Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combining multiple strategies for multiarmed bandit problems and asymptotic optimality

This brief paper provides a simple algorithm that selects a strategy at each time in a given set of multiple strategies for stochastic multiarmed bandit problems, thereby playing the arm by the chosen strategy at each time. The algorithm follows the idea of the probabilistic et-switching in the et-greedy strategy and is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the selected strategy converges to the best in the set under some conditions on the strategies in the set and the sequence of {et}.
What Will Be in Those Lap Tops: Empowering Students and Teachers to Add Content to an Educational Chatbot's Knowledge Base.

The Government of Kenya has in the recent past been on a serious footing to put in place ICT initiatives and projects aimed at realizing the potential within its recognition of ICT as a foundation for a knowledge economy as per vision 2030. The tempo has risen several notches higher with the current intention and initiative of making available laptops to pupils and students in primary schools in the years to come. However, once computer hardware is available to schools as PC's, Laptops and other mobile computing devices, a critical issue which must be adequately addressed is the educational content within. This paper outlines a possible approach using open source software development concepts and the Participatory Action Research (PAR) model as a means of empowering students and teachers to become active developers of the content they consume.
CEO compensation in high-tech firms and changes in the SFAS No 123 (R)

This study examines the effects of the introduction of the FASB statement 123 (R) on corporate performance and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation in high-technology firms. The total CEO compensation and short- and long-term compensations were tested regarding corporate performance. Panel data SUR models were estimated that describe total compensation and cash compensation as a proportion of total pay for the period between 2000 and 2010. The findings indicate that there is a positive relation between CEO compensation and firm performance in high-tech firms after the FASB statement 123 (R) is implemented, but with less intensity than before. This econometric study provides a better understanding of the relationship between CEO compensation and performance in high-technologies firms before and after the FASB statement 123 (R).
Omitted-Ability Bias and the Increase in the Return to Schooling

Over the 1980s, there were sharp increases in the return to schooling estimated with conventional wage regressions. We explore whether the relationship between ability and schooling changed over this period in ways that would have increased the schooling coefficient in these regressions. Our empirical results reject the hypothesis that an increase in the bias of the schooling coefficient, due to a change in the relationship between ability and schooling, has contributed to observed increases in the return to schooling. We also find that the increase in the schooling return has occurred for workers with relatively high levels of academic ability.
Modelling normative awareness:First considerations

As software agents are being employed in more complex situations, experimental findings in the social sciences are becoming increasingly relevant to the computational sciences. The social scientific concept of situation awareness is now being utilized to quantify the success of an agent's environmental perceptual comprehension and causative processing. In this paper, we suggest that awareness of one's situation is not sufficient to succeed in navigating the growing complexity of agent-based social interactions. In human societies norms (personal, legal, and social) have emerged as multi-faceted mechanisms for prescriptive pressures projected onto individual's beliefs and intentionality. Here we define the term normative awareness as the perceptual comprehension of norms and the prediction of the causative effect of actions on norms. In this paper, we suggest that such awareness of the creation and perpetuation of norms would prove advantageous to agent-based research and review to what extent the multi-agent system literature has implicitly utilized the concept of normative awareness. We recognize that a ubiquitous merger of the vernacular between the social and computational sciences is unnecessary, as such, we discuss when and how normative awareness should be extended to agent-based modelling and multi-agent systems.
Optical interconnects: out of the box forever?

Based on a variety of optimization criteria, recent research has suggested that optical interconnects are a viable alternative to electrical interconnects for board-to-board, chip-to-chip, and on-chip applications. However, the design of modern high-performance computing systems must account for a variety of performance scaling factors that are not included in these analyses. We will give an overview of the performance scaling that has driven current computer design, with a focus on architectural design and the effects of these designs on interconnect implementation. We then discuss the potential of optics at each of these interconnect levels, in the context of extant electrical technology.
Thermoelectric Devices: Influence of the Legs Geometry and Parasitic Contact Resistances on ZT

In this chapter, the impact of the shape of thermoelectric legs and parasitic contact resis- tances from metal electrodes and device wiring on thermoelectric figure of merit ZT is addressed. First section deals with the influence of the legs geometry on ZT. The shape of the legs is crucial in the thermoelectric performance of the thermoelectric devices. Unlike to conventional geometry thermoelectric legs, non-constant cross-section legs could help by lowering the overall thermal conductance of the device so as to increase the temperature gradient along legs, hence harnessing the Thomson effect, which is generally neglected in constant square cross-section thermoelectric legs. The final section is devoted to the electrical contact engineering of the device. Parasitic contact and wiring resistances play an important role in the performance of the device because they increase the isothermal resistance of the device. As the isothermal resistance of the device increases, the ZTdecreases.
Acute effects of psychopharmacological compounds on ionotropic receptor signalling and synaptic plasticity related mechanisms

In this work the effects of psychopharmacological compounds on neuronal receptor signalling are investigated on both molecular level and in the neuronal network. To determine a possible change in the mode of action of antidepressants at these receptors, specific microdomains (lipid rafts) in the cell membrane were impaired via cholesterol depletion. In addition the influence of antidepressants on specific signalling pathways during synaptic plasticity were examined.
Supplementation of pearl millet with soybean: changes in protein digestibility, amino acid composition and sensory quality during processing.

Pearl millet cultivar (Demby) was supplemented with soybean flour of different concentrations (5%, 10% and 15%). Cooking of pearl millet flour decreased both the protein content and digestibility. However, cooking of soybean flour was found to increase the protein digestibility but the protein content was not affected. Supplementation of pearl millet flour with soybean decreased the in vitro protein digestibility but at a given supplementation level it was increased after cooking. The lysine content of pearl millet flour is only 32% of the reference FAO pattern, and it decreased to 24% after cooking. Supplementation of pearl millet flour with soybean flour enriched the lysine content. It represented 49%, 70%, and 76% of the reference pattern before cooking, and 48%, 61% and 68% of the reference pattern after cooking when pearl millet was supplemented with 5%, 10% and 15%, respectively. The results showed that supplementation had increased the lysine content in pearl millet proteins which is likely to be as a result of a significant increase in the globulin fraction before and after cooking. The nutritional quality and protein availability of pearl millet flour, before and after cooking, increased due to the increase in the essential amino acids, especially lysine, as a result of supplementation with soybean flour.
The effects on consumption and saving of taxing asset returns

Orazio Attanasio is Professor of Economics at UCL and a Research Fellow at the IFS, where he directs the Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo). A fellow of the Econometric Society and of the British Academy, he works on household consumption and saving over the life cycle, on risk sharing, and on development economics. He was Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and he is currently Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association.
Commentary on "House prices and the stance of monetary policy "

From the standpoint of monetary policy, there are three key questions. First, was the behavior of house prices and quantities normal or unusual over the recent period? Second, did easy money cause a major portion of the rise in house prices and thus make house price declines a necessary outcome when monetary policy tightened? Third, could a regular response to housing—perhaps via the type of monetary conditions index discussed by JS—be desirable in smoothing out overall economic activity and housing markets themselves?
A Comparison of the ECMWF, MSC, and NCEP Global Ensemble Prediction Systems

Abstract The present paper summarizes the methodologies used at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC), and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) to simulate the effect of initial and model uncertainties in ensemble forecasting. The characteristics of the three systems are compared for a 3-month period between May and July 2002. The main conclusions of the study are the following: the performance of ensemble prediction systems strongly depends on the quality of the data assimilation system used to create the unperturbed (best) initial condition and the numerical model used to generate the forecasts; a successful ensemble prediction system should simulate the effect of both initial and model-related uncertainties on forecast errors; and for all three global systems, the spread of ensemble forecasts is insufficient to systematically capture reality, suggesting that none of them is able to simulate all sources of forecast .
Psychological well-being and perceived financial performance: An SME perspective

Psychological well-being is influenced by the “surrounding contexts of people’s lives” and has consistently been found to be associated with positive outcomes. Given the turbulent surrounding contexts facing SME owners in South Africa, the primary objective of this study was to investigate their level of psychological well-being and to establish the influence thereof on the financial performance of their businesses. A survey using a structured questionnaire was used to gather the necessary data. The population consisted of all owners of SMEs operating within the borders of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Criterion and convenience sampling were used and questionnaires were administered by field workers. In total 495 questionnaires were useable for statistical analysis. Scale validity and reliability was assessed, descriptive statistics calculated and Pearson’s product moment correlations established. Multiple regression analysis was undertaken to investigate the hypothesised relationships. The results show that the participating SME owners have high levels of positive psychological well-being and that their businesses are performing financially. The results also suggest that the more SME owners display the attributes associated with environmental mastery, self-acceptance and autonomy, the more likely their SMEs are to perform financially.
Impact of HF radar current gap-filling methodologies on the Lagrangian assessment of coastal dynamics

Abstract. High-frequency radar, HFR, is a cost-effective monitoring technique that allows us to obtain high-resolution continuous surface currents, providing new insights for understanding small-scale transport processes in the coastal ocean. In the last years, the use of Lagrangian metrics to study mixing and transport properties has been growing in importance. A common condition among all the Lagrangian techniques is that complete spatial and temporal velocity data are required to compute trajectories of virtual particles in the flow. However, hardware or software failures in the HFR system can compromise the availability of data, resulting in incomplete spatial coverage fields or periods without data. In this regard, several methods have been widely used to fill spatiotemporal gaps in HFR measurements. Despite the growing relevance of these systems there are still many open questions concerning the reliability of gap-filling methods for the Lagrangian assessment of coastal ocean dynamics. In this paper, we first develop a new methodology to reconstruct HFR velocity fields based on self-organizing maps (SOMs). Then, a comparative analysis of this method with other available gap-filling techniques is performed, i.e., open-boundary modal analysis (OMA) and data interpolating empirical orthogonal functions (DINEOFs). The performance of each approach is quantified in the Lagrangian frame through the computation of finite-size Lyapunov exponents, Lagrangian coherent structures and residence times. We determine the limit of applicability of each method regarding four experiments based on the typical temporal and spatial gap distributions observed in HFR systems unveiled by a K-means clustering analysis. Our results show that even when a large number of data are missing, the Lagrangian diagnoses still give an accurate description of oceanic transport properties.
Spatial prediction of demersal fish diversity in the Baltic Sea: comparison of machine learning and regression‐based techniques

&NA; Marine spatial planning (MSP) is considered a valuable tool in the ecosystem‐based management of marine areas. Predictive modelling may be applied in the MSP framework to obtain spatially explicit information about biodiversity patterns. The growing number of statistical approaches used for this purpose implies the urgent need for comparisons between different predictive techniques. In this study, we evaluated the performance of selected machine learning and regression‐based methods that were applied for modelling fish community indices. We hypothesized that habitat features can influence fish assemblage and investigated the effect of environmental gradients on demersal fish diversity (species richness and Shannon‐Weaver Index). We used fish data from the Baltic International Trawl Surveys (2001‐2014) and maps of six potential predictors: bottom salinity, depth, seabed slope, growth season bottom temperature, seabed sediments and annual mean bottom current velocity. We compared the performance of six alternative modelling approaches: generalized linear models, generalized additive models, multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machines, boosted regression trees and random forests. We applied repeated 10‐fold cross‐validation, using accuracy as the measure of model quality. Finally, we selected random forest as the best performing algorithm and implemented it for the spatial prediction of fish diversity from the Baltic Proper to the Kattegat. To obtain information on the data reliability and confidence of the developed models, which are essential for MSP, we estimated the uncertainty of predictions with standard deviation of predictions obtained from all the trees in the ensemble random forest method. We showed how state‐of‐the‐art predictive techniques, based on easily available data and simple Geographic Information System tools, can be used to obtain reliable spatial information about fish diversity. Our comparative work highlighted the potential of machine learning method to reduce prediction error in modelling of demersal fish diversity in the framework of MSP.
Characterization of Switchable Substrateless Frequency Selective Surfaces

In this paper, a new means for characterization of switchable substrateless frequency selective surfaces (FSS) was demonstrated with numerical and experimental approaches. The diodes model loaded active doubly periodic flat strip FSS acts as a dynamic screen, in which its surface reflectivity and transmittivity can be switched alternately and tuned through d.c. bias voltage control. The properties of FSS layer are characterized using a specially designed parallel plate waveguide (PPW) simulator that permits normal incidence excitation of the FSS under test and the responses are found between 3 to 5 GHz. It is shown that by means of d.c. bias control, the screen can be utilized in, (a) transmission mode as a dual band electromagnetic shutter, or, (b) reflection mode, as an amplitude shift keying (ASK) spatial modulator or dual band reflection canceller. In addition a hybrid de-embedding technique is employed to remove the influence the PPW simulator and reveal the true property of substrateless FSS. Typical experimental results are presented and validated against a new 3D electromagnetic (EM) modeling led de-embedding method for the composite FSS layer and PPW structure.
Validity of Korean Version of Functional Outcomes of Sleep Questionnaire in Patients with Simple Snoring and Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Background and ObjectiveaaWe developed a Korean version of the Functional Outcomes of Sleep Questionnaire (K-FOSQ) and investigated its reliability and validity in simple snorer or obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients. MethodsaaA total 432 participants (70% men, 84% OSA, mean age 50.0 ± 9.8 years) who were simple snorers or had OSA were included. We assessed the internal consistency, test-retest reliability, factor analysis, multitrait scaling analysis, and the concurrent validity of the K-FOSQ. Participants completed a battery of questionnaires including the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), Short Form-36 Health Survey (SF-36), Medical Outcomes Study-Sleep (MOS-Sleep) Scale, and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). ResultsaaFactor analysis identified five factors, in which only 24 items met the loading criteria. The five factors of K-FOSQ accounted for 73.0% of the variance. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for all domains exceeded the 0.70 standard for internal consistency. Test-retest re liability was acceptable (r = 0.41–0.93). Item-domain correlations ranged from 0.37 to 0.90. Only one item did not reach the threshold of 0.40. Floor effects were not observed, but ceiling effects were marked on all K-FOSQ subscales except one. All domains of K-FOSQ were significantly correlated with the corresponding scores of all tested instruments. The global K-FOSQ had a strong correlations (r > 0.50) with ESS and Sleep Problem Index-2 of MOS-Sleep, and had medium-sized correlations (r = 0.40–0.50) with BDI and SF-36 total scores. The K-FOSQ global and subscales did discriminate between participants with and without daytime sleepiness, but not between simple snorers and OSA patients.
Galactic magnetic field generation by the electric current of cosmic rays

In this paper we propose a new mechanism for the generation of a large-scale galactic magnetic field by the electric current created by cosmic rays. A model with the sources of relativistic particles, distributed homogenously and continuously in the galactic disk is used, and intensities of the sources correspond to the observed intensities. The anisotropic diffusion of cosmic rays in the galaxy is considered and it is shown that the created magnetic field depends strongly on the symmetry of the diffusion tensor as well as on the relationship between the tensor's components. The helicity of turbulence (α-effect) is not considered. Only the small-scale "seed" fields ejected from stars and generated by cosmic rays are necessary to start the global magnetic field generation. The diffusion of the field because of turbulent motions and the differential rotation of the galactic disk are taken into account. The diffusion coefficient values estimated from the observed parameters of the galactic medium are used in the calculations. The obtained magnetic field is approximately a few micro-gauss which is of the same order of magnitude as the observed galactic field. Therefore, it is concluded that the relativistic particles are significant and, possibly, essential for the process of the large-scale galactic magnetic field generation. More precise determinations of the diffusion coefficients for the field and the particles are needed to reach the final conclusion about the field's value. The future development of the theory should also include dynamo action, the nonlinear effects, and the self-consistent approach to the problem.
The german banking system: characteristics and challenges

This Paper gives an overview of the German banking system and current challenges it is facing. It starts with an overview of the so-called "Three-Pillar-Banking-System" and a detailed description of the current structure of the banking system in Germany. A brief comparison of the banking system in Germany with the ones in other European countries points out its uniqueness. The consequences of the financial crisis of 2007/2008 and further challenges for the German banking system are discussed, as well as the the ongoing debate around the question whether the strong government involvement should be sustained.
Physical and biological processes over a submarine canyon during an upwelling event

Short, shelf-break canyons are shown to have a substantial influence on local water properties and zooplankton distribution. Barkley Canyon (6 km long) off the west coast of Vancouver Island was extensively sampled in July 1997 and found to have water property and current patterns similar to those observed over Astoria Canyon (22 km long) off the coast of Washington State. Results from Barkley Canyon reveal that the canyon influence can occur very close to the surface (at the thermocline depth of 10 m) and that, near the canyon rim, the stretching vorticity generated over the canyon is strong enough to produce a closed cyclonic eddy of sufficient strength to trap deep passively drifting tracers. Most zooplankton species are advected by the currents; those near the ocean surface pass over the canyon, while those at depth are advected toward the coast. Euphausiids (Euphausia pacifica and Thysanoessa spinifera), the strongest swimming zooplankton collected in the 1997 study, were most prevalent in the closed.