precharge mechanism for output voltage ripple reduction. A prototype of the pump was designed and fabricated in 130 nm CMOS process. The pump supplied with 1.2 V delivers 1.5 V on its output. Despite reducing the size of the filtering capacitor (down to 5.2 % of the "flying" capacitor), the ripple level is 50 mV.
Plant Lesions Promote the Rapid Multiplication of Escherichia coli O157:H7 on Postharvest Lettuce

ABSTRACT Several outbreaks of Escherichia coli O157:H7 infections have been associated with minimally processed leafy vegetables in the United States. Harvesting and processing cause plant tissue damage. In order to assess the role of plant tissue damage in the contamination of leafy greens with E. coli O157:H7, the effect of mechanical, physiological, and plant disease-induced lesions on the growth of this pathogen on postharvest romaine lettuce was investigated. Within only 4 h after inoculation, the population sizes of E. coli O157:H7 increased 4.0-, 4.5-, and 11.0-fold on lettuce leaves that were mechanically bruised, cut into large pieces, and shredded into multiple pieces, respectively. During the same time, E. coli O157:H7 population sizes increased only twofold on leaves that were left intact after harvest. Also, the population size of E. coli O157:H7 was 27 times greater on young leaves affected by soft rot due to infection by Erwinia chrysanthemi than on healthy middle-aged leaves. Confocal microscopy revealed that leaf tip burn lesions, which are caused by a common physiological disorder of lettuce, harbored dense populations of E. coli O157:H7 cells both internally and externally. Investigation of the colonization of cut lettuce stems by E. coli O157:H7 showed that the pathogen grew 11-fold over 4 h of incubation after its inoculation onto the stems, from which large amounts of latex were released. The results of this study indicate that plant tissue damage of various types can promote significant multiplication of E. coli O157:H7 over a short time and suggest that harvesting and processing are critical control points in the prevention or reduction of E. coli O157:H7 contamination of lettuce.
A Multistatic GNSS Synthetic Aperture Radar for Surface Characterization

Bistatic global navigation satellite system (GNSS) radar has received increased attention in recent years within both the radar and GNSS communities. In this paper, the traditional bistatic GNSS radar and bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) concepts are fused into a more generic multistatic GNSS SAR system for surface characterization. This is done by using the range and Doppler processing techniques on signals transmitted by multiple satellites to determine the angular dependence of the surface reflectivity. The method has also been tested experimentally, and the results are presented.
Effect of Early Pelvic Binder Use in Emergency 2 Management of Suspected Pelvic Trauma : A 3 Retrospective Cohort Study 4

Background: We aimed to evaluate the effect of early pelvic binder use in emergency 16 management of suspected pelvic trauma, compared with the conventional stepwise approach. 17 Methods: We enrolled trauma patients with initial stabilization using a pelvic binder for suspecting 18 pelvic injury. Inclusion criteria were traumatic injury requiring a trauma team and at least one of 19 the following: loss of consciousness or Glasgow coma score (GCS) < 13; systolic blood pressure < 90 20 mmHg; falling from ≥6 m; injury to multiple vital organs; and suspected pelvic injury. Various 21 parameters, including gender, age, mechanism of injury, GCS, mortality, hospital stay, initial vital 22 sign, revised trauma score, injury severity score, and outcome, were assessed and compared with 23 historical controls. Results: A total of 204 patients with high-energy multiple-trauma from single 24 level I trauma center in North Taiwan were enrolled in the study from August 2013 to July 2014. 25 The two group baseline patient characteristics were all collected and compared. The trauma 26 patients with suspected pelvic fractures initially stabilized with a pelvic binder had shorter hospital 27 and ICU stays. The study group achieved statistically significantly improved survival and lower 28 mean blood transfusion volume and mortality rate although they were more severe in the trauma 29 score. Conclusions: We recommend prompt pelvic binder use for suspected pelvic injury before 30 definitive imaging is available, as a cervical spine collar is used to protect the cervical spine from 31 further injury prior to definitive identification and characterization of an injury. 32
Changes in negative emotionality in infancy: The role of mother's attachment concerns

In a longitudinal study the contribution of mothers' attachment concerns to the infant negative emotionality was examined. Ninety-three mothers described their child's temperament at 3 and 9 months. The results revealed that increased negative emotionality at 9 months was related not only to high levels of fussiness at 3 months but also to mothers' concerns and worries about their personal relationships. It was found that infants of mothers who tended to be avoidant in their close adult relationships showed increased levels of negative emotionality during the latter part of the first year. Further, infants of mothers who appeared secure (not avoidant) in their adult close relationships showed decreased levels of negative emotionality. The findings of the present study give some support to a directional link between caregivers' characteristics and the regulation of negative emotionality in infancy.
Women, Salons, and the State in the Aftermath of the French Revolution

Historians have generally accepted the argument that the salon culture through which women participated in the public sphere of eighteenth-century France faded in the 1780s, foreshadowing and complementing the general exclusion of women from politics by the French Revolution. This article presents evidence that salon sociability came back to life in the aftermath of the French Revolution, giving upper-class women renewed access to the public sphere as part of the partial reconstruction of aristocratic power. Napoleon encouraged this revival as part of a strategy for winning the support of traditional elites, but he deplored powerful women and struggled to contain salonnières by reducing them to hostesses. He supported the development of ministerial salons centered on male notables and exiled Madame de Staël, France's most prominent salonnière, in order to silence political dissent in high society. Salons recovered significantly with the liberalization of the public sphere during the Restoration and the July Monarchy, along with the influence of salonnières, who presided over a new mondanité (society life) linked closely with the political sociability of elites, and supported by an enduring nostalgia for the elegant society of the past. Nevertheless, the connection between mondanité and politics slowly weakened, and upper-class women saw their informal political role diminished due to the rise of modern institutions designed to organize the political life of a widening middle-class electorate. The salon's decreasing significance within the public sphere occurred after the consolidation of modern gender norms and the juridical inscription of women's second-class status.
Generalization of the PageRank Model

AbstractThis paper develops a generalization of the PageRank model of page centralities in the global webgraphof hyperlinks. The webgraph of adjacencies is generalized to a valued directed graph, and the scalardampening coeﬃcient for walks through the graph is relaxed to allow for heterogeneous values. Avisitation count approach may be employed to apply the more general model, based on the number ofvisits to a page and the page’s proportionate allocations of these visits to other nodes of the webgraph. 1 Introduction In a multi-agent network, the total inﬂuences of the agents are related to the number and length of thewalks in the network. A model of this relationship [1] isV= (I+αW+α 2 W 2 +α 3 W 3 +.)(1 −α)= (I−αW) −1 (1 −α) (1)where W n×n is row-stochastic and 0 < α < 1 is scalar. The v ij of V= [v ij ] correspond to the relative netinﬂuence of agent j on agent i. Thus,r=1nV T 1, r T 1= 1, (2)is the average relative net inﬂuence of agent j on all agents of the system, and may taken as a measure ofthe centrality of node j in the system [2, pp.1485 -1487]. The average may be based on the n values of eachcolumn, or n − 1 values when the main diagonal values of V are excluded. If the model is expressed asfollows [3]r=1−αn+αW
Test-Retest Variability in Glaucoma Patients Tested with C-20-1 Screening-Mode Frequency Doubling Technology Perimetry

Purpose:To investigate test-retest variability in glaucoma patients tested with C-20-1 (screening) Frequency Doubling Technology (FDT) perimetry. Methods:Thirty-one glaucoma patients with a range of visual field defects (17 with mild, 11 with moderate, and 3 with severe defects by AGIS classification) and experienced in standard automated perimetry but not FDT perimetry were prospectively recruited. The C-20-1 screening mode of FDT was consecutively administered three times. Concordance between tests for each patient was measured by presence and severity of defects for each test location. Learning and/or fatigue effects were also evaluated using FDT test scores in which number and severity of defects was graded. Results:Agreement between FDT test locations averaged 88% for any defect, but only 51% for severity of defect. Although the mean test score increased slightly over the three tests, subjects did not demonstrate a statistically significant change in test score across the three testings (P = 0.975). Among 17 patients with early glaucoma (AGIS score 1–5), two returned a normal initial FDT test, and four returned a normal second FDT test. Conclusions:Using C-20-1 FDT, concordance between tests at a given test location was high for the presence of any defect, which would be important in glaucoma screening, but was only fair for severity of defect. Six of 17 patients with early glaucoma returned normal tests during testing. This group of glaucoma patients with perimetric experience did not demonstrate a significant learning or fatigue effect with FDT screening perimetry.
Administrative Traditions and Policy Change: When Policy Paradigms Matter. The Case of Italian Administrative Reform During the 1990s

In recent years a growing number of scholars have developed cognitive and ideational theoretical frameworks for the analysis of policy-making processes: their underlying belief is that ideas (conceived as beliefs, causal theories and paradigms) really do matter. The concept of policy paradigm has been particularly useful in studying both the contents and dynamics of policy change. The present paper takes this concept, partially reformulates Hall's definition in terms of the distinction between the hegemonic and dominant paradigm, and then uses it to come to terms with the contents and dynamics of the Italian administrative reforms implemented during the 1990s. Mixing the conceptual lenses offered by the ideational and cultural path taken in the field of public policy and by historical neo-institutionalism, this article attempts to explain the Italian trajectory, and to underline how normative and cognitive elements represent an important influence on the ‘design’ and ‘strategy’ of policy change. Our analysis of the consistency of the reformers’ documents and policy strategy shows that, despite their claims, the contents and strategy of reform do not represent a paradigmatic about-turn, but constitute an evolutionary adaptation to external pressures imposed by the hegemonic administrative paradigm.
Solving Packing Integer Programs via Randomized Rounding with Alterations

We give new approximation algorithms for packing integer programs (PIPs) by employing the method of randomized rounding combined with alterations. Our first result is a simpler approximation algorithm for general PIPs which matches the best known bounds, and which admits an efficient parallel implementation. We also extend these results to a multi-criteria version of PIPs. Our second result is for the class of packing integer programs (PIPs) that are column sparse, i. e. , where there is a specified upper bound k on the number of constraints that each variable appears in. We give an (ek+ o(k))-approximation algorithm for k-column sparse PIPs, improving over previously known O(k 2 )-approximation ratios. We also generalize our result to the case of maximizing non-negative monotone submodular functions over k-column sparse packing constraints, and obtain an e 2k
Inhibitors of the renin angiotensin system: implications for the anaesthesiologist.

The major long-term benefits of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors have now clearly been demonstrated in patients with arterial hypertension, cardiac insufficiency, coronary artery disease and several renal diseases. Such long-term treatment markedly alters the cardiovascular response to anaesthesia and surgery, whereas preliminary data suggest that short-term renin angiotensin system blockade might provide perioperative organ protection and improved circulatory conditions. Besides the classic view that the conversion of angiotensin I to angiotensin II is mainly due to ACE, alternative pathways have recently been identified, including cathepsin G as well as chymostatin- and aprotinin-sensitive serine proteases that are released from mastocytes and endothelial cells and which are insensitive to the effects of ACE inhibitors. These proteases are thought to contribute to tissue perfusion under hypoxic conditions and to structural remodelling. In clinical practice, ACE inhibitors may be preferred to angiotensin II receptor antagonists since the former, besides reducing angiotensin II synthesis, also lead to an accumulation of kinins (e.g. bradykinin), which have important cardio- and renal protective effects through liberation of prostacyclin and nitric oxide in endothelial cells and through stimulation of guanylate cyclase to form cyclic GMP.
Traditional and novel electrocardiographic conduction and repolarization markers of sudden cardiac death

Sudden cardiac death, frequently due to ventricular arrhythmias, is a significant problem globally. Most affected individuals do not arrive at hospital in time for medical treatment. Therefore, there is an urgent need to identify the most-at-risk patients for insertion of prophylactic implantable cardioverter defibrillators. Clinical risk markers derived from electrocardiography are important for this purpose. They can be based on repolarization, including corrected QT (QTc) interval, QT dispersion (QTD), interval from the peak to the end of the T-wave (Tpeak - Tend), (Tpeak - Tend)/QT, T-wave alternans (TWA), and microvolt TWA. Abnormal repolarization properties can increase the risk of triggered activity and re-entrant arrhythmias. Other risk markers are based solely on conduction, such as QRS duration (QRSd), which is a surrogate marker of conduction velocity (CV) and QRS dispersion (QRSD) reflecting CV dispersion. Conduction abnormalities in the form of reduced CV, unidirectional block, together with a functional or a structural obstacle, are conditions required for circus-type or spiral wave re-entry. Conduction and repolarization can be represented by a single parameter, excitation wavelength (λ = CV × effective refractory period). λ is an important determinant of arrhythmogenesis in different settings. Novel conduction-repolarization markers incorporating λ include Lu et al.' index of cardiac electrophysiological balance (iCEB: QT/QRSd), [QRSD× (Tpeak - Tend)/QRSd] and [QRSD × (Tpeak - Tend)/(QRSd × QT)] recently proposed by Tse and Yan. The aim of this review is to provide up to date information on traditional and novel markers and discuss their utility and downfalls for risk stratification.
Diversity trends and their ontogenetic basis: an exploration of allometric disparity in rodents

It has been hypothesized that most morphological evolution occurs by allometric differentiation. Because rodents encapsulate a phenomenal amount of taxonomic diversity and, among several clades, contrasting levels of morphological diversity, they represent an excellent subject to address the question: how variable are allometric patterns during evolution? We investigated the influence of phylogenetic relations and ecological factors on the results of the first quantification of allometric disparity among rodents by exploring allometric space, a multivariate morphospace here derived from, and encapsulating all, the ontogenetic trajectories of 34 rodent species from two parallel phylogenetic radiations. Disparity was quantified using angles between ontogenetic trajectories for different species and clades. We found an overlapping occupation of allometric space by muroid and hystricognath species, revealing both clades possess similar abilities to evolve in different directions of phenotypic space, and anatomical diversity does not act to constrain the labile nature of allometric patterning. Morphological features to enable efficient processing of food serve to group rodents in allometric space, reflecting the importance of convergent morphology, rather than shared evolutionary history, in the generation of allometric patterns. Our results indicate that the conserved level of morphological integration found among primates cannot simply be extended to all mammals.
Chinese Named Entity Abbreviation Generation Using First-Order Logic

Normalizing named entity abbreviations to their standard forms is an important preprocessing task for question answering, entity retrieval, event detection, microblog processing, and many other applications. Along with the quick expansion of microblogs, this task has received more and more attentions in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel entity abbreviation generation method using first-order logic to model long distance constraints. In order to reduce the human effort of manual annotating corpus, we also introduce an automatically training data construction method with simple strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than state-of-the-art approaches.
CHANGING PATTERN OF NASAL CARRIAGE OF STAPHYLOCOCCUS AUREUS IN UNDERGRADUATE MEDICAL STUDENTS

Staphylococcus aureus is the most common pathogen in nosocomial infections (4-6,17,19). Nasal carriage of Staphylococcus aureus is now considered a well defined risk factor for subsequent infections in various groups of patients (5,8,12,19). Nasal carriage of the pathogen among hospital personnel is an important source of nosocomial infection (1.3.18). Very few dedicated studies have investigated the nasal carriage state among medical students (3,18,21). Incidence of Staphylococcus aureus in the nasal flora of medical students, with or without varying degrees of clinical exposures were determined in our study. Nasal cultures from these students demonstrated a significantly increasing rate of colonization of Staphylococcus aureus with increased clinical exposure and also a corresponding increase in Methicillin resistance.
Narrative Semiotics and Teachers’ Beliefs Regarding the Relevance of Formal Learning Theory to Classroom Practice: a US study

Abstract The primary objective of this study was to examine teachers’ assumptions about the relevance to classroom practice of the kind of formal learning theory one encounters in educational psychology courses in the USA. Sixty‐six pre‐ and inservice teachers wrote a total of 132 narratives explaining how knowledge of certain aspects of behavioral learning theory could help teachers resolve the problems described in open‐ended case studies. The narratives were evaluated in terms of five parameters which were inferred from theory about narrative discourse. Together the parameters described how an author defined, ordered, and connected the standard components of narrative discourse (setting, problem, resolution, etc.). The analysis indicated that both pre‐ and inservice teachers tended to regard behavioral learning theories as prescriptive solutions that could be applied to any classroom context to yield predictable results. Preservice teachers tended to generalize beyond the boundaries of a case, inferrin.
Cost effectiveness and equity are ignored

EDITOR,—David L Sackett and colleagues' editorial on evidence based medicine is confused and inadequate.1 The authors argue, among other things, that “doctors practising evidence based medicine will identify and apply the most efficacious interventions to maximise the quality and quantity of life for individual patients. ” (Note the use of “apply” (does the patient have no choice? ) and “efficacious” rather than effective. ) This individual medical ethic has to be traded off against the social ethic of the …
Earning Its Place as a Pan-Human Theory: Universality of the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect across 41 Culturally and Economically Diverse Countries.

For more than 2 decades, big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) research has demonstrated that students in high-ability classes and schools have lower academic self-concepts than their equally able counterparts in mixed-ability schools. However, cross-cultural BFLPE research has been limited to mostly developed and individualist countries. Using the Program for International Student Assessment database (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2005a, 2005b), the present investigation assessed the BFLPE in 41 culturally and economically diverse countries. In support of the BFLPE, the effect of school-average self-concept was negative for the total sample (effect size = -.49), negative for each of the 41 countries considered separately, and statistically significant in 38 countries. In this large, culturally diverse sample of countries, the BFLPE was evident in both collectivist and individualist cultures and in economically developing and developed nations. Implications for BFLPE theory and educational practice are discussed