Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study on the Effectiveness of the ASR-Based English Teaching Software in Helping College Students' Listening Learning

The development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology makes the human-computer interaction possible. Considering the deficiencies currently in the English pronunciation teaching, this paper employs relevant principles of speech recognition, proposes the design of an automatic English pronunciation grading system in the English teaching field, describes in detail the system structure, functions and processes and introduces the key technologies and steps to implement the system: dynamic time warping algorithm, establishment of corpuses, consonant/vowel (C/V) segmentation technology and grading standards. Results of a small-scale test show that the system is useful to testing the English pronunciation of international students.
A novel Physical Unclonable Function using RTN

PUFs have emerged as an alternative to traditional Non-Volatile Memories in the field of hardware security. In this paper, a novel PUF is proposed that uses the Random Telegraph Noise phenomenon as the underlying source of entropy. This phenomenon manifests as discrete and random shifts in the drain current of transistors and it is characterized by several parameters like the number of the defects in the device, as well as the emission and capture time constants and current shifts of these defects. Using the recently reported Maximum Current Fluctuation metric, it is possible to condense all this information and use it for the PUF design. By forming pairs of transistors, measuring, and comparing their Maximum Current Fluctuation over a given time interval, we demonstrate using numerical experiments that it is possible to obtain a PUF. Furthermore, the results reported here show that this RTN-based PUF matches, and even out-performs, other silicon PUFs in terms of uniqueness, unpredictability, and reliability with an evident advantage in silicon area.
Structure Features of the Surface of Structural Alloyed Steel after Pulse-Plasma Treatment

The paper presents the results of a study of the development of one of the technological modes of pulse-plasma treatment of structural alloyed steel 40X. Steel 40X is widely used in mechanical engineering in the production of high-strength parts. After quenching and tempering, this steel has high mechanical properties: $\boldsymbol{\sigma}_{0,2}=720\ldots 1560$ MPa; ${}_{\boldsymbol{\sigma B}}=860\ldots 1760$ MPa; $\boldsymbol{\delta}_{5}\geq 8\%;\ \boldsymbol{\psi}\geq 35\%$. In this experiment, steel 40X was used after preliminary heat treatment (isothermal quenching for bainite in oil at T=850°C). The subsequent pulse-plasma treatment was carried out at a specific heat flux Q=6,5×108 W/m2. Complex of methods for studying samples of 40X steel, including optical metallography, scanning electron analytical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy, showed the following. The base metal is represented by the structure of upper and lower bainite with a small amount of martensite. Base metal microhardness is 4120 … 5090 MPa. As a result of pulse-plasma treatment of the surface of 40X steel, a layer with a dispersed martensitic structure is formed on the metal surface to a depth of 70 µm during the formation of a substructural component. The microhardness of this layer is 6550 … 5160 MPa. The parameters of the substructure directly in the surface layer along the depth of the metal up to 20 µm are 30 … 120 nm. Herewith, a uniform distribution of dislocation density is observed in the forming substructure. The absence of dislocation density gradients predetermines the absence of local internal stress gradients. This will provide crack resistance of the treated surface in this zone.
Seasonal Migration and Feminization of Farm Management: Evidence from India

Using gender-disaggregated data on land operations from India, this study demonstrates a relationship between seasonal or short-term migration for work and feminization of farm management. Using a nationally representative dataset covering 35,604 rural Indian households in 2013, the study identifies whether women are taking on the role of farm managers in households with short-term migrants. Results show that women are less likely than men to be decision makers on farms. This dynamic changes when there is short-term migration in the household, with a greater probability of women being decision makers on farms. These results are robust to concerns over omitted variables, endogeneity, and sample selection issues. The study highlights the importance of unpacking the feminization process to better understand the role of women as farm managers and the need for supporting this transition to ensure that women farmers realize their full potential. HIGHLIGHTS Short-term migration (STM) is integral to household livelihood strategy in rural India. Feminization of agricultural labor is distinct from the feminization of farm management. In households with STM, women are more likely to be engaged with farm decisions. Effect of STM is stronger for spouse of household head or unmarried daughters. Effect of STM is weaker when there are more adult men in the household. Individual-level data for time use, agricultural decisions, and migration are important.
A Spiking Neural Network with Resistively Coupled Synapses Using Time-to-First-Spike Coding Towards Efficient Charge-Domain Computing

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are expected to be energy efficient when implemented on dedicated hardware. However, fully exploiting SNN’s characteristics such as event-driven communications challenges on circuit designers and manufacturers. In this paper, inspired by the recent success of an artificial neural network (ANN) based system, known as charge-domain computing (CDC), we propose a novel framework for SNNs called “RC-Spike. ” As CDC, RC-Spike uses a two-phase system: input spikes are received in the accumulation phase, and a neuron produces a spike in the spike generation phase. In RC-Spike, synaptic currents are accumulated with resistively coupled synapses, with which circuit implementation can be simplified compared with CDC circuits. Because of this resistive coupling effect, a neuron in RC-Spike does not compute an exact dot product. However, RC-Spike can be successfully trained in the framework of SNNs, and we show that the learning performance of RC-Spike is as high as ANNs on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets.
Differences in business undergraduate perceptions by preferred classroom learning environment

ABSTRACT Online education continues to grow at business schools. The authors compared undergraduate business student perceptions across three different classroom learning delivery environments: online, hybrid, and face to face. Based on the survey responses using two independent samples, the authors' analyses found that students who preferred online delivery perceived higher timely graduation and were more likely to recommend online or hybrid courses, whereas students' perceptions of persistence and institutional commitment were not related to classroom learning delivery preference.
Task Interruptions Undermine Cyber Defense

Computer network defense analysts engage a difficult, though critical, task in cyber defense. Anecdotally, these operators complain of frequent task interruptions while they are performing their duties. The goal for the current study was to investigate the effect of a commonly reported interruption, answering email, on accuracy and completion times in a simulated network analyst task. During task trials, participants were interrupted by emails between alert investigations, during alert investigations, or not at all (control). The results indicated that email interruptions increased alert completion times regardless of when they occurred, but interruptions that occurred during an alert investigation also reduced the accuracy of subsequent judgments about alert threat. Overall, the results suggest that task interruptions can potentially undermine cyber defense, and steps should be taken to better quantify and mitigate this threat.
Effects of Peer Tutoring on Passing Developmental Mathematics

6 Chapter 1: Challenges of Remediation . 8 Chapter 2: Background on Developmental Math and the Learning Center . 17 Chapter 3: Theory and Practice of Peer Tutoring . 26 Chapter 4: Method . 54 Chapter 5: Results . 69 Chapter 6: Discussion . 76 References . 87
On The Development of a Legal Penalty Prediction System for Drunk Driving Cases

Recent years, computer-aided penalty prediction have been promoted to gain people's trust to the judicial systems, especially in developing Chinese region. In this paper, we propose machine learning based models to predict the legal penalty of criminal cases. Particularly, we focus on drunk driving cases as they are frequent, and the regulations are clear. Unlike western text which words are separated by spaces, words in Chinese text are continuum. In our proposed method, we first use a word segmentation method to separate the Chinese words in text and apply a pre-trained model to convert words into vectors. In the vector space, words with similar meanings have short distance with each other. As the amount of each penalty varies greatly, resulting a data imbalance problem. Therefore, we adapt the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) algorithm as a solution. Finally, we apply deep learning-based models, including Bi-GRU and TextCNN to perform penalty prediction, and compare their advantages and disadvantages.In the experimental result, for drunk driving case penalty prediction, our propose SMOTE + TextCNN solution can reach 73.96% of accuracy. If we allow the prediction to be plus or minus one month from the actual, the accuracy is 95.60%. As for the computation time, our proposed method can predict the penalty of 1,524 drunk driving cases per second.
Talking about weight talk: primary care practitioner knowledge, attitudes and practice

ABSTRACT Background: Primary care practitioners (PCPs) have a vital role in patient weight management. This study investigates knowledge, attitudes and practice of UK PCPs regarding patient weight management. Methods: A cross-sectional questionnaire assessed PCP perceived knowledge, self-reported practice, attitudes towards overweight/obesity and actual knowledge regarding overweight and obesity management. Practitioners from NE Scotland were invited to participate. Results: Participants comprised 107 PCPs. Most participants viewed management of overweight and obesity as core to their roles and 75% reported discussing weight with overweight/obese patients. Management techniques included discussion and advice provision. Behavioural change techniques (BCTs) were reported infrequently, despite perceptions that patients lacked motivation to lose weight. A quarter of participants reported a lack of training and a third reported inadequate skills to manage overweight/obese patients. Mean percent correct for knowledge questions was approximately 53%. Barriers to patient weight management included lack of specialists for referral and limited time. Conclusions: This study confirmed a primary care role in managing weight in overweight/obese patients. Our finding that most participants reported discussing weight with their overweight or obese patients is unsupported by previously published research, however, a more comprehensive sample of practitioners is required to scrutinize this disparity. Incongruence exists between practitioners’ perceptions of difficulties associated with patient weight loss and the tools they use to address them. Inclusion of training in BCT, the provision of weight care specialists, or referral on to commercial weight loss organizations may provide more effective pathways for PCPs to assist weight loss for overweight/obese patients in primary care.
How the Managerial Environment Effects on Corporate Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Turkey

This paper aims to investigate the mediating role of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) between charismatic leadership (CL) and corporate entrepreneurship (CE), as well as to examine the moderator effect of ethical climate on the relationships between charismatic leadership (CL) and corporate entrepreneurship (CE). Structural equation modeling ıs performed to test the proposed relations using data collected from 425 white-collar workers in Istanbul. The analysis results show charismatic leadership, organizational citizenship behaviors, and ethical climate to positively and significantly correlate with corporate entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, principled local ethical climate has a moderator effect between charismatic leadership and organizational citizenship as it strengthens the positive relationship between them. This means that better ethical environmental conditions strengthen the positive effect of charismatic leadership on corporate entrepreneurship. This study contributes to the literature by attempting some novelties such as: (a) testing the impact and importance level of ethical climate in the work environment of an emerging country such as Turkey, (b) investigating the moderating role of ethical climate on the relationship between charismatic leadership and corporate entrepreneurship, and (c) analyzing the mediating relationship among charismatic leadership, organizational citizenship behavior and corporate entrepreneurship and checking the mediating role of organizational citizenship behavior over them.
Connecting orbits of autonomous Lagrangian systems

In contrast to the time-dependent case, the time-t-section of Mañé set of autonomous Lagrangian systems is independent of time, thus, it is nowhere disconnected. This causes some difference in the study of dynamics, for instance, Mather's c-equivalence cannot exist among different cohomology classes if they are not in a flat of the α-function (cf (Bernard 2002 Ann. Inst. Fourier 52 1533–68.)). In this paper, we show how to construct connecting orbits in autonomous systems, and propose a modified notion of c-equivalence. We also apply the result to construct diffusion orbits in an energy surface.
Friction stir welding of duplex stainless steels

Abstract Duplex stainless steels are successful in a variety of applications such as the food industry, petrochemicals and plants for desalination of seawater, where high corrosion resistance and high mechanical strength are required. However, the beneficial microstructure may change during fusion welding steps, and it can compromise the performance of these materials. Friction stir welding is a solid-state process avoiding typical problems concerning solidification such as solidification cracks, liquation and segregation of alloying elements. Superduplex stainless steels can avoid unbalanced proportions of ferrite and austenite, formation of secondary deleterious phases and grain growth of ferrite in the heat-affected zone. Consolidated friction stir welded joints with full penetration 6 mm thick were obtained for UNS S32101 and S32205 duplex and S32750 and S32760 superduplex stainless steels. The friction stir welds were submitted to tensile tests indicating an improvement of strength in welded joints, showing increased yield and tensile strength for all studied cases. Regarding the microstructural characterization, an outstanding grain refinement was observed in the welded joint, achieving grain sizes as small as 1 μm. This refinement was associated with the combination of microstructural restoration mechanisms in the dual-phase microstructure promoted by severe deformation associated with a high temperature during the welding process.
Studying the language of Dutch audio description: An example of a corpus-based analysis

The present paper aims to combine insights from Applied Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, Multimodality Research and Audiovisual Translation Studies in order to explore language use in a specific form of audiovisual translation, namely Audio Description (AD) for the blind and visually impaired. It is said that the communicative function of ADs and their multimodal context have a significant influence on the lexical, grammatical and syntactical choices describers make. This article aims to uncover these idiosyncratic linguistic patterns by conducting a quantitative and qualitative analysis of an annotated, audiovisual corpus of 39 Dutch films and series that have been released with AD in Flanders and the Netherlands. The paper analyses frequency lists, keywords, part-of-speech distributions and type-token ratios statistically and subsequently conducts a qualitative analysis taking systemic functional linguistics as a theoretical framework. The results confirm the hypothesis that the language of AD is idiosyncratic and highlight the most salient lexico-grammatical features characterising the language of Dutch AD.
Prevalence and determinants of non-communicable diseases in Saudi Arabia

Abstract Background Chronic diseases are considered the leading cause of mortality in Saudi Arabia. With a lack of national health surveillance systems, this study examines chronic disease prevalence and multimorbidity and their associated factors in Saudi Arabia. Methods Data was pooled from two cross-sectional national surveys conducted across the 13 regions of Saudi Arabia between March and July 2018. The study targeted Arabic speakers aged 18 years or older. The presence of chronic diseases was assessed according to self-reported medical diagnoses of chronic conditions. Multimorbidity was assessed based on the reported number of diseases (no condition, at least 1, and ≥ 2 conditions). Factors associated with chronic diseases’ presence were examined using regression analysis. Results Out of the total participants (N= 7,317), the most reported chronic conditions were cardiovascular diseases (15.1%) followed by respiratory diseases (14.16%). The multimorbidity prevalence (≥ 2 chronic conditions) was nearly 5.6% (n= 564). Factors found to be significantly associated with the presence of chronic diseases were age, gender, employment status, marital status, and smoking. The findings showed that those who rated their health as fair or poor were almost three times more likely to be diagnosed with at least one chronic condition (95% CI: 2.21 - 3.56, P <0.001). Conclusions The study found a proportion of Saudis living with chronic diseases and multimorbidity with the highest risk among elderly people. The study findings are useful in building a sustainable health surveillance system and designing effective health policies and interventions to tackle the burden of chronic disease in Saudi Arabia.
Cheat Detection Through Temporal Inference of Constrained Orders for Subsequences

For select domains and datasets, duplicates may be, in part or in whole, instances of cheating. We may specifically observe this for Sony's PlayStation Network (PSN) that services the world's most popular gaming platform. The key to cheat detection in like domains is the ability to perform temporal deduplication. Temporal data is increasingly prevalent and is not well suited to traditional similarity and distance-based deduplication techniques. We strengthen the well-established Adaptive Sorted Neighborhood Method (ASNM) with an approach for temporal data domains ($\text{ASNM}+\text{LCS}$) that applies ASNM, infers attribute metadata, and further detects duplicates through inference of temporal ordering requirements using Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) for records of a shared type. Using LCS, we split each record's temporal sequence into constrained and unconstrained sequences. We flag suspicious (errant) records that are non-adherent to the inferred constrained order and we flag a record as a duplicate if its unconstrained order, of sufficient length, matches that of another record. ASNM and $\text{ASNM}+\text{LCS}$ were evaluated against a labeled dataset of 22,794 records from PSN trophy data where duplication may be indicative of cheating. $\text{ASNM}+\text{LCS}$ F1 scores outperformed ASNM at every similarity threshold with at least 32% improvement. ASNM's best performance was an F1 of. 708 at the 0.99 threshold; $\text{ASNM}+\text{LCS}$ yielded an F1 of. 938. The significant performance improvement costs little overhead as $\text{ASNM}+\text{LCS}$ averaged only 3.79% additional runtime.
Potential occupational health effects of municipal solid waste management in Nigeria, the case of Lagos and Ibadan

Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM), which include generation of wastes, collection, transportation, recycling and reuse, and disposal poses threat to humans especially the waste handlers and managers and the entire ecosystem. In this study, relevant data and information about the health hazards associated with MSWM were gathered using structured questionnaires administered to three different categories of municipal solid waste (MSW) handlers namely; Domestic Waste Handlers (DWHs), Highway Waste Managers (HWMs) and Dumpsite Waste Managers and Scavengers (DWMSs) in Lagos and Ibadan. Site visits and interviews were conducted to evaluate the general health status of the waste managers and the current MSWM practises in the cities. The results showed that personal protective equipment were not used by many of the managers; wastes were not segregated at the point of generation and/or collection, waste from different sources such as industrial, agricultural, household, commercial etc., some of which contained hazardous materials were codisposed in open dumpsites. Thus, exposure of solid waste managers to hazardous substances in the waste stream was apparent, which might cause diseases such as skin infections among others as a result of improper and unsustainable MSWM. The lack of and none usage of personal protective equipment alongside with the ignorance of the waste handlers may results in occupational health hazards associated with MSWM. These people had suffered for ailments from occupational exposure to toxic, hazardous and infectious substances present in the waste stream. Hence, the needs for proper training, awareness raising and enlightenment of the waste handlers on the risks and health hazards of improper protection and haphazard solid waste management. The need for sustainable and integrated waste management is recommended. Keywords : Municipal solid waste, Health hazard, Dumpsite, Waste handler, Waste management
Effect of Women’s Role on Household Decision Making on Institutional Delivery of the recent Child in Nepal

Effect of Women’s Role on Household Decision Making on Institutional Delivery of the recent Child in Nepal Ramesh Adhikari, PhD Associate Professor, Geography and Population Department, Mahendra Ratna Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal Email: rameshipsr@gmail.com Accepted 15 June 2015 Nepalese women are behind than men in many areas, such as educational attainment, participation in decision-making and health service utilization, all of which have an impact on reproductive health outcomes. This paper explores effect of women's role on household decision making on institutional delivery of the child in Nepal Data as drawn from the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, 2011. The analysis is confined to women who had given birth in the five years preceding the survey (n=4,148). The net effect of women’s role on household decision making on institutional delivery after controlling for the effect of other predictors has been measured through multivariate logistic regression analysis. The findings indicate that institutional delivery was still very low in Nepal. Only two in five of the women (40%) had delivered their last child with health facilities. Notably, higher level of women’s role on household decision was associated with higher level of institutional delivery [adjusted odds ratio (aOR=1.20)] than their comparison group. It can be concluded that programs should aim to increase use of maternal health services by improving women’s role on household decision making so that the overall well-being of the family can be maintained and enhanced.