Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An effective method for incentivizing groups implemented in a collaborative problem-based learning system to enhance positive peer interaction and learning performance

ABSTRACT Many studies have verified that the effective promotion of both positive interactions among individual group members and group accountability is a critical issue in collaborative problem-based learning (CPBL). This work, therefore, proposes a group incentive mechanism (GIM) that is based on considering several important factors that influence peers’ interactions and group accountability in collaborative learning to improve learning performance, interactive relationships, group efficacy, and the cohesiveness of groups of learners in a CPBL system. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed GIM, 48 Grade 4 students from two classess were recruited from an elementary school in Taoyuan City, Taiwan, to participate in an instruction experiment. Two classess were randomly assigned to the experimental group using CPBL with the proposed GIM and the control group using CPBL with the individual incentive mechanism (IIM) to solve a target problem collaboratively. Analytical results reveal that although the control group of learners with the IIM exhibited greater social interactions than the experimental group of learners with the proposed GIM, the experimental group exhibited better learning performance, group efficacy, and positive interactive relationships than the control group.
Concentrations of von Willebrand factor in diabetes

1 Lip GYH, Tean KN, Dunn FG. Treatment of atrial fibrillation in a district general hospital. Br HeartJ 1994;71:92-5. 2 Zarifis J, Beevers DG, lip GYH. A survey of acute admissions with atrial fibrillation in a multiracial hospital population. Clin Sci 1995;33(suppl):34-5P. 3 Benjamin EF, Levy D, Varizi SM, D'Agostino RB, Belanger AJ, Wolf PA. Indepent risk factors for atrial fibrillation in a population-based cohort. The Framingham heart study. AAMA 1994;271:840-4. 4 Krahn AD, Manfreda J, Tate RB, Mathewson FAL, Cuddy TE. The natural history of atrial fibrillation: incidence, risk factors and prognosis in the Manitoba follow-up study. Am J Med 1995;98:476-84. 5 Sudlow CM, Rodgers H, Kenny RA, Thomson RG, Sweeney KG, Pereira Gray DJ, et al. Service provision and use of anticoagulants in atrial fibrillation. BMJ 1995;311:558-60.
Research spin-offs and the digital revolution: some evidence from Italian case-studies

: The interest about Research spin-offs (RSOs) has constantly increased since the last fifteen years on average, as their number is augmenting all over Europe and, consequently, several academic debates about the effective success, convincing strategy, and real performance of this peculiar kind of start-up company are open and arouse tricky questions. In addition, following the Internet revolution and globalization, nowadays we are assisting to the rising of high-growth firms, gazelles, “unicorns” and other kinds of companies that go beyond the traditional (old) vision of doing business. Moreover, open innovation, lean start-up and design thinking are at present some representative emerging strategies for doing business. Notwithstanding, in this fast-changing scenario and despite the growing relevance for companies of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital technologies, the role and the features of RSOs specifically providing digital products/services are still unexplored. In this paper, we leverage on a multiple case study analysis of four Italian digital RSOs to highlight differences and similarities with non-digital RSOs, their peculiarities in terms of drivers that foster their creation (as the role of the universities or the location issues), or, in terms of potential value
Mental health literacy and attitudes of human resource practitioners in South Africa

Background: South African companies need to contend with numerous transformation and development issues since the country's re-entry into the international marketplace. One component that is receiving increasing attention is the wellbeing of employees in the drive to remain competitive within the global economy. This study argues that mental illness is a component of employee wellbeing that has been ignored, even though these conditions are highly prevalent and costly to businesses. The lack of recognition, research and information about mental illness in the workplace raises questions about the knowledge and orientation of human resource (HR) practitioners. This study therefore aimed to investigate and describe the mental health literacy and attitudes ofHR practitioners in South Africa. Methodology: This study had a descriptive purpose and employed a sample survey research design to distribute a mail questionnaire to a randomly selected sample of human resource practitioners registered with the South African Board for Personnel Practice (SABPP). The measuring instrument comprised mental health literacy and attitudes scales that have been extensively researched and reported to have sound psychometric properties. Three vignettes portraying mental disorders selected for their relevance to the business world (i.e., depression, panic disorder and alcohol abuse) were used as aids to achieving the research aim. A standard statistical package (SPSS 10.0) was utilised to determine descriptive and inferential statistics with an accepted 5% level of significance. Results: A response rate of 31% was achieved yielding an equal distribution of responses across the study vignettes. HR practitioners who acted as respondents to this study were found to be illiterate regarding mental illness and to hold subtle negative attitudes towards the mentally ill. Less than 10% could recognise mental illness as opposed to the majority who regarded the behaviour in the vignettes as normal responses. Whereas just over a third could correctly name the diagnosis described in the vignettes, only 7% were able to identify panic disorder. Most respondents believed that psychosocial stress factors caused mental illness, while only 29% where of the opinion that biological factors had a role in the aetiology of mental illness. Respondents favoured psychological and lifestyle treatment strategies and opposed medical treatments, irrespective of the type of mental illness presented with. Although as a group respondents showed mainly positive attitudes towards the mentally ill, evidence was found that the commonly held myths of danger/violence and the irresponsible/ childlike nature of the mentally illwere adhered to. Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
Analogies Between Logic Programming and Linguistics For Developing Students' Understanding of Argumentation Texts

The research and its’ findings contribute to the previous body of knowledge with relation to students difficulties in understanding argumentation texts in Linguistics studies. Moreover, it suggests a new approach of using argumentation in the framework of inference as apply in LP to scaffold students’ conceptions. The use of an interactive computerized system (like the logic programming language Prolog) can scaffold students in constructing their knowledge, develop their computational thinking skills, and also enables to vary the teaching methods.
Performance Characteristics of Hedge Fund Indices

The focus of the study is to provide a detailed account of how various strategy-specific or composite hedge fund indices have performed in the past. The study analyses returns (monthly) of different hedge funds. The study selected popular categories of Hedge fund index against DJIA (Dow Jones Industrial Average) and Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Index. The Data is taken from January 1994 to December 2018 and is taken from Credit Suisse Hedge fund database. The study finds that most hedge fund indices witness a drop in returns over time, and most hedge funds do not provide additional diversification benefits with respect to traditional asset class. On a risk-adjusted basis, majority of hedge fund indices out-perform the broader equity market, risk-adjusted performances of various hedge fund strategies, does not change drastically with use of different risk-adjusted measures. As opposed to prevalent studies like Atil, Bali and Demirtas [1] [2], indicating Equity market neutral hedge fund index as the best performer in terms of risk-adjusted returns, the current study finds Event Driven Distressed hedge fund Index as the best performer.
Prediction of Exhaust Emission Costs in Air and Road Transportation

In this paper, the calculation of exhaust emission costs originating from aircraft and road vehicles in the base year 2017 and in the forecasting year 2032, in the Republic of Serbia, was carried out. The presented methodology includes a number of influential factors for air transport (airport capacity, number of operations, aircraft type, relevant engine, range) and for road transport (changing of traffic volumes, design and operating speeds, the quality of the pavement structure, type of terrain and category of road sections, dependence of exhaust emission from changes in vehicle speed). It was found that in the current operating conditions, the dominant costs in the total exhaust emission costs are the costs of nitrogen oxides (61%) in road transport, whilst carbon dioxide costs are dominant in air transport (52%). In the future, carbon dioxide costs will have a share of over 80% in the road transport sector and over 58% in the air transport sector in total exhaust emission costs. The average exhaust emission costs per one aircraft operation (international flights) will range from 141 to 145€. In road transport, the average exhaust emission costs at 100 km in 2032 will range from 1.8 to 2.2€.
An Exploration: How Voluntourism Conservation Projects Coordinate with and Contribute to Conservation Efforts in Madre de Dios, Peru

Mirroring trends in international tourism, alternative tourism, and ecotourism, the voluntourism industry has grown, developed and diversified significantly over the past two decades. Scientific attention to voluntourism has focused mainly on participant motivations and outcomes. However, explicit research on the outcomes and impacts voluntourism projects generate for their host communities and environments is sparse. As voluntourism becomes increasingly frequent, it is critical to design and implement projects that maximize potential for positive impacts and minimize negative impacts. This study focuses on voluntourism conservation projects in the Madre de Dios region in Peru which is a global conservation priority. Specifically, the research investigates (1) operational characteristics of voluntourism conservation projects, (2) the social networks and relationships among stakeholders to understand the ways in which these relationships influence projects and, ultimately, (3) the ability of voluntourism projects to effectively and collectively contribute to regional conservation needs. Through a social network analysis and interviews with leaders of voluntourism conservation projects, the findings suggest that some projects are well-connected to and coordinated with other conservation entities and efforts of the region. Yet, there are many projects that are disconnected and struggle to coordinate their activities with broader conservation efforts. Operational characteristics relate to a project’s ability to communicate and coordinate with efforts of other conservation entities, implying that voluntourism leaders can adjust operations to allow for a project that, in addition to meeting participant needs, generates relevant contributions to the conservation needs of Madre de Dios.
Shortcut Connections Based Deep Speaker Embeddings for End-to-End Speaker Verification System

The objective of speaker verification is to reject or accept whether or not the input speech is that of a enrolled speaker. Traditionally, i-vector or speaker embeddings system such as d-vector representing the speaker information has been showing high performance with similarity metrics at the backend. Recently it has been proposed an end-to-end system based on previous speaker embeddings approach without additional strategy after extraction. Among the various models, CNN based end-to-end system is showing state-of-the-art performance. CNN based model is trained to classify multiple speakers and speaker embeddings are extracted. In this paper, we propose shortcut connections based deep speaker embeddings for end-to-end speaker verification system. We construct modified ResNet-18 model so that the activation outputs from bottleneck architecture have shortcut connections to speaker embeddings. Deep speaker embeddings are extracted by jointly training in end-to-end approach. The model was constructed without other sophisticated methods such as length normalization, or additive margin softmax loss. When we tested proposed model on the unconstrained conditions data set called VoxCeleb1, the result showed EER of 3.03% when tested with high dimensional deep speaker embeddings. This is the state-of-the-art performance of endto-end speaker verification model on VoxCeleb1.
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Treated With Modified Hyper C-VAD Protocol In Iran

Background Relapse and mortality remains high in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) with reported 5-year survival less than 39%. Bone marrow transplant (BMT) has been offered to some patients; however, 70% of patients do not have a donor-matched sibling and transplant beds are limited in Iran. We treated a cohort of 251 patients by inducing a remission and then treating with Hyper-CVAD rather than treating with Hyper-CVAD at induction and examined survival compared to reports in the literature. Methods We conducted a retrospective review of survival of 251 treated with a modified protocol of Hyper-CVAD between 2005 and 2012. The treatment protocol used 4-week induction regimen with Vincristine, Daunorubicin, and Dexamethasone. BCR-ABL positive patients also received daily Imatinib. Intrathecal methotrexate and cytarabine were given to patients with brain involvement. Remission was evaluated by a bone marrow biopsy and aspiration. If patient had T-Cell ALL then we add cyclophosphamide to the induction regimen. Hyper-CVAD treatment was initiated two weeks after last dose of Vincristine. Any patient with brain or bone involvement received radiotherapy post induction. BMT was offered to all BCR-ABL positive patients or those who had a suitable donor. All patients in complete remission received monthly vincristine prednisone for 5 days ,6- mercaptopurine every night and methotrexate every week up to 30 months . Patient with persistent liver enzyme elevation received cyclophosphamide instead of methotrexate. Result The mean age was 26 (range 14 to 70). The cohort included patient with T ALL (11%), Burkitt’s type ALL (15%), Pre-B ALL (67%), Pro-B ALL (4%) and BCR-ABL (3%). Sixteen patients died during the first month. Mortality increased to 45 patients at the end of six months. Relapse was the main cause of death. BMT was conducted after complete second remission and suitable patient with BCR-ABL positive patients on 13 occasions but none survived. At 5 years of follow up 129 patients were alive (50.1% survival). Conclusion Our patients experienced an improved survival compared to reports in the literature and many did not have complication of radiotherapy. A modified Hyper-CVAD protocol should be the subject of further investigation for the treatment of ALL. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.
The Influence of Exchange Rate, Interest Rate and Inflation on Stock Price of LQ45 Index in Indonesia

There are many factors that affect Indonesian public listed companies stock prices. Macroeconomic factors are crucial for any change in national capital markets. The aim of this research study is to focus on examining the impact of foreign exchange rates, inflation rates, and interest rates on stock prices in Indonesia. The monthly data of 5 years range from 2013 to 2017 was used for this research study. The findings of the study revealed that there is a relationship between the dependent and independent variables. Keywords—foreign exchange rate; interest rate; inflation; stock
A New Frame Work for Content Based Image Retrieval Based on Rule Based Motifs on Full Texton Images

This paper derives new framework for content based image retrieval (CBIR) by deriving color features and texture features. This paper initially transforms the RGB color plane image into HSV color plane and derives the individual histograms on H, S and V planes. This paper derives rule based dynamic motif matrix (RDMM) on full texton index (FTi) index images of V-plane. The FTi overcomes the disadvantages and ambiguity issues in indexing textons of earlier methods. The RDMM overcomes the ambiguity issues arise especially when two or more pixels of the 2x2 grid exhibit the similar intensity levels and this reduces overall retrieval rate. This paper integrated the co-occurrence features derived on RDMM-FTi with histogram features of pure color model. The proposed framework is tested on popular color databases and also compared with state of art models of texton and motif based methods based on average precision rate (APR) and average recall rate(ARR). The experimental results indicate the efficacy of the proposed method over the existing methods.
Evaluating Domain Ontologies

The number of applications being developed that require access to knowledge about the real world has increased rapidly over the past two decades. Domain ontologies, which formalize the terms being used in a discipline, have become essential for research in areas such as Machine Learning, the Internet of Things, Robotics, and Natural Language Processing, because they enable separate systems to exchange information. The quality of these domain ontologies, however, must be ensured for meaningful communication. Assessing the quality of domain ontologies for their suitability to potential applications remains difficult, even though a variety of frameworks and metrics have been developed for doing so. This article reviews domain ontology assessment efforts to highlight the work that has been carried out and to clarify the important issues that remain. These assessment efforts are classified into five distinct evaluation approaches and the state of the art of each described. Challenges associated with domain ontology assessment are outlined and recommendations are made for future research and applications.
Tax revenue and economic growth in Morocco: Application of ARDL approach

The objective of this article is to study the impact of taxation on Moroccan economic growth, based on an ARDL model, on time series from 1981 to 2017. The main results show that in the short term, direct and indirect taxation have a negative effect on economic growth. In the long term, direct taxation has a positive effect and indirect taxation remains negative. In the short term, the investment variable has an instant negative impact on growth. However, over time, its effects become positive. For openness, it has a positive impact on growth. In the long term, investment has a negative and significant effect and openness has a positive and not a significant impact on economic growth.
Export or Perish: Can Internal Devaluation Create Enough Good Jobs in Southern Europe?

ABSTRACT During the early 2010s, creditor states and EU institutions demanded that the Southern states of the eurozone liberalise their labour markets to facilitate internal devaluation and export-led recoveries. With some variation, the Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian governments complied. This article explains why such a strategy of internal devaluation within the eurozone might fail to produce adequate employment growth to put these countries on stable financial footing. It exploits variation in the timing and intensity of reforms to evaluate the record of the internal devaluation strategy. Our findings suggest that there is no linear relationship between internal devaluation and export-growth. Even where the latter has been impressive, dualism persists and the employment recovery has been weak.
On the many faces of atomic multicast

Many current online services need to serve clients distributed across geographic areas. Coordinating highly available and scalable geographically distributed replicas, however, is challenging. While State Machine Replication is the most direct way of achieving availability, no scalability comes from the traditional approach. Typically, scalability is obtained by partitioning the original application state among groups of servers, which leads to further challenges. Atomic multicast is a group communication abstraction that groups processes, providing reliability and ordering guarantees, and can be explored to provide partially replicated applications a scalable and consistent alternative. This work confronts the challenges of providing practical group communication abstractions for crash faulttolerant and Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) models. Although there are plenty of atomic multicast algorithms that tolerate crash failures, they suffer from two major issues: (a) high latency for messages addressed to multiple groups, and (b) low performance when proportion of messages to multiple groups is high. To solve the first problem and reduce the latency of multi-group messages, this work presents FastCast, an algorithm with unprecedented four communication delays. The second problem can be addressed by maximizing the proportion of single-group messages and eliminating additional communication among groups to execute operations. In this direction, this document introduces GeoPaxos, a protocol that partitions the ordering of operations like atomic multicast while still keeping the state fully replicated. In the BFT model, the task is more challenging, since servers can behave arbitrarily. This thesis presents ByzCast, the first algorithm that tolerates Byzantine failures. ByzCast is hierarchical and introduces a new class of atomic multicast defined as partially genuine. Lastly, since at the very core of most strong consistent replicated system resides a consensus protocol, the thesis concludes with Kernel Paxos, a Paxos implementation provided as a loadable kernel module, providing at the same time high performance, and abstracting ordering from the application execution.
Testing Ricardian Equivalence with the Narrative Record On Tax Changes

The Ricardian equivalence hypothesis is tested empirically with a subcategory of the narrative measures of US tax shocks developed by Romer and Romer (in, American Economic Review 2010;100:763). The present value of tax increases motivated solely by concerns for improving the fiscal health of the government is used. These tax news represent a switch from debt to tax financing that should have no effects on real output and consumption. For the post‐1982:IV period, fiscal anticipation plays an important role as many of the tax increases are implemented with substantial delays. Anticipated tax hikes increase economic activity in the delay period. Ricardian equivalence is rejected.
The impact of gender demography on male and female role interpretations and contributions: A qualitative study of non-executive directors of Icelandic boards

5 ACKNOWLEDEGMENTS 7 DISSEMINATIONS TO DATE 10 TABLE OF CONTENTS 12 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES 15 CHAPTER I – LINKING DOCUMENT 16 1. BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE FOR THE RESEARCH 16 2. OVERVIEW OF THE RESEARCH PROCESS 22 2.