Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Republic.com 2.0

What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to create echo chambers--to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the democratic benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly limit the information they receive, creating ever-smaller niches and fragmenting the shared public conversation on which democracy depends? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions before 9/11, in Republic.com, and they have become even more urgent in the years since. Now, in Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Web logs have emerged as a significant force in politics and where cyber-jihadists have embraced the Internet to thwart democracy and spread violence. Emphasizing the value of unplanned, unchosen encounters, the original Republic.com provoked a strong reaction from cyber-optimists. In Republic.com 2.0 Sunstein answers the critics and expands his argument to take account of new developments, including the blogosphere, and fresh evidence about how people are using the Internet. He demonstrates that the real question is how to avoid "information cocoons" and to ensure that the unrestricted choices made possible by technology do not undermine democracy. Sunstein also proposes new remedies and reforms--focusing far less on what government should do, and much more on what consumers and producers should do--to help democracy avoid the perils, and realize the promise, of the Internet.
Namibian pre-service science teachers’ perspectives on environmental issues

As with many countries worldwide, Namibia is, despite its relatively small population and stable government, facing some significant environmental problems. This research sought to determine how a group of potentially influential tertiary-level students perceived the state of the environment in Namibia. To this end, a cohort of 20 preservice science teachers were interviewed to determine their perceptions of the environmental issues facing Namibia. The majority of the cohort identified deforestation as the major such issue. They also associated this concern with other problems such as soil erosion, salinity, and desertification. Some also raised concerns about global warming and associated climate change; several of the preservice teachers believed the country was already experiencing the effects of this. Although the population of Namibia is quite small relative to its area, the future teachers perceived population growth as a problem contributing to both environmental and social problems. All viewed education as key to reducing family size and alleviating social and environmental problems. However, none of the cohort made any connection between increasing patterns of consumption and environmental degradation.
Computers in Secondary Schools in Developing Countries: Costs and Other Issues

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks go to many people for their contribution to this research and especially to: • the staff of the schools, colleges businesses and other organisations visited in South Africa and Zimbabwe who kindly talked to me about their work and freely gave of their time to provide the data on which this report is based. • the staff of WorLD in South Africa and Zimbabwe, of SchoolNet SA and of Western Cape Schools' Network who helped to plan and implement my visits and especially to The judgements expressed in this document do not necessarily reflect the views of these organisations or the governments they represent. 3 The complete sets of data gathered during this research and used as the basis for this paper can be found at: www.world-links.org together with a skeleton of the framework used to collect the data.
The Concept of Attack Scenarios and Its Applications in Android Malware Detection

In this paper, we propose the concept of attack scenarios, which can be learned and selected from a set of malicious applications and described by sets of Android APIs, to characterize Android malware. Because of its characteristics that produce almost no false-positive, attack scenarios can be used as a pre-filter for machine-learning based detectors to enhance the detection performance at low false-positive rate. By combining different machine learning techniques, we demonstrate that the proposed approach can increase the detection rates. To evaluate our approach, we analyze 20,914 Android application containing 3,145 malicious samples on two different machine learning techniques, KNN and SVM. The experiment results show that the proposed approach can raise the detection rate up to 95.9% malware at 1% false positive rate and 95.9% malware at 0.1% false positive rate respectively.
A review of passive forensic techniques for detection of copy-move attacks on digital videos

In recent times, the ease in availability and usability of digital video editing tools has become a major challenge to video forensic experts, to accurately authenticate any suspected digital video content. Besides, the wide range and rapid advancement in the field of such editing tools and improvements in anti-forensic techniques has enabled any naïve user to edit, alter, and modify any digital video with minimal traces/footprints. Recent surveys in the field of digital video forensics highlight the need of research in this field. The requirement of authenticating the integrity of the contents of digital videos ranges from an individual to organizations, defense and security setups to law enforcement agencies. Further to it, the need to explore newer and more effective Passive (or Blind) video forgery detection approaches is gaining importance day by day. This is attributable to the fact that digital videos are accepted as evidences in most of the countries and real life cases involving tampered digital videos, more often than not, rarely get supplemented by any other reference information besides the suspected video. This paper aims at highlighting the challenges and brings out opportunities in the field of Passive or Blind digital video forensics, focusing on spatio-temporal or copy-move attacks on digital videos, by reviewing the existing literature and research work in this field.
Threshold Voltage Control in Al 0.72 Ga 0.28 N/AlN/GaN HEMTs by Work-Function Engineering

The first demonstration of high-Al-composition (> 70%) AlGaN high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) is reported. High electron mobility (! 1300 cm 2 /Vs at room temperature) was achieved in novel high-Al-composition AlGaN 2-D electron gas structures. The threshold voltages (Vth) of Al0.72Ga0. 28N/AlN/GaN HEMTs were shifted from " 1.0 to " 0.13 V by employing different gate metal stacks, Al/Au and Ni/Au, respectively. With a 4-nm Al2O3 gate dielectric on top of the nitride heterostructures, the! 0.9-eV work-function difference between Al and Ni induced ! 0.9-V Vth shift in the pairs of the Al/Au and Ni/Au gate HEMTs, which indicates that the Fermi level is unpinned at the ALD Al2O3/AlGaN interface. The results were reproducible for HEMTs of various gate lengths. The results suggest that it is possible to obtain enhancement- and depletion- mode AlGaN HEMTs using work-function engineering which can enable integrated monolithic digital circuits without postgrowth recess etching or ion implantation. Index Terms—Enhancement (E) mode, gallium nitride, molecu- lar beam epitaxy (MBE), threshold voltage (Vth), transistor, work function.
Traffic and nucleation events as main sources of ultrafine particles in high-insolation developed world cities

Abstract. Road traffic emissions are often considered the main source of ultrafine particles (UFP, diameter smaller than 100 nm) in urban environments. However, recent studies worldwide have shown that – in high-insolation urban regions at least – new particle formation events can also contribute to UFP. In order to quantify such events we systematically studied three cities located in predominantly sunny environments: Barcelona (Spain), Madrid (Spain) and Brisbane (Australia). Three long-term data sets (1–2 years) of fine and ultrafine particle number size distributions (measured by SMPS, Scanning Mobility Particle Sizer) were analysed. Compared to total particle number concentrations, aerosol size distributions offer far more information on the type, origin and atmospheric evolution of the particles. By applying k-means clustering analysis, we categorized the collected aerosol size distributions into three main categories: "Traffic" (prevailing 44–63% of the time), "Nucleation" (14–19%) and "Background pollution and Specific cases" (7–22%). Measurements from Rome (Italy) and Los Angeles (USA) were also included to complement the study. The daily variation of the average UFP concentrations for a typical nucleation day at each site revealed a similar pattern for all cities, with three distinct particle bursts. A morning and an evening spike reflected traffic rush hours, whereas a third one at midday showed nucleation events. The photochemically nucleated particles' burst lasted 1–4 h, reaching sizes of 30–40 nm. On average, the occurrence of particle size spectra dominated by nucleation events was 16% of the time, showing the importance of this process as a source of UFP in urban environments exposed to high solar radiation. Nucleation events lasting for 2 h or more occurred on 55% of the days, this extending to > 4 h in 28% of the days, demonstrating that atmospheric conditions in urban environments are not favourable to the growth of photochemically nucleated particles. In summary, although traffic remains the main source of UFP in urban areas, in developed countries with high insolation urban nucleation events are also a main source of UFP. If traffic-related particle concentrations are reduced in the future, nucleation events will likely increase in urban areas, due to the reduced urban condensation sinks.
Cooperating to Unlock the Voltage-dependent K Channel

Opening the Shaker K channel should be easy. Release the membrane potential that normally holds it closed, and massive stored molecular energies snap it rapidly and inexorably into its open configuration. Unlocking the inner secrets of this voltage-dependent channel's gating mechanism has proven to be much more difficult. An article by Ledwell and Aldrich in this issue has opened that door significantly.
Exports and Firm Characteristics — First Evidence from Fractional Probit Panel Estimates

Using recently released nationally representative data and a new estimator for fractional probit panel models, this paper reconsiders the relationship between the fraction of exports in total sales and firm characteristics in West and East German manufacturing. Controlling for unobserved firm characteristics no impact of human capital and R&D intensity on export performance is found, while firm size is positively related to exporting in West Germany only.
Utility functions for central bankers: the not so drastic quadratic

Following Blinder's (1997) suggestion, we examine the implications for the optimal interest rate rule following the relaxation of the assumption that the policymaker's loss function is quadratic. We investigate deviations from quadratics for both symmetric and asymmetric preferences for a single target and find that: (i) other characterisations of risk aversion, than that implied by the quadratic, only affect dead-weight losses, unless there is also muliplicative uncertainty; (ii) asymmetries affect the optimal rule under both additive and muliplicative uncertainty but result in interest rate paths observationally similar, and in some cases equivalent, those implied by a shifted quadratic; (iii) the use of an asymmetric los functions leads to important insights on the issues of goal independence and monetary policy delegation; (iv) non-quadratic preferences, per se , are neither sufficient nor necessary to generate the 'Brainard conservatism principle' and thus do not offer much added value when analysing the policy issues of caution and gradualism. Our results suggest that in the context of monetary policymaking the convenient assumption of quadratic losses may not be that drastic after all.
Fast In-Memory SQL Analytics on Relationships between Entities

In this paper, we study relationship queries on graph databases with binary relationship. A relationship query is a graph reachability query bounded on primary-keys and foreign-keys with aggregation on single output attribute. Both row stores and column stores miss key opportunities towards the efficient execution of relationship queries, making them unacceptably slow in real-world OLAP scenarios. We present the FastR in-memory analytics engine that utilizes a new form of bottom-up fully pipelined query processing execution strategy. The plans run on a novel data organization that combines salient features of column-based organization, indexing and compression. Furthermore, FastR compiles its query plans into query-aware executable C++ source codes. Besides achieving runtime efficiency, FastR also reduces main memory requirements because, unlike column databases, FastR selectively allows more dense forms of compression including heavy-weighted compressions, which do not support random access. In our experiments, we used FastR to accelerate queries for two OLAP dashboards in the biomedical field. The first dashboard runs queries on the PubMed dataset and the second one on the SemMedDB dataset. FastR outperforms Postgres by 2-4 orders of magnitude and MonetDB by 1-3 orders of magnitude, when all of them are running on RAM. Our experiments dissect the FastR advantage between (i) the novel FastR execution strategy and associated data structures and (ii) the use of compiled code. We also provide an analysis and experiments illustrating space savings due to appropriate use of compression methods. Finally, we investigate the beneficial effect of the increasing CPU cycles / RAM transfer rate ratio on the space-time tradeoff for various compression methods used in FastR.
Metalized polyethylene mulch to repel Asian citrus psyllid, slow spread of huanglongbing and improve growth of new citrus plantings.

BACKGROUND Greening or huanglongbing (HLB) is a debilitating disease of citrus caused by Candidatus Liberibactor asiaticus and transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid (ACP), Diaphorina citri. HLB now occurs worldwide in all major citrus growing regions except the Mediterranean and Australia. Management relies principally on insecticidal control of the ACP vector, but is insufficient, even for young trees which are most susceptible to the disease. We tested the ability of metalized polyethylene mulch to repel adult ACP as well as effects on incidence of HLB and early tree growth. RESULTS Metalized mulch significantly reduced ACP populations and HLB incidence compared to whiteface mulch or bare ground. In addition, metalized mulch, together with the associated drip irrigation and fertigation system, increased soil moisture, reduced weed pressure, and increased tree growth rate. CONCLUSION Metalized mulch slows spread of ACP and therefore HLB pressure on young citrus trees. Metalized mulch can thereby augment current control measures for young trees based primarily on systemic insecticides. Additional costs could be compensated for by increased tree growth rate which would shorten time to crop profitability. These advantages make a compelling case for large-scale trials using metalized mulch in young citrus plantings threatened by HLB.
Towards an Agile Approach to Software Process Improvement: Addressing the Changing Needs of Software Products

This paper highlights the need for greater agility and flexibility in the process improvement activity. The ideas presented here relate to aspects that have arisen from a case study of a global software product organisation. A model of how software process improvement can be agile in nature is proposed. This model is intended as indicative of the issues that need consideration by IS management. The model highlights the need to learn to improve through situated practice within an organisational framework that supports the needs of the business.
Estimating open economy Phillips curves for the euro area with directly measured expectations

This paper examines euro-area inflation dynamics by estimating open economy New Keynesian Phillips curves based on the assumption that all imports are intermediate goods. Instead of imposing rational expectations a priori, Consensus Economics survey data and OECD inflation forecasts are used to proxy inflation expectations. The results suggest that, compared with a closed economy New Keynesian Phillips curve, euro-area inflation dynamics are captured better by the open economy specification. Moreover, in the open economy context, even if we allow for persistence in expectations, the hybrid specification of the New Keynesian Phillips curve is needed in order to properly capture the euro-area inflation process.
TRANSFORMASI NILAI BUDAYA LOKAL DALAM MEMBANGUN AKUNTABILITAS ORGANISASI SEKTOR PUBLIK

Abstrak: Transformasi Nilai Budaya Lokal dalam Membangun Akuntabilitas Sektor Publik. Penelitian ini bertujuan mentransformasi nilai akuntabilitas budaya lokal dalam meningkatkan pelaksanaan akuntabilitas pemerintah daerah bersama masyarakat. Penelitian dilakukan pada pemerintah daerah Tana Toraja menggunakan metode etnografi kritis inkulturatif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan adanya dua jenis akuntabilitas yakni akuntabilitas masukan (aktivitas penyusunan program yang dilakukan oleh pihak agen yakni pemerintah daerah) dan keluaran (aktivitas yang dilakukan oleh pihak prinsipal, yakni masyarakat). Rekonstruksi akuntabilitas masukan dan keluaran dinyatakan dalam aktivitas kombongan(duduk bersama untuk memecahkan suatu masalah). Abstract: Transformation of Local Cultural Values to Build Public Sektor Accountability. This study aims to transform the value of local culture of accountability to improve the implementation of the local government and public accountability. This research was conducted in the area of Tana Toraja using acculturated critical ethnography as paradigm and research method. The results show masukan (program construction activity doing by public government as agent) and keluaran accountability (public activity as prinsipal). Reconstruction of masukan and keluaran accountability expressed in Kombongan activity (sitting together to solve the problem).
Why people don't go to Church.

Document Type Book Publisher Openbook Publishers Place of Publication Adelaide Faculty Faculty of Community Services, Education and Social Sciences School School of Communications and Arts / Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts, Technology, Education and Communications RAS ID 376 Comments Originally published as : Bellamy, J., NCLS Research, & National Church Life Survey (Australia). (2002). Why people don't go to church. Adelaide, S. Aust. : Openbook.
Visual–Motor Transformations Within Frontal Eye Fields During Head-Unrestrained Gaze Shifts in the Monkey

A fundamental question in sensorimotor control concerns the transformation of spatial signals from the retina into eye and head motor commands required for accurate gaze shifts. Here, we investigated these transformations by identifying the spatial codes embedded in visually evoked and movement-related responses in the frontal eye fields (FEFs) during head-unrestrained gaze shifts. Monkeys made delayed gaze shifts to the remembered location of briefly presented visual stimuli, with delay serving to dissociate visual and movement responses. A statistical analysis of nonparametric model fits to response field data from 57 neurons (38 with visual and 49 with movement activities) eliminated most effector-specific, head-fixed, and space-fixed models, but confirmed the dominance of eye-centered codes observed in head-restrained studies. More importantly, the visual response encoded target location, whereas the movement response mainly encoded the final position of the imminent gaze shift (including gaze errors). This spatiotemporal distinction between target and gaze coding was present not only at the population level, but even at the single-cell level. We propose that an imperfect visual–motor transformation occurs during the brief memory interval between perception and action, and further transformations from the FEF's eye-centered gaze motor code to effector-specific codes in motor frames occur downstream in the subcortical areas.
Prevalence of Intestinal Parasitic Infections and their Association with Nutritional Status of Rural and Urban Pre-School Children in Benue State, Nigeria

Background and Objectives: Intestinal parasitic infections are highly prevalent in developing countries, contributing to high incidence of malnutrition and morbidity. This study aimed to find the prevalence of intestinal parasitic infections and their association with nutritional status of children in Benue State, Nigeria. Methods: A cross sectional study conducted from January-June 2016, among 418 school children under-5 years of age. Anthropometric data, height-for-age, weight-for-height, and weight-for-age Z-scores from each child and fecal samples were collected and screened for intestinal parasites using standard laboratory methods. Results: Among the intestinal parasitic infections detected, the prevalence of E. histolytica was higher (51.0% and 29.0%) than all other parasites encountered in rural and urban pupils (P<0.05). Other parasites were Hookworm (46.2% and 24.8%); G. lamblia (11.5% and 8.6%); and T. trichiura (2.4% and 5.2%). The prevalence of stunting (HAZ<-2), in rural and urban pupils were 43.8% and 32.9%; 64.4% and 39.0% rural and urban pupils were underweight (WAZ<-2), while 30.3% and 24.3% were wasted (WHZ<-2). Infected children had significantly (P<0.05) higher z-scores than the uninfected children. Conclusion and Global Health Implications: Benue State is among the Nigerian states with the highest burden of tropical diseases with a current plan of elimination implemented through mass drug administration. This study identify/evaluate some essential information that will support the planning and implementation of the State’s ongoing efforts.
Work-Life Policies and Women's Post-childbirth Labour Mobility

7 INTRODUCTION 8 CHAPTER 1: MOTIVATIONS AND LITERATURE 12 1.1 Women and Work 12 1.1.1 Trends in Women’s Labour Force Participation 12 1.1.2 Cultural Restraints on Women’s Labour Market Participation 13 1.2 Economic Consequences of Women’s Constrained Labour Force Participation: Skill and Wage Depreciation 13 1.2.1 General and Specific Skills 13 1.2.2 The Role of Work-life Policies in Reducing Unwanted Mobility and Skill Depreciation 14 1.3 Work participation around maternity leave 15 1.3.1 The Australian Policy Context and the Effects of Paid Maternity Leave 15 1.3. 2 The Importance of Maternity Leave Periods 17 1.3. 3 Reducing unwanted mobility: general versus maternity-specific policies 17 1.4 The Crucial Role of Organisational Culture 18 CHAPTER 2: DATA 21 2.1 The HILDA Survey 21 2.2 Sample Selection 22 2.3 Dependent Variables 23 2.4 Key Explanatory Variables 25 2.5 Control Variables Employment Related 28 2.5. 1 Respondents’ Employment Characteristics 28 2.5. 2 Employer Characteristics 30 2.6 Control Variables – Not Employment Related 31 2.6. 1 Personal Background and Education 31 2.6. 2 Income (all values are in 2006 dollars) 32 2.6. 3 Family Formation and the Timing of the Birth 33 2.6. 4 Household and situational information 33 2.6. 5 Partner Information 34 CHAPTER 3: THEORY AND ECONOMETRIC APPROACH 35 3.1 A Modified Theory of Time Allocation 35