Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WHO NEEDS CAPITAL-ACCOUNT CONVERTIBILITY?

Imagine landing on a planet that runs on widgets. You are told that international trade in widgets is highly unpredictable and volatile on this planet, for reasons that are poorly understood. A small number of nations have access to imported widgets, while many others are completely shut out even when they impose no apparent obstacles to trade. With some regularity, those countries that have access to widgets get too much of a good thing, and their markets are flooded with imported widgets. This allows them to go on a widget binge, which makes everyone pretty happy for a while. However, such binges are often interrupted by a sudden cutoff in supply, unrelated to any change in circumstances. The turnaround causes the affected economies to experience painful economic adjustments. For reasons equally poorly understood, when one country is hit by a supply cutback in this fashion, many other countries experience similar shocks in quick succession. Some years thereafter, a widget boom starts anew. Your hosts beg you for guidance: how should they deal with their widget problem? Ponder this question for a while and then ponder under what circumstances your central recommendation would be that all extant controls on international trade in widgets be eliminated. Substitute “international capital flows” for “widgets” above and the description fits today’s world economy quite well. We have just gone through a lending boom-and-bust cycle in Asia which is astounding in its magnitude. In 1996, five Asian economies (South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines) received net private capital inflows amounting
Are PLLs dead? A tutorial on kalman filter-based techniques for digital carrier synchronization

Carrier synchronization is a fundamental stage in the receiver side of any communication or positioning system. Traditional carrier phase tracking techniques are based on well-known phase-locked loop (PLL) closed-loop architectures, which are still the methods of choice in modern receivers. Those techniques are well understood, easy to tune, and perform well under benign propagation conditions, but their applicability is seriously compromised in harsh propagation environments, where the signal may be affected by high dynamics, shadowing, strong fadings, multipath effects, or ionospheric scintillation. From an optimal filtering standpoint, the Kalman filter (KF) is clearly a powerful alternative, but the synchronization community seems still reluctant to exploit all the potential it has to offer. The purpose of this article is twofold: i) to review the basics and state of the art on both PLL and KF-based tracking techniques and ii) to present and justify the reasoning behind the systematic use of KF-based tracking approaches instead of the well-established PLL-based architectures from both theoretical and practical points of view. To support the discussion, two specific scenarios of interest to the aerospace community are numerically evaluated: robust carrier tracking of global navigation satellite systems' signals and synchronization in a deep space communications system.
Prevention of Epilepsy After Head Trauma: Do We Need New Drugs or a New Approach?

Summary: Annually in the U.S. about 500,000 head injuries are severe enough to require hospitalization. Past studies of severe head trauma estimate the risk of late seizures, which are synonymous with epilepsy, to be from 26 to 53%. Furthermore, head trauma accounts for 5% of all epilepsy cases and 20% of symptomatic epilepsy. Although potentially preventable, no effective prophylaxis for posttraumatic epilepsy currently exists. Prior attempts to prevent posttraumatic epileptogenesis used various anticonvulsants, usually given many hours after injury. Generally these studies showed these agents suppressed seizures in the first week after trauma, but had no effect on the incidence of late posttraumatic seizures. Brain trauma engages a rapid excitotoxic process triggered by glutamate release, similar to that seen with ischemia. For ischemic cell damage early and rapid delivery of agents has been a key to rescuing or protecting neurons. Yet, no study has addressed whether the rapidity of drug delivery is critical in the prophylaxis of late seizures. Perhaps excitotoxicity proximate to the brain injury also leads to the neurological deficits seen after severe trauma, initiating and promoting epileptogenesis, and that disrupting this process may prevent epilepsy. While experimental models of epileptogenesis have shown that GABAergic drugs, including valproate (VPA), may be antiepileptogenic, the timing of treatment with putative prophylactic drugs has not been studied. Recent laboratory work explored this issue using an in vitro model of posttraumatic epileptogenesis. The data suggest that a limited time domain exists for VPA to intervene in the epileptogenic process, requiring the earliest possible intervention. We contend that protection from posttraumatic epileptogenesis can be conferred only if agents are given soon after trauma. A pilot study is proposed to begin to translate these findings to explore the feasibility of early VPA delivery to severe head trauma patients admitted to Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, NY, a Level 1 trauma center.
Rural Infrastructure and Growth: An Overview

Rural infrastructure is crucial for agriculture, agro-industries and overall economic development of rural areas. It also, incidentally, provides basic amenities that improve the quality of life. However, infrastructure projects, including those in rural sector, involve huge initial investments, long gestation periods, high incremental capital output ratio, high risk and low rate of returns on investment. All these factors are not conducive for private sector entry into infrastructure. Further there are many attributes of infrastructure that make it difficult for individuals to design, construct, operate and maintain these services effectively and efficiently. As a result of this, infrastructure services, the world over, are largely provided by the public sector. Thus there are often good reasons for public sector involvement in the provision of rural infrastructure services, however in the production of such services there exists a role for other than public sector entities also (Ostrom et al., 1993) Infrastructure is an umbrella term for many activities referred to as social overhead capital by development economists as Arthur Lewis, Rosenstein-Rodan, Ragner Nurkse and Albert Hirschman. Lewis included public utilities, ports, water supply and electricity as infrastructure (Lewis, 1955) whereas Hirschman outlined four conditions that characterise infrastructure or social overhead capital: the services provided to facilitate or are basic to economic activity; the services are usually public goods because of economic externalities; these services cannot be imported; these investments tend to be indivisible or ‘lumpy’ (Hirschman, 1958). Later, in the sixties, besides the above, emphasis was laid on agricultural research, extension and rural financial institutions as important elements of infrastructure, due to increasing recognition of the role of agriculture in economic development and the vital role that infrastructure plays in generating agricultural growth (de Vries, 1960; Ishikawa, 1967).
Approximating fuzzy membership functions from clustered raw data

Clustering is the process of identifying groups of similar data fulfilling certain criteria. Fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm generates cluster centers and degree of memberships of each pattern to each fuzzy cluster. However, this clustered raw data is not of much benefit for the symbolic representation of fuzzy rule base which can be generated using standard algorithms like fuzzy decision trees and others. Also human interpretability is improved when clustered raw data is represented by Triangular, Trapezoidal, or Gaussian kind of membership functions, rather than representing as matrix of raw membership values. The convex hull method for the estimation of trapezoidal membership functions from the clustered raw data is of limited use and many a times generates membership functions that are either highly overlapped or highly separated. In this article, two heuristic algorithms are presented for the estimation of parameterized family of membership functions, namely, triangular and trapezoidal. Each of these algorithms has been explained formally and then stated in pseudo code form and illustrated with a sample dataset. Finally, the practical application of these algorithms is given in the context of our recent research.
Absolute quantification of target DNA: a simple competitive PCR for efficient analysis of multiple samples.

PCR is an exquisitely sensitive method for detection of minute amounts of target DNA. The exponential nature of DNA amplification, however, is prone to burden the experimental data with significant standard error due to the tube-to-tube inherent variations in amplification efficiency. Therefore the reliable quantitation of DNA or RNA templates by PCR necessitates introduction of an internal standard. Typically, in a series of replicates of analyzed sample the defined range of such standards is coamplified together with constant unknown amount of wildtype template (1, 2) or alternatively both templates are subjected to endpoint dilution (3). Obviously, each of the methods is based on multiple PCR reactions which are to be performed simultaneously with each of the analyzed samples. Such procedure, nevertheless, may become cumbersome when large numbers of samples are to be analyzed. We describe a modification of competitive PCR which is based on standardization of interpolation from a calibration curve. This approach enables accurate analysis of multiple samples by comparison with a single set of standard samples containing known amounts of the wild-type template of interest. Effective compensation for intra-assay variability is achieved using a constant amount of internal standard to spike all samples being analyzed as well as the samples used as standards. The comprehensive equation — logiN^/N^) = \og(N01/Ng^) + nlogieff^effi) defines the yield of the two products in any competitive PCR in terms of the ratio of the two original templates and their relative efficiencies of amplification, and simplifies when the products of both the endogenous wild-type template and the exogenous internal standard are generated with the same efficiency. Provided that this requirement (effi = effd is
On The Gender Effects of Handedness in Professional Tennis

The aim of this study was to explore the effects of the gender variable in relation to other player and match characteristics on the advantage possessed by left-handed professional tennis players over their right-handed rivals. The data include 16 732 male tennis players and 16 432 female tennis players who played 438 937 and 415 346 matches, respectively, in the period from 1968 to the end of 2011. The results revealed that the advantage of left-handed professional tennis players is higher in males compared to females. The inverse impact of player and match quality on the left-handers’ advantage was clearly confirmed. On the contrary, it seems that the type of court surface does not directly imply this advantage. To obtain an overview on the individual level, directed and weighted networks of tennis matches in both gender categories were constructed. Applying network analytic methods and the PageRank algorithm, the best left and right-handed players in the Open Era of tennis were identified. The top three ranked left-handed players in the male and female categories were found to be far more consistent in their ranks achieved against left and right-handed opponents compared to their right-handed counterparts.
More definitions in sickle cell disease: Steady state v base line data

are present at high frequencies in patients with hypereosinophilic syndrome. Haematologica 2009;94:1236–1241. 3. Ghia P, Prato G, Stella S, et al. Age-dependent accumulation of monoclonal CD41CD81 double positive T lymphocytes in the peripheral blood of the elderly. Br J Haematol 2007;139:780–790. 4. Morice WG, Kimlinger T, Katzmann JA, et al. Flow cytometric assessment of TCR-Vbeta expression in the evaluation of peripheral blood involvement by T-cell lymphoproliferative disorders: A comparison with conventional T-cell immunophenotyping and molecular genetic techniques. Am J Clin Pathol 2004; 121:373–383. 5. Helbig G, Wichary R, Razny M, et al. The proportion of CD3CD41 T-cell population remained unaffected after corticosteroids treatment for lymphocytic variant hypereosinophilic syndrome (L-HES). Scand J Immunol 2010;72: 372–373. 6. Verstovsek S, Tefferi A, Kantarjian H, et al. Alemtuzumab therapy for hypereosinophilic syndrome and chronic eosinophilic leukemia. Clin Cancer Res 2009;15: 368–373.
Personalized Table-Top Game Recommendations

Table-top games have proven to enhance the lives of people of all ages. From children fostering the ability to focus to adults reducing their risk of developing Alzheimers disease, games continue to play a significant role in people’s success in life. Recent prevalence in table-top games have increased production and sales for the game industry, thus providing a large variety of table-top game options to users. The volume of table-top options available to users, however, is problematic as buying new, unfamiliar games is a risk, since purchase cannot guarantee play satisfaction, and 100% refunds are not warrantied if game components have been tampered with. Existing websites such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble recommend table-top games to users, but their methodology is mainly based on consumer purchase patterns which neglect game characteristics in their non-personalized recommendations. These characteristics, which include topic relevance, complexity, and game category, can significantly affect the satisfaction level of game play when players experiment with new table-top games. In order to assist users in finding games of interest to play and enrich the player’s gameplaying experience, we have developed PeGRec (Personalized Game Recommender), a novel software system that recommends the latest and most personally intriguing table-top games for users. We show in a series of evaluation tests that PeGRec’s recommendations are more personalized and accurate in rankings according to user interests than the ones provided by Amazon’s and Barnes & Nobles’ game recommenders, respectively.
The unified maximum a posteriori (MAP) framework for neuronal system identification

The functional relationship between an input and a sensory neuron's response can be described by the neuron's stimulus-response mapping function. A general approach for characterizing the stimulus-response mapping function is called system identification. Many different names have been used for the stimulus-response mapping function: kernel or transfer function, transducer, spatiotemporal receptive field. Many algorithms have been developed to estimate a neuron's mapping function from an ensemble of stimulus-response pairs. These include the spike-triggered average, normalized reverse correlation, linearized reverse correlation, ridge regression, local spectral reverse correlation, spike-triggered covariance, artificial neural networks, maximally informative dimensions, kernel regression, boosting, and models based on leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. Because many of these system identification algorithms were developed in other disciplines, they seem very different superficially and bear little relationship with each other. Each algorithm makes different assumptions about the neuron and how the data is generated. Without a unified framework it is difficult to select the most suitable algorithm for estimating the neuron's mapping function. In this review, we present a unified framework for describing these algorithms called maximum a posteriori estimation (MAP). In the MAP framework, the implicit assumptions built into any system identification algorithm are made explicit in three MAP constituents: model class, noise distributions, and priors. Understanding the interplay between these three MAP constituents will simplify the task of selecting the most appropriate algorithms for a given data set. The MAP framework can also facilitate the development of novel system identification algorithms by incorporating biophysically plausible assumptions and mechanisms into the MAP constituents.
Scalable and Detail-Preserving Ground Surface Reconstruction from Large 3D Point Clouds Acquired by Mobile Mapping Systems

The currently existing mobile mapping systems equipped with active 3D sensors allow to acquire the environment with high sampling rates at high vehicle velocities. While providing an effective solution for environment sensing over large scale distances, such acquisi-tion provides only a discrete representation of the geometry. Thus, a continuous map of the underlying surface must be built. Mobile acquisition introduces several constraints for the state-of-the-art surface reconstruction algorithms. Smoothing becomes a difficult task for recovering sharp depth features while avoiding mesh shrinkage. In addition, interpolation-based techniques are not suitable for noisy datasets acquired by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems. Furthermore, scalability is a major concern for enabling real-time rendering over large scale distances while preserving geometric details. This paper presents a fully automatic ground surface recon-struction framework capable to deal with the aforementioned constraints. The proposed method exploits the quasi-flat geometry of the ground throughout a morphological segmentation algorithm. Then, a planar Delaunay triangulation is applied in order to reconstruct the ground surface. A smoothing procedure eliminates high frequency peaks, while preserving geometric details in order to provide a regular ground surface. Finally, a decimation step is applied in order to cope with scalability constraints over large scale distances. Experimental results on real data acquired in large urban environments are presented and a performance evaluation with respect to ground truth measurements demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF CHAOTIC ENCRYPTION TECHNIQUE

Drastic growth in multimedia communication resulted to numerous security issues in the transmission of data. Moreover, the network used for the digital communication does not provide much security for the data transfer. During this time, tens of millions people using the internet options for essential communication and is being a tool for commercial field increased, So that security is an enormously important issue to deal with. We need to be protected confidentiality of data and provide secure connections for it. Hence we necessitate recognizing the different aspects of security and their applications. Many of these applications ranging from secure commerce, protecting passwords or pin and payments to private communications. As we know that, Cryptography is now becoming an essential aspect of the secure communication. Cryptography is the science of writing secret code with confident algorithm and key. The basic components of cryptography are encryption and decryption algorithms, digital signature and hashed message authentication code. We know that encryption is the synonym of cryptography. Different kinds of encryption are used in this modern era. Chaotic encryption is the type of the encryption which has adopted the concept of chaos. In this study, we are studying the history of cryptography until chaotic cryptography and analyzing the performance of chaotic encryption technique. The evaluation is performed in terms of encryption speed, the CPU utilization with time and the battery power consumption. The experimental results are specified the efficiency of the algorithms.
Particle statistics and lossy dynamics of ultracold atoms in optical lattices

Experimental control over ultracold quantum gases has made it possible to investigate low-dimensional systems of both bosonic and fermionic atoms. In closed one-dimensional systems there are many similarities in the dynamics of local quantities for spinless fermions and strongly interacting "hard-core" bosons, which on a lattice can be formalized via a Jordan-Wigner transformation. In this study, we analyze the similarities and differences for spinless fermions and hard-core bosons on a lattice in the presence of particle loss. The removal of a single fermion causes differences in local quantities compared with the bosonic case because of the different particle exchange symmetry in the two cases. We identify deterministic and probabilistic signatures of these dynamics in terms of local particle density, which could be measured in ongoing experiments with quantum gas microscopes.
Phylogenetic signal in extinction selectivity in Devonian terebratulide brachiopods

Abstract Determining which biological traits affect taxonomic durations is critical for explaining macroevolutionary patterns. Two approaches are commonly used to investigate the associations between traits and durations and/or extinction and origination rates: analyses of taxonomic occurrence patterns in the fossil record and comparative phylogenetic analyses, predominantly of extant taxa. By capitalizing upon the empirical record of past extinctions, paleontological data avoid some of the limitations of existing methods for inferring extinction and origination rates from molecular phylogenies. However, most paleontological studies of extinction selectivity have ignored phylogenetic relationships because there is a dearth of phylogenetic hypotheses for diverse non-vertebrate higher taxa in the fossil record. This omission inflates the degrees of freedom in statistical analyses and leaves open the possibility that observed associations are indirect, reflecting shared evolutionary history rather than the direct influence of particular traits on durations. Here we investigate global patterns of extinction selectivity in Devonian terebratulide brachiopods and compare the results of taxonomic vs. phylogenetic approaches. Regression models that assume independence among taxa provide support for a positive association between geographic range size and genus duration but do not indicate an association between body size and genus duration. Brownian motion models of trait evolution identify significant similarities in body size, range size, and duration among closely related terebratulide genera. We use phylogenetic regression to account for shared evolutionary history and find support for a significant positive association between range size and duration among terebratulides that is also phylogenetically structured. The estimated range size–duration relationship is moderately weaker in the phylogenetic analysis due to the down-weighting of closely related genera that were both broadly distributed and long lived; however, this change in slope is not statistically significant. These results provide evidence for the phylogenetic conservatism of organismal and emergent traits, yet also the general phylogenetic independence of the relationship between range size and duration.