Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leveling the Playing Field : Financial Regulation and Disappearing Local Bias of Institutional Investors

We examine whether exogenous shocks to firms’ information environments generated by Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) influenced the degree of local bias of institutional investors. Our main conjecture is that as financial regulation makes the information environment more competitive, the local informational advantage of institutional investors declines and their preferences for local stocks weaken. Consistent with this conjecture, we find that following regulatory changes, the local bias of institutional investors declines by a half and ownership becomes more diffused geographically. These shifts in ownership patterns are more salient among firms that had more opaque information environments prior to the regulation changes. Further, the performance of the local component of institutional portfolios worsens considerably and, at the aggregate market-level, the degree of informed trading attributed to local investors declines. Taken together, these findings indicate that Reg FD and SOX “leveled the playing field” and eliminated the local informational advantage of institutional investors. Please address all correspondence to Alok Kumar, Department of Finance, School of Business Administration, 514 Jenkins Building, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124; Phone: 305-284-1882; email: akumar@miami.edu. Gennaro Bernile can be reached at 305284-6690 or gbernile@bus.miami.edu. Johan Sulaeman can be reached at 214-768-8284 or sulaeman@mail.cox. smu.edu. We thank Anup Agrawal, Warren Bailey, Scott Bauguess, Vidhi Chhaochharia, Larry Fauver, George Korniotis, Kelvin Law, Evgeny Lyandres, Kumar Venkataraman, Peter Wysocki, and seminar participants at University of Miami, University of Tennessee, and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for helpful comments and valuable suggestions. We are very grateful to Jefferson Duarte and Lance Young for allowing us to use their PIN decomposition data, and to the Financial Markets Research Center at Vanderbilt University for providing the effective spread data. We are responsible for all remaining errors and omissions.
Infiltration rates on residential lawns in central Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT: Home lawns account for a large portion of the pervious segments of urbanized watersheds. Soil movement and compaction during building construction processes alter soil physical properties, and thus, change hydrologic characteristics of the area. This research quantified the infiltration rates of 15 home lawns in central Pennsylvania and correlated the infiltration rates with selected turf and soil characteristics. Average infiltration rates ranged from 0.4 to 10.0 cm/hr (0.16 to 3.94 in/hr). Correlations with grass tiller density, soil bulk density, and percentages of sand, silt, and clay were not significant. Excavation procedures and lawn establishment methods appear to affect infiltration of home lawns more than any other factors.
Effect of vehicular pollution on Duranta repens L. in Jammu City

Experimental potted plants of Duranta repens has been exposed to air pollution at major traffic crossings-Amphalla chowk, Dogra chowk, Bikram chowk, Satwari chowk of Jammu city and also inside University Campus in the department which has been taken as a reference site. Sets of 10 plants were kept at each site and analyzed for various micro morphological, anatomical and biochemical parameters to assess the changes due to air pollution. Analysis of data revealed that micro-morphological parameters viz. stomatal frequency, epidermal cell frequency increased significantly while others like size of the stomata, epidermal cells and length, breadth ratio of the epidermal cells decreased significantly in plants kept at polluted location. All the anatomical parameters such as thickness of midrib region, midrib adjoining region, spongy tissue, upper epidermis and vascular bundles decreased significantly in exposed plants. Among biochemical parameters chlorophyll b decreases significantly while ascorbic acid increases significantly. Air Pollution Tolerance Index (APTI) has also been calculated and found to increase significantly in plants kept at polluted location which indicate that the Duranta repens serve as sink to air pollutants and can be effectively employed for phyto-monitoring auto exhaust pollution along the road side of the busy traffic ways.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Power Network Topology Control

Learning in high-dimensional action spaces is a key challenge in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world systems. In this paper, we study the possibility of controlling power networks using RL methods. Power networks are critical infrastructures that are complex to control. In particular, the combinatorial nature of the action space poses a challenge to both conventional optimizers and learned controllers. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) represents one approach to address this challenge. More precisely, a HRL framework for power network topology control is proposed. The HRL framework consists of three levels of action abstraction. At the highest level, there is the overall long-term task of power network operation, namely, keeping the power grid state within security constraints at all times, which is decomposed into two temporally extended actions: 'do nothing' versus 'propose a topology change'. At the intermediate level, the action space consists of all controllable substations. Finally, at the lowest level, the action space consists of all configurations of the chosen substation. By employing this HRL framework, several hierarchical power network agents are trained for the IEEE 14-bus network. Whereas at the highest level a purely rule-based policy is still chosen for all agents in this study, at the intermediate level the policy is trained using different state-of-the-art RL algorithms. At the lowest level, either an RL algorithm or a greedy algorithm is used. The performance of the different 3-level agents is compared with standard baseline (RL or greedy) approaches. A key finding is that the 3-level agent that employs RL both at the intermediate and the lowest level outperforms all other agents on the most difficult task. Our code is publicly available.
Studies of Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Report 13: Solid Cancer and Noncancer Disease Mortality: 1950–1997

Abstract Preston, D. L. , Shimizu, Y. , Pierce, D. A. , Suyama, A. and Mabuchi, K. Studies of Mortality of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Report 13: Solid Cancer and Noncancer Disease Mortality: 1950–1997. Radiat. Res. 160, 381–407 (2003). This continues the series of general reports on mortality in the cohort of atomic bomb survivors followed up by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. This cohort includes 86,572 people with individual dose estimates, 60% of whom have doses of at least 5 mSv. We consider mortality for solid cancer and for noncancer diseases with 7 additional years of follow-up. There have been 9,335 deaths from solid cancer and 31,881 deaths from noncancer diseases during the 47-year follow-up. Of these, 19% of the solid cancer and 15% of the noncancer deaths occurred during the latest 7 years. We estimate that about 440 (5%) of the solid cancer deaths and 250 (0.8%) of the noncancer deaths were associated with the radiation exposure. The excess solid cancer risks appear to be linear in dose even for doses in the 0 to 150-mSv range. While excess rates for radiation-related cancers increase throughout the study period, a new finding is that relative risks decline with increasing attained age, as well as being highest for those exposed as children as noted previously. A useful representative value is that for those exposed at age 30 the solid cancer risk is elevated by 47% per sievert at age 70. There is no significant city difference in either the relative or absolute excess solid cancer risk. Site-specific analyses highlight the difficulties, and need for caution, in distinguishing between site-specific relative risks. These analyses also provide insight into the difficulties in interpretation and generalization of LSS estimates of age-at-exposure effects. The evidence for radiation effects on noncancer mortality remains strong, with risks elevated by about 14% per sievert during the last 30 years of follow-up. Statistically significant increases are seen for heart disease, stroke, digestive diseases, and respiratory diseases. The noncancer data are consistent with some non-linearity in the dose response owing to the substantial uncertainties in the data. There is no direct evidence of radiation effects for doses less than about 0.5 Sv. While there are no statistically significant variations in noncancer relative risks with age, age at exposure, or sex, the estimated effects are comparable to those seen for cancer. Lifetime risk summaries are used to examine uncertainties of the LSS noncancer disease findings.
Analysis of the mechanistic link between micro-climate and macro-biogeographic patterns of intertidal rocky shore organisms

Temperature is considered one of the most important drivers of biological processes affecting the physiology and ecology of both endotherms and ectotherms. Intertidal species, despite their marine ancestry, are periodically exposed to extremely stressful and variable terrestrial conditions, and thus have long been regarded as ideal models for understanding how the physical environment drives physiology, biotic interactions, and ecological patterns in nature. The rocky intertidal environment is remarkably variable at a centimeter scale, and the complexity of its small-scale topography ensures that most locations encapsulate a myriad of contrasting microhabitats for species to explore, with vastly different thermal characteristics. Yet, the importance of this variability in determining large-scale macro-ecological processes remains virtually unknown. This thesis takes advantage of this singular system to gain insights on the basic ecological process driving the distribution of species, setting their range limits, and dictating change. The first chapter sets the context of this thesis by introducing the main theoretical concepts, environmental setting and studied species, and briefly identifying the current gaps in knowledge. The general introduction ends with an outline of the rationale and with a list of the manuscripts that compose the thesis. The second chapter aims at unravelling the intricate patterns of environmental variability. Firstly, the complexity of the thermal environment of rocky shores along the European Atlantic coast is detailed, showing that thermal differences between sun-exposed and shaded microhabitats are higher than those related to seasons, latitude or shore level. Secondly, a global look into the role of shading provided by coastal topography reveals that in some regions topographical shading may be a major source of habitat complexity. Although likely, the biological significance of this new pattern is yet to be ascertained, opening exciting new opportunities for future research. Focusing on the microhabitat level, the third chapter sets out to evaluate the implications of the striking levels of environmental variability identified. Through the quantification of the heat-shock proteins present in individuals of Patella vulgata Linnaeus, 1758 from different microsites along the European Atlantic coast, it is shown that different thermal histories are consistently associated with differences in physiological performance. The link found confirms that the limiting effects of temperature, rather than being related to latitude, seem to be tightly associated with microsite variability, which therefore is likely to have profound effects on the way local populations (and species) respond to climatic changes. In order to evaluate the relative contribution of water and air temperature during emersion for the build-up of thermal stress, a modern and simplified infrared heartbeat rate sensing system was designed. iii
Genetic characteristics and taxonomic classification of soils in the Mountain Wuyi

On the bases of Chinese soil taxonomy, the diagnostic features of six pedons in the Mr. Wuyi were identified and the correction in soil classification was discussed. The results showed that Udic Ferrisols, Udic Luvisols, Perudic Luvisols and Perudic Cambisols were distributed in the sequence from lower to higher elevation ranging from hill to mediate mountain.
CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Deep convolutional networks are well-known for their high computational and memory demands. Given limited resources, how does one design a network that balances its size, training time, and prediction accuracy? A surprisingly effective approach to trade accuracy for size and speed is to simply reduce the number of channels in each convolutional layer by a fixed fraction and retrain the network. In many cases this leads to significantly smaller networks with only minimal changes to accuracy. In this paper, we take a step further by empirically examining a strategy for deactivating connections between filters in convolutional layers in a way that allows us to harvest savings both in run-time and memory for many network architectures. More specifically, we generalize 2D convolution to use a channel-wise sparse connection structure and show that this leads to significantly better results than the baseline approach for large networks including VGG and Inception V3.
Analyses of Maize Yield Potential by Chinese Farming System Zoning Based on AEZ Model

In this paper,maize yield potentials by 41 Chinese farming system sub-zones were calculated on the bases of AEZ model that was developed by FAO and IIASA according to checked statistical data from 1961 to 1997 in China.The distribution of maximum maize yield potential on chinese GIS map was pointed out.The results showed that maximum yield potential of maize will be about two and half times of its present level,which is valuable to maize high yield breeding and cultivation.
Modelling The Impact Of Climate Change And Variability On Water Availability And Economic Likelihood: An Example From The Caribbean

Climate change and variability continues to receive attention as a major challenge for water resources, food security, and economic wellbeing especially in tropical SIDS. Research on climate change and variability has tended to concentrate on the physical dimension, yet less attention has been paid to the consequences for human and economic related activities. This research aims to investigate the impact of climate change and variability on water availability, food security, agricultural land use, and economic wellbeing in a tropical environment. An optimizing framework has been developed which balanced those competing demands. Results indicate that climate change has a greater negative impact on water availability and food security as compared to the impact of climate variability, where variability tends to mitigate the impact of the climate changes. The consequences of climate changeability are unevenly distributed across economic sectors and users. Consumers experience the negative consequences particularly when water abstraction is constrained for sustainability purpose. The approach provides a comprehensive tool for explaining the effectiveness of adaptation measures and possible policy response.
Remote Sensing Inversion of Soil Salinity Based on Feature Space

The soil surface salinity accumulation is the main cause of soil salinization,therefore timely and accurate means of remote sensing of soil salinity has important practical significance.With Ugan-Kuqa River Delta Oasis as the study area,using Landsat satellite data in April 2011,adopting improved vegetation index MSAVI and SI,soil salinity feature space remote sensing model was constructed.The correlation analysis was conducted on field surface 0-10 cm soil salinity in Sep.2011,R2= 0.859 6,the accuracy is better,which has important practical significance for the development of agriculture in arid oasis.
Experimental study on feasibility of filled subgrade with weathered soft rock

On the basis of field survey of slate phyllite and siltstone along Wu-Guang Railway, the mineral components and the properties of enduring collapse are discussed. Then, combining the strength of weathered soft rock and the results of compaction test, the feasibility of filled subgrade with weathered soft rock are judged. Furthermore, the judging principle and method of feasibility of filled subgrade with weathered soft rock are set up.
Physiological and morphological responses of olive plants to ozone exposure during a growing season

matal aperture) and morphological (individual leaf area and stomatal density) responses in leaves of five-year-old olive plants (Olea europaea L. cvs. Frantoio and Moraiolo) exposed to filtered air containing < 3 ppb O3 or 100 ppb O3 for 5 h day −1 for 120 days in fumigation chambers. After 100 days of treatment, leaf drop and development of necrotic spots were observed in O3-fumigated plants of Moraiolo but not of Frantoio. Significant reductions in photosynthetic activity (57%) and stomatal conductance (69%) were detected in O3-fumigated plants of Frantoio compared with control plants. In O3-fumigated plants of Moraiolo, the decrease in photosynthetic activity (17%) was not statistically significant, but a significant reduction in stomatal conductance (40%) was observed. In both cultivars, leaves that developed after exposure to O3 showed decreased stomatal aperture (63.6 and 54.8% with respect to the Frantoio and Moraiolo controls, respectively) and one-sided leaf area, and increased stomatal density compared with control leaves. Actual transpiring stomatal surface decreased substantially in both Frantoio (59.8%) and Moraiolo (56.3%) in response to O3 treatment. Relative transpiring stomatal surface (RTSS) in Frantoio decreased from 0.54 (control) to 0.27% (O3 treated) of total leaf surface. The corresponding values for Moraiolo were 0.79 and 0.42%. However, because the RTSS of Moraiolo leaves in the O3 treatment was 0.42 versus 0.27% in Frantoio, the potential uptake of O3 was higher for Moraiolo plants than for Frantoio plants. The large O3-induced reduction in transpiring stomatal surface in both cultivars could have significant effects on olive productivity in the Mediterranean area, where high O3 concentrations persist for long periods during the year.
Endocrine‐disrupting chemicals: Mainstream recognition of health effects and implications for the practicing internist

Rapidly advancing evidence documents that a broad array of synthetic chemicals found ubiquitously in the environment contribute to disease and disability across the lifespan. Although the early literature focused on early life exposures, endocrine‐disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are now understood to contribute substantially to chronic disease in adulthood, especially metabolic, cardiovascular, and reproductive consequences as well as endocrine cancers. The contribution to mortality is substantial, with over 90,000 deaths annually and at least $39 billion/year in lost economic productivity in the United States (US) due to exposure to certain phthalates that are used as plasticizers in food packaging. Importantly, exposures are disproportionately high in low‐income and minoritized populations, driving disparities in these conditions. Though non‐Hispanic Blacks and Mexican Americans comprise 12.6% and 13.5% of the US population, they bear 16.5% and 14.6% of the disease burden due to EDCs, respectively. Many of these exposures can be modified through safe and simple behavioral changes supported by proactive government action to both limit known hazardous exposures and to proactively screen new industrial chemicals prior to their use. Routine healthcare maintenance should include guidance to reduce EDC exposures, and a recent report by the Institute of Medicine suggests that testing be conducted, particularly in populations heavily exposed to perfluoroalkyl substances—chemicals used in nonstick coatings as well as oil‐ and water‐resistant clothing.
New Exploration Discovery and Development Trend of Oil/Gas Exploration around the World in 2012

The rapid development of deepwater and unconventional oil gas has changed the world oil and gas market.To summarize the distribution of new exploration discoveries,it is one of the key means to understand the characteristic of the world oil and gas market and forecast the trend of the future exploration. The reserves from offshore discovery accounted for 90% of world newly increased reserves in 2012.The offshore in East Africa and Eastern Brazil have become the most important areas of reserves growth.There are continuous oil and gas exploration breakthroughs in the potential areas,such as Southern Caspian Sea and eastern Mediterranean,while rapid progresses in the strategic replacement areas,such as Barents Sea in Arctic.Meanwhile,the supply region of unconventional oil and gas has been formed in America.In order to enhance the technological innovation,it will become the main trend of oil and gas exploration to intensify the deepwater risk exploration and stick to the development of unconventional resources in the future.
Activating mutations in the epidermal growth factor receptor underlying responsiveness of non-small-cell lung cancer to gefitinib.

BACKGROUND Most patients with non-small-cell lung cancer have no response to the tyrosine kinase inhibitor gefitinib, which targets the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). However, about 10 percent of patients have a rapid and often dramatic clinical response. The molecular mechanisms underlying sensitivity to gefitinib are unknown. METHODS We searched for mutations in the EGFR gene in primary tumors from patients with non-small-cell lung cancer who had a response to gefitinib, those who did not have a response, and those who had not been exposed to gefitinib. The functional consequences of identified mutations were evaluated after the mutant proteins were expressed in cultured cells. RESULTS Somatic mutations were identified in the tyrosine kinase domain of the EGFR gene in eight of nine patients with gefitinib-responsive lung cancer, as compared with none of the seven patients with no response (P<0.001). Mutations were either small, in-frame deletions or amino acid substitutions clustered around the ATP-binding pocket of the tyrosine kinase domain. Similar mutations were detected in tumors from 2 of 25 patients with primary non-small-cell lung cancer who had not been exposed to gefitinib (8 percent). All mutations were heterozygous, and identical mutations were observed in multiple patients, suggesting an additive specific gain of function. In vitro, EGFR mutants demonstrated enhanced tyrosine kinase activity in response to epidermal growth factor and increased sensitivity to inhibition by gefitinib. CONCLUSIONS A subgroup of patients with non-small-cell lung cancer have specific mutations in the EGFR gene, which correlate with clinical responsiveness to the tyrosine kinase inhibitor gefitinib. These mutations lead to increased growth factor signaling and confer susceptibility to the inhibitor. Screening for such mutations in lung cancers may identify patients who will have a response to gefitinib.