Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Peas in a pod: Canadian and Australian banks before and during a Global Financial Crisis

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Canadian and Australian banking systems have been singled out by some commentators as having performed better than many other banking systems, particularly those in Europe, America and the United Kingdom. Banks in both Canada and Australia, for instance, have continued to report enviable earnings, sound capital levels, and high credit ratings both before and during the GFC. The G-20 and the European Union have tried to identify the features of the Canadian and Australian financial systems which have underpinned this success in order to use them in shaping a revised international regulatory framework. One area of focus has been the regulations governing “quality of capital”. Despite these apparent successes, there is some evidence that both Canadian and Australian banks experienced considerable deterioration in the market value of their assets during the GFC. In this paper we use the KMV / Merton structural methodology, which incorporates market asset values, to examine default probabilities of 9 listed Canadian banks and 13 Australian listed banks in both a pre-GFC period (20002006) and a GFC period (2007-2008). We also modify the model to incorporate conditional probability of default which measures extreme credit risk. This paper finds that bank risk was significantly similar for Australian and Canadian Banks during the GFC period. This includes an assessment of impaired assets, Value at Risk (VaR) and Distance to Default (DD), as well as the extreme measures of Conditional VaR (CVaR), and Conditional Distance to Default (CDD); metrics which confirm the two countries similarities in terms of a significant increase in credit risk between pre-GFC and GFC periods. The extent of this increase was, however, far more pronounced for Australia, which was coming off a lower base. Bank risk for both countries was found to be far lower than for global counterparts due to factors such as sound regulatory control and low levels of involvement in sub-prime lending. This could provide lessons for global banks on risk management. A key conclusion of the paper is that it is important that fluctuating market values, especially the extreme fluctuations which are measured by CVaR and CDD, are a key consideration when determining risk management criteria such as capital adequacy.
Long-term effects of job displacement in Japan: A conservative estimate using the Japanese Longitudinal Survey on Employment and Fertility (LOSEF)

Using data from the Japanese Longitudinal Survey on Employment and Fertility (LOSEF), we investigate the long-term effects of employment (or job) displacement on earnings in the Japanese labor market. Using a fixed-effects model, we find significant negative effects of displacement, amounting to 21.7% of monthly earnings. Further, we conclude that the earnings penalty is persistent, with the estimate of earnings losses remaining at 16.2% four years after displacement. Given that our sample includes those who experienced displacement only once in their career and were reemployed as a standard worker within a year, we consider that our estimates of the earnings reductions associated with job displacement are conservative.
An adaptive approach of syntactic ambiguity resolution in Pashto

A natural language contains a variety of ambiguities. From a computational point of view, it is very difficult to cope with these ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguity arises from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, not from the range of meanings of single words. Here, a knowledgebased adaptive approach has been proposed to resolve the syntactic ambiguities in Pashto text. The resolution involves user interaction with the system to select the appropriate meaning of the ambiguous phrase from a set of possible meanings stored in the knowledge base of the system. The user can add a new meaning to the knowledge base, for a particular phrase, if it is not there. The system has been tested on a raw Pashto corpus and resulted in accuracy of 90%.
Examining the Relationship between Home and School Computer Use and Students' English/Language Arts Test Scores.

With increased emphasis on test-based accountability measures has come increased interest in examining the impact of technology use on students’ academic performance. However, few empirical investigations exist that address this issue. This paper (1) examines previous research on the relationship between student achievement and technology use, (2) discusses the methodological and psychometric issues that arise when investigating such issues, and (3) presents a multilevel regression analysis of the relationship between a variety of student and teacher technology uses and fourth grade test scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) English/Language Arts test. In total, 986 fourth grade students from 55 intact classrooms in nine school districts in Massachusetts were included in this study. This study found that, while controlling for both prior achievement and socioeconomic status, students who reported greater frequency of technology use at school to edit papers were likely to have higher total English/language arts test scores and higher writing scores. Use of technology at school to prepare presentations was associated with lower English/language arts outcome measures. Teachers' use of technology for a variety of purposes were not significant predictors of student achievement, and students’ recreational use of technology at home was negatively associated with the learning outcomes.
ASIC Implementation of High Performance Radix-8 CORDIC Algorithm

The COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer(CORDIC) is a well known special purpose algorithm to compute various complex mathematical functions. Since CORDIC has less hardware complexity, it has achieved the attention of many researchers. CORDIC is the part of many real time applications such as FFT and DCT in the field of communication systems, signal and image processing. Main drawback of CORDIC algorithm is high latency i.e. number of iterations required to compute the total rotation. Many researchers have reported CORDIC algorithm with reduced latency but at the cost of increase in hardware complexity and/or increase in delay of micro-rotation i.e. iteration. In this paper the radix-8 CORDIC algorithm is presented. Proposed radix-8 CORDIC algorithm takes $n/3$ iterations to compute the total rotation and three additional iterations to compensate the scale factor. Further the detailed comparison between proposed radix-8 CORDIC algorithm and recently reported CORDIC algorithm is presented considering three parameters: 1. Latency 2. Hardware Complexity and 3. Critical Delay.
Contribution of mouse models in constitutional thrombocytopenia

Les thrombopenies constitutionnelles resultent d’anomalies de production des plaquettes sanguines (thrombopoiese) d’origine hereditaire. Les connaissances autour de ces maladies, longtemps mal diagnostiquees et peu etudiees, ont considerablement augmente ces vingt dernieres annees. L’essor des techniques de biologie moleculaire permettant l’identification des mutations et la culture de megacaryocytes provenant de patients, permise par la decouverte de la thrombopoietine, ont grandement contribue a ces progres. Parallelement, la manipulation des genes dans la souris (transgenese, inactivation totale ou conditionnelle, creation de mutations ponctuelles reproduisant les mutations humaines, mutagenese chimique aleatoire) a permis de creer des modeles de maladies qui ont grandement contribue au decryptage des tableaux cliniques et biologiques presentes par les patients. La plupart des thrombopenies pour lesquelles le gene mute a ete identifie ont maintenant un modele d’etude murin. La mise en relation des donnees obtenues dans ces modeles et dans les cellules isolees de patients a abouti a une meilleure comprehension des pathologies et des mecanismes normaux de production des plaquettes. Il reste que pres de la moitie des thrombopenies constitutionnelles sont encore non etiquetees. L’essor du sequencage a haut debit du genome devrait augmenter le nombre de genes candidats que la generation de nouveaux modeles murins permettra de confirmer comme cause de la maladie.
Multiwavelength study of the infrared dust bubble S51

We investigate the environment of the infrared dust bubble S51 and search for evidence of triggered star formation in its surroundings. We performed a multiwavelength study of the region around S51 with data taken from large-scale surveys: 2MASS, GLIMPSE, MIPSGAL, IRAS, and MALT90. We analyzed the spectral profile and the distribution of the molecular gas (13CO, C18O, HCN, HNC, HCO+, C2H, N2H+, and HC3N), and dust in the environment of S51. We used mid-infrared emission three-color image to explore the physical environment and GLIMPSE color-color diagram [5.8]-[8.0] versus [3.6]-[4.5] to search for young stellar objects and identify the ionizing star candidates. From a comparison of the morphology of the molecular gas and the Spitzer 8.0 \mu m emission, we conclude that the dust bubble is interacting with CO at a kinematic distance of 3.4 kpc. The bubble S51 structure, carried with shell and front side, is exhibited with 13CO and C18O emission. Both outflow and inflow may exist in sources in the shell of bubble S51. We discover a small bubble G332.646-0.606 (R_in = 26", r_in = 15", R_out = 35" and r_out = 25") located at the northwest border of S51. A water maser, a methanol maser and IRAS 16158-5055 are located at the junction of the two bubbles. Several young stellar objects are distributed along an arc-shaped structure near the S51 shell. They may represent a second generation of stars whose formation was triggered by the bubble expanding into the molecular gas.
Performance Analysis of Alpha Beta Filter, Kalman Filter and Meanshift for Object Tracking in Video Sequences

Object Tracking is becoming increasingly important in areas of computer vision, surveillance, image processing and artificial intelligence. The advent of high powered computers and the increasing need of video analysis has generated a great deal of interest in object tracking algorithms and its applications. This said it becomes even more important to evaluate these algorithms to quantify their performance. In this paper, we have implemented three algorithms namely Alpha Beta filter, Kalman filter and Meanshift to track an object in a video sequence and compared their tracking performance based on various parameters in normal and noisy conditions. The proposed parameters employed are error plots in position and velocity of the object, Root mean square error, object tracking error, tracking rate and time taken to track the object. The goal is to illustrate practically the performance of each algorithm under such conditions quantitatively and identify the algorithm that performs the best.
Ten key papers in synthetic aperture sonar

There are now hundreds of patents and papers on synthetic aperture sonar; some of them of key importance whereas many others are of peripheral or minor interest. Here we take what we consider to be the top ten publications in synthetic aperture sonar and explain why we believe they are important and how they have made a significant contribution to the developing discipline or have made some leap of imagination in the area. This paper is more than a catalogue of the top ten citations since not all the real advances in the field have been published in academic peer‐review journals.
Diets and foraging behaviour of red and eastern grey kangaroos in arid shrub land: is feeding behaviour involved in the range expansion of the eastern grey kangaroo into the arid zone?

Eastern grey kangaroos (Macropus giganteus) have expanded into arid areas usually the habitat of red kangaroos (Macropus rufus). Extra watering sites for domestic stock is the suggested reason. However, changes in vegetation also have occurred due to grazing from domestic stock. We investigated the foraging strategies of M. giganteus and M. rufus in arid rangeland to see if these are involved in the range changes. Foraging patterns were similar, with both species mostly foraging at night; total feeding times were the same. M. giganteus and M. rufus had differing diets, though there was considerable overlap of 81 - 87%. Both species were highly selective, having similar narrow dietary niche breaths. Differences in plant preferences occurred and though both species had a preference for grass that of M. giganteus was higher. A larger foregut in M. giganteus reinforces its focus on grass. M. rufus also selected dicot forbs and malvaceous sub-shrubs. Both kangaroos showed avoidance of abundant chenopod shrubs (saltbushes and bluebushes) and trees. It is likely that the changes to arid-zone vegetation, with a shift to grass and annual dicot forbs, has been important for the expansion of M. giganteus, possibly combined with the greater availability of water.
Study of Emission and Capture Processes in AlGaN/GaN HEMT Heterostructures

Authors of this contribution are discussing and comparing two e-mode p-GaN HEMT samples from defect distribution point of view. Focus is put on the differences in leakage current and the identified deep energy levels by Deep Level Transient Spectroscopy. The investigation showed a possible connection between the leakage current where in sample A with higher leakage current 9 deep energy levels, while in sample B with lower leakage current only five deep energy levels were identified. This conclusion was verified by temp-fit simulations and Arrhenius plot examinations. The presence of Mg acceptor, nitrogen interstitials and carbon interstitial defect were confirmed in both types of samples.
A Survey on Automatic Emotion Recognition Using Audio Big Data and Deep Learning Architectures

Traditional speech emotion recognition is based on the pipeline of pre-processing, feature extraction, dimensionality reduction and classification. Recognition performance such as the accuracy largely depends on the professional feature engineering and the classifier, which will be more difficult in the scenario of big data. Recently, many emotion researchers trend the direction to automatic emotion recognition from the raw signal, the motivation behind this is that neural network can learn representation and find the final result automatically. This work focuses on categorization and reviews on the current progress on end-to-end speech emotion recognition problems. In this survey, we discuss the requirement of the network model, process procedures and current achiements. We also explore some potential future issues in speech emotion recognition
Zicht op ruimte voor leren

In dit hoofdstuk bespreken we hoe de context waarin netwerken ontstaan, beter begrepen kan worden en welke dimensies van sociaal leren mede invloed hebben op de wijze waarop een groep aan het leren is. Begrip voor de situatie waarin netwerken ontstaan en de wijze waarop netwerken zich organiseren zal helpen om de ruimte waarin netwerken leren te optimaliseren.
Examining Elementary Teachers’ Attitudes toward the Teacher Ranking System in China

This study examined the general attitudes of Chinese teachers towards the teacher ranking system in China and if the ranking system motivates teachers to work harder. One hundred and eighty-seven teachers from 54 elementary schools in Beijing of China were surveyed using Charlotte Danielson Frame Work for Teaching Evaluation. The results show a positive correlation between the relationship of years of teaching and attainment of higher titles. This suggests teaching with more years of experience attained higher titles. A negative correlation appeared between years of teaching and education levels. Thus, teachers who taught for more years tended to have lower education levels. Teachers who attained higher titles were viewed as more structural and skilled teachers. In general, most teachers held positive attitudes towards this ranking system.
Dual Quaternions

As we know, quaternions are very efficient for representing rotations with clear geometric meaning (rotation axis and angle) and only one redundancy. Unfortunately, they do not handle translations, which meanwhile can be made multiplicative along with rotations via the use of homogeneous coordinates. Despite also being 4-tuples, homogeneous coordinates are algebraically incompatible with quaternions. In 1873, dual quaternions were introduced by William Kingdom Clifford [1] in an effort to combine rotations and translations while retaining the benefits of the quaternion representation of rotations.
The role of IFNAR and MyD 88 signaling in induction of IL-15 expression in vivo 1

Interleukin-15 (IL-15) plays a multifaceted role in immune homeostasis, but the unreliability of IL-15 detection has stymied exploration of IL-15 regulation in vivo. To visualize IL-15 expression, we created a transgenic mouse expressing emerald-GFP (EmGFP) under IL-15 promoter control. EmGFP/IL-15 was prevalent in innate cells including dendritic cells (DCs), macrophages, and monocytes. However, DC subsets expressed varying levels of EmGFP/IL-15 with CD8+ DCs constitutively expressing EmGFP/IL-15 and CD8− DCs expressing low EmGFP/IL-15 levels. Virus infection resulted in IL-15 upregulation in both subsets. By crossing the transgenic mice to mice deficient in specific elements of innate signaling, we found a cell-intrinsic dependency of DCs and Ly6C+ monocytes on IFNAR expression for EmGFP/IL-15 upregulation after VSV infection. In contrast, myeloid cells did not require the expression of MyD88 to upregulate EmGFP/IL-15 expression. These findings provide evidence of previously unappreciated regulation of IL-15 expression in myeloid lineages during homeostasis and following infection.
Effects of protein supplementation on resistance and resilience of lambs naturally infected with gastrointestinal parasites

In this study, the objective was to evaluate the efficacy of protein supplementation on gastrointestinal nematode control in lambs naturally infected. Sixty weaned Ile de France and Texel crossbred lambs, with 60 days of age, were divided into three groups (n=20) according to the level of protein in the concentrate: low protein (LP; 8.5%), moderate protein (MP; 15%), and high protein (HP; 25%). The daily amount of concentrate offered was based on 3% of live weight, which was continued throughout the experiment of 98 days. Evaluations were conducted biweekly from days 0 (D0) to 98 (D98). There were no significant differences (p > 0.05) in the average weight among the LP, MP and HP groups, which was 22.0, 21.4, and 21.1 kg, respectively, on D0 and 46.4, 48.3, and 48.2 kg, respectively, on D98. The daily weight gain was not significantly different among the groups (LP, 250 g; MP and HP, 276 g; p > 0.05). The average egg count per gram of feces (epg) of the LP group on D98 (6,765; an increase of 5,690 epg from D0) was higher than that of the MP and HP groups (1,617.5, p 0.05, respectively), which remained constant throughout the study. The hematocrit values decreased (p < 0.05) from D0 to D98 only in the LP group. Only in the HP group (p < 0.05), the mean serum total protein concentration increased from D0 (5.3 g dL-1) to D98 (5.8 g dL-1). The average albumin level on D98 (2.10 g dL-1) was lower than that on D0 (2.52 g dL-1) in the LP group (p < 0.05). During the study, 10 lambs overall were treated with anthelmintic because the epg values exceeded 10,000; six treated lambs were from the LP group, 3 from the HP group, and only 1 from the MP group. These results indicate that supplementation of diet with 15% protein increases the resistance and resilience of lambs to gastrointestinal parasites.
FE ANALYSIS OF A COUPLED ENERGETIC-STATISTICAL SIZE EFFECT IN PLAIN CONCRETE BEAMS WITH VARYING MATERIAL PROPERTIES

The numerical FE investigations of a coupled energetic-statistical size effect in unnotched concrete beams of similar geometry under quasi-static three point bending were performed within elasto-plasticity with non-local softening. The stochastic FE analyses were carried out with three different beam sizes. Deterministic calculations were performed with the uniform distribution of a uniaxial tensile strength. In statistical calculations cross-correlated random fields were used to describe the spatial fluctuation of material randomness. Stochastic simulations were made with varying uniaxial tensile strength, initial fracture energy and elastic modulus. The effect of independently and simultaneously varying material parameter was investigated.
Real-time precipitation suppression in video streams

In surveillance cameras rain and snow can introduce an unwelcome noise to the video stream. The resulting effect of the rain becomes bright streaks in the frames of the video. These streaks can disturb human viewers and image processing algorithms. Rain streaks can be hard to detect and remove as they are a very dynamic phenomenon dependent on camera settings and weather conditions. This thesis aims to research some already invented rain removal algorithms and compare and evaluate them. Surveillance cameras supply video in real-time so it is not possible to access the whole video and perform heavy computations relying on information from the future. Qualities such as level of streak suppression and time required to perform necessary calculations are weighed against each other.
Dynamics of non-minimally coupled perfect fluids

We present a general formulation of the theory for a non-minimally coupled perfect fluid in which both conformal and disformal couplings are present. We discuss how such non-minimal coupling is compatible with the assumptions of a perfect fluid and derive both the Einstein and the fluid equations for such model. We found that, while the Euler equation is significantly modified with the introduction of an extra force related to the local gradients of the curvature, the continuity equation is unaltered, thus allowing for the definition of conserved quantities along the fluid flow. As an application to cosmology and astrophysics we compute the effects of the non-minimal coupling on a Friedmann-Lemaȋtre-Robertson-Walker metric at both background and linear perturbation level and on the Newtonian limit of our theory.