Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct measurement of piston friction of internal-combustion engines using the floating-liner principle

Piston–cylinder interactions account for a significant portion of frictional losses in an internal-combustion engine. This is mainly as the result of significant changes in the operating conditions (the load, the speed and the temperature) as well as the contact geometry and the encountered topography during a typical engine cycle. These changes alter the regime of lubrication which underlies the mechanisms of friction generation. The multi-variate interactive nature of the problem requires quite complex analyses which do not fully replicate the actual in-situ conditions. Therefore, there is a need for direct measurement of cyclic friction under controlled conditions. The paper describes the use of a novel floating-liner arrangement which is capable of direct measurement of friction, its transitory mechanisms, as well as determination of the regime of lubrication.
Performance management practices in lean manufacturing organizations: a systematic review of research evidence

Abstract This paper provides the first systematic look into the existing research on performance management (PM) practices employed in lean manufacturing organisations (LMOs). It adopts a systematic review method to examine the evidence generated in the period 2004 – 2015 and uses a comprehensive PM framework to synthesise the findings. The results suggest that PM practices that have the most prominent role in LMOs are those that, firstly, are located closest to front-line actions and, secondly, explicitly address operational realities. This calls into question the primacy of accounting-driven controls in LMOs, suggesting that operational controls may be more effective than top-down accounting-based PM practices. The results also confirm the bias towards operational-level issues but suggest that LMOs may integrate the operational and the strategic levels by using PM practices that drive organisational learning through employee involvement and engagement.
Proton transport through self-generated waves in impulsive flares

Energetic proton transport through self-generated Alfven waves in impulsive (γ-ray) flares is studied using the method of Monte Carlo simulations. Protons are traced inside a flux tube after they are released from a point source located inside the loop until they hit the boundary of the 1-D simulation box and escape. As they stream from the source towards the boundaries, the particles generate Alfven waves through the streaming instability. We consider both open and closed field lines. In the closed field line case, the escaping particles precipitate and produce observable secondary emissions; for the open field line, particles precipitate only from one end of the field line, and escape freely to the interplanetary medium from the other end. For a sufficiently large number of accelerated protons per unit area, n0VA/Ωp where n0 is the plasma density, VA the Alfven speed, and Ωp the proton gyro-frequency, the particle flux from the source produces a turbulent trap that expands at Alfven speed in both directions from the source. The resulting γ-ray emission from the loop legs consists of a precursor, related to the quick propagation of particles when the trap has not formed yet, and of a delayed brightening in the loop leg closer to the source, related to the opening of the turbulent trap as the self-generated waves reach the solar surface. For impulsive injections lasting L/(2VA), where L is the loop length, the second emission may be suppressed by adiabatic deceleration in the expanding turbulent trap. For open field lines, our model is capable of producing the small ratio of the numbers of interplanetary-to-interacting protons typically observed in impulsive flares, if the proton source is located close to the Sun.
ANA, RF and CRP in Patients with Rheumatic Symptoms (SLE and/or RA) in the King Abdul-Aziz Hospital-Jeddah-Saudi Arabia

Purpose of the research: This study was done to explore the ANA, RF and CRP in the patients with some of Rheumatic Symptoms Materials and methods: The studies were done for 103 patients with Rheumatic Symptoms and were included in this study and their sera tested for the presence of Antinuclear Antibody (ANA), Rheumatoid Factor (RF), and Creactive protein (CRP). Results: The results showed that 33% of the patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosis (SLE) had+ve ANA, the remainder 67% of patients were with Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), the incidence of SLE was 4: 1 female to male while of RA was 2: 1. The highest titers of ANA, RF, and CRP were in females. In the following age groups (10-14), (15-19) and (35-39) the incidence of SLE were in females only. No male or female with SLE in (40-44), (45-49) or (50-54). Conclusion: The patients cleared that most patients were harmed either by Rheumatoid Arthritis or +ve Anti- Nuclear Antibody when they had Systemic Lupus Erythematosis.
Does Corporate Performance Determine Capital Structure and Dividend Policy?

We present an integrated theory of capital structure and dividend policy in which both financial policy choices are driven by the same underlying factors and jointly determined as implicit governance mechanisms to allocate control over real (project choice) decisions between managers and investors. At one extreme is a very highly levered firm with very little equity. Such a firm puts the maximum control over project choice in the hands of investors. At the other extreme is an all-equity firm that pays no dividends. Such a firm puts maximum control in the hands of the manager. Between these two extremes is a continuum of control allocations determined by different debt-equity ratios and different dividend payout ratios. Higher debt-equity ratios and higher dividend payouts lead to greater investor control. Despite the absence of agency or asymmetric information problems, control matters because of a divergence of beliefs between the manager and investors that could lead to disagreement over the value-maximizing project choice. The extent of the potential disagreement depends upon the firm's prior performance. The manager sets the firm's dividend policy and capital structure to optimally trade off the value he attaches to being in control of project choice against the decline in stock price from taking control away from investors. We generate testable predictions from the theory and then test them empirically. These tests provide strong support for the theory.
Using Literature and Multiple Technologies in ESL Instruction

Many instructors are using literary texts along with language structure books in English as a Secondary Language (ESL) classrooms. Since literature is often written to portray a particular cultural or authentic experience, the material presented may not be familiar to ESL students. Also, the students may find such texts structurally complex and impossible to understand. To overcome these challenges, instructors need to implement strategies that will make the literary materials relevant and useful to student learning. The current study describes how multiple technologies were successfully employed in the presentation of Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart. In addition, ESL students’ reactions to the integration of technology in instruction were explored. Findings from this study have pedagogical implications for instructors who plan to incorporate literature and technology into their ESL curricula.
Property Rights, Oil and Income Levels: Over a Century of Evidence

We investigate the e¤ects of di¤erent regimes of control rights over oil exploitation on ag- gregate domestic income. We construct a new panel dataset on petroleum ownership struc- tures for up to 68 countries between 1867-2008, distinguishing among regimes of Domestic Control, Foreign Control, and international Partnerships. Results show that Partnerships tend to generate higher domestic income than Foreign and Domestic Control. This result is robust to controlling for political regimes (i.e. democracy, anocracy, autocracy), time e¤ects, and other factors. Existing theories of incomplete contracts capture several aspects, but not the general mechanism underlying the relationships between aggregate domestic income and control regimes in primary sectors.
A Causality Analysis of Coal Consumption and Economic Growth for China and India

China and India are the two countries with the strongest economic growth in the world. Meanwhile they consume much of the global coal to fuel their economic development. With coal burning as a major factor contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions, China and India are confronted with a dilemma of economic growth and environment protection. Will coal consumption reduction cause economic shocks? Is there a causal relationship between coal consumption and economic growth in China and India? In this paper Granger causality tests were used to examine the relationship between coal consumption and GDP in China and India, using data for the period from 1965 to 2006. It was found that a unidirectional causality from GDP to coal consumption existed in China while a unidirectional causality from coal consumption to GDP did in India. Therefore, developing cleaner and more efficient technologies is essential to reduce their CO2 emissions to reach sustainable development.
Nonlinear system identification of the dissolved oxygen to effluent ammonium dynamics in an activated sludge process

Aeration of biological reactors in wastewater treatment plants is important to obtain a high removal of soluble organic matter as well as for nitrification but requires a significant use of energy. It is hence of importance to control the aeration rate, for example, by ammonium feedback control. The goal of this report is to model the dynamics from the set point of an existing dissolved oxygen controller to effluent ammonium using two types of system identification methods for a Hammerstein model, including a newly developed recursive variant. The models are estimated and evaluated using noise corrupted data from a complex mechanistic model (Activated Sludge Model no.1). The performances of the estimated nonlinear models are compared with an estimated linear model and it is shown that the nonlinear models give a significantly better fit to the data. The resulting models may be used for adaptive control (using the recursive Hammerstein variant), gain-scheduling control, L2 stability analysis, and model based fault detection.
Local Group Velocity from the PSCz and BTP Surveys

Abstract We present a brief overview and preliminary measure of the Local Group velocity, using the PSCz survey together with its recently completed extension into the Galactic plane, the Behind The Plane (BTP) survey. The addition of the BTP has increased the total sky coverage from 84% to 93%, drastically reducing the systematic uncertainty in the direction of the local gravitational pull caused by incomplete sky coverage. We present methods that self-consistently determine the acceleration in the presence of redshift distortions. Preliminary results suggest that the dipole converges within the survey limiting depth. There is a large, but only marginally significant, component to the dipole arising at 180–200 h –1 Mpc.
Ants and people: a test of two mechanisms potentially responsible for the large‐scale human population–biodiversity correlation for Formicidae in Europe

Aim: Recent coarse‐scale studies have shown positive relationships between the biodiversity of plants/vertebrates and the human population. Little is known about the generality of the pattern for invertebrates. Moreover, biodiversity and human population might correlate because they both covary with other factors such as energy availability and habitat heterogeneity. Here we test these two non‐mutually exclusive mechanisms with ant species‐richness data from the Fauna Europaea.
Multi-source Transformer for Automatic Post-Editing

English. Recent approaches to the Automatic Post-editing (APE) of Machine Translation (MT) have shown that best re-sults are obtained by neural multi-source models that correct the raw MT output by also considering information from the corresponding source sentence. In this paper, we pursue this objective by exploiting, for the ﬁrst time in APE, the Transformer architecture. Our approach is much simpler than the best current solutions, which are based on ensembling multiple models and adding a ﬁnal hypothesis re-ranking step. We evaluate our Transformer-based system on the English-German data released for the WMT 2017 APE shared task, achieving results that outperform the state of the art with a simpler architecture suitable for industrial applications.
The importance of different spatial scales in determining structural and functional characteristics of deep-sea infauna communities

The urge to understand spatial distributions of species and communities and their causative processes has continuously instigated the development and testing of con- ceptual models in spatial ecology. For the deep sea, there is evidence that structural and functional characteristics of benthic communities are regulated by a multitude of biotic and environmental processes that act in concert on differ- ent spatial scales, but the spatial patterns are poorly under- stood compared to those for terrestrial ecosystems. Deep-sea studies generally focus on very limited scale ranges, thereby impairing our understanding of which spatial scales and as- sociated processes are most important in driving structural and functional diversity of communities. Here, we used an extensive integrated dataset of free-living nematodes from deep-sea sediments to unravel the importance of different spatial scales in determining benthic infauna communities. Multiple-factor multivariate permutational analyses were performed on different sets of community descriptors (struc- ture, structural and functional diversity, standing stock). The different spatial scales investigated cover two margins in the northeast Atlantic, several submarine canyons/channel/slope areas, a bathymetrical range of 700-4300 m, different sam- pling locations at each station, and vertical sediment profiles. The results indicated that the most important spatial scale for structural and functional diversity and standing stock vari- ability is the smallest one; infauna communities changed sub- stantially more with differences between sediment depth lay- ers than with differences associated to larger geographical or bathymetrical scales. Community structure differences were greatest between stations at both margins. Important regulat- ing ecosystem processes and the scale on which they occur are discussed. The results imply that, if we are to improve our understanding of ecosystem patterns of deep-sea infauna and the relevant processes driving their structure, structural and functional diversity, and standing stock, we must pay partic- ular attention to the small-scale heterogeneity or patchiness and the causative mechanisms acting on that scale.
Self-efficacy, mathematics’ anxiety and perceived importance: an empirical study with Portuguese engineering students

The accomplishment in mathematics has gained attention from educators and arises as an emerging field of study, including in engineering education. However, in Portugal, there is still incipient research in the area; so it is high time to explore factors that might enlighten the gap in the study of the relationship between Portuguese engineering students and the learning of mathematics. The main purpose of this study is to explore three factors identified in the literature as influencing the learning of mathematical concepts – self-efficacy, anxiety towards mathematics and perceived importance of mathematics – and search for differences by gender and by type of engineering course, a dimension not much reported in the literature but which was revealed as important in the team's previous research. Based on a sample of 140 undergraduate students of different engineering courses from University of Minho, results only identify differences in the type of course and not in gender. These results constitute a contribution and open new paths for future research in the engineering education.
A Novel Sparse Deep Belief Network for Unsupervised Feature Learning

Deep belief networks are currently the dominant technique for modeling the architectural depth of the brain, and can be trained efficiently by the greedy layer-wise unsupervised learning. Motivated by the evidence from analysis of the primate visual cortex, introducing the notion of sparsity encourages deep belief networks converge on images toward filters that closely resemble their biological counterparts [13], as well as improve the classification results obtained by subsequently built classifier using hidden representations. In this paper, we propose a novel version of sparse deep belief network for unsupervised feature extraction. Instead of constraining the expected activation of hidden units to the same low level of sparsity as in [13], we explicitly encourage the hidden units to be sparse by adding a L1 regularization term into the likelihood function of Restrict Boltzmann Machine (RBM). In the proposed approach, we do not need to determine the “sparse target” of hidden units beforehand, and therefore the sparsity level can be automatically learnt which is helpful for learning more discriminative features. Several experiments by extracting features from image datasets show that our approach learns hierarchical representations which mimicks computations in the cortical hierarchy, and obtains more discriminative representation than PCA and several basic algorithms of deep belief networks.
A Multi-Criteria-Based Guideline for Marked and Unmarked Pedestrian Crosswalks at Unsignalized Intersections

There have been controversial perceptions with respect to the use of marked pedestrian crosswalks at unsignalized intersections over the years. Several agencies tend to prefer marked crosswalks at most locations with the expectation of improving pedestrian mobility and safety. However, several studies conclude that marked crosswalks actually involve higher pedestrian accident rates than unmarked crosswalks. Such controversial claims make it difficult for state and local agencies to develop policies pertaining to pedestrian crosswalks. Existing guidelines for determining marked and unmarked crosswalk types are normally presented as descriptive statements or mostly relying on a single dominate factor like pedestrian volume. One of the major issues lies in the lack of comprehensive consideration and interpretation of all potential variables. A new guideline is presented to help select marked and unmarked crosswalks at unsignalized intersections with no traffic signals or stop signs on the major street approach. The guideline is based on a combination of revised multi-criteria decision analysis methodologies, PROMETHEE and the Analytical Hierarchy Process. A ranking score considering potential factors, including variables such as volume, speed limit, and pedestrian related crash records is produced to represent the likelihood of using a marked or unmarked crosswalk. The proposed guideline was further applied to a case study involving 32 unsignalized intersections in Nevada and the study showed promising results with the guideline.
Very Large Array H53α and H92α Line Observations of the Central Region of NGC 253

We present new VLA observations toward NGC 253 of the recombination line H53α (43 GHz) at an angular resolution of 1. ″5 × 1. ″0. The free-free emission at 43 GHz is estimated to be ~140 mJy, implying a star formation rate of 2 M☉ yr-1 in the nuclear region of this starburst galaxy. A reanalysis is made for previously reported H92α observations carried out with angular resolution of 1. ″5 × 1. ″0 and 0. ″36 × 0. ″21. Based on the line and continuum emission models used for the 1. ″5 × 1. ″0 angular resolution observations, the RRLs H53α and H92α are tracers of the high-density (~105 cm-3) and low-density (~103 cm-3) thermally ionized gas components in NGC 253, respectively. The velocity fields observed in the H53α and H92α lines (1.″5 × 1.″0) are consistent. The velocity gradient in the central ~18 pc of the NE component, as observed in both the H53α and H92α lines, is in the opposite direction to the velocity gradient determined from the CO observations. The enclosed virial mass, as deduced from the H53α velocity gradient over the NE component, is ~5 × 106 M☉ in the central ~18 pc region. The H92α line observations at high angular resolution (0.″36 × 0.″21) reveal a larger velocity gradient, along a P.A. ~ -45° on the NE component, of ~110 km s-1 arcsec-1. The dynamical mass estimated using the high angular resolution H92α data (~7 × 106 M☉) supports the existence of an accreted massive object in the nuclear region of NGC 253.
Impact of Human Resource Practices on Job Satisfaction in the Microfinance Industry

The microfinance industry has received great recognition in this epoch. The study of job satisfaction in microfinance industry has not been conducted to date. The aim of the study was to determine the impact of HR practices like job autonomy, as well as leadership behavior and team work on the job satisfaction of employees working in microfinance industry. The study also determines the level of job satisfaction between male and female employees. The sample of the study consisted of 102 employees working in KBL, TMFB and FMBL of Okara, Sahiwal and Pakpattan. The test used to find out the relations were correlation, regression and independent T-test. There was a positive and significant relationship between job autonomy, leadership behavior and team work and job satisfaction. Furthermore, it was found that female employees were more satisfied with their job than the male employees in this industry. Keywords: Human resource (HR) practices, job autonomy, leadership behavior, team work, job satisfaction, microfinance sector
CAN INERTIAL MEASUREMENT UNITS BE USED TO VALIDLY MEASURE PELVIS AND THORAX MOTION DURING CRICKET BOWLING

Identifying lumbar injury risk amongst cricket bowlers is a challenge to those involved in the sport. Bowling technique injury risk factors concerning thoracic and pelvic motion have been identified by previous research that used three-dimensional (3D) retroreflective (RR) motion analysis. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) are considered a feasible and more portable means of 3D motion analysis. However, the validity of IMU measurement of thorax and pelvis movement during bowling has not yet been fully determined. This study aimed to achieve this by comparing concurrent IMU and RR angle outputs. Results suggest that when RR coordinate systems are aligned with the IMUs’ there are no significant differences in cricket bowling relevant angle outputs. However, some differences arise when IMUs are compared to the anatomically derived RR angle outputs typically used in 3D analysis.
Institutions, Economic Growth, and Foreign Aid in Nepal

This paper investigates the dynamics of economic development in Nepal in the context of foreign aid, institutional change, and political instability. A brief historical account of the recent revolutions is provided to highlight the institutional background of the empirical analysis. Taking into account the time series properties of the variables of interest, the econometric analysis demonstrates that contrary to the results of some recent cross-section studies, foreign aid does contribute positively to economic development in Nepal. On the other hand, the estimation results reveal that “human capital” accumulation and political unrest have had little long term effect on per capita income.