Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Convergence to Market Efficiency of Top Losers

This study investigates the convergence process toward efficiency of daily top gainers. The convergence process toward efficiency is much clearer as a result of using a GARCH(1,Â 1) model compared to the OLS model, and exhibits a monotonic decline as the time interval increases. The relationship between volatility and order imbalances is, however, not strong enough, suggesting that market makers do have the capability to reduce price volatility. This study develops an imbalance-based trading strategy, which earns a positive profit but fails to outperform the buy-and-hold strategy (i.e., open-to-close returns). A nested causality approach, which examines the dynamic return-order imbalance relationship during the price-formation process, confirms the results.
Forward integrals and an Itô formula for fractional Brownian motion

We consider the forward integral with respect to fractional Brownian motion B(H)(t) and relate this to the Wick–Ito–Skorohod integral by using the M-operator introduced by Ref. 10 and the Malliavin derivative . Using this connection we obtain a general Ito formula for the Wick–Ito–Skorohod integralswith respect to B(H)(t), valid for .
Valorisation of menu labelling at fast food restaurants: exploring consumer perceptions Importância da presença de informação nutricional no cardápio de restaurantes fast food: explorando as percepções do consumidor

Summary The present study aimed to investigate Portuguese consumers’ interest for the provision of nutrition information at fast food restaurants and reactions to alternative presentations of this information. Four focus groups, with 5 to 8 consumers, were conducted in which participants were asked to look at three mock fast food restaurant menus that varied with respect to whether calorie information was provided and whether small portions and salads were available. Participants also discussed about fast food perceptions and attitudes, and fast food meal criteria decisions as well as the influence of nutrition information available at fast food restaurants on consumer meal decisions. Generally, participants were not interested on nutrition information when they eat at fast food restaurants, because eating at fast food restaurants continues to be mainly associated with taste, pleasure and convenience. Except for women with lower education, some participants were very critical regarding healthy menu identification, putting into question the regular menus without nutrition information. Some participants did not think they would do the calculations required to use the information on number of calories in each serving in order to report their estimation of daily energy requirements. Men, compared to women, were more aware of the possible ways in which fast food restaurants could provide point of purchase nutrition information.
Thrombosis Therapy: Focus on Antiplatelet Agents

Platelet adhesion, activation and aggregation to the injured vessel wall are crucially involved in the pathogenesis of thrombus formation. Agents in theory thwarting these phases would have significant clinical value. The current antiplatelet drugs used in daily clinical practice include COX-1 inhibitor aspirin, ADP P2Y12 receptor antagonist clopidogrel, and the GPIIb-IIIa antagonists (abciximab, eptifibatide and tirofiban). However, confined curative ratio along with unforeseen bleeding risk remains a major puzzle of antiplatelet therapy. With advances in understanding of the molecular basis of platelet in thrombosis, newer antiplatelet agents that targets different stage of thrombus formation have been recently developed, mostly including agents targeting platelet adhesion (GPIV, vWF), activation (GPVI, P2Y12, TPα, PAR1, phosphodiesterase, cyclooxygenase), and aggregation (GPIIb/IIIa). In this article, we will review the advantages and limitations of various antiplatelet agents that have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or under development.
MVEDSUA: Higher Availability Dynamic Software Updates via Multi-Version Execution

Dynamic Software Updating (DSU) is a technique for patching stateful software without shutting it down, which enables both timely updates and non-stop service. Unfortunately, bugs in the update itself---whether in the changed code or in the way the change is introduced dynamically---may cause the updated software to crash or misbehave. Furthermore, the time taken to dynamically apply the update may be unacceptable if it introduces a long delay in service. This paper makes the key observation that both problems can be addressed by employing Multi-Version Execution (MVE). To avoid delay in service, the update is applied to a forked copy while the original system continues to operate. Once the update completes, the MVE system monitors that the responses of both versions agree for the same inputs. Expected divergences are specified by the programmer using an MVE-specific DSL. Unexpected divergences signal possible errors and roll back the update, which simply means terminating the updated version and reverting to the original version. This is safe because the MVE system keeps the state of both versions in sync. If the new version shows no problems after a warmup period, operators can make it permanent and discard the original version. We have implemented this approach, which we call MVEDSUa, by extending the Kitsune DSU framework with Varan, a state-of-the-art MVE system. We have used MVEDSUa to update several high-performance servers: Redis, Memcached, and VSFTPD. Our results show that MVEDSUa significantly reduces the update-time delay, imposes little overhead in steady state, and easily recovers from a
Strategic Integration between U.S. Airways and Iberia in One World

The air transportation is one of the most important international industries; there are three major networks or strategic alliances (One World, Sky Team and Star Alliance). They seek to overcome each other, whilst the members leave the guild and join another. This paper attempts to determine the reasons for the performance of the joint venture and the performance of firms within the alliance.
THE COST–BENEFIT MODEL OF THERMOREGULATION DOES NOT PREDICT LIZARD THERMOREGULATORY BEHAVIOR

Physiological processes are optimized within a narrow range of body temperatures. Reptiles engage in behavioral thermoregulation to achieve the optimal body temperature range. Interestingly, however, thermoregulatory effort varies over time and across species. The cost–benefit model of thermoregulation of R. B. Huey and M. Slatkin is the only conceptual framework that attempts to explain the observed variation. The model postulates that reptiles should engage in thermoregulation when the costs incurred do not outweigh the benefits. The main cost is the thermal quality of the environment: thermoregulation is more costly in habitats of low thermal quality. We used thermal quality of the habitat, measured by the deviations of operative temperatures from the preferred body temperature range, as an indicator of costs and two quantitative indices of thermoregulation as indices of thermoregulatory investment. Regressions of the indices of thermoregulation on thermal quality of the habitat produced no pattern or .
Accurate determination of band gaps within density functional formalism

In this paper, we report an adaptation of the Harbola-Sahni (HS) exchange potential to the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital (TB-LMTO) method to determine band gaps (BGs) of solids accurately. We show that the electrostatic basis of derivation of the Harbola-Sahni potential allows this nonvariational approach to improve substantiallyoverlocal-densityapproximationderivedBGs,bringingthemveryclosetoexperimentalvalues.That the accuracy of the HS potential is directly responsible for the determination of correct BGs is demonstrated by performing similar calculations with an accurate model potential that too leads to BGs close to their experimental values. Moreover, ground-state properties like equilibrium lattice parameters and bulk moduli (BM) for various semiconductors like C, Si, AlN, AlP, BP, and 3C-SiC calculated with the HS approach are in close agreement with the experiments. The clear physical interpretation of HS potential leads us to suggest exploring its use for calculating various properties of solids.
Distribution and ecological aspects of sand flies (Diptera: Psychodidae) species in Northeastern Iran

Objective: To determine both the distribution and the ecological characteristics of sand flies in Golestan Province, northeast of Iran in 2016. Methods: In this study, 34 villages were selected based on their geographical conditions. Sticky paper traps were used for collecting the sand flies. Sampling was carried out in each of villages from May to November. In each village, 60 traps for indoors and 60 for outdoors were monthly installed. The species of all collected sand flies were determined using approved morphological keys. Pearson coefficient correlation was used to find the relationship between the number of collected Phlebotomus papatasi from different villages and incidence rate of zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis as well as the number of positive cases of the disease. The altitude of the studied villages was extracted from digital elevation model of the area using GIS and vegetation cover density index of the province was extracted from Modis satellite imagery and distribution map of sand flies drown up. Results: Overall, 5 428 sand flies were collected and identified, belonging to 18 species. Phlebotomus wenyoni was reported for the first time from the area in this study. The frequency of sand flies in the villages located in northeast of the Golestan province (the plateau area, lower altitude, arid and semi-arid climates, and lower vegetation cover density), were more than other villages in this province. There was a significant correlation between the number of collected Phlebotomus papatasi and incidence rate of the zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis cases in different villages (r=0.837, P=0.019) as well as the number of positive cases of the disease (r=0.688, P<0.001). Conclusions: In the northeaster areas of Golestan Province which is known as the endemic foci of zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis, the abundance of sand flies were more and the conditions for their growth and development were more appropriate.
Variation in populations of common pistachio psyllid, Agonoscena pistaciae (Hem.: Psyllidae), with different chemical control levels: narrower wing shape in the stressed environment

The common pistachio psyllid, Agonoscena pistaciae Burckhardt & Lauterer (Hemiptera: Psyllidae), is a key pest of pistachio trees in Iran. Both psyllid nymphs and adults directly damage pistachio; they extract large quantities of sap from tree and produce honeydew and cause deformation of leaves resulting in great economic damage. Little is known about the intraspecific variation of common pistachio psyllid in regions with stressed conditions, such as areas under high levels of pesticide application. Therefore, this study using geometric morphometrics was designed to 1) evaluate morphological differences in wing shape in populations under different levels of pesticide application in Kerman province as the main pistachio producer in the world, and 2) search for a link between the morphological data and previously studied molecular data. The populations were collected from regions with high and low pesticide applications. The results showed that wing shape (P < 0.01) and size (P < 0.01) are different between populations exposed to different chemical control programs. Based on the results, narrower wing shape was found in psyllid population in stressed environment (population with extreme chemical control programs). In spite of allometric growth, significant shape differences still remain when the data are adjusted to constant size, which showed the important role of genetic changes in the observed morphological changes. Moreover, links between morphologic and previously studied molecular data were revealed. Based on the results, it appears that an evolutionary resistance process is developing, therefore insecticide resistance management programs, in the regions under investigation, is recommended.
Arabic Text Genre Classification

Text genre is a type of written text. Arabic text genre classification predicts genre of specific text document written in Arabic independent of its topic. In this paper, an approach was proposed that takes an Arabic document and classify it into one of four genres which are advertisements, news, subjective and scientific documents. Since the frequency of words approach produces a low performance when used in the genre, an attempted was made to generate attributes based on the style of the text. This approach evaluated using corpus collected for this purpose. Using four machine learning methods, our approach compared with the word frequency approach, and it found that our approach is better than this mainstream approach. It, also, found that predicting subjectivity and scientific genre is more accurate than predicting advertisements and news.
SIRE-DP-2008-58 Financial shocks and the US business cycle

Employing the financial accelerator (FA) model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) enhanced to include a shock to the FA mechanism, we construct and study shocks to the efficiency of the financial sector in post-war US business cycles. We find that financial shocks are very tightly linked with the onset of recessions, more so than TFP or monetary shocks. The financial shock invariably remains contractionary for sometime after recessions have ended. The shock accounts for a large part of the variance of GDP and is strongly negatively correlated with the external finance premium. Second-moments comparisons across variants of the model with and without a (stochastic) FA mechanism suggests the stochastic FA model helps us understand the data. JEL Classification: E30, E44, E52.
Challenges and Opportunities in Finfish Nutrition

Abstract Much of the criticism leveled at aquaculture (e.g., dependency on animal-derived feedstuffs, nutrient-laden effluent discharges, and increased organic contamination in edible products) can be traced to the feeds in use. Accordingly, finfish nutritionists are being challenged to formulate feeds that not only meet the nutritional requirements of livestock but also minimize production costs, limit environmental impacts, and enhance product quality. These challenges not only add considerable complexity to finfish nutrition but also afford opportunities to avoid some of the mistakes made by other industries in the past. From a review of the current status of finfish nutrition with respect to major nutrient classes, we comment on future opportunities and promising avenues of research. Alternative protein sources, specifically those derived from marine bycatch, plants, and microbes, are discussed, as well as methods to facilitate their implementation in finfish feeds. Dietary lipid, its role in fish bio.
Molecular detection of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus harbouring β- lactamase resistance genes isolated from different sources of infections

Background and objective: The detection and investigation of methicillin resistance staphylococci specifically S. aureus in clinical microbiology setting is very helpful both for informing the appropriate treatment of individual patients and also for the surveillance of these organisms. This study aimed at the rapid molecular detection of methicillin resistant staphylococci harbouring β-lactamase gene and determination of the efficiency of m-PCR through comparison with uniplex PCR. Methods: Standard microbiological techniques were applied for the determination of the presence of methicillin resistant S. aureus in samples recovered from different body sites of patients who attended Al-Kadhumyhia Teaching and Baghdad Teaching Hospitals. The resulting methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA) isolates were subjected to uni and multiplex PCR amplifications for detecting the existence of mec A gene and β-lactamase (TEM) resistance gene. Results: Half of the cases involved were found to be caused by MRSA. All the tested isolates showed positive amplification bands for the presence of mec A gene and only 48.8% of these harbored TEM gene. The obtained results revealed high sensitivity of universal bacterial and TEM primers expressed as 97.6% and 100% respectively, while the sensitivity of mec A primer was limited to 60%. Conclusion: The phenotypic identification of MRSA revealed a higher incidence rate and that different molecular techniques can yield conflicting results and it can also be concluded that resistant due to beta- lactamase production can be a crucial factor added to the previously settled methicillin resistant due to mec A gene.
SELF EXCITED VIBRATION OF A LINE ELEMENT OF BUILDING LINES STRUCTURE

Structure element of a building connected with the ground in a line is usually modeled as a beam with the Winkler type support. The elastic property of the support is assumed to be linear or with cubic nonlinearity. Unfortunately, the experiments do not prove such an assumption. It is evident that the nonlinearity is with the order which is a real positive number which need not to be an integer. In this paper the generalization of the beam with Winkler support is done by introducing the nonlinearity of any non-integer order. The line structure, i.e., beam has transversal vibrations. The mathematical description of these vibrations is a nonlinear partial differential equation. To solve the equation, we suggest an analytic procedure. The solution is assumed as a product of a time and a displacement function. After averaging, the problem transforms into a second order nonlinear differential equation. The approximate solution has the form of a cosine (ca) Ateb function. Analyzing the obtained results the influence of support properties on the system behavior is considered. The attention is given to the influence of the Winkler-Pasternak foundation, too.
High-aspect-ratio, ultrathick, negative-tone near-uv photoresist for MEMS applications

Detailed investigations of the limits of a new negative-tone near-UV resist (IBM SU-8) have been performed. SU-8 is an epoxy-based resist designed specifically for ultrathick, high-aspect-ratio MEMS-type applications. We have demonstrated that with single-layer coatings, thicknesses of more than 500 /spl mu/m can be achieved reproducibly. Thicker resist layers can be made by multiple coatings, and we have achieved exposures in 1200-/spl mu/m-thick, double coated SU-8 resist layers. We have found that the aspect ratio for near-UV (400 nm) exposed and developed structures can be greater than 18 and remains constant in the thickness range between 80 and 1200 /spl mu/m. Vertical sidewall profiles result in good dimensional control over the entire resist thickness. To our knowledge, this is the highest aspect ratio reported for near-UV exposures and resist thicknesses. These results will open up new possibilities for low-cost LIGA-type processes for MEMS applications. In addition, the SU-8 material has interesting mechanical properties which also makes it attractive for photoplastic device fabrication.
The reciprocal dynamics of organizing and sense-making in the implementation of major public-sector reforms

: Drawing on a longitudinal study from the early years of implementation of health-care networks in Quebec, this article describes how public-sector managers deal with complex challenges when both organizational structures and organizational strategies are radically transformed simultaneously. The new organizations studied had to completely re-shuffle roles and responsibilities of their management teams while making sense of their new mandate of developing a population-focused approach to health problems – all the time maintaining day-to-day operations. The four health-care networks studied proceeded somewhat differently to meet these reciprocal challenges. The study reveals the importance of balancing organizing initiatives (focused on structures) with “sense-making” initiatives (focused on strategies), of developing capacities for sense-making through the creation of key “sense-maker/sense-giver” positions whose occupants are able to ensure that conceptual activities engage people working at different levels, even as organizational structures are in flux, and of mobilizing external constraints and influences as opportunities and resources in sense-making and organizing. Sommaire : Se fondant sur une etude longitudinale des premieres annees de la mise en œuvre des reseaux de soins de sante au Quebec, cet article decrit la maniere dont les gestionnaires du secteur public font face a des defis complexes, alors que les structures et les strategies organisationnelles sont radicalement transformees simultanement. Les nouveaux organismes etudies ont du completement remanier les roles et les responsabilites de leurs equipes de gestion et comprendre leur nouveau mandat d'elaborer une approche axee sur la population pour ce qui est des problemes de sante, tout en maintenant leurs activites au jour le jour. Les quatre reseaux de soins de santeetudies ont travaillea relever ces defis reciproques d'une maniere assez differente. L'etude revele l'importance de trouver un equilibre entre les initiatives consistant a organiser (axees sur les structures) et les initiatives consistant a interpreter les faits (axees sur les strategies) ; de perfectionner les capacites a interpreter les faits grâce a la creation de postes cles d'«interpreteurs de faits», dont les titulaires veilleraient a ce que des activites conceptuelles fassent intervenir les gens travaillant a differents niveaux meme lorsque les structures organisationnelles fluctuent continuellement; et enfin de tirer parti des contraintes et influences externes comme autant d'occasions et de ressources pour interpreter et organiser les faits.
Distortions , Infraestructure and Labor Supply in Latin American Countries

I document differences in labor supply between a set of Latin American countries and the U.S. in the period 1990-2005. These differences are mostly explained by large differences in female labor supply. In the U.S. the female labor force participation was 69% by 1990, while in Brazil and Mexico was 39% and 37%, respectively. Females began to participate more in the labor market of these countries when more households acquired access to basic infrastructure and when distortive policies affecting the price of household appliances were partially removed. I use a model of home production with endogenous labor force participation to account for these facts. I conclude that the price of household appliances and access to infrastructure are quantitatively important in explaining cross-country labor supply differences.
AN EFFICIENT METHODOLOGY FOR GENERATING SYNTHETIC POPULATIONS WITH MULTIPLE CONTROL LEVELS

This paper details a new methodology for controllin g attributes on multiple analysis levels within a population synthesis program. The methodology de termines how both householdand personlevel characteristics can jointly be used as contro ls when synthesizing populations, as well as how other multiple level synthetic populations, suc h as firm/employee, household/vehicle, etc. can be estimated. The use of multi-level controls is implemented through a new technique involving the estimation of household selection pro babilities based on the probability of observing each household given the required personlevel characteristics in each analysis zone. The new procedure is a quick and efficient method f or generating synthetic populations which can accurately replicate desired person-level chara teristics