Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Competition and specialization in credit markets

Competition in credit markets creates incentives for lenders to specialize in lending to particular types of borrowers. However, whether lenders have the ability to specialize at all and, if they can specialize how they will specialize is unclear. I analyze the impact of an exogenous increase in credit market competition, brought about by state-wide and national deregulation of U.S. commercial banking markets, on the degree to which commercial banks specialize in lending. I find that in more competitive lending markets after deregulation larger banks become more specialized relative to smaller banks. However, both groups of banks exhibit greater specialization, albeit in different ways. Larger banks specialize more in loans backed by real estate loans arguably characterized as “hard-information” loans. Smaller banks specialize more in unsecured commercial loans, especially small business loans, and personal loans – loans arguably characterized as “soft-information” loans. When banks specialize in real-estate-backed loans, they exhibit larger fractions of loan defaults in these loans, which suggests they specialize in these loans by lowering the costs of lending to all borrowers, resulting in an overall expansion of credit in the market for real-estate-backed loans. In contrast, when banks specialize in unsecured business and personal loans, they exhibit lower default rates in these loans, suggesting that they specialize by becoming better at identifying good quality loans, rather than by lowering the overall costs of lending in these categories. Finally, I examine how banks may lower their lending costs in reaction to competition through the use of loan resale and derivatives markets. Overall, the analysis provides evidence that competition leads to greater specialization amongst lenders and provides evidence on how different types of lenders become specialists in lending.
The CLI Continuum of Care Model : A Multidisciplinary Approach to Improve Outcomes

, TM November 2014 Welcome to the Critical Limb Ischemia Compendium, or CLIC, which was born out of the need to provide more information to health care providers treating patients with critical limb ischemia (CLI), who are often left with minimal to no options for care. It is time to turn the key that opens the door to CLI therapy and just treat CLI. The time has come for vascular specialists to create a movement in the implementation of therapeutic plans for CLI patients that includes promising alternatives to amputation. The time has come to ask for more resources, tools, data, medications, and systems of care for the sick CLI patient. The spectrum of presentation of CLI has changed and therefore it is time for CLI therapy goals to change. CLI used to be the disease of elderly and debilitated patients. This is no longer true. CLI is claiming younger patients every day and is reaching epidemic proportions. Given the predicted morbidity and mortality associated with CLI, vascular specialists, family physicians, podiatrists, and wound care specialists have to turn the key by using each of their educational backgrounds and clinical experience to provide the level and spectrum of appropriate care these patients need. As the impact of this disease continues to broaden, so do the skills, tools, and medicines available to counter the progressive stages of the disease. Each member of the team with his or her unique and varied skill set has something to contribute to the therapeutic algorithm of the CLI patient. So let’s put our hands together, unify directed efforts and “Just treat it! ” Turning the Key to Critical Limb Ischemia Therapy
Satellite Based Longterm Deformation Monitoring on Dams and its Surroundings

Surface deformation of dams and its surroundings may endanger infrastructure and even human lives. Satellites monitor single structure displacements and movements of surrounding landscapes at regular intervals. They can help to understand the nature of ground instabilities and formulate an adequate response. Satellite based monitoring ideally complements terrestrial surveying. InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) is a technique that allows mapping millimeter-scale deformations of the earth’s surface with radar satellite measurements in a very high resolution. In general the precision of InSAR movement measurement is optimized by interferometric time series analyses with an increasing stack of radar acquisitions over time. A precision within the range of few milimeters will then be achievable for each individual measurement. Thousands or even millions of measurement points can be reliably analysed. Detailed movement maps for dams in Kirgizstan and Iraq are created, demonstrating the capacity of the InSAR technique. The Mosul dam in Iraq is well known for standing on unstable soft soil and gypsum. The results show surface movements that may arise from underground instabilities and water pressure of the reservoir. The presented results demonstrate that satellite based interferometric monitoring provides precise and cost-effective information suitable for static risk assessment approaches.
Peer-reviewed science from blogs: an option for the Brazilian growing interest in science?

Introduction The science blogosphere has significantly increased in recent years. The information gap that was traditionally fulfilled by science journalists and scientificallycurious laymen, has now a new protagonist: the scientist. Blogs are one of the most up-to-dated tools that scientists use to communicate their ideas to other scientists or to the general public (Bonetta, 2007). This scenario may result from incentives to scientists to engage with the blogosphere (Nature, 2009) and face its challenges, which turns into also a great opportunity to them (Kouper, 2010). Science blogs have a positive tendency for aggregation, mainly through blog platforms developed by respectful science magazines or through new tools that either allow a new system of science publishing (Akst, 2010) or value online peer-reviewed publication. Our study verified how peerreviewed publications are disseminated through the science blogosphere via Twitter, a recently created social media tool. We discussed the results in the context of increased interest by the Brazilian public for science, revealed in 2010 in a research sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of the Science & Technology. Background ResearchBlogging.org (RB) is a website that aggregates peer-reviewed research posts from several science blogs in seven different languages. It was created in 2007 by science blogger Dave Munger and developed in collaboration with Seed Media Group. It is a useful source for readers interested in cutting-edge research and to those who praise comments and explanation of science done in first-hand, by scientists and experts in their respective fields. In addition, given that the intrinsic structure of the web makes it difficult to make a clear distinction between scientific and pseudo-scientific content, RB is a tool to vouch academic research and avoid the spread of pseudoscientific content. The site now has over 1,700 registered blogs, with over 18,000 posts about peer-reviewed research on subjects ranging from Anthropology to Zoology. The site also collects posts from 54 Portuguese-speaking blogs, and compiles 706 posts in Portuguese until now (January 2011). This number makes Portuguese the third most popular language in the RB following
Swiss Francs Seem to Make Insured Move: Comparing Daily and Monthly Financial Incentives of a Scalable Digital Health Intervention

Despite the widely known necessity to counteract the increase in physical inactivity, only small strides have been achieved so far. Digital health interventions (DHIs) are proposed to reach both healthy and at-risk populations on a large scale. However, designing scalable DHIs that are engaging in the long term remains a challenge. Small financial incentives may help to achieve such long-lasting behaviour changes. This work thusly investigates the effects of daily or monthly paid small financial incentives on step counts and goal achievements in physical activity. Six-month observational field data of a physical activity DHI (PADHI), offered by a Swiss health insurer, was used for this investigation. From 1623 contacted customers, 742 (45.7%) joined the PADHI. Step counts and times the challenging goal was reached were significantly higher in the condition of daily paid incentives. The findings from objectively measure daily step counts and goal achievements indicate better outcomes when incentives are paid daily. Further findings indicate the importance of recording various physical activities and not only step counts.
GIS based Road Safety Audit

All road safety audit process done for Indian condition are effective, but tedious and also time consuming. This paper is intended to illustrate applications of Geographic Information System (GIS) in transportation planning for which authors have made an attempt to simplify road safety audit process by integrating it with a GIS based software “Gram ++”. This technique will help the road auditors to differentiate different sites of a road segment having higher accident frequency with sites having low accident frequency which should be potentially improved in a cost effective manner. It will also help road safety audit experts to identify and focus on the real problems at specific site of road segment right from planning stage for which authors have presented the procedure & discussed how it can be applied so that all road features can be considered simultaneously.
Marine ecosystems and global change : towards policy options for human adaptations

Editorial Dawn Ashby, GLOBEC IPO, Plymouth, UK (d.ashby@pml.ac.uk) The GLOBEC 3rd Open Science Meeting is the next big event in the calendar for the GLOBEC IPO. We have had a tremendous response, with over 300 abstracts submitted, which has resulted in a very exciting programme of workshops and plenary sessions (for further details see p.27). Due to the size of the venue we are limited in the number of participants, so I’d like to encourage you to register and pay your registration fee early to ensure your place at the symposium, reduced registration fees are available until 15 April. I’d now like to ask for all of your help in producing a pictorial history of GLOBEC for display at the OSM. If you have any photographs of GLOBEC activities that you would like to share (including any of the national, multinational or regional programmes) could you please send them to the GLOBEC IPO (globec@pml.ac.uk), we would prefer photographs in a digital format but if this is not possible please mail the originals to the IPO and we will scan and return them. It would help us greatly if you could also provide a caption, including where and when they were taken and the names of the people in the photograph. I look forward to receiving your photographs and seeing many of you in Victoria.
POSTER: A Model for Trusted Identity in NFV Environment

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a multiparty and dynamic trust environment in which actors such as virtual network function (VNF) provider, Infra provider, Telecommunication Service provider and End users/subscribers dynamically provide or consume services based on trust. To set trust for an identity, currently for most cases, we rely on leap of faith, attestation from a trusted platform, or certificate from a trusted third party. However, these approaches fall short during scaling or create a single point of failure which are unwanted properties for continuous network service. Given the importance of security and service continuity in NFV domain, this paper proposes Trusted Identity Model a distributed approach for defining trust of an identity. It uses publicly verifiable ledger and a consensus-driven approach to set trust for identity.
ANOVA and Fisher Criterion based Feature Selection for Lower Dimensional Universal Image Steganalysis

Unethical uses of data hiding methods have made Image Steganalysis a very important area of research work in the field of Digital Investigations. Effectiveness of any Image Steganalysis algorithm depends on feature selection and feature reduction. The goal of this paper is to develop a reduced dimensional merged feature set for universal image steganalysis using Fisher Criterion and ANOVA techniques. Statistical features extracted from wavelet subbands and binary similarity patterns extracted from DCT of an image are merged to make combined feature set. Fisher criterion and ANOVA test are applied to evaluate the combined feature vector score and then only those features are selected which are found sensitive in both feature selection methods. These reduced dimensional 15-D feature vector is used to train SVM classifier with RBF kernel. The proposed algorithm is tested against steganography methods like F5, Outguess and LSB based method. Stego images are generated using widely available stego tools for two standard image databases: CorelDraw and BSDS500. Results are further validated using 10 fold cross validation process. The proposed algorithm achieves overall 97% detection accuracy against various steganography methods.
Earnings Premiums and Penalties for Self-Employment Around the World DRAFT

This paper uses local linear regressions to estimate the earnings premium or penalty associated with self-employment for each worker in 67 countries around the world. We find no evidence of systematic earnings penalties for self-employed workers in lowand middle-income countries; if anything the self-employed earn a premium in low-income countries. On the other hand, the vast majority of workers in high-income countries earn a self-employment earnings penalty. In low-and middle-income countries, selfemployment earnings premiums are largest for poorly educated workers. This paper also investigates how self-employment earnings penalties relate to common measures of regulations at the country level. In general, self-employment penalties are larger in less regulated economies, and rise as measures of property rights enforcement increase and regulations on credit are loosened. Labor market regulations have no consistent relationship with self-employment earnings premiums. These results are at odds with the traditional view that self-employment in developing countries is largely residual employment in a segmented or dualistic labor market. Rather, these results appear to be more consistent with a model where a self-employment earnings penalty can exist because employees are able to bargain for a share of firm profits (quasi-rents). As countries develop, increased firm productivity and increasing bargaining power of employees lead to increased sharing of profits and higher earnings for employees, resulting in self-employment penalties in high-income countries.
Principles for comparing sets of documents in citation analysis: From independent samples to comparing sub-samples in terms of percentile ranks

Using citation analysis, sets of documents can be compared as independent samples; for example, in terms of average citation counts using potentially different reference sets. From this perspective, the size of samples matters only for the statistical significance testing of differences and the error estimation. Using the percentile rank approach, differences among citation distributions can be studied in a single scheme. The comparison among the sets reveals that different sizes of the samples affect the weighing of the probabilities and therefore the rankings. We distinguish among (1) the normalization of papers against external reference sets, (2) the normalization in terms of frequencies relative to the margin-totals of independent versus dependent samples, and (3) the potentially normative definition of percentile rank classes for the evaluation (e.g., top-1% most highly cited; median, etc.).
Listen Only When Spoken To: Interpersonal Communication Cues as Smart Speaker Privacy Controls

Abstract Internet of Things and smart home technologies pose challenges for providing effective privacy controls to users, as smart devices lack both traditional screens and input interfaces. We investigate the potential for leveraging interpersonal communication cues as privacy controls in the IoT context, in particular for smart speakers. We propose privacy controls based on two kinds of interpersonal communication cues – gaze direction and voice volume level – that only selectively activate a smart speaker’s microphone or voice recognition when the device is being addressed, in order to avoid constant listening and speech recognition by the smart speaker microphones and reduce false device activation. We implement these privacy controls in a smart speaker prototype and assess their feasibility, usability and user perception in two lab studies. We find that privacy controls based on interpersonal communication cues are practical, do not impair the smart speaker’s functionality, and can be easily used by users to selectively mute the microphone. Based on our findings, we discuss insights regarding the use of interpersonal cues as privacy controls for smart speakers and other IoT devices.
Morphology, Dispersion, and Stability of Cu Nanoclusters on Clean and Hydroxylated r-Al2O3(0001) Substrates

Using high-resolution dynamic scanning force microscopy (SFM) operated in the noncontact mode, we investigate here the detailed morphology, dispersion, and thermal stability of nanometer-sized three-dimensional Cu clusters on an R-Al2O3(0001) substrate. We systematically study the effect of surface hydroxylation by depositing metallic Cu either on an ultrahigh vacuum prepared Al-terminated alumina surface or on surfaces prehydroxylated/hydrated by exposure to varying doses of H2O. Three-dimensional growth of Cu nanoclusters dispersed evenly on the surface is observed independent of surface preparation. As the top facet of the nanoclusters appears hexagonal in SFM images, we conclude that they are regular Cu crystallites in the equilibrium form. For strongly hydroxylated surfaces, however, a reduced aspect ratio (height-to-width) of the nanoclusters indicates an increased wetting of the Cu. We propose that Cu bonding to the hydroxylated surface is enhanced by the formation of Cu-O-Al bonds. Surprisingly when heating the surface, Cu remains dispersed on the surface, but it is observed that the total coverage of Cu on the surface is rapidly reduced when the sample is heated to temperatures above 450 °C for clean and 550 °C for hydroxylated surfaces. Our results unexpectedly show that Cu is desorbed from the ∼3 nm wide Cu nanoclusters at temperatures wellbelow the melting temperature of bulk Cu, and the sublimation is completed before the onset of sintering or ripening of the Cu nanoclusters under the conditions of our experiment. Our observations thus reveal significant changes in the cohesive energies of nanometer-sized Cu clusters, which is an effect that should be taken into account when modeling the stability of Cu crystallites, for example, with regard to sintering of Cu-based catalysts.
Poster: Who spams whom? Detecting Opinion Spammer Groups and Their Spam Targets

We investigate on detection of opinion spammer groups and their spam targets in review systems. People tend to trust reviews from top-ranked reviewers much more than those from low-ranked ones [1]. Spammers may thus artificially manipulate the ranking system to make their own reviews attract more attention from others; or to make competitors’ reviews attract less attention. In this work, we thus address two aspects of potential for collaborative opinion spamming behavior (i.e., boosting or demoting). In our approach, we focus on outgoing relationships of spammers to detect users who are artificially promoted or demoted. Previously, we revealed strong positive spam communities based upon their interaction patterns and the sentiments of those interactions [2]. In this work we further explore positive/negative spam targets of such strong communities with the sentiment analysis on outgoing relationships from the strong communities. Through extensive experiments on Amazon dataset, we show that spammers tend to have interest more in their own promotion rather than in others’ demotion.
On the factorization of the Haar measure on finite Coxeter groups

Let W be a finite Coxeter group and let λW be the Haar measure on W, i.e., λW (w) = |W |−1 for every w ∈ W. We prove that there exist a symmetric set T ̸= W of generators of W consisting of elements of order not greater than 2 and a finite set of probability measures {μ1, . , μk} with their supports in T such that their convolution product μ1 ∗ . ∗ μk = λW . 2000 AMS Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 60B15; Secondary: 20F55.
AliGraph: An Industrial Graph Neural Network Platform

We introduce AliGraph, an industrial distributed computation system for graph neural network (GNN). It empowers end-to-end solutions for users to address their scenarios by taking graph into deep learning frameworks. As an independent and portable system, the interfaces of AliGraph can be integrated with any tensor engine that is used for expressing neural networkmodels. By co-designing the flexible Gremlinlike interfaces for both graph query and sampling, users can customize data accessing pattern freely. Moreover, AliGraph also shows excellent performance and scalability. It allows pluggable operators to adapt to the fast development of GNN community and outperforms existing systems an order of magnitude in terms of graph building and sampling. ACM Reference format: Kun Zhao, Wencong Xiao, Baole Ai, Wenting Shen, Xiaolin Zhang, Yong Li, Wei Lin. 2019. AliGraph: An Industrial Graph Neural Network Platform. In Proceedings of Workshop on AI Systems at SOSP 2019, Ontario, Canada, Oct 27, 2019 (AI Systems ’19), 3 pages.
Pericardiocentesis in cardiac tamponade: A case for “Less is More”

Introduction: Cardiac tamponade could be a life-threatening condition and immediate pericardiocentesis is the treatment of choice. Acute decompensated heart failure as a complication of pericardiocentesis is less well known. Understanding the pathophysiology of cardiac tamponade may give clues to understanding the etiology of this uncommon but life-threatening condition. Case Report: A 53-year-old female underwent emergency pericardiocentesis for acute cardiac tamponade. Baseline echocardiography demonstrated a large global pericardial effusion with normal left ventricular dimensions and systolic function, and typical features of tamponade. The clinical situation improved considerably following the removal of 1.5 liters of pericardial fluid over a period of 15 minutes. Within 24 hours she developed acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF). Echocardiography demonstrated severe biventricular systolic dysfunction while cardiac magnetic resonance imaging showed wall motion abnormalities consistent with inverted Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. On medical therapy she recovered completely after three weeks. Conclusion: Large volume pericardiocentesis may be a triggering mechanism for biventricular failure.