Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimal distributed generation in green building assessment towards line loss reduction for Malaysian public hospital

This paper presents an optimization approach for criteria setting of Renewable Distributed Generation (DG) in the Green Building Rating System (GBRS). In this study, the total line loss reduction is analyzed and set as the main objective function in the optimization process which then a reassessment of existing criteria setting for renewable energy (RE) is proposed towards lower loss outcome. Solar photovoltaic (PV)-type DG unit (PV-DG) is identified as the type of DG used in this paper. The proposed PV-DG optimization will improve the sustainable energy performance of the green building by total line losses reduction within accepted lower losses region using Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm. The distribution network uses bus and line data setup from selected one of each three levels of Malaysian public hospital. MATLAB simulation result shows that the PV-DG expanding capacity towards optimal scale and location provides a better outcome in minimizing total line losses within an appropriate voltage profile as compared to the current setting of PV-DG imposed in selected GBRS. Thus, reassessment of RE parameter setting and the proposed five rankings with new PV-DG setting for public hospital provides technical justification and give the best option to the green building developer for more effective RE integration.
Modeling the effect of electronic banking expansion on profitability using neural networks and system dynamics approach

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of electronic banking (e-banking) on the profitability of banks is an important subject. Although there are many studies in this area, the effect of using different e-banking instruments, such as internet banking, telephone banking, ATM and POS, was not investigated comprehensively, using a system dynamics approach. To fill this gap, the present study tried to develop an analytical model with a systematic approach through identifying the effects of different areas of e-banking services in a financial institution. Design/methodology/approach The income and cost of each transaction via different e-banking services were identified and the incomes and costs, number of transactions and other model variables were predicted for the next period using a single-layer neural network (perceptron). The proposed model was designed based on the system dynamics approach. Then, rates and auxiliary variables were introduced to the model based on the prediction data. Finally, the model was validated and different scenarios were examined. Findings Results showed that increased investment on e-banking can increase online customers, thereby boosting the bank’s incomes through raising transaction fees and acquiring additional resources. On the other hand, the need for physical branches and associated costs reduces with increasing the tendency of traditional customers toward using e-banking services. Simulation results showed that although the expansion of e-banking carries a huge financial burden on the bank, the costs reduce and profitability significantly increases with time. Originality/value This study can be used by senior managers of the bank throughout e-banking planning. This is because it systematically addressed the effects of e-banking expansion on different (banking) areas. The present study may also encourage researchers to conduct more extensive studies.
Optimal reconfiguration of distribution networks for power loss reduction

A new technique to solve the network reconfiguration problem in distribution systems is proposed in this paper. The goal is to minimize active power losses without solving any load flow in the optimization process but ensuring the radial configuration and other realistic constraints. A linearized model is adopted and new concepts associated with the network connectivity are introduced.
Do You Bind? The Representation of Visual Features and Objects in Working Memory

A central debate in visual working memory research centres on the nature of visual working memory representations. The object account proposes that the fundamental units of visual working memory are integrated representations, such that items are stored in working memory in an all-or-none fashion. The feature-channel account, on the other hand, proposes that visual features are stored independently of each other. According to this account, additional representations are required to code for the associations between visual feature
The Drivers of Income Inequality in Rich Countries

Rising income inequality has recently come centre-stage as a core societal concern for rich countries. The diagnosis of the forces driving inequality upwards and their relative importance remains hotly contested, notably with respect to the roles of globalization versus technology and of market forces versus institutions and policy choices. This survey provides a critical review and synthesis of recent research. The focus is on income inequality across the entire distribution, rather than only on what has been happening at the very top. We pay particular attention to including what has been learned from the analysis of micro-data, to ensuring that the coverage is not unduly US-centric, and to analyses of the interrelations between the different drivers of inequality. The marked differences in inequality trends across countries and time-periods reflect how global economic forces such as globalisation and technological change have interacted with differing national contexts and institutions. Major analytical challenges stand in the way of a consensus emerging on the relative importance of different drivers in how income inequality has evolved in recent decades.
DEVELOPMENT OF INQUIRY SKILLS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL (GRADE 7): ANALYSING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF INSTRUCTION

One important demand in science education is to provide students with competences of scientific inquiry. The purpose of this study is to investigate, how middle school students develop inquiry skills under various kinds of instruction. Students ́ inquiry skills was measured by a paper-and-pencil-test with multiple-choice items. The research design included a set of pre-instruction and post-instruction tests on process skills and the content of photosynthesis as well as a ten week intervention. The outcomes of two different learning environments of inquiry learning (open and guided inquiry) are compared to a control group, taught by teacher-centered methods using direct instruction. The results show the highest increase of inquiry skills in the experimental group I followed by the experimental group II (guided inquiry) and the control group. Irrespective of the type of instruction, inquiry learning is more effective than teachercentered methods.
Quasi-Unsupervised Color Constancy

We present here a method for computational color constancy in which a deep convolutional neural network is trained to detect achromatic pixels in color images after they have been converted to grayscale. The method does not require any information about the illuminant in the scene and relies on the weak assumption, fulfilled by almost all images available on the web, that training images have been approximately balanced. Because of this requirement we define our method as quasi-unsupervised. After training, unbalanced images can be processed thanks to the preliminary conversion to grayscale of the input to the neural network. The results of an extensive experimentation demonstrate that the proposed method is able to outperform the other unsupervised methods in the state of the art being, at the same time, flexible enough to be supervisedly fine-tuned to reach performance comparable with those of the best supervised methods.
Parasitic resistance in an MOS transistor used as on-chip decoupling capacitance

Adding on-chip decoupling capacitance has become a popular method to reduce dI/dt noise in integrated circuits. The most area-efficient realization of on-chip capacitance in a standard CMOS process is to use the gate capacitance of MOS transistors. In this paper, the inevitable parasitic resistance of an MOS transistor is estimated, which is important for two reasons. The resistive noise caused by this parasitic must be kept low, and, if properly sized, this resistance can be used to dampen potential resonance oscillations.
Ownership structure and firm performance : an empirical study of publicly listed firms in Germany

This paper examines the impact of ownership structure on firm performance of publicly listed firms in Germany. An ordinary least square regression model (performed with robust standard errors) was applied to investigate the relationship. Firm performance was measured by the return on equity, return on assets and a market value measure, Tobin´s Q. The results do not show a significant linear relationship between ownership structure and firm performance. Nevertheless, institutional investors that hold a stake of the total shares, tend to have a significant positive relationship with Tobin’s Q and a negative relationship with return on assets.
Improving Enterprises’ Cross-Border M&A Sustainability in the Globalization Age—Research on Acquisition and Application of the Foreign Experience

The advancement of globalization has encouraged an increasing number of enterprises to go abroad and take cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to expand their overseas market and improve core competitiveness, although many acquirers fail to gain value from post-acquisition integration. On the basis of organizational learning theory, this paper explores the effect of executives’ foreign experience on cross-border M&A sustainability, and examines how the externally acquired knowledge can be effectively applied to cross-border M&A practice. Taking a sample of Chinese listed companies that have completed cross-border M&As during 2008–2016, our research proposes an integrated framework of foreign experiential knowledge, and discusses the process of acquisition and application of this experiential knowledge into cross-border M&As. Empirical research findings show that, compared with the general foreign experience, the specific foreign experience based on target country significantly improves cross-border M&A sustainability, and executives with host-specific work experience plays a more important role than that of education experience. Further research found that long-tenured executives positively moderate the effect of foreign experiential knowledge on cross-border M&A sustainability, while the pay gap for executives, which hampers internal coherence, plays a negative moderating role. This research provides a new insight into the promotion of the sustainable development of enterprise cross-border M&A in the globalization age.
Reflective thinking on communicative teaching in writing

For second language learners, English writing as one of the forms of communication is particularly tough. In order to help learners to write correctly and fluently, teachers could guide learners to integrate genre and content reasonably to meet their communicative needs, to motivate their interest and to improve their writing skills. The paper provides diverse teaching techniques and strategies for teachers to help learners from the elementary level, the intermediate level or the advanced level to be fully exposed in communicative activities in class. And teachers are expected to give feedbacks to ideas, feelings, or perceptions that students have tried to communicate through their writing in a sensible way. Teaching writing is a process of aiding learners to discover themselves and implicit communication with readers with purposes.
An Econometric Investigation of the Impact of Gender Income Gap on the Gender Gap in Crime: The Case of Arkansas State

Bu calisma, cinsiyet hususunu dikkate alarak sucun belirleyicilerini aciklamayi hedeflemektedir. Arkansas eyaleti ve bu eyalet icerisinden 4 sehir rassal olarak secilmistir. Standart en kucuk kareler ekonometrik tahmin sisteminin kume direncli standart hatalar yontemiyle kullanilmasiyla elde edilen tahmin sonuclari, gelir duzeyinin negatif ve tutuklanma olasiliginin suc piyasasina katilimi pozitif ve istatistiki olarak anlamli olarak etkiledigini gostermistir. Bu calismanin en onemli bulgusu erkek ve kadinlar arasinda gelir farkinin artmasinin erkeklerin, kadinlara gore, suc isleme oranini arttirdigini gostermesidir. Sonuclar literaturden farkli olarak, tutuklanma olasiliginin belirli bir esik degerinden sonra, suc oranlarini arttirdigini gostermektedir.
Recognition Memory Revisited: An Aging and Electrophysiological Investigation

This study provides a better understanding of contributing factors to age differences in human episodic memory. A recurrent finding in recognition memory is that older adults tend to have lower overall accuracy and tend to make fewer false-alarm errors in judging new items, relative miss errors (Coyne, Allen & Wickens, 1986; Danziger, 1980; Poon and Fozard 1980). Two possible causes for decline in these abilities include an age-related decrement in speed of processing (Salthouse 1991) and changes in information processing ability due to entropy (Allen, Kaufman, Smitch, & Propper 1998a; Mallik et al., in preparation). Additionally, age differences may be partially explained by a tendency for older adults to exhibit a conservative response bias. Surprisingly this study found no age-related differences in recognition memory accuracy, and older adults did not show a more conservative response bias. Due to these null results for age, the study examined the role of response bias (propensity to indicate a probe as being recognized, or new) on recognition memory accuracy and the role of the release from proactive interference (PI) across age. This study introduces a new ERP (Event-Related Potential) component to measure the recognition of “miss” responses called “FN400 Below Threshold”. This component, when
Developing practical chemistry skills by means of student-driven problem based learning mini-projects

Problem-based learning mini-projects (‘PBL mini-projects’) are used as an alternative to the traditional ‘recipe-style’ laboratory teaching method with the aim of enhancing students’ experience of chemistry laboratory practicals. Small groups of students (3–4) in the second year of their degree are assigned a project title and they must devise the experimental protocol to carry it out. This teaching method better reflects real-life problem solving situations. The students responded favourably in their feedback on these laboratory classes. Class attendance and general class morale were found to be noticeably higher than in previous years. This paper describes the implementation of the PBL mini-projects in our teaching laboratories and examines some feedback obtained from the students (42 in total) and teaching staff involved over a two year period (2004/5 and 2005/6). [Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. , 2007, 8 (2), 130-139]
Interest rate differentials and the dynamic asymmetry of exchange rates

We propose a unified econometric strategy to revisit the informational content of interest rates differentials (IRD) for predicting exchange rates. The novelty of our approach consists in allowing for a time-varying asymmetry component in the conditional distribution of the depreciation rate, therefore explicitly modeling the link between interest rates and the likelihood of a depreciation. To assess the economic significance of IRD as a predictor, we derive a directional forecasting procedure from our model and apply this technique to daily exchange rates of the Euro and the Swiss Franc. We document in-sample and out-of-sample performances significantly superior to benchmark models, both in terms of sign forecasts and trading profits. Overall, we find the dynamic asymmetry component to be driven by interest rate differentials, but also by general uncertainty and past unexpected shocks. These findings empirically confirm currency crash theories for recent time periods, suggesting that the larger the difference between interest rates, the more likely the high yield currency appreciates but also exhibit larger depreciation risks.
Statistical Methods And Theory For Analyzing High Dimensional Time Series

High dimensional time series1 presents uniques challenges due to both the serial dependence and the large feature space. In this research, we consider three topics under high dimensional time series: graphical model estimation under multiple time series, portfolio optimization under heavy-tailed time series, and Kolmogorov dependent time series. In the first topic, we consider multiple stationary time series with varying covariance structure, and propose a graphical model estimator that borrows strength from all time series. In the second topic, we consider financial asset return series that exhibit heavy-tailed distributions. We reformulate portfolio optimization based on quantile statistics to explicitly accommodate heavy tails. In the third topic, we propose a general framework for modeling serial dependence in multivariate time series. We explore its connections with existing models, and demonstrate its applications in scatter matrix estimation. At the core of these topics are several methods for estimating high dimensional covariance and scatter matrices, and the quantification of how their consistency is affected by the dependence strength of the time series. Detailed definition is introduced in Chapter 1.
Monetary policy in a Model with Commodity and Financial Markets

This paper builds a small open economy model for a net commodity exporter to consider financial frictions and monetary policies in order to investigate the main determinants of business cycles. Since we make a distinction to the access of financial markets between the commodity and non-commodity sectors, we notice that as usual, a commodity price shock benefits the competitiveness of the economy and its borrowing terms. We outline a novel effect in this paper which we dub the “financial market effect” following a positive commodity price shock that decreases the credit premium and hence exacerbate the commodity price boom. However, the negative sectoral downturn affects entrepreneur credit together with disinflationary pressures of a real exchange rate appreciation. This opens the role for stabilization policies which we analyze comparing three types of monetary regimes. Estimating the model on South Africa, a major commodity exporting economy with inflation targeting regime, we find as conventional wisdom suggests that a hypothetical Taylor rule targeting the price-level allows for adjustment in inflation expectations that can dampen disinflationary pressures. Furthermore, due to smoother change in nominal rate of interest, there is lesser variability in financial markets.
Cash inflow conundrum in Ugandan SMEs: A perspective of ISO certification and firm location

The study employed the World Bank Enterprise survey 2013 for Uganda and quintile method to determine the relationship between firm location, International Standards Organization (ISO) certification and cash inflows of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Uganda. The results show that ISO certification and firm location are positively and significantly related to SMEs’ cash inflows. It was also realized that other factors such as using email, foreign ownership, access to finance and tax administration are not obstacles to firm’s cash inflows. Our findings suggest that creating awareness among entrepreneurs about ISO certification and creating enabling environment for SMEs in Uganda to become ISO certified should be highly considered by Government of Uganda. In addition, the Government of Uganda with Kampala Capital City Authority must develop deliberate policy to enable SMEs get internet connection cheaply and faster. This will ease doing businesses and enable SMEs’ cash inflows to grow. Key words: Cash inflows, location, International Standards Organization (ISO) certification, Uganda.
The effects of peripheral service quality on spectators’ emotions and behavioural intentions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of peripheral service quality on football match spectators’ emotions and behavioural intention. Design/methodology/approach Data were obtained from a survey of 342 spectators of professional league football in Malaysia and analysed using the partial least squares technique. Findings The results illustrated the significant role of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions in forming spectators’ behavioural intentions. Furthermore, they demonstrated that the drivers of pleasant and unpleasant emotions are different. While entertainment, electronic devices and stadium announcers have positive effects on pleasant emotion, facilities and electronic devices have negative effects on unpleasant emotion. Entertainment, electronic devices and stadium announcers have indirect effects on behavioural intentions through pleasant emotions. Unpleasant emotions mediated the effects of facilities and electronic devices on behavioural intentions. Originality/value The findings of this study suggest that football marketers must understand the crucial role of peripheral service quality and spectators’ emotions. Through stimulating pleasant emotions in spectators and preventing unpleasant emotions from arising, football marketers can ensure that these spectators will attend football stadiums.
Contextual Classification of Sea-Ice Types Using Compact Polarimetric SAR Data

Automatic classification methods using satellite imagery are beneficial in the sea-ice-type mapping of the Arctic regions. In the near future, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) will be launched, providing unique compact polarimetric (CP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, expected to be an improvement over the current RADARSAT-2 dual-polarimetric SAR imagery. This motivates the implementation of a CP-dedicated automatic scene classification approach. First, an existing unsupervised segmentation algorithm called iterative region growing using semantics (IRGS) is used to segment ice-class homogeneous regions to reduce the impact of speckle noise. Second, a support vector machine (SVM) is used to classify the ice-type labels for each homogeneous region. Two complex quad-polarimetric RADARSAT-2 scenes are used to mathematically simulate the corresponding CP scenes for algorithm testing. Classification accuracy shows that using only the two CP intensity images leads to improved results compared with standard dual-polarimetric scenes. Using the CP data, the best classification results are obtained with the reconstructed QP data for the IRGS segmentation and all derived CP features for the SVM labeling. The results support the expected potential that CP scenes will provide improved sea-ice classification than the current operational dual-pol scenes.