Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perception and Attitude of Consumers' Towards Packaged Drinking Water in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Descriptive research design was used to select 200 respondents (i.e., 100 from each study places) following purposive sampling technique on two study areas (Market; Living). Personal observation and interview with retailers were done to triangulate the collected data from the formal survey. The collected data was analyzed using SPSS version 20 software program. Descriptive statistical measurements, Index and multinomial regression model was calculated to assess the relationship between customers point of emphasis during packaged water buying and respondents demographic variables. Majority of the respondent who frequently purchase packaged water generated a monthly income between 5000 and 10000 Birr. Television and radio was ranked first compare to other Media. Living place customers were more health concerned as compared to market place customers. Market place customer’s primarily give emphasis to price of packaged water. Almost all (97%) customers did not have the awareness towards packaged water standards. Only 86(43%) of the total respondents checked the chemical composition, of which 74(85%) of the respondents did not understand it. Customers sex, educational level and health status showed significant relationship with choice of packaged water quality -1.42(p<0.05), price -2.45(P<0.01) and health status -1.80(P<0.05) in market place and living places, respectively.
Private sector participation in flood proof urban development projects

Floods are a serious threat for the Netherlands. The majority of the Netherlands lies beneath sea level. Since the great North Sea flood in the Netherlands in 1953, which caused 1,836 victims and widespread property damage, the state focused on protecting the country against floods by building dikes and dunes. Recently, representatives of the national government explored different strategies to protect the country from flooding. The ambition of the state is to work as efficiently as possible with the money available when it comes to flood protection. One of the strategies is to integrate flood protection in urban development projects and share responsibility for flood protection with private actors like real estate developers.
License Plate Recognition (LPR): A Review with Experiments for Malaysia Case Study

Most vehicle license plate recognition use neural network techniques to enhance its computing capability. The image of the vehicle license plate is captured and processed to produce a textual output for further processing. This paper reviews image processing and neural network techniques applied at different stages which are preprocessing, filtering, feature extraction, segmentation and recognition in such way to remove the noise of the image, to enhance the image quality and to expedite the computing process by converting the characters in the image into respective text. An exemplar experiment has been done in MATLAB to show the basic process of the image processing especially for license plate in Malaysia case study. An algorithm is adapted into the solution for parking management system. The solution then is implemented as proof of concept to the algorithm.
How Social Interaction Affects Purchase Intention in Social Commerce: A Cultural Perspective

In the context of social commerce, the influence of culture on consumers’ behavior and attitude is more significant. This paper empirically analyzes the influence of social interaction (perceived risk, trust, and intimacy) on consumers’ purchase intention in social commerce, and the antecedent effect of cultural dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism/collectivism) on social interaction is also explored. Data were collected in China and France from consumers who had prior online shopping experience on social commerce websites. The results show that the impact of perceived risk on subsequent purchase intention in social commerce will be transferred by trust and intimacy to a certain extent. The intimacy between users contributes to trust-building, and both of their positive impacts on purchase intention would show distinct effects in different cultures. Besides, cultural dimensions are proved to have a significant effect on users’ social interaction. Although high uncertainty avoidance brings perceived risk, it can promote subsequent trust-building. These findings help provide managerial insights for social commerce community to establish effective trust mechanism in a multicultural context.
Social Incentives in the Workplace

We present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers' behaviour is affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where there are no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensation scheme in place. To do so, we combine data on individual worker productivity from a firm's personnel records with information on each worker's social network of friends in the firm. We find that compared to when she has no social ties with her co-workers, a given worker's productivity is significantly higher when she works alongside friends who are more able than her, and significantly lower when she works with friends who are less able than her. As workers are paid piece rates based on individual productivity, social incentives can be quantified in monetary terms and are such that (i) workers who are more able than their friends are willing to exert less effort and forgo 10% of their earnings; (ii) workers who have at least one friend who is more able than themselves are willing to increase their effort and hence productivity by 10%. The distribution of worker ability is such that the net effect of social incentives on the firm's aggregate performance is positive. The results suggest that firms can exploit social incentives as an alternative to monetary incentives to motivate workers.
The contribution of environmental events and social support to serious suicide attempts in primary depressive disorder.

In order to investigate the contribution of environmental events to the occurrence of serious suicide attempts, patients were interviewed about the events that occurred to them or their spouse in the 12 months previous to the actual suicide attempt. Several methodological improvements relative to previous events and suicide research were incorporated in the study. Only primary depressive attempters (n= 14) were selected, and for purposes of comparison, a primary depressive control group (n = 14) was selected. Moreover, seriousness of suicide attempt was quantified and assessed in each patient, and only moderately or severely serious attempters were chosen. The results showed that the occurrence of serious suicide attempts is strongly associated with an increased rate of independent events (events not influenced by the patient's behavior, decisions, or disorder) in the year preceding the attempt, and that a particularly high density of such events between episodic onset and the attempt may serve as the direct initiator of an attempt. Our data also suggest that exit events, where an important social support is lost to the patient, may play a particularly significant role in initiating an attempt. Moreover, the findings suggest that the presence of social support may buffer the impact of exit events and thereby reduce suicidal risk. Implications of our findings for the highest risk period of suicide are discussed.
Improving unsupervised vector-space thematic fit evaluation via role-filler prototype clustering

Most recent unsupervised methods in vector space semantics for assessing thematic fit (e.g. Erk, 2007; Baroni and Lenci, 2010; Sayeed and Demberg, 2014) create prototypical rolefillers without performing word sense disambiguation. This leads to a kind of sparsity problem: candidate role-fillers for different senses of the verb end up being measured by the same “yardstick”, the single prototypical role-filler. In this work, we use three different feature spaces to construct robust unsupervised models of distributional semantics. We show that correlation with human judgements on thematic fit estimates can be improved consistently by clustering typical role-fillers and then calculating similarities of candidate rolefillers with these cluster centroids. The suggested methods can be used in any vector space model that constructs a prototype vector from a non-trivial set of typical vectors.
EOFs of

While approximate cyclostationary processes are commonly found in climatic and geophysical studies, one great disincentive in using cyclostationary empirical orthogonal functions is their computational burden. This is especially so for three-dimensional, space-time case. This paper discusses a simple method of computing approximate cyclostationary empirical orthogonal functions based on the theory of harmonizable cyclostationary processes. The new method is computationally much more eecient than that by Kim et al. (1996a). In the new method cyclostationary empirical orthogonal functions are easier to understand. Namely, they are naturally deened as the products of Bloch functions (inner modes) and Fourier functions (outer modes), which otherwise is the result of the factor-ization theorem (Smith 1969). Bloch functions are simply the principal components (PC) of the coeecient time series, which are generally correlated. They represent the normal modes of the nested uctuations of harmonizable cyclostationary processes. Under the assumption of independent PC time series, Bloch functions are computed independently of the outer modes, which results in a tremendous speedup in computation.
Evaluating the EASY-backfill job scheduling of static workloads on clusters

This research aims at improving our understanding of backfilling job scheduling algorithms. The most frequently used algorithm, EASY-backfilling, was selected for a performance evaluation by scheduling static workloads of parallel jobs on a computer cluster. To achieve the aim, we have developed a batch job scheduler for Linux clusters, implemented several scheduling algorithms including ARCA and EASY-Backfilling, and carried out their performance evaluation by running well known MPI applications on a real cluster. Our performance evaluation carried out for EASY-Backfilling serves two purposes. First, the performance results obtained from our evaluation can be used to validate other researcherspsila results generated by simulation, and second, the methodology used in our evaluation has alleviated many problems existed in the simulations presented in the current literature.
The Extent of Ethics Instruction in Technical and Professional Communication Graduate Programs

In this research, I performed a content analysis of the required courses in technical and professional communication (TPC) graduate course syllabi to investigate the prevalence of ethics-related materials included in course instruction. The literature on the topic of ethics instruction in TPC programs identifies ethics as an important area of study for technical communication students. The literature also suggests that effective ethics instruction is layered into assignments and throughout TPC curricula. The content analysis for my research included collecting the syllabi of required courses from a sample of TPC graduate programs, and coding for the occurrence of journal articles and textbook chapters that included the word “ethics” in the title, summary, or keywords. Additionally, my methodology includes an examination of the frequency that ethics materials occur as assigned readings in course syllabi. The three main findings I show are 1) the number of assigned readings from textbook chapters versus journal articles 2) the disproportionate amount of ethics instruction from research-related courses 3) the low course engagement for assigned ethics readings. My findings show that on average, TPC programs assign ethics content both from journal articles and from textbook chapters. However, I was surprised to find more assigned textbook chapters than journal articles, based on my expectations from the literature on this topic. Additionally, my data showed a disproportionate number of ethics references coming from courses I identify as research-focused. Research textbooks typically contain sections on the ethics of research and this can and should be distinguished from the topic of communication-ethics that I reviewed from the literature.
Oceans'98 Ieee/oes Conference Robust Feature Tracking in Underwater Video Sequences

| This paper proposes a robust feature tracker based on an eecient outlier rejection scheme, suitable for feature tracking in subsea video sequences. We extend the Shi-Tomasi-Kanade scheme by introducing a technique for rejecting spurious features. We employ a simple and ee-cient outlier rejection rule, called X84, and prove that its theoretical assumptions are satissed in the feature tracking scenario. Experiments with synthetic and real subsea sequence connrm that our algorithm locates and discards unreliable features accurately and consistently, and tracks good features reliably over many frames. We also illustrate quantitatively the beneets introduced by the algorithm with the example of fundamental matrix estimation .
Optimal Timing of Selection Contests

A principal must choose an agent to perform a task and faces a tradeoff in deciding when to hold a selection contest. Agents’ types evolve and thus a later contest is more accurate. However, an agent’s effort in the contest diminishes her task performance and the less time until the task, the costlier the effort. We explore the optimal timing decision and show that later contests are better whenever types are more disperse and whenever ability at the task gives agents an edge in the contest. We find that the expected performance of the selected agent is invariant to the average ability and can either increase or decrease with the number of participants. We also recast the timing decision as a more general screening problem in which the principal suffers the signaling costs of the chosen agent. We argue that the optimal screening mechanism is equivalent to that in Chakravarty and Kaplan (2006), is stochastic, and favors agents with low hazard ratios.
Origin and structure of embryoids arising from epidermal cells of the stem of Ranunculus sceleratus L.

Embryoids are initiated from single highly cytoplasmic cells of the stem epidermis of plantlets of Ranunculus sceleratus L. derived from callus cultures. The embryoids show embryological development of the Crucifer type except that the suspensor is reduced or suppressed. The cells of the young embryoids have a large central nucleus surrounded by small vacuoles, a cytoplasm rich in free ribosomes or ribosomes in small polysomes, prominent amyloplastids and abundant spherosomes. These cells also frequently contain multivesicular and myelin bodies. The spherosomes are observed in various stages of development; they are typically arranged in a layer below the cell wall, the space between the spherosomes and the wall being rich in spherical vesicles and microtubules. As embryoid development proceeds the plastids show internal differentiation; globular centres and, surrounding them, electron-transparent droplets are associated with the origin of the thylakoid membranes. The walls of the embryogenic cells are initially rich in plasmodesmata but as the embryoid develops cytoplasmic continuity with the embedding tissue is severed and the embryoid is clearly delineated. The embryology and fine structure of the embryoid cells is compared with that of zygotic embryos of Capsella and Ranunculus .
Reaction Time Distribution Analysis of Neuropsychological Performance in an ADHD Sample

Differences in reaction time (RT) variability have been documented between children with and without Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Most previous research has utilized estimates of normal distributions to examine variability. Using a nontraditional approach, the present study evaluated RT distributions on the Conners’ Continuous Performance Test in children and adolescents from the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD sample compared to a matched sample of normal controls (n = 65 pairs). The ex-Gaussian curve was used to model RT and RT variability. Children with ADHD demonstrated faster RT associated with the normal portion of the curve and a greater proportion of abnormally slow responses associated with the exponential portion of the curve. These results contradict previous interpretation that children with ADHD have slower than normal responding and demonstrate why slower RT is found when estimates of variability assume normal Gaussian distributions. Further, results of this study suggest that the greater number of abnormally long RTs of children with ADHD reflect attentional lapses on some but not all trials. The MTA is a cooperative treatment study performed by six independent research teams in collaboration with the staff of the Division of Clinical and Treatment Research of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Rockville, Maryland and the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE). The NIMH Principal Collaborators are Peter S. Jensen, M.D., L. Eugene Arnold, M.Ed., M.D., John E. Richters, Ph.D., Joanne B. Severe, M.S., Donald Vereen, M.D., and Benedetto Vitiello, M.D. Principal Investigators and coinvestigators from the six sites are as follows: University of California at Berkeley/San Francisco (UO1 MH50461): Stephen P. Hinshaw, Ph.D., Glen R. Elliott, M.D., Ph.D.; Duke University (UO1 MH50447): C. Keith Conners, Ph.D., Karen C. Wells, Ph.D., John S. March, M.D., M.P.H. ; University of California at Irvine/Los Angeles (UO1 MH50440): James M. Swanson, Ph.D.; Dennis P. Cantwell, M.D.; Timothy Wigal, Ph.D.; Long Island Jewish Medical Center/Montreal Children's Hospital (UO1 MH50453): Howard B. Abikoff, Ph.D., Lily Hechtman, M.D.; New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University/Mount Sinai Medical Center (UO1 MH50454): Laurence L. Greenhill, M.D., Jeffrey H. Newcorn, M.D.; University of Pittsburgh (UO1 MH50467): William E. Pelham, Ph.D., Betsy Hoza, Ph.D. Helena C. Kraemer, Ph.D. (Stanford University) is statistical and design consultant. The OSEP/DOE Principal Collaborator is Thomas Hanley, Ed.D. Aaron Hervey, Ph.D. was supported on this project by a midcareer development award to the second author (K24 MH64478).
A Prior-based Transfer Learning Method for the Phishing Detection

In this paper, we introduce a prior-based transfer learning method for our statistical machine learning classifier which based on the logistic regression to detect the phishing sites that relies on our selected features of the URLs. Because of the mismatched distributions of the features in different phishing domains, we employ multiple models for different regions. Since it is impossible for us to collect enough data from a new region to rebuild the detection model, we adjust the existing models by the transfer learning algorithm to solve these problems. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on a real-world task of detecting the phishing websites. After a number of experiments, our proposed transfer learning algorithm achieves more than 97% accuracy. The result demonstrates the use of this algorithm in the anti-phishing scenario is feasible and ready for our large scale detection engine.
Social Media and Post-Election Crisis in Kenya

This article analyzes the role of the media during the two months of post election crisis in 2008 in Kenya. We discuss how people exchanged information during and after the media ban, and analyze online discussions and media coverage. Particular emphasis is given to the role of the “social media” such as web 2.0 communication tools and services, which enable citizens to interact or share contents online. Our analysis shows that during the crisis the “social media” functioned as an alternative medium for “citizen communication” or “participatory journalism”. This experience has important implications for the process of democratization in Kenya.
Comprehensive Analyses of Ventricular Myocyte Models Identify Targets Exhibiting Favorable Rate Dependence

Reverse rate dependence is a problematic property of antiarrhythmic drugs that prolong the cardiac action potential (AP). The prolongation caused by reverse rate dependent agents is greater at slow heart rates, resulting in both reduced arrhythmia suppression at fast rates and increased arrhythmia risk at slow rates. The opposite property, forward rate dependence, would theoretically overcome these parallel problems, yet forward rate dependent (FRD) antiarrhythmics remain elusive. Moreover, there is evidence that reverse rate dependence is an intrinsic property of perturbations to the AP. We have addressed the possibility of forward rate dependence by performing a comprehensive analysis of 13 ventricular myocyte models. By simulating populations of myocytes with varying properties and analyzing population results statistically, we simultaneously predicted the rate-dependent effects of changes in multiple model parameters. An average of 40 parameters were tested in each model, and effects on AP duration were assessed at slow (0.2 Hz) and fast (2 Hz) rates. The analysis identified a variety of FRD ionic current perturbations and generated specific predictions regarding their mechanisms. For instance, an increase in L-type calcium current is FRD when this is accompanied by indirect, rate-dependent changes in slow delayed rectifier potassium current. A comparison of predictions across models identified inward rectifier potassium current and the sodium-potassium pump as the two targets most likely to produce FRD AP prolongation. Finally, a statistical analysis of results from the 13 models demonstrated that models displaying minimal rate-dependent changes in AP shape have little capacity for FRD perturbations, whereas models with large shape changes have considerable FRD potential. This can explain differences between species and between ventricular cell types. Overall, this study provides new insights, both specific and general, into the determinants of AP duration rate dependence, and illustrates a strategy for the design of potentially beneficial antiarrhythmic drugs.