Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Digital Circuits for Probabilistic Inference

We introduce combinational stochastic logic, an abstraction that generalizes deterministic digital circuit design (based on Boolean logic gates) to the probabilistic setting. We show how this logic can be combined with techniques from contemporary digital design to generate stateless and stateful circuits for exact and approximate sampling from a range of probability distributions. We focus on Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for Markov random fields, using massively parallel circuits. We implement these circuits on commodity reconfigurable logic and estimate the resulting performance in time, space and price. Using our approach, these simple and general algorithms could be affordably run for thousands of iterations on models with hundreds of thousands of variables in real time.
The role of banking and financial policies in promoting micro, small, and medium enterprises

The results of empirical research confirm that a well-functioning and developed financial sector fosters economic growth. Additionally, financial deepening has a significantly larger impact on the poorest parts of societies, thus playing a critical role in reducing income inequality and poverty. In many countries, however, the level of financial development is very low due to severe consequences arising from asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers. This, in turn, restricts the amount of capital available to companies, especially small and medium ones. In this paper we have attempted to give some answers to the question of what the government’s role should be in overcoming barriers to capital and financing. The empirical research, as well as case studies of successful reforms, indicate that the main role to be played by the government in supporting financial sector development is to ensure macroeconomic stability and provide an appropriate legal and infrastructural framework for its functioning. Finally, we also argue that in the 21st century global-knowledge economy there is a need for a deeper discussion about the efficacy of public support for SMEs and its redirection to narrowly defined innovative sectors,which may create the potential for long-term development and an increase of social welfare.
The Epidemiology of Low- and High-Energy Distal Radius Fracture in Middle-Aged and Elderly Men and Women in Southern Norway

Background Distal radius is one of the most frequent sites for fractures in the elderly population. Despite this, there is a paucity of epidemiological data for distal radius fracture, in particular, distinguishing between high- and low-energy fractures. Our aim was to study the epidemiology of high- and low-energy distal radius fracture in middle-aged and elderly men and women in Southern Norway, and search for associates with high- or low-energy distal radius fracture in this population. Methodology/Principal Findings Patients with distal radius fractures aged ≥50 years were identified from all four hospitals in Southern Norway between 2004 and 2005. Age-adjusted and age-specific incidence rates for men and women were calculated, and potential associates with high- and low-energy distal radius fracture were explored both in univariate and multivariate analyses. A total of 799 individuals (118 men and 681 women) aged ≥50 years with low-energy and 84 (48 men and 36 women) with high-energy distal radius fracture were identified. The overall age-adjusted incidence rate per 10,000 person-years was 18.9 for men (low energy, 12.8 vs. high-energy, 6.1) and 75.1 for women (low energy, 71.1 vs. high energy, 4.0). In multivariate model, younger age, male gender, summer season, and living in a rural area were independently associated with an increased risk of high-energy fracture. Conclusion An approximately fourfold higher age-adjusted incidence rate for distal radius fracture was found among women, when compared with men. However, the proportion of patients with high-energy distal radius fracture was approximately fivefold higher in men than in women. Our data suggest that younger age, male gender, summer seasons, and living in rural areas are independent risk factors for increased risk of high-energy distal radius fracture.
Money-Based Interest Rate Rules: Lessons from German Data

The paper derives the monetary policy reaction function implied by money growth targeting. It consists of an interest rate response to deviations of the inflation rate from target, to the change in the output gap, to money demand shocks and to the lagged interest rate. In the second part, it is shown that this type of inertial interest rate rule characterises the Bundesbank's monetary policy from 1979 to 1998 quite well. This result is robust to the use of real-time or ex post data and to the consideration of serially correlated errors. The main lesson is that, in addition to anchoring long-term inflation expectations, monetary targeting introduces inertia and history-dependence into the monetary policy rule. This is advantageous when private agents have forward-looking expectations and when the level of the output gap is subject to persistent measurement errors.
Mechanism Design for Strategic Crowdsourcing

This thesis looks into the economics of crowdsourcing using game theoretic modeling. The art of aggregating information and expertise from a diverse population has been in practice since a long time. The Internet and the revolution in communication and computational technologies have made this task easier and given birth to a new era of online resource aggregation, which is now popularly referred to as crowdsourcing. Two important features of this aggregation technique are: (a) crowdsourcing is always human driven, hence the participants are rational and intelligent, and they have a payoff function that they aim to maximize, and (b) the participants are connected over a social network which helps to reach out to a large set of individuals. To understand the behavior and the outcome of such a strategic crowd, we need to understand the economics of a crowdsourcing network. In this thesis, we have considered the following three major facets of the strategic crowdsourcing problem. (i) Elicitation of the true qualities of the crowd workers: As the crowd is often unstructured and unknown to the designer, it is important to ensure if the crowdsourced job is indeed performed at the highest quality, and this requires elicitation of the true qualities which are typically the participants’ private information. (ii) Resource critical task execution ensuring the authenticity of both the information and the identity of the participants: Due to the diverse geographical, cultural, socio-economic reasons, crowdsourcing entails certain manipulations that are unusual in the classical theory. The design has to be robust enough to handle fake identities or incorrect information provided by the crowd while performing crowdsourcing contests. (iii) Improving the productive output of the crowdsourcing network: As the designer’s goal is to maximize a certain measurable output of the crowdsourcing system, an interesting question is how one can design the incentive scheme and/or the network so that the system performs at an optimal level taking into account the strategic nature of the individuals. In the thesis, we design novel mechanisms to solve the problems above using game theoretic modeling. Our investigation helps in understanding certain limits of achievability, and provides design protocols in order to make crowdsourcing more reliable, effective, and productive.
Expression of epidermal keratins and filaggrin during human fetal skin development

The major structural proteins of epithelia, the keratins, and the keratin filament-associated protein, filaggrin, were analyzed in more than 50 samples of human embryonic and fetal skin by one-dimensional SDS PAGE and immunoblotting with monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies. Companion samples were examined by immunohistochemistry and electron microscopy. Based on structural characteristics of the epidermis, four periods of human epidermal development were identified. The first is the embryonic period (before 9 wk estimated gestational age), and the others are within the fetal period: stratification (9-14 wk), follicular keratinization (14-24 wk), and interfollicular keratinization (beginning at approximately 24 wk). Keratin proteins of both the acidic (AE1-reactive, type I) and the basic (AE3-reactive, type II) subfamilies were present throughout development. Keratin intermediate filaments were recognized in the tissue by electron microscopy and immunohistochemical staining. Keratins of 50 and 58 kD were present in the epidermis at all ages studied (8 wk to birth), and those of 56.5 and 67 kD were expressed at the time of stratification and increased in abundance as development proceeded. 40- and 52-kD keratins were present early in development but disappeared with keratinization. Immunohistochemical staining suggested the presence of keratins of 50 and 58 kD in basal cells, 56.5 and 67 kD in intermediate cells, and 40 and 52 kD in the periderm as well as in the basal cells between the time of stratification and birth. Filaggrin was first detected biochemically at approximately 15 wk and was localized immunohistochemically in the keratinizing cells that surround hair follicles. It was identified 8-10 wk later in the granular and cornified cell layers of keratinized interfollicular epidermis. These results demonstrate the following. An intimate relationship exists between expression of structural proteins and morphologic changes during development of the epidermis. The order of expression of individual keratins is consistent with the known expression of keratins in simple vs. stratified vs. keratinized epithelia. Expression of keratins typical of stratified epithelia (50 and 58 kD) precedes stratification, and expression of keratins typical of keratinization (56.5 and 67 kD) precedes keratinization, which suggests that their expression marks the tissue commitment to those processes. Because only keratins that have been demonstrated in various adult tissues are expressed during fetal development, we conclude that there are no "fetal" keratins per se. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Understanding Tourists' Involvement with Pop Culture : A Case of Korean Pop Music

While the power of pop culture has increased tourism demand in showcased destinations, there has been little empirical research investigating tourists’ involvement with pop culture. Based on a survey of Chinese tourists who visit South Korea, this research seeks to identify four different levels of involvement tourist groups. More specifically, adapting the conceptual framework of Psychological Continuum Model (PCM), the research investigates the linkage between tourists’ involvement with pop culture and general outcomes of tourism experiences. The findings suggest that tourists have different levels of involvement with Korean pop culture: awareness, attraction, attachment and allegiance, and the four groups have different characteristics in terms of demographics, visit purpose, tourists’ fulfillment (utilitarian and hedonic value), attitude toward visiting of Korea and revisit intention to Korea.
Building and applying a concept hierarchy representation of a user profile

Term dependence is a natural consequence of language use. Its successful representation has been a long standing goal for Information Retrieval research. We present a methodology for the construction of a concept hierarchy that takes into account the three basic dimensions of term dependence. We also introduce a document evaluation function that allows the use of the concept hierarchy as a user profile for Information Filtering. Initial experimental results indicate that this is a promising approach for incorporating term dependence in the way documents are filtered.
Research on the Evaluation of Textual Comprehensibility Based on French Corpus

The study on the degree of the textual comprehensibility based on French corpus comes under the umbrella of corpus-involved text research. A systematic random sampling is employed in the present paper to compare the six different groups extracted from one and the same sampled French text. The formula, viz. A+BX=C, is provided here to equidistantly extract linguistic fragments from the famous French novel L'Assommoir. "A" means the starting page, "B" the distance of extraction, "C" the total number of the pages contained in a text, "X" the set of pages available. If the condition is fully met by B? (10, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1), the corresponding sampling ratios are 9.55%, 20.29%, 25.13%, 33.13%, 50.36% and 100% respectively, which also bring different values of textual comprehensibility, notably 0.0897, 0.0841, 0.0854, 0.0847, 0.0848, 0.0854. The non-relevance between textual comprehensibility and the sampling ratio verifies that the system of textual comprehensibility evaluation based on English and Japanese corpora can successfully extend to the French corpus, which helps the literature critics to analyze French texts according to a pre-set procedure via computers.
Recommendation System Based on Fuzzy Cognitive Map

With the increase of data volume and visitor volume, the website faces great challenge in the environment of network. How to know the users' requirements rapidly and effectively and recommend the required information to the user becomes the research direction of all websites. The researchers of recommendation system propose a series of recommendation system models and algorithms for the user. The common challenge faced by these algorithms is how to judge the user intention and recommend the relevant content by little user action. The paper proposes the user situation awareness and information recommendation system based on fuzzy clustering analysis and fuzzy cognitive maps, and verifies the validity of the algorithm by the application to recommendation site of academic thesis.
A constrained parameter estimation approach for some vision problems

Previous work of the authors developed a theoretically well-founded scheme (FNS) for finding the minimiser of a class of cost functions. Various problems in video analysis, stereo vision, ellipse-fitting, etc, may be expressed in terms of finding such a minimiser. However, in common with many other approaches, it is necessary to correct the minimiser as a post-process if an ancillary constraint is also to be satisfied. In this paper we develop the first integrated scheme (CFNS) for simultaneously minimising the cost function and satisfying the constraint. Preliminary experiments in the domain of fundamental-matrix estimation show that CFNS generates rank-2 estimates with smaller cost function values than rank-2 corrected FNS estimates. Furthermore, when compared with the HartleyZisserman Gold Standard method, CFNS is seen to generate results of comparable quality in a fraction of the time.
Reusable motion synthesis using state-space controllers

The use of physically-based techniques for computer animation can result in realistic object motion. The price paid for physically-based motion synthesis lies in increased computation and information requirements.1 We introduce a new approach to realistic motion specification based on state-space controllers. A user specifies a motion by defining a goal in terms of a set of destination states. A state-space controller is then constructed, which provides an optimal-control solution that guides the object from an arbitrary starting configuration to a goal. Motions are optimized with respect to time and control energy. Becasue controllers are specified in terms of destination states only, it is easy to reuse the same controller to produce different motions (from different starting states), or to create a complex sequence of motions by concatenating several controllers. An implementation of state-space controllers is presented, in which realistic motions can be produced in real time. Several examples will be considered.
International Accounting Treatment Regarding Revenue

This paper discusses the news on international accounting treatments of revenue arising from the extensive process of convergence between IASB and FASB that began in 2002. The starting point of this approach is to identify the treatments currently applicable to income. Finally we presented a summary of the main provisions of the new standard IFRS 15 “Revenue from Contracts with Customers”, which replaces IAS 11 and IAS 18 (as well as a number of SIC and IFRIC interpretations) required to be applied from January 1, 2017, emphasizing the potential impact on entities.
The Effect of Welfare Reform on Women's Marital Bargaining Power

Author(s): Bird, Mia | Advisor(s): Raphael, Steven | Abstract: Marital bargaining models predict changes in the policy environment that affect the relative well-being of husbands and wives in divorce will indirectly affect the distribution of power within marriage. This study estimates the effect of 1996 welfare reform policies on the marital bargaining power of women with young children. Although the distribution of marital power cannot be directly observed, I utilize Consumer Expenditure data to infer shifts in bargaining power from changes in family demand. I first differentiate gendered patterns of consumption to create an indicator of relative bargaining power which I call the "male bias. " I then use policy variation over time and across states to identify the effect of welfare reform on the marital bargaining power of low-income women with young children. I characterize states as either "intensive" and "non-intensive" reformers based on 12 dimensions of welfare reform implementation policy. Based on these characterizations, I use a triple-difference estimator to capture the differential change in bargaining power for women with young children in intensive reform states. I estimate a 20 percentage point increase in the male bias for poor women and an 8 percentage point increase in the male bias for low-income women over the period of welfare reform. These findings suggest welfare reform caused a substantial decline in the marital bargaining power of those women most likely to view welfare as a potential alternative to marriage. Given evidence from the literature connecting women's bargaining power with the share of family resources allocated toward children, these findings may have both equity and efficiency implications for further welfare policy reform.
Multiplayer Belief Revision and Accuracy Orders

A syntactical and a semantical framework are proposed for the modeling of a hierarchical belief structure and of a message characterized by its content and status. For a given message, a multiplayer belief revision rule that transforms any initial belief structure into a &nal belief structure is designed. Several accuracy relations are introduced in order to express the formal conditions under which a belief structure can be said more accurate than another. Finally, it is proved that accuracy can be carried from the message to the &nal belief for a given initial belief. Journal of Economic Literature Classi&cation Number: C72.
Axiomatizing Confident EL^bot_gfp-General Concept Inclusions in the Presence of Untrusted Individuals

To extract terminological knowledge from data, Baader and Distel have proposed an effective method that allows for the extraction of a base of all valid general concept inclusions of a given finite interpretation. In previous works, to be able to handle small amounts of errors in our data, we have extended this approach to also extract general concept inclusions which are “almost valid” in the interpretation. This has been done by demanding that general concept inclusions which are “almost valid” are those having only an allowed percentage of counterexamples in the interpretation. In this work, we shall further extend our previous work to allow the interpretation to contain both trusted and untrusted individuals, i. e. individuals from which we know and do not know that they are correct, respectively. The problem we then want to solve is to find a compact representation of all terminological knowledge that is valid for all trusted individuals and is almost valid for all others.
Quantifying the Contribution of Hosts with Different Parasite Concentrations to the Transmission of Visceral Leishmaniasis in Ethiopia

Background An important factor influencing the transmission dynamics of vector-borne diseases is the contribution of hosts with different parasitemia (no. of parasites per ml of blood) to the infected vector population. Today, estimation of this contribution is often impractical since it relies exclusively on limited-scale xenodiagnostic or artificial feeding experiments (i.e., measuring the proportion of vectors that become infected after feeding on infected blood/host). Methodology We developed a novel mechanistic model that facilitates the quantification of the contribution of hosts with different parasitemias to the infection of the vectors from data on the distribution of these parasitemias within the host population. We applied the model to an ample data set of Leishmania donovani carriers, the causative agent of visceral leishmaniasis in Ethiopia. Results Calculations facilitated by the model quantified the host parasitemias that are mostly responsible for the infection of vector, the sand fly Phlebotomus orientalis. Our findings indicate that a 3.2% of the most infected people were responsible for the infection of between 53% and 79% (mean – 62%) of the infected sand fly vector population. Significance Our modeling framework can easily be extended to facilitate the calculation of the contribution of other host groups (such as different host species, hosts with different ages) to the infected vector population. Identifying the hosts that contribute most towards infection of the vectors is crucial for understanding the transmission dynamics, and planning targeted intervention policy of visceral leishmaniasis as well as other vector borne infectious diseases (e.g., West Nile Fever).
Recommender systems: incremental clustering on web log data

Nowadays, recommendation systems are definitely a necessity in the websites not just an auxiliary feature, especially for commercial websites and web sites with large information services. Recommendation systems use models constructed by applying statistical and data mining approaches on derived data from websites. In this paper we propose a new hybrid approach that leverages usage data and data domain of website to construct a recommendation model. A data mining model will be created by applying clustering algorithm, and then the model is adjusted by statistical approach based on the change of behavior of users or data domain of website periodically. We believe that by this novel approach the problem of inaccuracy of conventional usage data models partly due to slowly change of behavior of users or data domain of websites will be solved.
Spin diffusion and the role of screening effects in semiconductors

The electron spin properties in semiconductors are of great interest because of their potential in future spin-driven microelectronic devices. We performed simulations on electron spin injection in an n-doped silicon bar from a magnetic semiconductor with spin-dependent conductivity. A variation of doping can introduce charge accumulation/depletion layer at the interface. We found substantial spin transport differences, when spins are introduced through a charge accumulated and a charge depleted interface layer. Special attention is paid to a possible spin injection efficiency enhancement compared to the existing theory at the charge neutrality condition. We found that at a fixed bulk spin polarization, the efficiency increases, if spins are injected from a charge depleted source.