Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of the World Financial Crisis on the Polish Interbank Market: A Swap Spread Approach

The swap spread is defined as the difference between the fixed rate of an interest rate swap and the yield of the treasury with the same maturity. The swap spread is usually interpreted as the effective proxy of bank liquidity and the credit spread indicator. The interpretation is very similar to the LIBOR-OIS spread and in the context of Polish interbank market – WIBOR-OIS. However, WIBOR-OIS is less reliable during the crisis of confidence because of lack of interbank operation with the maturity longer than 1 month. Swap spreads base on two liquid instruments, thus they are free of this defect. The main goal of this paper is to assess how Polish swap spreads and their conditional variance reacted to important events connected with the subprime crisis and crisis of confidence in the Polish interbank market.
Competition and Information Production in Market Maker Models

The microstructure literature models the mechanisms through which fundamental information is incorporated into market prices. This paper extends previous models by endogenising information production and analysing incentives for costly information production. In contrast to the existing literature, increasing the number of informed traders can result in reduced price informativeness. When prices have an allocative role this has welfare consequences: the regulatory implications of a dichotomy between private and public incentives for information gathering are discussed.
Commercial Low-Fat Milk Markedly Stimulates Mammary Carcinogenesis in Rats

Commercial cows’ milk contains considerable amounts of estrogens. This study assessed the effect of commercial low-fat milk on the development of 7,12-dimethylbenz(a)anthracene (DMBA)-induced mammary tumors in rats. Eighty six-week-old female Sprague-Dawley rats received a single oral dose of 5 mg DMBA. Twenty-four hours later, the animals were divided into 4 groups of 20 animals each and given one of four test solutions for 20 weeks as their drinking liquid: low-fat (1%) milk (M), artificial milk (A), estrone sulfate solution (0.1 μg/ml, E), or tap water (W). The artificial milk was formulated to supply essentially the same calories as the milk. The low-fat milk contained 378 pg/ml estrone sulfate. Tumor incidence, the cumulative number of tumors, and the sum of tumor diameters were higher in the M and E groups than in the A or W groups. Overall, the development of mammary tumors was in the order: M = E > A = W. Whereas the plasma 17β-estradiol concentration in the M group was the second highest after the E group, the plasma level of insulin-like growth factor (IGF-I) was significantly higher in the M group than in the other three groups. In conclusion, commercially available low-fat milk promotes the development of DMBA-induced mammary tumors in rats. The degree of the promotion is almost comparable to that of 0.1 μg/ml estrone sulfate. The high estrogen content in the milk may be responsible for the promotional effects, acting in concert with other hormones such as IGF-
An Efficient and Accurate Two-Stage Fourth-order Gas-kinetic Scheme for the Navier-Stokes Equations

For computational fluid dynamics (CFD), the generalized Riemann problem (GRP) solver and the gas-kinetic kinetic scheme (GKS) provide a time-accurate flux function starting from a discontinuous piecewise linear flow distributions around each cell interface. With the use of time derivative of the flux function, a two-stage Lax-Wendroff-type (L-W for short) time stepping method has been recently proposed in the design of a fourth-order time accurate method [18]. In this paper, based on the same time-stepping method and the second-order GKS flux function [34], a fourth-order gas-kinetic scheme is constructed for the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations. In comparison with the formal one-stage time-stepping third-order gas-kinetic solver [21], the current fourth-order method not only reduces the complexity of the flux function, but also improves the accuracy of the scheme, even though the thirdand fourth-order schemes have similar computation cost. Most importantly, the robustness of the fourth-order GKS is as good as the second-order one. Perfect numerical solutions can be obtained from the high Reynolds number boundary layer solutions to the hypersonic viscous heat conducting flow computations. Many numerical tests, including many difficult ones for the Navier-Stokes solvers, have been used to validate the current fourth-order method. Following the two-stage time-stepping framework, the one-stage third-order GKS can be easily extended to a fifth-order method with the usage of both first-order and second-order time derivatives of the flux function. The use of time-accurate flux function may have great impact on the development of higher-order CFD methods.
Psychosocial Aspect of Health and Illness

Life continuously presents before us the circumstances that can affect our physical or psychological well being. Chronic illness conditions are particularly stressful because a chronic disease is an irreversible illness that one must live with for weeks to years. Not only the victim but many persons related to victims are likely to worry and become weary of the process of dealing with diagnosis, grieving, the loss of health or life style, financial difficulties and worrying about the future. In the face of such losses the experience of fear, anger, depression, anxiety, and disorientation is normal. Chronic illness is an emotionally, as well as, physically depriving experience. It can do lasting harm by threatening a person’s sense of well being, competence and feelings of productivity (Dubey, 2003). Life stresses, like a chronic disease may foster enhanced resilience because they provide an opportunity to learn new coping skills (Caspi, Bolger & Eckenrode, 1987). The coping process involves cognitions, emotions, and behaviour. Patients’ experience of chronic illness not only depends on the severity of illness but also the personal and social resources available. These psychosocial factors will moderate the perceived threat of a disease and facilitate or pose barriers to adaptation (Dubey, 2003).
Predicting Foreign Exchange Arbitrage

We collect 32 data series for each of the three relevant currencies: AUD, JPY, and USD. Our data capture activities in the financial markets, conditions of the economy, the state of international trade, and the stance of economic policies. With the exception of the Economic Policy Uncertainty (“EPU”) Index, which is compiled by three leading economists and available at www.policyuncertainty. com, all data are obtained from Bloomberg:
Intelligent Prompting System to Assist Stroke

Stroke survivors often have difficulties performing Activities of Daily Living (ADL). When trying to complete a task, they tend to rely on caregivers who give them cues when necessary. However, this reliance on caregivers’ support may affect their ability to live independently. In our study, we have developed CogWatch an assistive system designed to provide guidance to stroke survivors during teamaking. An evaluation of the system was carried out on twelve patients. The latter were asked to complete different ADLs with and without CogWatch’s assistance. Results showed that patients succeed at the tasks more often when assisted by the system than without guidance. It is anticipated that this system could be installed in the home environment and provide early stage rehabilitation.
Mating type and mating strategies in Neurospora

In the heterothallic species Neurospora crassa, strains of opposite mating type, A and a, must interact to give the series of events resulting in fruiting body formation, meiosis, and the generation of dormant ascospores. The mating type of a strain is specified by the DNA sequence it carries in the mating type region; strains that are otherwise isogenic can mate and produce ascospores. The DNA of the A and a regions have completely dissimilar sequences. Probing DNA from strains of each mating type with labelled sequences from the A and the a regions has shown that, unlike in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, only a single copy of a mating type sequence is present in a haploid genome. The failure to switch is explainable by the physical absence of DNA sequences characteristic of the opposite mating type. While the mating type sequences must be of the opposite kind for mating to occur in the sexual cycle, two strains of opposite mating type cannot form a stable heterokaryon during vegetative growth; instead, they fuse abortively to give a heterokaryon incompatibility reaction, which results in death of the cells along the fusion line. The DNA sequences responsible for this reaction are coextensive with those sequences in the A and a regions which are necessary to initiate fruiting body formation. The genus Neurospora also includes homothallic species – ones in which a single haploid nucleus carries all the information necessary to form fruiting bodies, undergo meiosis, and produce new haploid spores. One such species, N. terricola, contains one copy each of the A and the a sequences within each haploid genome. Another homothallic species, N. africana, contains a single copy of the A sequence in the haploid genome, but does not contain any sequences corresponding to the a sequence. We present a model for the role of the mating type‐specific sequences in heterothallic and homothallic species of Neurospora and we speculate on the origin of the different modes of reproduction in the genus Neurospora.
Gender-Specific Differences in the Relationship between Autobiographical Memory and Intertemporal Choice in Older Adults

As the population of older adults grows, their economic choices will have increasing impact on society. Research on the effects of aging on intertemporal decisions shows inconsistent, often opposing results, indicating that yet unexplored factors might play an essential role in guiding one's choices. Recent studies suggest that episodic future thinking, which is based on the same neural network involved in episodic memory functions, leads to reductions in discounting of future rewards. As episodic memory functioning declines with normal aging, but to greatly variable degrees, individual differences in delay discounting might be due to individual differences in the vitality of this memory system in older adults. We investigated this hypothesis, using a sample of healthy older adults who completed an intertemporal choice task as well as two episodic memory tasks. We found no clear evidence for a relationship between episodic memory performance and delay discounting in older adults. However, when additionally considering gender differences, we found an interaction effect of gender and autobiographical memory on delay discounting: while men with higher memory scores showed less delay discounting, women with higher memory scores tended to discount the future more. We speculate that this gender effect might stem from the gender-specific use of different modal representation formats (i.e. temporal or visual) during assessment of intertemporal choice options.
A Hybrid Approach for Fusing Physics and Data for Failure Prediction

This work describes the architecture for developing physics of failure models, derived as a function of machine sensor data, and integrating with data pertaining to other relevant factors like geography, manufacturing, environment, customer and inspection information, that are not easily modeled using physics principles. The mechanics of the system is characterized using surrogate models for stress and metal temperature based on results from multiple non-linear finite element simulations. A cumulative damage index measure has been formulated that quantifies the health of the component. To address deficiencies in the simulation results, a model tuning framework is designed to improve the accuracy of the model. Despite the model tuning, unmodelled sources of variation can lead to insufficient model accuracy. It is required to incorporate these un-modelled effects so as to improve the model performance. A novel machine learning based model fusion approach has been presented that can combine physics model predictions with other data sources that are difficult to incorporate in a physics framework. This approach has been applied to a gas turbine hot section turbine blade failure prediction example.
The Geography of Equity Listing: Why Do European Companies List Abroad?

This paper documents the aggregate trends in the foreign listings of companies and analyzes both their distinctive pre-listing characteristics and their post-listing performance relative to other companies. In the 1986-97 interval, many European companies listed abroad, but did so mainly on US exchanges. At the same time, the number of US companies listed in Europe decreased. The cross-listings of European companies appear to have sharply different motivations and consequences depending on whether they cross-list in the United States or within Europe. In the first case, companies pursue a strategy of rapid expansion fuelled by high leverage before the listing and large equity issues after the listing. They rely increasingly on export markets both before and after the listing, and tend to belong to high-tech industries. In the second case, companies do not grow more than the control group, and increase their leverage after the cross-listing. Also, they fail to increase their foreign sales in the wake of the cross-listing. The only common features of the two groups are their large size, high foreign sales before cross-listing and high R&D spending after cross-listing.
Persistence of Elevated Plasma CXCL8 Concentrations Following Red Blood Cell Transfusion in a Trauma Cohort

ABSTRACT Red blood cell (RBC) transfusion is associated with alterations in systemic concentrations of IL-8/CXCL8 functional homologs in a murine model. Whether RBC transfusion alters systemic neutrophil chemokine concentrations in individuals sustaining traumatic injury is not known. We conducted a retrospective, single-center study of severely injured trauma patients presenting within 12 h of injury with a base deficit greater than 6 and hypotension in the field. Plasma concentrations of 25 chemokines, cytokines, and growth factors were obtained from both transfused (n = 22) and nontransfused (n = 33) groups in the first 48 h following admission. The transfused group (mean RBC units, 2.7 [SD, 1.7]) tended to be older (49.9 [SD, 21.1] vs. 40.4 [SD, 19.9] years, P = 0.10), with a higher percentage of females (40.9% vs. 18.2%, P = 0.06) and a higher Injury Severity Score (27.1 [SD, 12.7] vs. 21.4 [SD, 10.2], P = 0.07). In univariate and multivariate analyses, transfusion was associated with increased hospital and intensive care unit length of stay but not ventilator-free days. Plasma CXCL8 concentrations were higher in the transfused (84 [SD, 88] pg/mL) than the nontransfused group (31 [SD, 21] pg/mL, P = 0.003). Using a linear prediction model to calculate bioanalyte concentrations standardized for age, sex, Injury Severity Score, and admission SBP, we observed that CXCL8 concentrations diverged within 12 h following injury, with the transfused group showing persistently elevated CXCL8 concentrations by contrast to the decay observed in the nontransfused group. Other bioanalytes showed no differences across time. Red blood cell transfusion is associated with persistently elevated neutrophil chemokine CXCL8 concentrations following traumatic injury.
Physical design tradeoffs in power distribution networks for 3-D ICs

A physical model for the design of the power distribution networks in three-dimensional integrated circuits is proposed. The tradeoffs among the different design parameters are specified and analyzed. Different case studies are explored, indicating that smaller and denser TSVs can deliver power more efficiently as compared to larger and coarsely distributed TSVs. The interplay between the TSV count and the intra-plane power distribution network in reducing the power supply noise is also shown.
On the Performance Variation in Modern Storage Stacks

Ensuring stable performance for storage stacks is important, especially with the growth in popularity of hosted services where customers expect QoS guarantees. The same requirement arises from benchmarking settings as well. One would expect that repeated, carefully controlled experiments might yield nearly identical performance results--but we found otherwise. We therefore undertook a study to characterize the amount of variability in benchmarking modern storage stacks. In this paper we report on the techniques used and the results of this study. We conducted many experiments using several popular workloads, file systems, and storage devices--and varied many parameters across the entire storage stack. In over 25% of the sampled configurations, we uncovered variations higher than 10% in storage performance between runs. We analyzed these variations and found that there was no single root cause: it often changed with the workload, hardware, or software configuration in the storage stack. In several of those cases we were able to fix the cause of variation and reduce it to acceptable levels. We believe our observations in benchmarking will also shed some light on addressing stability issues in production systems.
An End to End Gluing Construction for Metrics of Constant Positive Scalar Curvature

Complete, constant positive scalar curvature metrics on S n \ {p 0 ,. ,p k } admit a definite asymptotic structure, i.e., the metric is asymptotically S n-1 -invariant near each puncture. This allows one to glue together two such metrics near their punctures, provided the asyrnptotics match, and create a metric whose scalar curvature is nearly constant. In this paper we perturb this new metric to obtain a new metric with constant scalar curvature.
Independent Differentiation of Sexual and Social Traits

In the process of development in mammals and birds, an individual becomes either male or female. The dogma of sexual differentiation explains this development in terms of gonadal secretions, which direct the growth of an organism along masculine or feminine lines. However, this type of bimodality is not found in all traits that are displayed in reproductive contexts. For example, aggressive behaviors displayed during the breeding season can be expressed by both males and females. Furthermore, this reproductive aggression is highly variable between individuals, regardless of sex. The development of variable traits like reproductive aggression is therefore likely to be influenced by factors in addition to gonadal secretions. We propose that social traits associated with reproduction can differentiate along pathways that are distinct from the developmental pathways of primary sexual traits.
Muckle-Wells Syndrome Effectively Treated with Canakinumab: Is the Recommended Dosing Schedule Mandatory?

Cryopyrin-associated periodic fever syndrome (CAPS) is a rare inherited disease due to mutations in the NLRP3 (also called CIAS1) gene on chromosome 1q44 resulting in overproduction of interleukin-1. CAPS comprises three clinically overlapping disorders including Muckle-Wells syndrome. We report on two half-siblings with Muckle-Wells syndrome who were successfully treated with the interleukin-1 beta antibody canakinumab. Despite reduced dosing and longer treatment intervals compared to the recommended dosing schedule (e.g. 150 mg every 8 weeks), the efficacy and tolerability of canakinumab was impressive in both patients. The pharmacologic properties of canakinumab are reviewed and the clinical and economical aspects highlighted. We show that with individualized ‘reflare-guided’ administrations of canakinumab overall costs could hypothetically be reduced by 50% (approx. USD 60,000/patient/year) and therefore could have a major impact on treatment costs.
Smart tourism experiences: conceptualisation, key dimensions and research agenda

«Smart tourism» has gained momentum in research fostered by the revolution of the latest generation of information and communication technologies and has rapidly become a leading stream of literature. The concept has permeated governments and the business sphere and has been accompanied by the quest for developing smart devices, services and tourist destinations. However, experiences as the main focus of smartness development in tourism and destinations have received comparably little attention in the smart discourse. Smart destinations, as new ecosystems backed by concrete geographical contexts, facilitate the co-creation of a rich, technology-based, smart tourism experience (STE). Yet, a clear definition and examination of the dimensions of what constitutes a smart tourism experience is still to be developed. This paper aims to discuss the main core precedent constructs of STEs, namely: a) technology enhanced experiences and b) smart destinations, to underpin a holistic definition of a smart tourism experience. Based on an in-depth literature review, a novel conceptual model for this concept is developed and an agenda for further research is proposed drawing on the identified key themes and dimensions of this construct. By mapping out smart tourism experiences and providing real examples, this research contributes to the theoretical foundations of smart tourism and tourist experiences.
NATIONAL AND REGIONAL ECONOMICS VIII FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND TRADE *

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries. We show that widespread knowledge of languages is an important determinant for foreign trade, with English playing an especially important role. The robustness of our results is confirmed by quantile regressions.
Unit Roots in Economic and Financial Time Series: A Re-Evaluation based on Enlightened Judgement

This paper re-evaluates the key past results of unit root test, emphasizing that the use of a conventional level of significance is not in general optimal due to the test having low power. The optimal levels for popular unit root tests, chosen using the line of enlightened judgement under a symmetric loss function, are found to be much higher than conventional ones. We also propose simple calibration rules for the optimal level of significance for a range of unit root tests based on asymptotic local power. At the optimal levels, many time series in the extended Nelson-Plosser data set are judged to be trend-stationary, including real income variables, employment variables and money stock. We also find nearly all real exchange rates covered in the Elliott-Pesavento study to be stationary at the optimal levels, which lends strong support for the purchasing power parity. Additionally, most of the real interest rates covered in the Rapach-Weber study are found to be stationary.