Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Academic Stress among Undergraduate Students : The Case of Education Faculty at King Saud University

This study investigated the academic stressors experienced by the students at university. A total sample of 232 subjects participated in this study were obtained from faculty of education at KSU. Data were collected through selfadministered questionnaire which was randomly distributed to the students during lecture time. Data obtained were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation, and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The result showed that academic overloads, course awkward, inadequate time to study, workload every semester, exams awkward, low motivation, and high family expectations were drive moderately stress among students. It was also found that fear of failure is the major source of stress among undergraduate students. Moreover, the study found that there were positive correlation between religiosity sources and academic stress (r= .300**, p=.00). Lastly, the study found that there were no significant differences in academic stress among students with different, level of study and specializations.
The role of US organic certifiers in organic hotspot formation

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the formation of hotspots of organic operations (geographically close areas that have positively correlated high numbers of organic operations), paying particular attention to the role of the organic certifying agent. We analyze the association of county-level factors related to policy, economics, demographics and organic certifiers with the probability that a county is in a hotspot or coldspot (geographically close areas that have positively correlated low numbers of organic operations) of organic operations. The results suggest that a high presence of government run organic certifying agents, as well as a high presence of private organic certifying agents who provide outreach services, are both positively associated with the probability that a county belongs to a hotspot. Other factors, such as the level of property taxes and the distance of the county from the nearest interstate, are also significantly correlated with the probability that a county is in a hotspot. Understanding factors associated with organic hotspots is important given the surge in momentum in the organic industry and the concerns that demand for organic products may be outpacing domestic supply. In particular, understanding the role that certifiers play in the formation of organic hotspots is important, as certain services provided by certifiers may be indicative of the level of communication between organic operations and their communities. The results of this paper may encourage public institutions that approve and regulate organic certifiers to provide incentives for offering outreach services, and private institutions interested in promoting organic operations to work more closely with certifying agents as a means to boost organic hotspots.
Applying Benford’s Law to Detect Accounting Data Manipulation in the Banking Industry

We utilise Benford’s Law, which predicts the frequencies in different digits in data, to test if balance sheet and income statement data used to assess bank soundness were manipulated prior to, and also during, the global financial crisis. We find that banks adjust loan loss provisions to manipulate earnings and income upwards. Distressed institutions that have stronger incentives to conceal their financial difficulties also manipulate loan loss allowances and non-performing loans downwards. Moreover, manipulation is magnified during the crisis and expands to encompass regulatory capital.
Measuring sputter yields of ceramic materials

*† ‡ § This paper describes the sputter yield measurements on isolating materials. To avoid charging of the non-conducting target a neutralizer is employed. The target current is determined from reference measurements of a material with known sputter yield. Strong effects of the neutralizing electrons on the ion beam properties at the target were found. Therefore, a comprehensive characterization of the ion properties at the target has been performed. The sputter yield of quartz, alumina (Al2O3) and boron nitride (BN) under normal xenon ion incidence has been measured in the energy range 100 to 800 eV.
Hashimoto thyroiditis in children and adolescents : evaluation of clinical and laboratory findings

Sum mary Aim: The objective of this study was retrospective analysis of clinical and laboratory findings of children and adolescents with Hashimoto thyroiditis. Material and Method: We evaluated 78 patients with HT who were between 4-17 years of age. Physical examination and family history of the patients, thyroid functions, auto-antibody titers and USG scans were evaluated retrospectively. Results: Two (2.6%) patients presented with hyperthyroidism, while 10 (11.7%), 17 (21.8%) and 49 (62.8%) patients presented with hypothyroidism, subclinical hypothyroidism and euthyroidism, respectively. The major symptoms included nervousness, sweating, weight gain and loss of appetite. Sixty-three (80.8%) patients had goiter and 52 (66.7%) patients had positive anti-thyroid peroxidase antibody at the time of diagnosis. Among the 19 patients who were euthyroid initially, 2 patients became hyperthyroid, 1 became hypothyroid and 1 became subclinically hypothyroid during follow-up. Familial history of thyroid disease was found in 31 (39%) patients. Conclusions: Clinical and laboratory findings may vary at the time of diagnosis and during follow-up in children and adolescents with HT. Periodic monitoring of the patients is very important. (Turk Arch Ped 2011; 46: 309-13)
Automatic Stroke Lesion Segmentation With Limited Modalities

MRI Brain image segmentation is a valuable tool in the diagnosis and treatment of many different types of brain damage. There is a strong push for development of computerized segmentation algorithms that can automate this process because segmentation by hand requires a great deal of effort by a highly skilled professional. While hand segmentation is currently considered the gold standard, it is not without flaws; for example, segmentation by two different people can provide slightly different results, and segmentation by hand is labor intensive. Due to these flaws, It is desirable to make this process more consistent and more efficient through computer automation. This project investigates four promising approaches for the automatic segmentation of brain MRIs containing stroke lesions found in recent literature. Two of these algorithms are designed to use multiple modalities of the same patient during segmentation, while the other two are designed to handle one specific modality. The robustness of each to limited, or different, image sequences than they were originally designed for will be tested by applying each to two datasets that contain 24 and 36 patients with chronic stroke lesions. These tests concluded that performance for the multi modal algorithms does tend to decrease as input modalities are removed, however it also revealed that FLAIR imaging in particular seems to be especially valuable for segmenting stroke lesions. In both multi-modal algorithms while there was an overall drop in Dice scores, any testing that included FLAIR images performed significantly better than any other tests. The single channel algorithms had difficulty segmenting any modalities different from the specific one that they were designed for, and were generally unable to detect very small lesions.
A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus

Evidence is offered for arsenate replacing phosphate as a molecular building block in a Mono Lake, California, bacterium. Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Although these six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically possible that some other elements in the periodic table could serve the same functions. Here, we describe a bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae, isolated from Mono Lake, California, that is able to substitute arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth. Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins. Exchange of one of the major bio-elements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical importance.
Historical Biogeography of the New-World Pupfish Genus Cyprinodon (Teleostei: Cyprinodontidae)

Abstract Analysis of mtDNA sequence variation (2,548 bp from ND2, cytb, and part of the control region) indicates that the genus Cyprinodon began diverging in the Late Miocene from a common ancestor with Megupsilon, a monotypic genus on the Mesa del Norte of Mexico. The geographic pattern of mtDNA variation, with estimates of divergence time, suggests that by the end of the Miocene Cyprinodon occurred from the Atlantic Coast and West Indies to near the western margin of North America via ancestral Rio Grande and Colorado River systems. Phylogeographic structure within the major mtDNA complexes supports a variety of hypotheses from geology and previous phylogenetic analyses for Late Neogene connections among basins in southwestern North America now separated by formidable barriers to dispersal. Comparison of the mtDNA tree with previous phylogenetic inferences from allozymes indicates that reticulate evolution involving divergent lineages probably was important in the history of Cyprinodon.
Doped Fiber Amplifier Characteristic Under Internal and External Perturbation

Significant effort has been made in recent years to improve the Doped Fiber amplifier gain and noise figure. Extend the optical bandwidth of doped fiber amplifiers beyond the traditional 1550nm band, making the excellent EDFA characteristics available in a wider spectral region also was the main effort in optical amplifier fields. Several techniques have been developed to improve gain and shift the gain to the shorter wavelength region. In this chapter, the effects of external perturbation such as macro-bending and fiber length and internal perturbation such as transversal distribution profile and doped concentration on doped fiber performance have been demonstrated (S.D.Emami et al., 2010). A macro-bending approach is demonstrated to increase a gain and noise figure at a shorter wavelength region of EDFA. The conventional double-pass configuration is used for the EDFA to obtain a higher gain with a shorter length and lower pump power. The macrobending suppresses the ASE at longer wavelength to achieve a higher population inversion at shorter wavelengths. Without the bending, the peak ASE at 1530nm, which is a few times higher than the ASE at the shorter wavelength, would deplete the population inversion and suppresses the gain in this region. Macro-bending is introduced as a new method to increase gain flatness and bandwidth of EDFA in C-band region. Varying the bending radius and doped fiber length leads to the optimized condition with flatter and broader gain profile. Under the optimized condition, gain at shorter wavelengths is increased due to increment of population inversion which results in gain reduction in the longer wavelength regions. The balance of these two effects in the optimized condition has a significant result in achieving a flattened and broadened gain profile. This technique is also capable to compensate the fluctuation in operating temperatures due to proportional temperature sensitivity of absorption cross section and bending loss of the aluminosilicate EDF . This new approach can be used to design a temperature insensitive EDFA for application in a real optical communication system which operates at different environments but still maintaining the gain characteristic regardless of temperature variations. The effect of macro-bending on high concentration EDFA using optimized
Motor Processes in Children's Mental Rotation

Previous studies with adult human participants revealed that motor activities can influence mental rotation of body parts and abstract shapes. In this study, we investigated the influence of a rotational hand movement on mental rotation performance from a developmental perspective. Children at the age of 5, 8, and 11 years and adults performed a mental rotation task while simultaneously rotating their hand (guided by a handle). The direction of the manual rotation was either compatible or incompatible with the direction of the mental rotation. Response times increased with increasing stimulus orientation angles, indicating that participants of all age groups used mental rotation to perform the task. A differential effect of the compatibility of manual rotation and mental rotation was found for 5-year-olds and 8-year-olds, but not for 11-year-olds and adults. The results of this study suggest that the ability to dissociate motor from visual cognitive processes increases with age.
PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ GOAL ORIENTATIONS ACROSS THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Education PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ GOAL ORIENTATIONS ACROSS THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING By Evelyn S. Chiang May 2004 Chair: Bridget A. Franks Major Department: Educational Psychology Within the framework of achievement goal theory, students vary according to their reasons for engaging in academic tasks and behaviors. Consequently, they differ in terms of academic outcomes such as self-regulation, task selection, persistence, and affect. One factor that is associated with student goal adoption is perception of the classroom goal structure. Teachers’ goals, beliefs, and approaches to instruction are instrumental in creating the classroom goal structure. However, little research has explored factors that may predict these teacher variables. There is preliminary evidence to suggest that teachers’ goal-oriented approaches to instruction are associated with their perceptions of the wider school climate. In this study, the goals of pre-service teachers are examined across two contexts: as learners in their teacher certification programs and as teachers in their early elementary or elementary internship classrooms. Potential predictors of these goals across contexts were examined. Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of the goal structure of their respective teacher certification programs were significantly related to
ALGORITHMIC DERIVATION OF NILPOTENT CENTERS

To characterize when a nilpotent singular point of an analytic differential system is a center is of particular interest, first for the problem of distinguishing between a focus and a center, and after for studying the bifurcation of limit cycles from it or from its period annulus. We give an effective algorithm in the search of necessary conditions for detecting nilpotent centers based in recent developments. Moreover we survey the last results on this problem and illustrate our approach by means of examples.
W phase source inversion for moderate to large earthquakes (1990–2010)

Rapid characterization of the earthquake source and of its effects is a growing field of interest. Until recently, it still took several hours to determine the first-order attributes of a great earthquake (e.g. M_w ≥ 7.5), even in a well-instrumented region. The main limiting factors were data saturation, the interference of different phases and the time duration and spatial extent of the source rupture. To accelerate centroid moment tensor (CMT) determinations, we have developed a source inversion algorithm based on modelling of the W phase, a very long period phase (100–1000 s) arriving at the same time as the P wave. The purpose of this work is to finely tune and validate the algorithm for large-to-moderate-sized earthquakes using three components of W phase ground motion at teleseismic distances. To that end, the point source parameters of all M_w ≥ 6.5 earthquakes that occurred between 1990 and 2010 (815 events) are determined using Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks, Global Seismographic Network broad-band stations and STS1 global virtual networks of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Data Management Center. For each event, a preliminary magnitude obtained from W phase amplitudes is used to estimate the initial moment rate function half duration and to define the corner frequencies of the passband filter that will be applied to the waveforms. Starting from these initial parameters, the seismic moment tensor is calculated using a preliminary location as a first approximation of the centroid. A full CMT inversion is then conducted for centroid timing and location determination. Comparisons with Harvard and Global CMT solutions highlight the robustness of W phase CMT solutions at teleseismic distances. The differences in M_w rarely exceed 0.2 and the source mechanisms are very similar to one another. Difficulties arise when a target earthquake is shortly (e.g. within 10 hr) preceded by another large earthquake, which disturbs the waveforms of the target event. To deal with such difficult situations, we remove the perturbation caused by earlier disturbing events by subtracting the corresponding synthetics from the data. The CMT parameters for the disturbed event can then be retrieved using the residual seismograms. We also explore the feasibility of obtaining source parameters of smaller earthquakes in the range 6.0 ≤_Mw < 6.5. Results suggest that the W phase inversion can be implemented reliably for the majority of earthquakes of Mw= 6 or larger.
A Practical Client Application Based on Attribute Based Access Control for Untrusted Cloud Storage

One of widely used cryptographic primitives for the cloud application is Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) where users can have their own attributes and a ciphertext encrypted by an access policy. Though ABE provides many benefits, the novelty often only exists in an academic world and it is often difficult to find a practical use of ABE for a real application. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a cloud storage client application which supports the concept of ABE. Our proposed client provides an effective access control mechanism where it allows different types of access policy to be defined thus allowing large datasets to be shared by multiple users. Using different access policy, each user only needs to access only a small part of the big data. The goal of our experiment is to explore the right set of strategies for developing a practical ABE-based system. Through the implementation and evaluation, we have determined the various characteristics and issues associated with developing a practical ABEbased application.
The influence of over feeding sows during gestation on reproductive performance and pig growth to slaughter

feed levels for sows in early to mid gestation has been found to increase muscle fibre number in the semitendinosus muscle of progeny thereby increasing their growth rate and improving food efficiency. Sows (n = 238) blocked at mating on parity and weight were assigned at random to the following gestation feed allowances (1) 30 MJ DE/day throughout gestation, (2) as for 1 but with 60 MJ DE/day from day 25 to 50 of gestation, (3) as for 1 but with 60 MJ DE/day from day 50 to 80 of gestation, (4) as for 1 but with 60 MJ DE/day from day 25 to 80 of gestation and (5) as for 1 but with 45 MJ DE/day from day 80 to 112 of gestation. At weaning, three pigs (heavy, medium and light birth weight) were selected from each of 80 litters and penned individually. Feed intake and pig weight was recorded up to slaughter at c.157 days of age. Treatment had little effect on pig weight (P > 0.05), daily gain (P > 0.05) or feed conversion efficiency (P > 0.05). Carcass back-fat thickness measured at 6cm from the edge of the split back between the 3 rd and 4 th last rib was 10.6, 9.9, 9.2, 11.0 and 10.6 (s.e.d. 0.39mm; P < 0.05) for Treatments 1 through 5 respectively. Birth weight was 1.81, 1.51 and 1.15 (s.e.d. 0.025kg; P < 0.001), slaughter weight was 95.5, 96.0 and 88.0 (s.e.d. 2.09kg; P < 0.01) and carcass weight was 72.2, 72.8 and 66.2 (s.e.d. 1.61kg; P < 0.01) for heavy, medium and light birth weight pigs, respectively. Females and males had similar birth weight, slaughter weight and carcass weight. Kill out yield was 768 and 744 (s.e.d 2.0g/kg; P < 0.01) and lean meat yield was 597 and 584 (s.e.d. 3.4g/kg; P < 0.001) for females and males, respectively. In conclusion, increasing gestation feeding allowance had little effect on pig performance to slaughter but did reduce carcass fatness. Light birth weight pigs had a lighter live-weight at slaughter and lighter carcass weight than medium and heavy birth weight pigs which were similar in this regard.
Hydrological performance of extensive green roofs in New York City: observations and multi-year modeling of three full-scale systems

Green roofs can be an attractive strategy for adding perviousness in dense urban environments where rooftops are a high fraction of the impervious land area. As a result, green roofs are being increasingly implemented as part of urban stormwater management plans in cities around the world. In this study, three full-scale green roofs in New York City (NYC) were monitored, representing the three extensive green roof types most commonly constructed: (1) a vegetated mat system installed on a Columbia University residential building, referred to as W118; (2) a built-in-place system installed on the United States Postal Service (USPS) Morgan general mail facility; and (3) a modular tray system installed on the ConEdison (ConEd) Learning Center. Continuous rainfall and runoff data were collected from each green roof between June 2011 and June 2012, resulting in 243 storm events suitable for analysis ranging from 0.25 to 180 mm in depth. Over the monitoring period the W118, USPS, and ConEd roofs retained 36%, 47%, and 61% of the total rainfall respectively. Rainfall attenuation of individual storm events ranged from 3 to 100% for W118, 9 to 100% for USPS, and 20 to 100% for ConEd, where, generally, as total rainfall increased the per cent of rainfall attenuation decreased. Seasonal retention behavior also displayed event size dependence. For events of 10–40 mm rainfall depth, median retention was highest in the summer and lowest in the winter, whereas median retention for events of 0–10 mm and 40 +mm rainfall depth did not conform to this expectation. Given the significant influence of event size on attenuation, the total per cent retention during a given monitoring period might not be indicative of annual rooftop retention if the distribution of observed event sizes varies from characteristic annual rainfall. To account for this, the 12 months of monitoring data were used to develop a characteristic runoff equation (CRE), relating runoff depth and event size, for each green roof. When applied to Central Park, NYC precipitation records from 1971 to 2010, the CRE models estimated total rainfall retention over the 40 year period to be 45%, 53%, and 58% for the W118, USPS, and ConEd green roofs respectively. Differences between the observed and modeled rainfall retention for W118 and USPS were primarily due to an abnormally high frequency of large events, 50 mm of rainfall or more, during the monitoring period compared to historic precipitation patterns. The multi-year retention rates are a more reliable estimate of annual rainfall capture and highlight the importance of long-term evaluations when reporting green roof performance.