Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal Mortgage Refinancing with Endogenous Mortgage Rates : an Intensity Based , Equilibrium Approach

This paper summarizes recent research on a new approach, namely, an equilibrium approach, to the valuation of fixed-rate mortgage contracts. Working in a discrete time setting with the mortgagor’s prepayment behavior described by a suitable intensity process and with exogenous mortgage rates, the value of the contract is derived in an explicit form that can be interpreted as the principal balance plus the value of a certain swap. This leads to a nonlinear equation for what the mortgage rate must be in a competitive market, and thus mortgage rates are endogenous and depend upon the mortgagor’s prepayment behavior. The complementary problem, where mortgage rates are exogenous and the mortgagor seeks the optimal refinancing strategy, is then solved via a Markov decision chain. Finally, the equilibrium problem, where the mortgagor is a representative agent in the economy who seeks the optimal refinancing strategy and where the mortgage rates are endogenous, is developed, solved, and analysed. Existence and uniqueness results, as well as a numerical example, are provided.
Cheque mates: participatory design of digital payments with eighty somethings

This paper describes a project exploring the design of digital payment services in collaboration with 16 people aged over 80. Many older people find cheques valuable as a means of payment but the UK Payments Council recently proposed their abolition. We describe two designs that simultaneously aimed to preserve and augment the paper cheque as a means of making electronic payments. These were devised during participatory design workshops through critical dialogues with our eighty something participants. Workshop discussions resulted in the creation of a real world cheque system where we issued pre-paid cheques without the involvement of banks. This work informed the development of a digital cheque book based on Anoto digital pen technology. The work illustrates the value of participatory design with 'extraordinary' users, such as the eighty somethings, in HCI.
C-Reactive protein, a sensitive marker of inflammation, predicts future risk of coronary heart disease in initially healthy middle-aged men: results from the MONICA (Monitoring Trends and Determinants in Cardiovascular Disease) Augsburg Cohort Study, 1984 to 1992.

BACKGROUND Inflammatory reactions in coronary plaques play an important role in the pathogenesis of acute atherothrombotic events; inflammation elsewhere is also associated with both atherogenesis generally and its thrombotic complications. Recent studies indicate that systemic markers of inflammation can identify subjects at high risk of coronary events. METHODS AND RESULTS We used a sensitive immunoradiometric assay to examine the association of serum C-reactive protein (CRP) with the incidence of first major coronary heart disease (CHD) event in 936 men 45 to 64 years of age. The subjects, who were sampled at random from the general population, participated in the first MONICA Augsburg survey (1984 to 1985) and were followed for 8 years. There was a positive and statistically significant unadjusted relationship, which was linear on the log-hazards scale, between CRP values and the incidence of CHD events (n=53). The hazard rate ratio (HRR) of CHD events associated with a 1-SD increase in log-CRP level was 1.67 (95% CI, 1.29 to 2. 17). After adjustment for age, the HRR was 1.60 (95% CI, 1.23 to 2. 08). Adjusting further for smoking behavior, the only variable selected from a variety of potential confounders by a forward stepping process with a 5% change in the relative risk of CRP as the selection criterion, yielded an HRR of 1.50 (95% CI, 1.14 to 1.97). CONCLUSIONS These results confirm the prognostic relevance of CRP, a sensitive systemic marker of inflammation, to the risk of CHD in a large, randomly selected cohort of initially healthy middle-aged men. They suggest that low-grade inflammation is involved in pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, especially its thrombo-occlusive complications.
Investing in Children and their Life Chances

Parents who have children and invest well in their future create, all at once, private and collective welfare. The increasingly large gap between the desired number of children and actual fertility must be interpreted as a welfare failure for families but also as a major problem for our economy and society. If, additionally, we invest too little in our children’s skills the outcome is negative both for their life chances and for our future productivity. The new lowfertility equilibrium together with a substantial number of early school leavers that we see in many advanced countries poses, accordingly a policy challenge of considerable urgency. The challenge is clearly not limited to the rich OECD nations. Fertility has fallen sharply in East Asia and now also in a number of Latin American countries. As a whole, Latin American fertility has fallen from an average of 4.5 births per woman in the late 1970s to 2.5 in the new Century. There are several Caribbean nations that are approaching low fertility, meaning less than 1.6 per woman, and Chile seems headed in a similar direction (Guzman et.al., 2006). Latin America also faces a major skills challenge. While school enrolment rates are generally high in Latin America, there is great unevenness in terms of post-lower secondary level attainment. From the PISA studies as well as the International Adult Literacy Surveys it is quite evident that key Latin American nations, such as Brazil, Chile and Mexico, perform internationally poorly in terms of developing cognitive learning skills. In the 2000 PISA study, the mean Brazilian score is one standard deviation below the OECD mean, a truly huge gap. Similarly, from the IALS data we see that a full half of the Chilean population scored in the bottom quintile in terms of both prose and quantitative abilities. 1 This suggests that youth in the economically most advanced Latin American countries are poorly prepared for the evolving knowledge economy. 1 In comparison to 7% in Sweden, 14% in Germany, and 21% in the UK and US (OECD, 2000: Table 2.2)
Factor and Rasch Analysis of the School Culture Survey.

This paper examines the School Culture Survey developed by J. Saphier and M. King (1985) and its association with school and teacher characteristics. The research was conducted in the context of a Department of Education Fund for Innovation in Education grant to a large school district in the western United States. Participants were 27 principals and 425 teachers who taught grades kindergarten through 12. Rasch and factor analyses indicated that three subscales comprise the School Culture Survey. They are: (1) Teacher Professionalism and Goal Setting; (2) Administrator Professional Treatment of Teachers; and (3) Teacher Collaboration. Results suggest that administrators perceived that they treated teachers more professionally than teachers thought the administrators did. Teachers with the most positive attitudes were from high or low socioeconomic status (SES) schools, while teachers with the least positive attitudes were from middle SES schools. Teachers with single-age, rather than multiage, classes scored significantly higher on subscale 1, Teacher Professionalism and Goal Setting. Age predicted responses on subscale 3, Teacher Collaboration. Satisfaction with position was a significant predictor for all three subscales. Teacher efficacy, conceptual complexity, and empowerment were significantly correlated with one or more of the three subscales, but at a low level. (Contains 1 figure, 9 tables, and 53 references.) (Author/SLD) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *****************AAA**AAAAAAAA*. AA*AA,k*A. *AA**************************** Factor and Rasch Analysis of the School Culture Survey U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Officce9t Educational Research and Improvement EDUO TIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY J EN /ulfct E)14 11 fa TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) Jennifer L. Edwards, PhD The Fielding Institute Kathy E. Green, PhD University of Denver Cherie A. Lyons, PhD University of Colorado at Denver Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association April, 1996 New York, New York
On Matrices Arising in the Finite Field Analogue of Euler's Integral Transform

In his 1984 Ph.D. thesis, J. Greene defined an analogue of the Euler integral transform for finite field hypergeometric series. Here we consider a special family of matrices which arise naturally in the study of this transform and prove a conjecture of Ono about the decomposition of certain finite field hypergeometric functions into functions of lower dimension.
Baud Rate Estimation of FSK Signals Based on Wavelet Transform

Baud rate is an important quantity in telecommunications and reconnaissance. Current baud rate estimation algorithm mainly focuses on Phase Shift Keying (PSK) and Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK) signals. This paper proposes a new baud rate estimation algorithm of Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) signals based on wavelet transform. Comparing with limited number of baud rate estimation methods for FSK signals, this algorithm has better anti-noise performance and can still work in high dynamic circumstance, as demonstrated by extensive Monte Carlo simulations.
Nonparametric Leverage and Volatility Feedback Effects and Nonparametric Conditional Dependence Between S & P 500 Index Returns and Log-Increments of Implied Volatility Index ( VIX ) ∗

This paper studies contemporaneous relationship between S&P 500 index returns and logincrements of the market volatility index (VIX) via a nonparametric copula method. Specifically, we propose a conditional dependence index to investigate how the dependence between the two series varies across different segments of the market return distribution. We observe the following findings: (a) the two series exhibit strong, negative, extreme tail dependence; (b) the negative dependence is stronger in extreme bearish markets than in extreme bullish markets; (c) the dependence gradually weakens as the market return moves toward the center of its distribution, or in quiet markets. The unique dependence structure supports the VIX as a barometer of markets’mood in general. Applying the proposed method to the S&P 500 returns and the implied variance (VIX), we find that the nonparametric leverage effect is much stronger than the nonparametric volatility feedback effect, although, in general, both effects are weaker than the dependence relation between the market returns and the log-increments of the VIX.
Natural Language Processing for Mental Health: Large Scale Discourse Analysis of Counseling Conversations

Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack of large-scale data with labeled outcomes of the conversations. In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study on the discourse of text-message-based counseling conversations. We develop a set of novel computational discourse analysis methods to measure how various linguistic aspects of conversations are correlated with conversation outcomes. Applying techniques such as sequence-based conversation models, language model comparisons, message clustering, and psycholinguistics-inspired word frequency analyses, we discover actionable conversation strategies that are associated with better conversation outcomes.
An efficient algorithm for the Single-Source Shortest Path Problem in graph theory

The single-source shortest path problem (SSSP), known as the basis of many application areas, is a fundamental matter in graph theory. In this paper, a new efficient algorithm named Li-Qi (LQ) is proposed for SSSP to find a simple path of minimum total weights from a designated source vertex to each vertex. The algorithm is based on the ideas of the queue and the relaxation, The main differences between this strategy with the Breadth-first search and the Bellman-Ford algorithm are that the vertices may be queued more than once and only the source vertex and relaxed vertices are queued; the algorithm terminates when the queue is empty. Experimental evaluation on different sizes of the generated graphs validates that the proposed algorithm far outperforms the simplest implementation of the Dijkstra¿s algorithm and surpasses the Bellman-Ford algorithm by about 2 times.
Discounting of Past and Future Rewards of Texas Hold’em Gamblers

The present study investigated the delay discounting of future and past monetary rewards by Texas Hold’em Poker gamblers. While present at a poker tournament, eight participants completed three delay discounting tasks which presented choices between smaller immediate and larger delayed consequences. All participants discounted the larger amounts of money in a hyperbolic fashion, and the degree to which discounting occurred appeared to be a function of the magnitude of regular wagering (less than or greater than 10 dollars per game) made during poker play. Results support previous research on the discounting of delayed consequences by gamblers and illustrate that the discounting of past rewards occurs in a similar fashion to the well-documented literature on the discounting of future rewards.
FAP20 is an inner junction protein of doublet microtubules essential for both the planar asymmetrical waveform and stability of flagella in Chlamydomonas

The question of what proteins compose the junctions between two tubules in doublet microtubules is long-standing. Here a conserved flagellar protein, FAP20, is shown to be an inner junction component important for stabilizing the axoneme and scaffolding intra–B-tubular structures required for a planar asymmetrical waveform.
Structure of a low-population intermediate state in the release of an enzyme product

Enzymes can increase the rate of biomolecular reactions by several orders of magnitude. Although the steps of substrate capture and product release are essential in the enzymatic process, complete atomic-level descriptions of these steps are difficult to obtain because of the transient nature of the intermediate conformations, which makes them largely inaccessible to standard structure determination methods. We describe here the determination of the structure of a low-population intermediate in the product release process by human lysozyme through a combination of NMR spectroscopy and molecular dynamics simulations. We validate this structure by rationally designing two mutations, the first engineered to destabilise the intermediate and the second to stabilise it, thus slowing down or speeding up, respectively, product release. These results illustrate how product release by an enzyme can be facilitated by the presence of a metastable intermediate with transient weak interactions between the enzyme and product. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.02777. 001
Development of String-based Force Display: SPIDAR

This paper presents the development of string-based force display system SPIDAR and its different versions. Ranging from a simple “pick and place” task to more complicated physical based interactions, SPIDAR has emerged as a distinguished haptic interface that have the following advantages: 1) scalability: with simple modification on its structure layout, SPIDAR can be fit to different working space such as desktop, workbench, and human-scale 2) String based: the string-based technology gives the developer the ability to display position, orientation and force feedback at once. Making it an effective mean for pointing and control for 3D environment. 3) Transparency: based on its string-based technology, SPIDAR keeps the working space transparent and do not obscure the visual display. SPIDAR’s quality of haptic feedback continued to improve through time to reach a high level of accuracy and update rate putting it in line with other major haptic systems.
A novel surface antigen expressed by a subset of human CD3- CD16+ natural killer cells. Role in cell activation and regulation of cytolytic function

The GL183 mAb was obtained by immunizing BALB/c mice with the E57 clone (CD7+CD2+CD3-CD16+CD56+) derived from human peripheral blood NK cells. In human peripheral blood, GL183-reactive cells ranged between 2 and 12% (mean 6.5%) in 10 different donors. Double fluorescence and FACS analysis showed that GL183+ cells were consistently included in the CD56+ or CD16+ cell populations. Moreover, since only a fraction of CD56+ or CD16+ cells (approximately 40%) coexpressed GL183 surface antigen, reactivity with GL183 mAb appears to define two subsets within the CD3- lymphocyte population expressing NK cell markers. Although, the majority of GL183+ cells were CD3-, approximately 1% expressed CD3 surface antigens. As shown by clonal analysis, these infrequent CD3+GL183+ cells coexpressed CD56 and CD16 antigens. Cloning of CD3- GL183+ or CD3-GL183- cell populations under limiting dilution conditions yielded clonal progenies that maintained their original surface phenotype. Therefore, expression or lack of expression of GL183 surface antigens represents a stable phenotypic property of a subset of human CD3- NK cells. Immunoprecipitation experiments and two- dimensional PAGE analysis indicated that GL183-reactive molecules were represented in different clones either by a single 58-kD chain or, more frequently, by two chains of approximately 55 and approximately 58 kD, respectively. Analysis of GL183+ or GL183- NK clones for their ability to lyse human (IGROV I) or murine (P815) tumor target cells indicated that GL183- clones were, on average, fivefold more efficient in inducing target cell lysis. GL183+ and GL183- clones produced comparable levels of TNF-alpha in response to PHA plus PMA or anti-CD16 mAb plus PMA. Importantly, production of TNF-alpha was also induced by stimulation of GL183+ clones with GL183 mAb plus PMA. These data indicated that GL183 antigen could mediate cell triggering. This concept was confirmed by the analysis of Ca2+ mobilization, as GL183 mAb induced (in GL183+ clones) increments of [Ca2+]i comparable with those induced by PHA. Moreover, GL183 mAb, or its F(ab')2 fragments, strongly enhanced the cytolytic activity of GL183+ clones against a panel of human tumor target cells, including U937, Raji, IGROV I, M14, and A549. In contrast, GL183 mAb, but not the F(ab')2 fragments, sharply inhibited the cytolytic activity of the same clones against P815, M12, and P3U1 murine target cells. In this case, the effect of GL183 mAb (inhibition) was opposite that of PHA or of stimulatory anti- CD2 or anti-CD16 mAbs, which consistently enhanced the target cell lysis. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
PRAMOD: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Supporting Efficient and Secure Database-as-a-Service

Cloud providers are realizing the outsourced database model in the form of database-as-a-service offerings. However, security in terms of data privacy remains an obstacle because data storage and processing are performed on an untrusted cloud. Achieving strong security under additional constraints of functionality and performance is even more challenging, for which advanced encryption and recent trusted computing primitives alone prove insufficient. In this paper, we propose PRAMOD – a novel framework for enabling efficient and secure database-as-a-service. We consider a setting in which data is stored encrypted on the untrusted cloud and data-dependent computations are performed inside a trusted environment. The proposed framework protects against leakage caused by observable data movement between different components (due to limited secure memory) by using a special component called scrambler running inO(n) time. It supports popular algorithms underlying many data management applications, including sort, compaction, join and group aggregation. The algorithms implemented in PRAMOD are not only privacy-preserving but also asymptotically optimal. They can be used as building blocks to construct efficient and secure query processing algorithms. The experimental study shows reasonable overheads over a baseline system assuring a weaker level of security. More remarkably, PRAMOD shows superior performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art solutions offering similar privacy protection: up to 4.4× speedup over the alternative data-oblivious algorithms.
Network Debt

Given a financial network of liabilities, we consider the following question: which agent’s potential default would implicate the most number of agents in the network structure? Simply comparing each agent’s total debt completely ignores the structure of the network. For propagation effects of a potential default, owing to a creditor who does not owe anybody and owing to a creditor who is heavily in debt himself clearly do not have the same implications even when the amount owed is the same. The liability network structure must be taken into account in order to capture downstream effects. We propose a general notion which addresses this issue quantitatively. Our notion yields a ranking of all agents in the network in terms of severity of default implications. Potential regulatory applications include stress testing for banks. JEL classification: C02; G19.
A High-Resolution Time-Frequency Rate Representation and the Cross-Term Suppression

In this paper, we propose a high-resolution time-frequency rate representation (HR-TFRR) and derive its analytical formula. This formula implies that the HR-TFRR has a narrower frequency rate support than the cubic phase function (CPF). Therefore, the HR-TFRR has a higher frequency rate (FR) resolution than the CPF and can distinguish closer components in the time-frequency rate domain. Due to the bilinear transform, the HR-TFRR suffers the cross term when the instantaneous frequency functions of the components are cross or very close. In order to suppress the cross term, we further propose a smoothed HR-TFRR (SHR-TFRR) by introducing an FR window to the HR-TFRR, which is expressed in the convolution form. Finally, numerical examples demonstrate that the HR-TFRR and the SHR-TFRR outperform their counterparts in frequency rate resolution and cross-term suppression, respectively. In addition, satisfactory performance of the proposed methods in phase parameter estimation and real-world signal analysis is given.