Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Interest Rate Risk Management and the Use of Derivative Securities

This study aims to demonstrate the utility of derivative financial instruments for the management of interest rate risk that is faced by banks and financial institutions, and to provide an efficient flow of monitoring and control thereof. Banking institutions can now use a combination of balance sheet and off balance sheet measures, i.e. gap method, of interest rate risk management, in order to control exposure of short-term rates and derivatives to control the residual interest rate exposures. The result of the study shows that banks can achieve better diversification and risk management using derivatives.
Update in the Mechanisms of Allergen-Specific Immunotheraphy

Allergic diseases represent a complex innate and adoptive immune response to natural environmental allergens with Th2-type T cells and allergen-specific IgE predominance. Allergen-specific immunotherapy is the most effective therapeutic approach for disregulated immune response towards allergens by enhancing immune tolerance mechanisms. The main aim of immunotherapy is the generation of allergen nonresponsive or tolerant T cells in sensitized patients and downregulation of predominant T cell- and IgE-mediated immune responses. During allergen-specific immunotherapy, T regulatory cells are generated, which secrete IL-10 and induce allergen-specific B cells for the production of IgG4 antibodies. These mechanisms induce tolerance to antigens that reduces allergic symptoms. Although current knowledge highlights the role of T regulatory cell-mediated immunetolerance, definite mechanisms that lead to a successful clinical outcomes of allergen-specific immunotherapy still remains an open area of research.
Bidirectional Modulation of Cocaine Expectancy by Phasic Glutamate Fluctuations in the Nucleus Accumbens

While glutamate in the nucleus accumbens (NAS) contributes to the promotion of drug-seeking by drug-predictive cues, it also appears to play a role in the inhibition of drug-seeking following extinction procedures. Thus we measured extracellular fluctuations of NAS glutamate in response to discriminative stimuli that signaled either cocaine availability or cocaine omission. We trained rats to self-administer intravenous cocaine and then to recognize discriminative odor cues that predicted either sessions where cocaine was available or alternating sessions where it was not (saline substituted for cocaine). Whereas responding in cocaine availability sessions remained stable, responding in cocaine omission sessions progressively declined to chance levels. We then determined the effects of each odor cue on extracellular glutamate in the core and shell subregions of NAS preceding and accompanying lever pressing under an extinction condition. Glutamate levels were elevated in both core and shell by the availability odor and depressed in the core but not the shell by the omission odor. Infusion of kynurenic acid (an antagonist for ionotropic glutamate receptors) into core but not shell suppressed responding associated with the availability odor, but had no effect on the suppression associated with the omission odor. Thus cocaine-predictive cues appear to promote cocaine seeking in part by elevating glutamatergic neurotransmission in the core of NAS, whereas cocaine-omission cues appear to suppress cocaine seeking in part by depressing glutamatergic receptor activation in the same region.
Long-term erythropoietic repopulating ability of old, young, and fetal stem cells

It is possible that erythropoietic stem cells do not age. This would mean that stem cells from old donors can function as well as those from young or fetal donors. The competitive repopulation assay has been used to test long-term stem cell function by directly comparing how well competing stem cells repopulate a recipient and produce differentiated cell types. C57BL/6J (B6) mice were used as donors, while recipients and competitors were WBB6F1 hybrids with genetically distinguishable hemoglobin. Lethally irradiated young WBB6F1 recipients were given a mixture of 2.5 X 10(6) cells from B6 old marrow, young marrow, or fetal liver donors; each recipient also received a standard dose of 1 X 10(6) marrow cells from a pool of young WBB6F1 competitors. Surprisingly, the old marrow cells competed the best in repopulating the recipients. This pattern was maintained even after recovery from sublethal irradiation, a treatment that severely stresses stem cells. This stress was demonstrated when sublethal irradiation caused a 20-fold decline in repopulating ability measured using hemoglobin markers, and a 3- to 7- fold decline using chromosome markers. Stem cells from old marrow competed better than young or fetal cells in similar experiments using immunologically crippled recipients or using unirradiated W/Wv recipients that are immunologically intact. In both types of recipients, the advantage of old marrow cells again persisted after recovery from sublethal irradiation. Other genotypes were tested, and marrow cells from old B6CBAF1 donors competed better than those from young donors of that genotype. However, marrow cells from young CBA donors completed better than those from old CBA donors. These results support the hypothesis that stem cells do not age, and suggest that regulatory changes with age promote rapid stem cell repopulation in B6 and B6CBAF1 mice, but inhibit it in CBA mice.
Using Noun Similarity to Adapt an Acceptability Measure for Persian Light Verb Constructions

Light verb constructions (LVCs), such as take a walk and make a decision, are a common subclass of multiword expressions (MWEs), whose distinct syntactic and semantic properties call for a special treatment within a computational system. In particular, LVCs are formed semi-productively: often a semantically-general verb (such as take) combines with a number of semantically-similar nouns to form semantically-related LVCs, as in make a decision/choice/commitment. Nonetheless, there are restrictions as to which verbs combine with which class of nouns. A proper computational account of LVCs is even more important for languages such as Persian, in which most verbs are of the form of LVCs. Recently, there has been some work on the automatic identification of MWEs (including LVCs) in resource-rich languages, such as English and Dutch. We adapt such existing techniques for the automatic identification of LVCs in Persian, an under-resourced language. Specifically, we extend an existing statistical measure of the acceptability of English LVCs (Fazly et al., 2007) to make explicit use of semantic classes of noun, and show that such classes are in particular useful for determining the LVC acceptability of new combinations.
'A drop in the bucket': Collective efficacy perceptions and environmental behaviour

Environmental degradation is a complex problem, many aspects of which may not be solved unless collective effort is undertaken. Collective Efficacy theory provides a useful framework to investigate how people view their ability and the effectiveness of their actions to solve environmental problems, which has been largely overlooked until now. Six focus groups were conducted to explore efficacy beliefs expressed by environmental Activists and Non-Activists in Perth, Western Australia, relating to waste management. All participants (n=38) expressed pessimistic views about the abilities of others to perform pro‑environmental behaviours. However, Activists were positive that a collective effort would be effective ('many drops will fill up the bucket') while Non-Activists felt strongly that the problem would still exist even if everyone performed waste-minimising behaviours ('it's just a drop in the bucket'). Behaviour change interventions might be more effective if they focus on convincing people that collective effort will be effective in solving environmental problems.
Facial expression recognition for detecting children's likes and dislikes

Facial expression recognition is one of the useful human-robot interaction technologies. This is also applicable to the project which is what field the children is interested in and how much it is. In this work-in-progress paper, we introduce the problem we have to cope with and what idea to be used in this project.
Deening and Measuring Maintainability

Maintainability is a measure of the ease with which a software system can be maintained. In this paper we propose a quantitative deenition of maintainability, and discuss means to estimate the maintainability of a software system on the basis of a static analysis of its deliverables. Such an estimation eeort is useful inasmuchas it allows us to predict the maintainability of a software system at delivery time. All the quantitative studies that have been carried out in the past two decades indicate that maintenance has a staggering nancial impact on the software industry, and that it is a drain on human resources. Typical studies provide that on average a software organization spends sixty percent (60 %) of its man-month resources on software maintenance, and forty percent (40 %) on the development of new applications. Because of the increasing reliance on software in various application domains, new applications are being put into operation at a faster rate than older applications are phased out; as a result, the relative impact of maintenance is expected to increase in the future {although at a more moderate rate than was initially feared. This state of aaairs, as well as this trend, are clearly cause for concern. The key to dealing with this concern is to identify the factors that aaect the costs of maintenance, quantify them, and endeavor to control them in the framework of software maintenance management. In keeping with this premise, the Canadian Space Agency is sponsoring a research project at the University of Ottawa 10, 11, 12, 13], with the objective of deening a measure of maintainability and investigating means to evaluate it. The Canadian Space Agency participates in the Space Station program by providing the Mobile Servicing System; part of this system is the Manipulator Development Simulation Facility, which the agency is contracting out to private software rms. The intent of the agency is to impose maintainability requirements on future deliveries of software that is contracted out. To do so, the agency must provide a deenition of maintainability (as part of the requirements speciication), as well as means to estimate the maintainability of a software deliverable at delivery time (as part of acceptance testing). In the next section we analyse the costs of software maintenance, identify the major controllable cost factors, and discuss how these can be controlled in the case of the MDSF project within CSA. In section 3 we …
LOVELY PAIRS AND DENSE PAIRS OF O-MINIMAL STRUCTURES

We study the theory of Lovely pairs of þ-rank one theories, in particular O-minimal theories. We show that the class of א0-saturated dense pairs of O-minimal structures studied by van den Dries [6] agrees with the corresponding class of lovely pairs. We also prove that the theory of lovely pairs of O-minimal structures is super-rosy of rank ≤ ω.
Invariant Measures and Orbit Closures on Homogeneous Spaces for Actions of Subgroups Generated by Unipotent Elements

The theorems of M. Ratner, describing the finite ergodic invariant measures and the orbit closures for unipotent flows on homogeneous spaces of Lie groups, are extended for actions of subgroups generated by unipotent elements. More precisely: Let G be a Lie group (not necessarily connected) and a closed subgroup of G. Let W be a subgroup of G such that AdG(W) is contained in the Zariski closure (in Aut(Lie G)) of the subgroup generated by the unipotent elements of AdG(W). Then any finite W-invariant W-ergodic measure on G/ is a homogeneous measure (i.e., it is supported on a closed orbit of a subgroup preserving the measure). Moreover, if G/ has finite volume (i.e., has a finite G-invariant measure), then the closure of any orbit of W on G/ is a homogeneous set (i.e., a finite volume closed orbit of a subgroup containing W). Both the above results hold if W is replaced by any subgroup � ⊂ W such that W/� has finite volume.
Research in Concurrent Planning

While even STRIPS planners must search for plans of unbounded length, temporal planners must also cope with the fact that actions may start at any point in time. Most temporal planners cope with this challenge by restricting action start times to a small set of decision epochs, because this enables search to be carried out in state-space and leverages powerful state-based reachability heuristics, originally developed for classical planning. Indeed, decision-epoch planners won the International Planning Competition’s Temporal Planning Track in 2002, 2004 and 2006. However, decision-epoch planners have a largely unrecognized weakness: they are incomplete. In order to characterize the cause of incompleteness, we identify the notion of required concurrency, which separates expressive temporal action languages from simple ones. We show that decisionepoch planners are only complete for languages in the simpler class, and we prove that the simple class is ‘equivalent’ to STRIPS! Surprisingly, no problems with required concurrency have been included in the planning competitions. We conclude by designing a complete state-space temporal planning algorithm, which we hope will be able to achieve high performance by leveraging the heuristics that power decision
Synthetic Photographs for Learning Aesthetic Preferences

Photo ranking algorithms aim to quantify features within photographs to determine aesthetic quality and learn user preferences over these features. However, current benchmark corpora of photographs contain nonquantifiable contextual information. Moreover, they do not control the variance of quantifiable features. The recently released Panorama data set contains annotated synthetic images with controlled contextual features. The images lay along the full range of quantifiable features. This paper focuses on improving the performance of a predictive learning model trained on the pairwise preferences collected on these images. Predictive models were trained on individual as well as group preferences. Feature selection improved prediction accuracy from the 67% earlier reported to 91% accuracy on the group preference. On average, individual raters' preferences were predicted with 87% accuracy. Top features varied widely among individuals. However, the most frequent top three features were tilted horizon line, cropped objects, and number of objects.
Regional Alterations in Purkinje Cell Density in Patients with Autism

Neuropathological studies, using a variety of techniques, have reported a decrease in Purkinje cell (PC) density in the cerebellum in autism. We have used a systematic sampling technique that significantly reduces experimenter bias and variance to estimate PC densities in the postmortem brains of eight clinically well-documented individuals with autism, and eight age- and gender-matched controls. Four cerebellar regions were analyzed: a sensorimotor area comprised of hemispheric lobules IV–VI, crus I & II of the posterior lobe, and lobule X of the flocculonodular lobe. Overall PC density was thus estimated using data from all three cerebellar lobes and was found to be lower in the cases with autism as compared to controls, an effect that was most prominent in crus I and II (p<0.05). Lobule X demonstrated a trend towards lower PC density in only the males with autism (p = 0.05). Brain weight, a correlate of tissue volume, was found to significantly contribute to the lower lobule X PC density observed in males with autism, but not to the finding of lower PC density in crus I & II. Therefore, lower crus I & II PC density in autism is more likely due to a lower number of PCs. The PC density in lobule X was found to correlate with the ADI-R measure of the patient's use of social eye contact (R2 = −0.75, p = 0.012). These findings support the hypothesis that abnormal PC density may contribute to selected clinical features of the autism phenotype.
1 2 M ar 2 00 6 Quantum Knots and Riemann Hypothesis

In this paper we propose a quantum gauge system from which we construct generalized Wilson loops which will be as quantum knots. From quantum knots we give a classification table of knots where knots are one-to-one assigned with an integer such that prime knots are bijectively assigned with prime numbers and the prime number 2 corresponds to the trefoil knot. Then by considering the quantum knots as periodic orbits of the quantum system and by the identity of knots with integers and an approach which is similar to the quantum chaos approach of Berry and Keating we derive a trace formula which may be called the von Mangoldt-SelbergGutzwiller trace formula. From this trace formula we then give a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. For our proof of the Riemann Hypothesis we show that the Hilbert-Polya conjecture holds that there is a self-adjoint operator for the nontrivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function and this operator is the Virasoro energy operator with central charge c = 1 2 . Our approach for proving the Riemann Hypothesis can also be extended to prove the Extended Riemann Hypothesis. We also investigate the relation of our approach for proving the Riemann Hypothesis with the Random Matrix Theory for L-functions. Mathematics Subject Classification: 57M27, 11M26, 11N05, 11P32.
Nonconcave utility maximization in the OFDMA downlink

The problem of utility maximization in an OFDMA downlink is considered. Based on measurements of a scalable video codec, concave and nonconcave utility functions are proposed. Two approaches to solving the utility maximization problem in a modular fashion are considered, one based on Lagrange duality, the other based on a projected gradient algorithm. Both methods yield the optimum solution for concave utilities. In the nonconcave case, simulation results show almost identical performance for both methods under the assumption that the dual solution is found. In contrast, the dual approach fails if the dual subproblems can only be solved to local optimality.
BOAT: an experimental platform for researchers to comparatively and reproducibly evaluate bug localization techniques

Bug localization refers to the process of identifying source code files that contain defects from descriptions of these defects which are typically contained in bug reports. There have been many bug localization techniques proposed in the literature. However, often it is hard to compare these techniques since different evaluation datasets are used. At times the datasets are not made publicly available and thus it is difficult to reproduce reported results. Furthermore, some techniques are only evaluated on small datasets and thus it is not clear whether the results are generalizable. Thus, there is a need for a platform that allows various techniques to be compared with one another on a common pool containing a large number of bug reports with known defective source code files. In this paper, we address this need by proposing our Bug lOcalization experimental plATform (BOAT). BOAT is an extensible web application that contains thousands of bug reports with known defective source code files. Researchers can create accounts in BOAT, upload executables of their bug localization techniques, and see how these techniques perform in comparison with techniques uploaded by other researchers, with respect to some standard evaluation measures. BOAT is already preloaded with several bug localization techniques and thus researchers can directly compare their newly proposed techniques against these existing techniques. BOAT has been made available online since October 2013, and researchers could access the platform at: http://www.vlis. zju.edu. cn/blp.
Bayesian Classification on Spatial Data Streams Using P-Trees

Classification of spatial data can be difficult with existing methods due to the large numbers and sizes of spatial data sets. The task becomes even more difficult when we consider continuous spatial data streams. Data streams require a classifier that can be built and rebuilt repeatedly in near real time. This paper presents an approach to deal with this challenge. Our approach uses the Peano Count Tree (P-tree), which provides a lossless, compressed and data-mining-ready representation (data structure) for spatial data. This data structure can be applied in many classification techniques. In this paper we focus on Bayesian classification. A Bayesian classifier is a statistical classifier, which uses the Bayes theorem to predict class membership as a conditional probability that a given data sample falls into a particular class. In this paper we demonstrate how P-trees can improve the classification of spatial data when using a Bayesian classifier. We also introduce the use of information gain calculations with Bayesian classification to improve its accuracy. The use of a P-tree based Bayesian classifier can not only make classification more effective on spatial data, but also can reduce the build time of the classifier considerably. This improvement in build time makes it feasible for use with streaming data.
The V Protein of Canine Distemper Virus Is Required for Virus Replication in Human Epithelial Cells

Canine distemper virus (CDV) becomes able to use human receptors through a single amino acid substitution in the H protein. In addition, CDV strains possessing an intact C protein replicate well in human epithelial H358 cells. The present study showed that CDV strain 007Lm, which was isolated from lymph node tissue of a dog with distemper, failed to replicate in H358 cells, although it possessed an intact C protein. Sequence analyses suggested that a cysteine-to-tyrosine substitution at position 267 of the V protein caused this growth defect. Analyses using H358 cells constitutively expressing the CDV V protein showed that the V protein with a cysteine, but not that with a tyrosine, at this position effectively blocked the interferon-stimulated signal transduction pathway, and supported virus replication of 007Lm in H358 cells. Thus, the V protein as well as the C protein appears to be functional and essential for CDV replication in human epithelial cells.
Meet-and join-closure of CTL operators

Results from lattice theory have successfully been applied by several researchers, e.g. [1, 7, 9, 10], to reduce the complexity of verification of distributed computations. The set of all reachable states of a distributed computation forms a lattice under a certain partial order relation. A property is said to exhibit meet-closure if the set of reachable states satisfying it is closed under the lattice meet operation, and join-closure if the set is closed under the lattice join operation. Techniques that apply lattice-theoretic concepts to the verification of distributed computations have largely leveraged the principles of meetand join-closure of the properties to be verified. It has been shown [7, 10] that exploiting such closure properties allows for the development of verification algorithms that have time and space complexity that is polynomial in the number of events in the computation. Since the number of reachable states in a computation is usually exponential in the number of events, these algorithms significantly alleviate the problem of state space explosion in formal verification. The temporal logic CTL [2] is popularly used to specify the properties to be verified on a distributed computation. It is thus desirable to study whether various CTL operators preserve the properties of meetand join-closure. Some CTL operators were previously studied in [10]. In this paper, we extend on the work in [10], and identify additional CTL operators that preserve these closure properties. We also revisit some of the operators which were shown not to preserve meet-closure in [10], and identify some conditions under which they do preserve meet-closure.