Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spreadsheet Risk Management in Organisations

The paper examines in the context of financial reporting, the controls that organisations have in place to manage spreadsheet risk and errors. There has been widespread research conducted in this area, both in Ireland and internationally. This paper describes a study involving 19 participants (2 case studies and 17 by survey) from Ireland. Three areas are examined; firstly, the extent of spreadsheet usage, secondly, the level of complexity employed in spreadsheets, and finally, the controls in place regarding spreadsheets. The findings support previous findings of Panko (1998), that errors occur frequently in spreadsheets and that there is little or unenforced controls employed, however this research finds that attitudes are changing with regard to spreadsheet risk and that one organisation is implementing a comprehensive project regarding policies on the development and control of spreadsheets. Further research could be undertaken in the future to examine the development of a "best practice model" both for the reduction in errors and to minimise the risk in spreadsheet usage.
Assessment of Bacterial Community Assembly Patterns and Processes in Pig Manure Slurry

The bacterial community assembly patterns and processes are poorly understood in pig manure slurry. We collected pig manure slurry samples during the winter and summer seasons from eight commercial pig farms in South Korea. The V3 region of 16S rRNA genes was PCR amplified and sequenced using paired-end Illumina technology for in-depth characterization of bacterial community. Firmicutes, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, Spirochaetes, and Tenericutes were the predominant bacterial phyla present in slurry samples. Bacterial taxonomic community composition was not influenced by the season; however, phylogenetic community composition was affected by seasonal variations. The community composition and diversity patterns were strongly influenced by pH. The bacterial diversity indices showed a unimodal relationship with pH. Phylogenetic signals were detected over only short phylogenetic distances, revealing that closely related bacterial operational taxonomic units (OTUs) tend to co-occur in the same environment; hence, they are ecologically similar. Across all samples, a niche-based process, through strong environmental filtering imposed by pH, primarily governed bacterial community assembly; however, in samples close to the neutral pH range, the role of environmental filtering was decreased due to neutral community assembly. In summary, pH emerged as the major physico-chemical variable in pig manure slurry that regulates the relative importance of niche-based and neutral processes in shaping the community assembly of bacteria.
Psychological needs of neurotypical family members of individuals on the autism spectrum

Chapter 1 reviews the psychological needs of family members of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). A systematic search strategy was followed and 12 studies were reviewed which were published since a review by Tint & Weiss in 2015. The synthesis discusses relationships between the difficult experiences and stress, coping mechanisms, and their link to resilience and reduction of stress in parents. Recommendations from Tint & Weiss’ (2015) review which concerned mostly family members of adults with ASD, are reiterated by the presented review which contained research where the family member with ASD was a young person. Further qualitative research needs to be conducted in order to broaden the knowledge base and aim to understand the real life experiences of family members in order to develop the appropriate support to prevent escalation of family members’ difficulties. Chapter 2 addresses the gap in the literature of qualitatively involving siblings in research as previous studies largely gathered quantitative data from parents about siblings as opposed to directly. Photovoice (2016) was used as a photo elicitation method which emphasises participant involvement in both gathering data and analysis. 5 siblings of children with ASD took photographs answering the question ‘what is it like having a brother with autism? ’ before completing an individual interview and group session where participants themselves brought their photographs into overall themes. A thematic analysis revealed main themes of focussing on their brother, difficult times, coping mechanisms, and ‘it’s not all bad’. Clinical implications and suggestions for resilience-based interventions are discussed, with reference to supporting previous findings from chapter 1. Chapter 3 presents two executive summaries, one written to be appropriate for young people, and one appropriate to a parent, carer, or professional reader. These are written with the main aim of disseminating within local CAMHS services. NB: Papers within this thesis have been written with the intention of submission for publication to Autism: The International Journal of Research and Practice. Extensive author guidelines for manuscript submission can be found in Appendix A, and have been followed as far as is compatible with the purpose of university submission.
Building general- and special-purpose corpora by Web crawling

The Web is a potentially unlimited source of linguistic data; however, commercial search engines are not the best way for linguists to gather data from it. In this paper, we present a procedure to build language corpora by crawling and postprocessing Web data. We describe the construction of a very large Italian general-purpose Web corpus (almost 2 billion words) and a specialized Japanese “blogs” corpus (about 62 million words). In both cases, we compare the corpora to existing newspapers corpora, and discuss examples of potential linguistic applications.
Wood and other aquatic habitat.

~ Riparian vegetation increases stream channel complexity and directly contributes to aquatic habitat through inputs of logs and branches. In turn, the provision of complex habitat has a major influence on aquatic biodiversity. ~ Logs and branches can enhance stream stability, regulate sediment transport and exert significant control on channel complexity in bedrock rivers and channel geomorphology in alluvial rivers. ~ Logs contribute to the formation of physical features in streams, such as scour pools and channel bars, which serve as habitat for in-stream biota. ~ Logs provide physical habitat for biota at all levels of the food chain, ranging from microscopic bacteria, fungi and algae, to macroinvertebrates, fish and turtles. ~ Logs also provide sites where bacteria, fungi and algae can process carbon and other nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, thus contributing to ecosystem processes such as productivity and respiration. ~ In alluvial rivers, logs can modify surface water/ground water exchange and enhance nutrient processing. ~ Logs from Australian riparian zones are relatively immobile. Our streams tend to have a low average stream power, the wood has a high density and many riparian trees have a complex branching structure that ensures they are easily anchored in position. ~ Although vast amounts of wood have been removed from many Australian rivers, what does remain provides important habitat for microbes, invertebrates, fish and other animals. ~ Retention and reinstatement of logs should be a priority for river rehabilitation, instead of removal or even realignment.
Deuterated hydrogen chemistry: partition functions, equilibrium constants and transition intensities for the H+3 system

H+3 and the deuterated isotopomers are thought to play an important role in interstellar chemistry. The partition functions of H+3, D2H+ and D+3 are calculated to a temperature of 800 K by explicitly summing the ab initio determined rotation–vibration energy levels of the respective species. These partition functions are used to calculate the equilibrium constants for nine important reactions in the interstellar medium involving H+3 and its deuterated isotopomers. These equilibrium constants are compared with previously determined experimental and theoretical values. The Einstein A coefficients for the strongest dipole transitions are also calculated.
A Layered Language Model based Hybrid Approach to Automatic Full Diacritization of Arabic

In this paper we present a system for automatic Arabic text diacritization using three levels of analysis granularity in a layered back off manner. We build and exploit diacritized language models (LM) for each of three different levels of granularity: surface form, morphologically segmented into prefix/stem/suffix, and character level. For each of the passes, we use Viterbi search to pick the most probable diacritization per word in the input. We start with the surface form LM, followed by the morphological level, then finally we leverage the character level LM. Our system outperforms all of the published systems evaluated against the same training and test data. It achieves a 10.87% WER for complete full diacritization including lexical and syntactic diacritization, and 3.0% WER for lexical diacritization, ignoring syntactic diacritization.
Modulation of responses to optic flow in area 7a by retinotopic and oculomotor cues in monkey.

Perception of two- and three-dimensional optic flow critically depends upon extrastriate cortices that are part of the 'dorsal stream' for visual processing. Neurons in area 7a, a sub-region of the posterior parietal cortex, have a dual sensitivity to visual input and to eye position. The sensitivity and selectivity of area 7a neurons to three sensory cues - optic flow, retinotopic stimulus position and eye position - were studied. The visual response to optic flow was modulated by the retinotopic stimulus position and by the eye position in the orbit. The position dependence of the retinal and eye position modulation (i.e. gain field) were quantified by a quadratic regression model that allowed for linear or peaked receptive fields. A local maximum (or minimum) in both the retinotopic fields and the gain fields was observed, suggesting that these sensory qualities are not necessarily linearly represented in area 7a. Neurons were also found that simply encoded the eye position in the absence of optic flow. The spatial tuning for the eye position signals upon stationary stimuli and optic flow was not the same, suggesting multiple anatomical sources of the signals. These neurons can provide a substrate for spatial representation while primates move in the environment.
A novel approach to fingerprint image quality

We present a novel measure of fingerprint image quality, which can be used to estimate fingerprint match performance. This means presenting the matcher with good quality fingerprint images will result in high matcher performance, and vice versa, the matcher will perform poorly for poor quality fingerprints. We discuss the implementation of our fingerprint image quality metric and we present the results of testing it on 280 different combinations of fingerprint image data and fingerprint matcher systems. We found that the metric predicts matcher performance for all systems and datasets. Our definition of quality can be applied to other biometric modalities and upon proper feature extraction can be used to assess quality of any mode of biometric samples.
Orientation, Supervision and University Student-teacher Performance in Oyo State, Nigeria

This study examined the influence of teaching practice orientation and supervision on university student-teachers’ performance in selected public secondary schools in Ibadan. The population consisted of all the penultimate and final year of the Faculty of Education students in the sampled instituitons. The sample was made of two hundred (200) student-teachers from 300 and 400 levels respectively and twenty cooperating teachers making two hundred and ten (210). Multistage and simple random sampling techniques were used to select the sample. For data collection, developed structured questionnaire was adopted and three research questions and two research hypotheses were formulated and tested at 5% level of significance. The instrument was given face validity and the reliability Cronbach Alpha was 0.86. Descriptive research design was used and the data collected was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics such as ANOVA and t-distribution test was used to analyze the gender difference. Among others, the result revealed a combined influence of teaching practice orientation and supervision (F=10.87, P<0.05) on the university possessive-teacher performance during the teaching practice exercise. It was recommended that teaching practice committee of each university should make sure that possessive-teachers are posted to the practicing schools where they are needed.
More of a Receiver Than a Giver: Why Do People Unfollow in Twitter?

We propose a logistic regression model taking into account two analytically different sets of factors–structure and action. The factors include individual, dyadic, and triadic properties between ego and alter whose tie breakup is under consideration. From the fitted model using a large-scale data, we discover 5 structural and 7 actional variables to have significant explanatory power for unfollow. One unique finding from our quantitative analysis is that people appreciate receiving acknowledgements from others even in virtually unilateral communication relationships and are less likely to unfollow them: people are more of a receiver than a giver.
Endovascular Treatment of Giant Splenic Artery Aneurysm

Introduction. Visceral artery aneurysms are uncommon. Among them, splenic artery is the most common (46–60%). Most splenic artery aneurysms are asymptomatic and diagnosed incidentally, but its rupture, potentially fatal, occurs in up to 8% of cases. Presentation of Case. A female patient, 64 years old, diagnosed with a giant aneurysm of the splenic artery (approximately 6.5 cm in diameter) was successfully submitted to endovascular treatment by stent graft implantation. Discussion. Symptomatic aneurysms and those larger than 2 cm represent some of the main indications for intervention. The treatment may be by laparotomy, laparoscopy, or endovascular techniques. Among the various endovascular methods discussed in this paper, there is stent graft implantation, a method still few reported in the literature. Conclusion. Although some authors still consider the endovascular approach as an exception to the treatment of SAA, in major specialized centers these techniques have been consolidated as the preferred choice, reserving the surgical approach in cases where this cannot be used. For being a less aggressive approach, it offers an opportunity of treatment to patients considered “high risk” for surgical treatment by laparotomy/laparoscopy.
Outcomes and markers in the assessment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

The clinical presentation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is highly variable, reflecting the interaction of a complex range of pathological changes including both pulmonary and systemic effects. The consequences of COPD experienced by the patient (i.e. its outcomes) include: symptoms, weight loss, exercise intolerance, exacerbations, health-related quality of life, health resource use and death. No single measure can reflect the variety of pathological effects or adequately describe the nature or severity of COPD. Currently, there are few validated markers for assessing COPD and evaluating the effectiveness of treatment. The forced expiratory volume in one second has been used as a global marker of COPD, but it does not fully reflect the burden of COPD on patients. New markers are needed to better characterise the full clinical spectrum of the disease and to guide the development and assessment of new and more effective therapies. This article considers the distinction between outcomes and markers, the various ways in which markers are used and the need for new markers in the management of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The process of marker selection and validation is reviewed and potential new biological, physiological and symptomatic markers for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are assessed.
Screening for Antiviral Activities of Isolated Compounds from Essential Oils

Essential oil of star anise as well as phenylpropanoids and sesquiterpenes, for example, trans-anethole, eugenol, β-eudesmol, farnesol, β-caryophyllene and β-caryophyllene oxide, which are present in many essential oils, were examined for their antiviral activity against herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) in vitro. Antiviral activity was analyzed by plaque reduction assays and mode of antiviral action was determined by addition of the drugs to uninfected cells, to the virus prior to infection or to herpesvirus-infected cells. Star anise oil reduced viral infectivity by >99%, phenylpropanoids inhibited HSV infectivity by about 60–80% and sesquiterpenes suppressed herpes virus infection by 40–98%. Both, star anise essential oil and all isolated compounds exhibited anti-HSV-1 activity by direct inactivation of free virus particles in viral suspension assays. All tested drugs interacted in a dose-dependent manner with herpesvirus particles, thereby inactivating viral infectivity. Star anise oil, rich in trans-anethole, revealed a high selectivity index of 160 against HSV, whereas among the isolated compounds only β-caryophyllene displayed a high selectivity index of 140. The presence of β-caryophyllene in many essential oils might contribute strongly to their antiviral ability. These results indicate that phenylpropanoids and sesquiterpenes present in essential oils contribute to their antiviral activity against HSV.
A transitional approach to the study of the information behavior of domestic migrant workers

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the life stories of migrant workers in Israel by analyzing different aspects of the information behavior that emerged from their narratives through a transitional perspective.Design/methodology/approachNarratives are a human way of communication that focuses on the stories people tell about themselves, their inner thoughts, their states of mind and how they perceive their own reality. In total, 20 Spanish-speaking domestic migrant workers were interviewed. The data collected form the narratives were study draws from the transitional theory.FindingsThe holistic phase of the content analysis revealed that participants experienced information poverty based on socioeconomic factors and perceptions of social exclusion, vulnerability and hostile surroundings. The content analysis yielded a theory of transitional information behavior that reflects the three stages of the migration process: ending of a new reality, a period of confusion and a sense of belonging. The theory encompasses four elements: process, disconnectedness, perceptions and patterns of response.Originality/valueThe study proposes an innovative look at information behavior of migrants by integrating a transitional perspective into the life stories of participants.
Volition profile of people with physical disability

Introduction: Volition is a determinant psychological factor in the improvement of the performance of the human behavior. The aim of the study was to analyze the volitional qualities; persistence, purposefulness and expediency based on personal characteristics and disability-related characteristics. Material and methods: The participants in this study were 140 people with physical disabilities (n=107 men, and n=33 women) while 10 people did not state their gender. Their age ranging from 14 to 67 years. The participants filled the questionnaire Measure Athletes’ Volition-Short (MAV-S). In addition following factors were put into analysis: gender, age, family status, education, occupational status, disability [congenital versus acquired], type of disability [spinal cord injury, brain palsy, amputation, poliomyelitis, muscular dystrophy and other type], form of exercise [sport activities – competitive versus recreational – and any activity], type of sport [team versus individual sports], type of experience [resistance, strength and skills], and form of games [Paralympic, European, National and Sectional]). Results: show that the people with physical disabilities who mainly take part in, physical activities manifest a high level volitional qualities (persistence, purposefulness, and expediency). Conclusions: Personal characteristics like form of exercise, type of sport (team, individual) and athletic experience play a moderating role in the existence of individual differences in volitional qualities.
Firing-rate resonances in small neuronal networks

In many communication systems, information is encoded in the temporal pattern of signals. For rhythmic signals that carry information in speci c frequency bands, a neuronal systemmay pro t from tuning its inherent ltering properties towards a peak sensitivity in the respective frequency range. The cricket Gryllus bimaculatus is a simple biological system for which only a narrow range of modulation frequencies is behaviorally relevant. I examined individual neurons in the peripheral and higher auditory system for tuning towards speci c temporal parameters and modulation frequencies. To this end, I combined extracellular electrophysiology with di erent stimulation paradigms involving amplitudemodulated sounds. Analysis of the experimental data revealed that—even in the auditory periphery—some of the examined neurons acted as tuned bandpass lters, yielding highest ring-rates for behaviorally relevant modulation frequencies. Using simple computational models, I demonstrate how common, cell-intrinsic or network-based mechanisms could account for the experimentally observed ring-rate resonances. These mechanisms include subthreshold resonances, spike-triggered adaptation, as well as the interplay of excitation and inhibition. I present how a serial combination of such elementary lters could explain the strong selectivity evident in the cricket’s behavior—without the need for a dedicated lter element. Pervasive neuronal mechanisms could therefore constitute an e cient, distributed frequency lter in a highly specialized, size-constrained neuronal system. Zirpy! Es tut mir leid, wir können jetzt nicht mehr zurück. Ich habe dich schon zu lange festgehalten. Lebe wohl, mein Freund!
Succession, Invasion, & Coexistence: PDEs in Ecology

We study the behavior of diffusive Lotka-Volterra systems in environments with spatially varying carrying capacities. In particular, we use numeric and analytic techniques to study two similar models for population growth, in order to determine their qualitative differences. Additionally, we investigate competition models in the presence of periodic disasters, in order to determine what factors affect competitive dominance. We found that under conditions of high spatial heterogeneity, the model for population growth was the main factor determining coexistence. Under low spatial heterogeneity, the effect of disturbance on the stronger competitor was the main factor determining coexistence.