Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Micro Evidence on Human Capital as the Engine of Growth

This study examines a crucial assumption in much of the recent work on endogenous growth, namely, constant returns to scale in the production of human capital. A simple model is constructed to show that the returns to scale in human capital production can be inferred from the relationship between the wage rate and years of schooling. A large international micro dataset is used to estimate this relationship. The empirical evidence is decisive. There are decreasing returns to scale in human capital production; that is, the micro-level evidence is not supportive of endogenous growth driven by human capital accumulation.
Multilateral Matchmaking and Hybrid Coverage in Multi Agent Systems

This thesis has two parts. The first part presents a hybrid app ro ch to the coverge problem under dead reckoning errors. Coverage is a canon i l robotics task, where single or multiple robots are given a target work area, and move about the area until every point in the area is visited by the robots. Th ere are many efficient exact-motion coverage algorithms, that cannot be used in pr actice, because they assume accurate movements by the robot; unfortunately, rea l robots have navigational errors—calledead reckoning errors . A standard costly solution is to utilize a hybrid approach where an exact-motion algorithm i s used on a robot that continuously localizes, so as to make course corrections. W e propose a novel hybrid coverage algorithm, called T RIM SAIL . It takes as input an exact-movement algorithm, the coverage tool size, and a maximal dead-recko ning error bound. It optimizes use of the exact-movement algorithm, so as to exec ute its coverage plan while minimizing movement and localization costs. T RIM SAIL guarantees complete coverage, even under dead-reckoning errors. We prese nt several variants of TRIM SAIL and demonstrate their efficacy in systematic experiments us ing data collected from real robots. We show that (i) the analytical p redictions for execution costs match the actual performance of the robot; (ii) al l versions outperform the standard hybrid; and (iii) T RIM SAIL ’s performance is robust to errors in cost estimates. The second part discuss multilater matchmaking under time c onstraints. In open multiagent systems (MAS), agents need mechanisms to lo cate possible partners for joint activities. Matchmaking is the process of int roducing two or more agents to one another. Many approaches to matchmaking use a c entr lized method, in which one or a fewmiddle agentsrespond to matchmaking requests from all agents in the system. However, recent technology trends lim it the efficacy of centralized systems. As a result we focus on distributed matchm aking, where each agent is capable of searching and announcing the activities it is eeking. Previous works on distributed matchmaking used techniques that are u nidirectional in nature: One agent searches, while the other passively waits to be contacted. In contrast, we allow for multidirectional searches to take place , in which all potential partners are involved. We present a new distributed techniq ue which scales well, and still maintains a relatively low matchmaking time and li ttle communication overhead. In addition, our technique introduces very low st orage and computational overhead for the agents. We empirically evaluate the proposed technique on bilateral matchmaking and show that it outperforms the ex isting techniques. Then, we further enhance our technique by using partial matc h queries for the case of multilateral (more than two partners) matchmaking a d demonstrate its advantages.
Contribution of Company Affiliation and Social Contacts to Risk Estimates of Between-Farm Transmission of Avian Influenza

BACKGROUND Models of between-farm transmission of pathogens have identified service vehicles and social groups as risk factors mediating the spread of infection. Because of high levels of economic organization in much of the poultry industry, we examined the importance of company affiliation, as distinct from social contacts, in a model of the potential spread of avian influenza among broiler poultry farms in a poultry-dense region in the United States. The contribution of company affiliation to risk of between-farm disease transmission has not been previously studied. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We obtained data on the nature and frequency of business and social contacts through a national survey of broiler poultry growers in the United States. Daily rates of contact were estimated using Monte Carlo analysis. Stochastic modeling techniques were used to estimate the exposure risk posed by a single infectious farm to other farms in the region and relative risk of exposure for farms under different scenarios. The mean daily rate of vehicular contact was 0.82 vehicles/day. The magnitude of exposure risk ranged from <1% to 25% under varying parameters. Risk of between-farm transmission was largely driven by company affiliation, with farms in the same company group as the index farm facing as much as a 5-fold increase in risk compared to farms contracted with different companies. Employment of part-time workers contributed to significant increases in risk in most scenarios, notably for farms who hired day-laborers. Social visits were significantly less important in determining risk. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE Biosecurity interventions should be based on information on industry structure and company affiliation, and include part-time workers as potentially unrecognized sources of viral transmission. Modeling efforts to understand pathogen transmission in the context of industrial food animal production should consider company affiliation in addition to geospatial factors and pathogen characteristics. Restriction of social contacts among farmers may be less useful in reducing between-farm transmission.
Performance enhancements for embedded software implementation of GNSS navigation algorithms

Calculation of a navigation solution in a GNSS receiver requires a number of different calculations to be carried out. In this paper, a number of software optimizations that can be used in the calculation of a navigation solution without decreasing the accuracy of the result are presented. Also, some optimizations that appeared to be unsuitable for navigation solution and could not be used are shown. Some attention is put on limited capabilities of embedded hardware (e.g. single-precision FPU) that may be used in GNSS receiver. Software was implemented in ANSI-compatible C language, built for ARM platform and executed on ARM instruction set simulator. Its performance was measured in execution time and estimated Whetstone FLOPs. Presented complexity budget shows the amount of calculations required by each stage of the solution.
High-resolution spatial analysis of a hurricane structure by means of X-band and Ka-band satellite synthetic aperture radar

Spaceborne synthetic aperture radars (SARs) have very good spatial resolution (of the order of hundreds meters in presence of precipitations) and the capability of fully characterize the extinction and scattering properties of the target. Nowadays several spaceborne SAR systems are operational, such as the Cosmo-SkyMed constellation (Covello et al., 2010) and TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X (Werninghaus et al., 2010), ensuring a great ground coverage, but also increasing the probability of observing precipitation events. Moreover, several projects are currently analyzing the feasibility of spaceborne SAR systems operating at higher frequency, such as Ka-band. So far, several sensitivity studies of SAR amplitude and phase received signal to atmospheric effects, and in particular to precipitations , have been assessed for frequencies above C band by numerous investigators in the last years, e.g. (Danklmayer et al., 2009), (Marzano et al., 2011), (Baldini et al., 2014).
Sphere Packing and Zero-Rate Bounds to the Reliability of Classical-Quantum Channels

In this paper, the sphere packing bound of Fano, Shannon, Gal- lager and Berlekamp and the zero-rate bound of Berlekamp are extended to general classical-quantum channels. The upper bound for the reliability func- tion obtained from the sphere packing coincides at high rates, for the case of pure state channels, with a lower bound derived by Burnashev and Holevo (21). Thus, for pure state channels, the reliability function at high rates is now ex- actly determined. For the general case, the obtained upper bound expression at high rates was conjectured to represent also a lower bound to the reliability function, but a complete proof has not been obtained yet. Finally, the obtained zero-rate upper bound to the reliability function of a general classical-quantum channel with no zero-error capacity coincides with a lower bound obtained by Holevo, thus determining the exact expression.
Effects of a Visual Distracter Task on the Gait of Elderly versus Young Persons

Seniors show deficits of dual-task walking when the second task has high visual-processing requirements. Here, we evaluate whether similar deficits emerge when the second task is discrete rather than continuous, as is often the case in everyday life. Subjects walked in a hallway, while foot proprioception was either perturbed by vibration or unperturbed. At unpredictable intervals, they were prompted to turn their head and perform a mental-rotation task. We found that locomotion of young subjects was not affected by this distracter task with or without vibration. In contrast, seniors moved their legs after the distraction at a slower pace through smaller angles and with a higher spatiotemporal variability; the magnitude of these changes was vibration independent. We conclude that the visual distracter task degraded the gait of elderly subjects but completely spared young ones, that this effect is not due to degraded proprioception, and that it rather might reflect the known decline of executive functions in the elderly.
Search and Retirement Under Asymmetric Information

We consider a labor market where the competitive search equilibrium is inefficient due to asymmetrical information. At the time when firms commit to specific hiring costs, workers hold private information on their intention of entering into retirement before the termination of the contract. When retirement is an event which occurs exogenously and information is complete, the long term employment relationship is preferred by the risk adverse workers. This implies that firms must implement a screening process when the information is asymmetric. We show that the optimal separating contract (an ascending wage profile) distorts the allocation of the workers who will retire later (the 'good' workers) in order to prevent the workers who will retire early (the 'bad' workers) from applying for these jobs. Secondly, we endogenize the retirement decision by considering two cases: an ex ante or ex post heterogeneity. In these two cases, we show that a separating equilibrium always exists, whereby good workers accept an ascending wage profile in order to make themselves differentiate from the 'bad' workers. These asymmetries in the information lead to an excess of retirement compared to the full information economy. Finally, in the case of ex post heterogeneity, we are able to show that the employment rate is unambiguously lower.
IZA Discussion Paper No . 546

Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Regulated Labor Market: The Case of Austria We study Austrian job reallocation in the period of 1978 to 1998, using a large administrative dataset where we correct for “spurious” entries and exits of firms. We find that on average 9 out of 100 randomly selected jobs were created within the last year, and that about 9 out of randomly selected 100 jobs will be destroyed within the next year. Hence, Austrian job flows seem to be of comparable magnitude as in other countries, similar to the well-known results of Davis et al. (1996) for the United States. Job reallocation appears to be driven primarily by idiosyncratic shocks. However, job creation increases significantly during cyclical upswings whereas job destruction rises in downturns. We also find substantial persistence of job creation and destruction. We show that the pronounced pattern of job reallocation rates falling with firm size and age continues to hold when we use a set of controls. Finally, we show that controlling for sector and for firm size composition Austrian job reallocation rates are only half the rates for the U.S. This result is not surprising given the impact of tighter regulation and labor law in Austria. JEL Classification: D21, J23, L11
Image Classification of Paddy Field Insect Pests Using Gradient-Based Features

Agriculture is one of the principal economic activities of the Jaffna peninsula in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka. Over 60% of the work force in the peninsula depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Paddy cultivation in the peninsula contributes substantially to the gross national income of the country. Such Paddy crops are affected by the attack of insect pests. Therefore paddy field insect pest identification is an important task to the sustainable agricultural development in the Jaffna peninsula. This paper offers a framework to classify images of paddy field insect pests using gradient-based features through the bag-of-words approach. Images of twenty classes of paddy field insect pests were obtained from Google Images and photographs taken by the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The images were then classified through the system that involves identification of regions of interest and representation of those regions as scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) or speeded-up robust features (SURF) descriptors, construction of codebooks which provides a way to map the descriptors into a fixed-length vector in histogram space, and the multi-class classification of the feature histograms using support vector machines (SVMs). Furthermore, the histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors were applied in classification. As a baseline classifier the nearest neighbour approach was used and compared with SVM-based classifiers. Testing results show that HOG descriptors significantly outperform existing local-invariant features: SIFT and SURF in paddy field insect pests classification. HOG descriptors when combined with SURF features yield around 90% accuracy in classification. For simplicity and speed, linear SVM was used as a classifier throughout the study.
Phrase-based statistical machine translation with pivot languages.

Translation with pivot languages has recently gained attention as a means to circumvent the data bottleneck of statistical machine translation (SMT). This paper tries to give a mathematically sound formulation of the various approaches presented in the literature and introduces new methods for training alignment models through pivot languages. We present experimental results on Chinese-Spanish translation via English, on a popular traveling domain task. In contrast to previous literature, we report experimental results by using parallel corpora that are either disjoint or overlapped on the pivot language side. Finally, our original method for generating training data through random sampling shows to perform as well as the best methods based on the coupling of translation systems.
Connectivity-aware Neighborhood Management Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Neighborhood relations are changing over time in wireless sensor networks due to different hardware or environmental effects. These effects and memory limitations require a balanced neighborhood management to ensure agility, stability, symmetry, and connectivity. The proposed neighborhood management protocol Mahalle is optimized with regard to these four criteria. Agility and stability are achieved by ALE, a new adaptive link estimator.
Real Options and the Informativeness of Segment Disclosures

This paper examines the informativeness of segment disclosures using a real-options framework. I study the relation between firm value and segment earnings when managers have options to adapt poorly-performing segments and to expand segments with investment opportunities. The segment adaptation option implies that segment losses should be less informative than segment profits about firm value. The segment expansion option implies that earnings will be capitalized at a higher rate for segments with higher investment opportunities. My empirical results are consistent with the hypotheses. This framework and supporting empirical evidence provide a direct link between the valuation and managerial-monitoring roles of segment disclosures.
BVE: a wafer-scale engine for differential equation computation

With the advent of specialized VLSI and WSI hardware components the finite difference algorithms for solving differential equations become more attractive. This paper presents a novel computer architecture dedicated to compute boundary value problems. Improvement in speed and reliability can be obtained by means of WSI technology; however, a fault/defect tolerant scheme must be designed. Here we present a time redundancy approach which uses all the available computational resources; this is there is no spare or idle processors. This special purpose WSI parallel architecture runs as a loosely coupled MIMD (multi-instruction multi-data streams) machine and may execute more than 100 million instructions per second. The main features of this boundary value engine (BVE) are: 1) local communication -connections are limited to nearest neighbor; 2) cell regularity -all processors, memories and buses are identical; and 3) fault-tolerance -faulty modules are discarded by means of a novel time redundancy approach. As the feature size continues to shrink, the architecture can easily be extended to accommodate more computational cells.
A novel approach for person authentication and content-based tracking in videos using kernel methods and active appearance models

A novel integration of methods for person authentication and tracking is proposed for real time security systems. The implementation of the idea for this real time implementation follows a three step procedure-face detection, recognition and content-based tracking. Instead of analyzing continuous videos we sample the frame based on a method derived from Shannon's information theory model. The Face-detector detects multi-viewed faces in a video using feature-based kernel methods in a reduced feature space obtained using ICA. The identified "face regions" are then passed on to the face recognition system which is based on Active Appearance Models (AAM). Once the subject is recognized, it can be tracked in the video using kernel based object tracking method. Several space reduction techniques have been used like ICA, PCA and skin-color segmentation.
Evidence that Beet Necrotic Yellow Vein Virus RNA-4 Is Essential for Efficient Transmission by the Fungus Polymyxa betae

The efficiency of transmission by Polymyxa betae of beet necrotic yellow vein virus (BNYVV) isolates containing different RNA components was compared using sugarbeet seedlings as test plants. Isolate S-4, containing RNA-1 + 2 + 4, was transmitted by P. betae about 100 times more efficiently than isolate S-3 (RNA-1 + 2 + 3) and about 1000 times more efficiently than isolate S-0 (RNA-1 +2). Isolate S-34 (RNA1 + 2 + 3 + 4) was transmitted even more efficiently than isolate S-4. Each isolate retained its characteristic RNA composition after transmission by P. betae. The virus content, measured by ELISA, of infected rootlets was S-34 > S-3 > S-4 > S-0. In inoculated leaves of Tetragonia expansa and Beta macrocarpa, isolates S-3 and S-34 multiplied more extensively than did S-4 and S-0. The inefficient transmission of isolate S-3 by P. betae, as compared with S-4, cannot be attributed to a poorer ability to spread in root tissue, but the difference in transmissibility of S-3 and S-0 may be explained in this way. These results show that RNA-4 of BNYVV is essential for efficient transmission by P. betae, and suggest that RNA-3 may influence the ability of the virus to spread in root tissue. RNA-4 and RNA-3 therefore seem to play important, but different, roles in virus survival and spread in nature.
Effects of the inversion layer centroid on MOSFET behavior

The effects of the average inversion-layer penetration, the inversion-layer centroid, on the inversion-charge density and the gate-to-channel capacitance have been analyzed. The quantum model has been used, and a variety of data have been obtained by self-consistently solving the Poisson and Schrodinger equations. An empirical expression for the centroid position that is valid for a wide range of electrical and technological variables has been obtained and has been applied to accurately model the inversion-layer density and capacitance.
Sensitivity of nonlinear precoding to imperfect channel state information in G.fast

Nonlinear Tomlinson-Harashima precoding has been proposed as a near-optimal interference mitigation technique for downstream transmission in G.fast systems, particularly in the transmit spectrum above 106 MHz. We propose an alternative implementation of Tomlinson-Harashima precoding and examine performance of the common and alternative implementations with respect to quantization errors and imperfect channel state information. We show that Tomlinson-Harashima precoding is more sensitive than optimized linear precoding to varying channel state information due to fluctuations in ambient conditions and sudden changes in termination impedance. We also show that Tomlinson-Harashima precoding only outperforms optimized linear precoding when the channel state information is almost perfectly known.
Neuroimaging Studies of Emotional Responses in PTSD

Abstract: Neuroimaging research offers a powerful and noninvasive means to understand healthy as well as dysregulated emotional processing in healthy subjects and PTSD patients. Functional neuroimaging findings suggest specific roles for subregions of the medial prefrontal (mPFC), orbito frontal (OFC), anterior cingulate (ACC), and insular cortices as well as the sublenticular extended amygdala (SLEA) and hippocampus in various components of emotional processing. Some of the same regions appear to be associated with emotional response to trauma, and with symptom formation in PTSD. Neuroimaging findings of emotional processing in healthy subjects and PTSD patients are discussed, addressing the specific roles of cortical regions like mPFC, ACC, and insula, and their potential contribution to PTSD pathophysiology. Processes of cognitive–emotional interactions and social emotions are discussed in an attempt to synthesize the prefrontal findings in healthy subjects and PTSD patients. Further links between functional neuroanatomy of emotional responses and neuroendocrine stress regulation are proposed.
A discrete-time feedback controller for containerized cloud applications

Modern Web applications exploit Cloud infrastructures to scale their resources and cope with sudden changes in the workload. While the state of practice is to focus on dynamically adding and removing virtual machines, we advocate that there are strong benefits in containerizing the applications and in scaling the containers. In this paper we present an autoscaling technique that allows containerized applications to scale their resources both at the VM level and at the container level. Furthermore, applications can combine this infrastructural adaptation with platform-level adaptation. The autoscaling is made possible by our planner, which consists of a grey-box discrete-time feedback controller. The work has been validated using two application benchmarks deployed to Amazon EC2. Our experiments show that our planner outperforms Amazon's AutoScaling by 78% on average without containers; and that the introduction of containers allows us to improve by yet another 46% on average.