Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensitivity of simulated convection to soil moisture in a region in central Amazon

We study the sensitivity of convective precipitation to soil moisture in a continental region in Central Amazon based on Atmospheric General Circulation Model (AGCM) simulations and further analyze the physical processes involved, in particular those related to the diurnal cycle. The region was selected on the analysis of perpetual January simulations with the University of California at Los Angeles AGCM. It shows a uniform and differentiated behavior in the diurnal cycle of convection, which is strongly associated to surface forcing and in opposite phase to large scale ascending motion. Sensitivity to ground wetness was explored based on a control parameter (which varies between 0 and 1) that multiplies evaporation. Results show that the largest sensitivity appears for relatively dry conditions, confirming previous studies. Although evaporation decreases monotonically as the control parameter is reduced, a slight increase in moisture convergence maintains precipitation almost unchanged up to a value of 0.3 of the parameter. The daily maxima in moisture convergence (excluding the extreme case with no evaporation within the region), convective precipitation, and large scale ascending motion at 500 mb are reached in the simulation with a value of 0.4 of the control parameter. Soil and surface temperature increase with decreasing sensitivity parameter, and show retarded daily maxima and larger diurnal amplitude. The same behavior is observed in the sensible heat flux and planetary boundary layer (PBL) height. These effects combine with the variations in PBL water vapor mixing ratio to produce a gradual sensitivity in PBL top relative humidity, in particularly during the morning hours when the humidification observed in the control simulation is gradually reverted, eventually inhibiting early afternoon convection. However, sensitivity of moist convection to ground wetness can not be fully explained without also considering large scale circulation feedbacks. In the more humid cases, deep convection is responsible for mid tropospheric warming. In the drier cases, convective induced warming is insufficient and a differential large scale subsiding motion is induced in the mid troposphere. In the extreme case, with the control parameter equal to zero, the large scale circulation changes drastically with the development of a shallow direct convergent cell that explains the notorious increase in large scale precipitation.
The Hybrid Rating Method:Proposal and Assessment of a Novel Way to Measure Attitudes

English In reaction to shortcomings with usual methods of measuring attitudes – mostly the five-point rating method – this paper presents the hybrid rating method as a novel approach to measuring attitudes. The hybrid rating method is characterised by its open ended design in which respondents create their own rating scale to fit their individual style. In this approach the central assumption was that respondents could express their attitudes better and the method therefore provides more and better information. The method is described in detail and procedures for scoring are presented. A comparison between the hybrid method and the five-point method, using an independent measure two-sample design (α = .05; β = .1), highlights the aspects: Information quantity, information quality, and pragmatic value. In both conditions 40 respondents answered the NEO-PI-R with either the five-point method or the hybrid method and rated the process in an additional questionnaire. Analysis showed that the hybrid method yielded more information than the five-point method (t = 2.823, p = 0.003) while potentially allowing additional information to be gathered from the individuals rating style. Psychometric quality was found to be close to identical between the two methods (both methods show an average Cronbach's α of .88) and respondents rated the two methods similarly. The method was observed to be more demanding, both in time and effort, and therefore is restricted in its application. Criticism towards the method and this study as well as further implications are discussed.
Excess Liquidity in the Financial Sector of Lesotho : Main Drivers and Policy Options

2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . 3 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION . 6 1.1 Background . 6 1.2 Brief Stylised Facts . 7 1.3 Statement of the Problem . 8 1.4 Objectives of the Study . 8 1.5 Research Questions . 8 1.6 Significance of the Study . 9 1.7 Study Outline . 9 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW . 10 2.
Towards a Model of Psychological Well-Being*The Role of Socioeconomic Status and Satisfaction with Income in Chile

Association between indexes of socioeconomic status, satisfaction with income and status, and psychological well-being (PWB) was examined in a representative sample of Chileans. Results confirm a positive association between socioeconomic status and satisfaction with income and status and PWB. Associations were stronger with PWB facets related to relational, control and self-esteem processes, and weaker with purpose of life, growth and autonomy. Structural equation modeling confirmed a direct significant coefficient of socioeconomic status on PWB, as well as an indirect significant path through satisfaction with income and status. Control for satisfaction with socioeconomic status and purchase power reduced but did not eliminate the effect of socioeconomic status on PWB. Results are consistent with a direct effect model of socio-structural position on well-being, but also with the relevance of satisfaction with social position as an appraisal process to indicate high psychological well-being.
Soil Fertility Status as Affected by Different Land Use Types and Topographic Positions: A Case of Delta Sub-Watershed, Southwestern Ethiopia

This study was aimed at assessing the status of soil properties under Enset (Enset ventricosum) farm, grazing and cultivated land from upper, middle and lower slope positions (15-25%, 8-15% and 3-8% slope) in Delta sub-watershed of Southwestern Ethiopia. Split block design was employed. A total of 54 soil samples, from 3 slope positions x 3 land use types (treatments) x 2 depths (0-20 and 20-40cm) x 3 replications, were collected and used to test for soil chemical properties. For soil physical properties assessment, 27 soil samples were collected from 0-20cm soil depth by using simple random sampling technique. The result from several soil chemical parameters revealed that OC, TN, C/N, AvP, CEC, exchangeable bases (K + , Mg +2 , Ca +2 and Na + ), ESP, PBS were significantly lower (p<0.001) in both depths of cultivated land and upper slope position than in respective slope positions of the other two land use types. However, average soil EC and pH did not show variation with both slope positions and land use types. The result also showed that soil physical property parameters such as soil bulk density, soil moisture and clay content in grazing lands were significantly higher (p<0.001). In contrast, total porosity and silt content were relatively lower in grazing land. From this finding, it can be concluded that there needs to be a look into not only land use types but also slope positions in developing land use planning and soil management strategies in this region. Keywords : slope gradient, land use change, soil depth, soil properties
Social and Cultural Dimensions of the Transformation of Higher Education in Central and Eastern Europe

The thesis of this article is that the main factors contributing to the need to rethink higher education institutions today are linked to the advent of the global age. Although the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are not yet feeling the full force of the ensuing pressures, higher education here is likely to be affected very soon by globalization-related processes. Higher education all over the world, including Central and Eastern Europe, is no longer the unique part of the public sector that it used to be, either in explicit political declarations, in public perceptions, or in practical terms. Higher education is doubly affected by the local post-1989 transformations and by more profound and more long-lasting global transformations. To neglect either of the two levels of analysis is to misunderstand a decade of failed attempts to reform higher education systems in this part of the world.
Hydrogen diffusion in zinc oxide thin films

Hydrogen diffusion in zinc oxide thin films was studied by secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) measurements, investigating the spreading of implanted deuterium profiles by annealing. By effusion measurements of implanted rare gases He and Ne the microstructure of the material was characterized. While for material prepared by low pressure chemical vapour deposition an interconnected void structure and a predominant diffusion of molecular hydrogen was found, sputter-deposited ZnO films showed a more compact structure and long range diffu- sion of atomic hydrogen. Hydrogen diffusion energies of 1.8 - 2 eV, i.e. higher than reported in literature were found. The results are discussed in terms of a H diffusion model analogous to the model applied for hydrogen diffusion in hydrogenated amorphous and microcrystalline silicon.
Genetic behaviour of qualitative and seed yield-related traits in Brassica rapa@@@Aliejinio rapso kokybiniai ir su sėklų derliumi susiję genetiniai požymiai

The domestic production of edible oil meets only 20.23% of the demand in Pakistan, and domestic oil production needs to be increased. Thanks to its short life cycle, high yield and yellow seed colour, oilseed rape (Brassica rapa L.) is a potentially useful source to fill the gap between production and consumption. This study was designed to ascertain the genetic expression of descriptive and seed yield-related traits in four B. rapa accessions (UAF11, Toria, BSA and TP-124-1) and their hybrid progenies obtained from complete diallel mating crossings. Heterosis and heterobeltiosis were computed for these traits. Seed colour was varying shades of brown and showed Mendelian genetics. Seed shape was consistently round in all lines, and leaf hairiness was a characteristic of all crosses including self. Each parent line had a particular leaf shape as elliptic, pandurate, lanceolate and ovate, and no intermediate or new shapes were observed in F1. Leaf colour was varying shades of green. Seed shape, leaf shape and leaf colour were under digenic control with no epistatic or maternal effects. Leaf shape showed multiple allelism. Seed shape showed no variations. Leaf hairiness was dominant and under monogenic control. Number of siliqua/primary branches of plant, number of siliqua/secondary branches of plant and total number of siliqua/plant directly affect seed yield of plant while effect of plant height is indirect. Variability was observed in heterosis and heterobeltiosis for all traits. UAF-11 and its crosses with Toria and TP-124-1 and their reciprocals were identified as the best hybrid progenies for future breeding efforts. Our results for the traits, compared here will, hopefully, facilitate future efforts to select productive B. rapa accessions for breeding programs aimed at optimizing heterosis.
Is Acquiring-Firm Shareholder Approval in Stock-for-Stock Mergers Perfunctory?

Despite mixed stock returns for acquirer shareholders in large stock-for-stock mergers, acquiring-firm merger proxy votes rarely fail; in the sample we examine, the average approval rate of votes cast is 95%. Our examination of whether merger votes are effective in monitoring management’s acquisition policy indicates that the margin of approval varies substantially with firm and deal characteristics, and while there are no failed votes in our sample some deals are only narrowly approved. These findings support the notion that merger proxy votes provide credible threats despite high average approval rates.
“Made in China” – How Does it Affect Measures of Competitiveness?

We propose a comprehensive analysis of a country’s price and non-price competitiveness that accounts for changes in the value added content of trade by combining two datasets – highly disaggregated trade data from UN Comtrade with internationally integrated Supply and Use Tables from the WIOD database. When we focus attention to the traditional measure of gross exports of goods, the analysis shows that advanced economies lost non-price competitiveness relative to emerging economies over the period 1995 to 2011. This picture changes when the fragmentation of production is considered. We find that the relative quality of production from the US, Canada, Germany and the UK when tracing value added in exports remained unchanged or even increased over this period. Likewise, the seemingly unchanged or improving relative quality of Brazil’s, Russia’s and India’s export goods largely arose from outsourcing rather than from improvements in the quality of domestic production. However, gains in Chinese non-price competitiveness remain impressive even after accounting for global value chain integration.
Competing Against Stereotypes: The Female Athlete Experience

This study examines the experiences of female varsity athletes related to gender stereotypes in the realm of sports. Dominant literature within the discipline of sports sociology recognizes the early distinction between masculine, feminine and gender-neutral sports. Studies conducted over the last three decades demonstrate an overall awareness of gender stereotypes and sport typing, yet how this gendered division of sport effects the athletes remains unclear. Drawing on data collected over the last three decades, I examine the existence and acknowledgement of gender stereotypes and sport typing in relation to female athletes and their participation in varsity athletics through semi-structured interviews. The data analysis shows that female athletes are aware of gender stereotyping in sport, although they do not explicitly acknowledge them as influencing their athletic experience. Rather, indirect expression of experience with gender stereotyping and subsequent coping strategies demonstrates that navigating gender stereotypes may be a subconscious effort, rather than exclusively visible
NEW EVENT DETECTION AND TRACKING IN TURKISH

NEW EVENT DETECTION AND TRACKING IN TURKISH Süleyman Kardaş M.S. in Computer Engineering Supervisors Prof. Dr. Fazlı Can Asst. Prof. Dr. Seyit Koçberber May, 2009 The amount of information and the number of information resources on the Internet have been growing rapidly for over a decade. This is also true for on-line news and news providers. To overcome information overload news consumers prefer to track the topics that they are interested in. Topic detection and tracking (TDT) applications aim to organize the temporally ordered stories of a news stream according to the events. Two major problems in TDT are new event detection (NED) and topic tracking (TT). These problems respectively focus on finding the first stories of previously unseen new events and all subsequent stories on a certain topic defined by a small number of initial stories. In this thesis, the NED and TT problems are investigated in detail using the first large-scale test collection (BilCol2005) developed by Bilkent Information Retrieval Group. The collection contains 209,305 documents from the entire year of 2005 and involves several events in which eighty of them are annotated by humans. The experimental results show that a simple word truncation stemming method can statistically compete with a sophisticated stemming approach that pays attention to the morphological structure of the language. Our statistical findings illustrate that word stopping and the contents of the associated stopword list are important and removing the stopwords from content can significantly improve the system performance. We demonstrate that the confidence scores of two different similarity measures can be combined in a straightforward manner for improving the effectiveness.
Molecular Characterization and Genetic Expression Profiles of Two Glycosidases from Different Oenococcus oeni Strains

The aim of this study was to characterize β-glycosidase (BGL) andphospho-β-glycosidase (PBGL), which is responsible for the oenological aromatic characteristics of wines. Six Oenococcus oeni strains were evaluated for their enzymatic activities by using p-nitrophenyl-β-D-glucopyranoside (pNPG) method. The sequences of BGL and PBGL genes were analyzed by bioinformatics techniques and validated by quantitative real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction technology (qRT-PCR). The genetic codes of wine-related β-glycosidases in the O. oeni were also analyzed to compare with the other strains. It was found that O. oeni CS-1b displayed the highest activity among all the strains. The enzymatic activity was high in the disrupted cell solution but low in the supernatants obtained from the intact cultured strain. It indicated that glycosidases were possibly mainly in cell-bound or intracellular form in those strains. The results of GC-MS showed that strains CS-1b and SD-1f which have higher level of gene expression can produce more kinds of aromas and some of them related to β-glucosidase were significantly increased.
Do Normative Appeals Affect Tax Compliance? Evidence from a Controlled Experiment in Minnesota

This paper explores one part of a 1994 Minnesota Department of Revenue field experiment designed to study the effectiveness of alternative enforcement strategies. Two letters containing different normative appeals were sent to two large groups of taxpayers; a control group received no letter. The impact of the letters on voluntary compliance is measured by comparing the change (for tax years 1994-93) in reported income and in taxes paid for treated versus control taxpayers (a difference-in-difference approach). We find little evidence of an overall treatment effect. However, the letters do appear to impact the compliance behavior of some groups of taxpayers.
Evaluating Allelopathic Effects of Some Plant Species in Tissue Culture Media as an Accurate Method for Selection of Tolerant Plant and Screening of Bioherbicides

Plant tissue culture technique could provide sterile and controllable condition in order to assay direct effect of different compounds on plant growth accurately. In this study, the effects of aqueous extracts prepared from roots and shoots of goosefoot ( Chenopodium album L.), redroot pigweed ( Amaranthus retroflexus L.), fennel ( Foeniculum vulgare ), and wormwood ( Artemisia absinthium L.) were evaluated on the seed germination and growth criteria in tissue culture media. The fennel root extract, nearly without phenolic content and with low antioxidant activity, showed the most drastic allelopathic effect on goosefoot, especially at 100 mg mL -1 concentration, which might be due to the presence of some substance potentially useful for biological control of goosefoot, an invasive weed. Goosefoot was resistant to extract of fennel shoot, wormwood root, and shoot, while fennel and radish (Raphanus sativus L.), at high concentration (100 mg mL -1 ), were not resistant to the root and shoot extracts of both goosefoot and redroot pigweed. In response to allelopathic components, shoot:root ratio was increased, and more peroxidase and superoxide dismutase activity were detected in roots. There was no direct relationship between allelopathic effects with total phenolic content and antioxidant activity. In conclusion, our results showed that allelopathic effects of extracts on growth and biochemical criteria depended on both the concentration levels and the plant parts from which the aqueous extract was derived. Therefore, tissue culture media is an accurate and suitable tool to screen plants resistant to allelopathic components of weeds, and to identify high allelopathic plants as potential bioherbicide and invasive plant controller.
Biokinetic Studies in the Treatment of Tannery Effluent

The present investigation deals with the anaerobic treatment of composite tan liquor with varying organic loads. BOD of the influent and effluent and MLSS of reactor were determined at various detention times to generate data for kinetic coefficients. The kinetic coefficients k (maximum substrate utilization rate), Ks (half velocity constant), Y (cell yield coefficient) and Kd (decay coefficient) were found to be 1.66 day-1, 1132 mg/L, 0.05 and 0.22 day-1, respectively. Overall BOD removal rate constant ‘K’ was found to be 1.46 day-1. The studies showed that an optimum BOD influent load of 0.8 Kg BOD/m3/day with 3 days retention time could be adopted to yield about 97 percent BOD reduc¬tion. The Bio-kinetic coefficients were evaluated using modified Monod’s equations to study the metabolic performance of the digestion process.
Toward EHW 2.0 - Some Ideas in HDL-Based Evolution of Digital Circuits

Evolvable Hardware (EHW) is a field of Evolutionary Computation (EC) started in the early 1990’s that includes a subfield of Evolvable Hardware Design and a subfield of Adaptive Hardware. Two methods of evolvable hardware design of a one-bit full adder are analyzed in this paper: first method is based on the well-known idea of gate-level design using a network of programmable gates, and the second method uses Verilog instructions coded in chromosomes represented as binary strings. Eventually, the two solutions were compared in terms of hardware resources and propagation times.
Determining and predicting correlation of macroeconomic indicators on credit risk caused by overdue credit

The banking system guarantees the economic strength of the country. Its sustainability is due to the sustainability of the credit portfolio. Therefore, scientific research on banking risks is always relevant. Basel recommendations and central bank regulations provide risk minimization in case of default of borrower by creating risk reserve, but the high range of macroeconomic factors creates a basis for creating credit risk. The model, which determines the risk factors, may be structurally the same, but the quality of the influence of factors is different in various countries. The influence of macroeconomic factors is particularly evident in developing countries. The impact of economic factors in different countries is high in GDP of these countries. The article focuses on determining the influence of macroeconomic factors on credit risk of systematic banks in Georgia. The coefficients of individual macroeconomic indicators are calculated by using Pearson’s correlation. The credit risk ratio is taken from the bank’s overdue credits and credit portfolio ratio. Based on the correlation coefficients obtained, the expected risk of shock changes is calculated.