Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SOCIAL LIFE CONNECTS THE WORLD: MALAYSIAN YOUTH'S USAGE BEHAVIOUR OF SOCIAL NETWORK SITES

The recent trend of using social network sites (SNS) is a globally widespread phenomenon. SNS such as Facebook, Friendster, MySpace and Twitter are popular among millions of users around the globe. SNS are used to build relationships, to communicate and share information, multimedia contents and daily happenings, and to increase their social networks for personal or business purposes. Thus, this study aims to investigate the main reasons for using SNS among Malaysian youth and their usage behaviour. In particular, this study also intends to look into their attitude towards SNS, and their overall usage experience. The investigation for this study is guided by the theoretical framework of Uses and Gratifications. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses, using survey and personal interview research, are employed to examine the uses and usage behaviours of SNS among Malaysian youth.
The category size bias: A mere misunderstanding

Redundant or excessive information can sometimes lead people to lean on it unnecessarily. Certain experimental designs can sometimes bias results in the researcher’s favor. And, sometimes, interesting effects are too small to be studied, practically, or are simply zero. We believe a confluence of these factors led to a recent paper (Isaac & Brough, 2014, JCR). This initial paper proposed a new means by which probability judgments can be led astray: the category size bias, by which an individual event coming from a large category is judged more likely to occur than an event coming from a small one. Our work shows that this effect may be due to instructional and mechanical confounds, rather than interesting psychology. We present eleven studies with over ten times the sample size of the original in support of our conclusion: We replicate three of the five original studies and reduce or eliminate the effect by resolving these methodological issues, even significantly reversing the bias in one case (Study 6). Studies 7–8c suggest the remaining two studies are false positives. We conclude with a discussion of the subtleties of instruction wording, the difficulties of correcting the record, and the importance of replication and open science.
The politics of aspiration: neo-liberal education policy, ‘low’ parental aspirations, and primary school Extended Services in disadvantaged communities

Geographical research on education has grown rapidly in both volume and scope during the first decade of the twenty-first century, and one relatively new theme to emerge from this growing literature is that of education and aspiration. Much of the nascent interest in aspiration concerns access to quality schooling and University education. In this paper by contrast we highlight the importance of studying the ways aspirations are (re)produced within the school community. Our empirical focus is on low-income England under New Labour. Here we pursue a two-fold approach: firstly examining how education professionals define parental aspirations for primary-aged children as low; before secondly considering their alternative understandings of appropriate aspirations and the practices through which they seek to promote these, both in school and through the use of Extended Services for parents and children. In conclusion we highlight the importance of inward and outward geographies of education which ‘recouple’ schools with their social context, and discuss the moral and political ambiguities involved in practices designed to raise aspirations.
Is faster economic growth compatible with reductions in carbon emissions? The role of diminished population growth

We provide evidence that lower fertility can simultaneously increase income per capita and lower carbon emissions, eliminating a trade-off central to most policies aimed at slowing global climate change. We estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions, accounting for the fact that changes in fertility patterns affect carbon emissions through three channels: total population, the age structure of the population, and economic output. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we estimate the elasticity of carbon emissions with respect to population and income per capita in an unbalanced yearly panel of cross-country data from 1950–2010. We demonstrate that the elasticity with respect to population is nearly seven times larger than the elasticity with respect to income per capita and that this difference is statistically significant. Thus, the regression results imply that 1% slower population growth could be accompanied by an increase in income per capita of nearly 7% while still lowering carbon emissions. In the second part of our analysis, we use a recently constructed economic-demographic model of Nigeria to estimate the effect of lower fertility on carbon emissions, accounting for the impacts of fertility on population growth, population age structure, and income per capita. We find that by 2100 C.E. moving from the medium to the low variant of the UN fertility projection leads to 35% lower yearly emissions and 15% higher income per capita. These results suggest that population policies could be part of the approach to combating global climate change.
Daily Human Physical Activity Recognition Based on Kernel Discriminant Analysis and Extreme Learning Machine

Wearable sensor based human physical activity recognition has extensive applications in many fields such as physical training and health care. This paper will be focused on the development of highly efficient approach for daily human activity recognition by a triaxial accelerometer. In the proposed approach, a number of features, including the tilt angle, the signal magnitude area (SMA), and the wavelet energy, are extracted from the raw measurement signal via the time domain, the frequency domain, and the time-frequency domain analysis. A nonlinear kernel discriminant analysis (KDA) scheme is introduced to enhance the discrimination between different activities. Extreme learning machine (ELM) is proposed as a novel activity recognition algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed KDA based ELM classifier can achieve superior recognition performance with higher accuracy and faster learning speed than the back-propagation (BP) and the support vector machine (SVM) algorithms.
Observational biases in flux magnification measurements

Flux magnification is an interesting complement to shear-based lensing measurements, especially at high redshift where sources are harder to resolve. One measures either changes in the source density (magnification bias) or in the shape of the flux distribution (e.g. magnitude-shift). The interpretation of these measurements relies on theoretical estimates of how the observables change under magnification. Here we present simulations to create multi-band photometric mock catalogues of Lyman-break galaxies in a CFHTLenS-like survey that include several observational effects that can change these relations, making simple theoretical estimates unusable. In particular, we show how the magnification bias can be affected by photometric noise, colour selection, and dust extinction. We find that a simple measurement of the slope of the number-counts is not sufficient for the precise interpretation of virtually all observations of magnification bias. We also explore how sensitive the shift in the mean magnitude of a source sample in different photometric bands is to magnification including the same observational effects. Again we find significant deviations from simple analytical estimates. We also discover a wavelength-dependence of the magnitude-shift effect when applied to a colour-selected noisy source sample. Such an effect can mimic the reddening by dust in the lens. It has to be disentangled from the dust extinction before the magnitude-shift/colour-excess can be used to measure the distribution of either dark matter or extragalactic dust. Using simulations like the ones presented here these observational effects can be studied and eventually removed from observations making precise measurements of flux magnification possible.
The Local Authority Infrastructure Provision Practice in Malaysia: The Role of Private Developers

Local authorities are turning to the private sectors to achieve their objective of providing local infrastructures for effective management of the local areas. Private sector and local authority have good understanding of the fundamental concept of local infrastructure provision. Despite this understanding, there are still considerable lapses of what best practice and method to adopt in the provision of local infrastructure. This study therefore examined the role of private developers in local infrastructure and the practices used by local authorities for infrastructural procurement in Malaysia. 22 local authorities and 16 developers were selected through purposive sampling method, and data collected using questionnaires was analysed using the descriptive analysis technique. The findings revealed that joint venture and complete public delivery systems; negotiations are the most commonly adopted practices and successful method applied by the local authority to securing infrastructure. One major weakness expressed by majority of the developers is difficulty to promote private sector involvement in local infrastructure development due to unregulated-procedure. This study therefore recommends that local authorities should not only be concerned on collaborative and joint approach but also in developing a well-coordinated structure and system of operations. Keywords: Local authority, Infrastructure provision, Practice. JEL Classifications: H75, H7
Asymptotics for the minimum Riesz energy and best-packing on sets of finite packing premeasure

We show that for every compact set A ⊂ Rm of finite α -dimensional packing premeasure 0 α ) coincides with the outer measure of A constructed from this limit by method I. The asymptotic behavior of the discrete minimum energy on compact subsets of a self-similar set K satisfying the open set condition is also studied for s greater than the Hausdor dimension of K. In addition, similar problems are studied for the best-packing radius.
Research Unit of Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Atmospheric Composition and Climate Change: overview of recent results

In this paper we present research methods and recent results obtained within activities of the Research Unit of Physics Chemistry and Biology of Atmospheric Composition and Climate Change, which is one of the centres of excellence of the Academy of Finland. The centre forms an integrated attempt to understand various, but interlinked, biosphere–atmosphere interactions applying inter- and multidisciplinary approaches in a coherent manner. The main disciplines used cover aerosol and environmental physics, atmospheric chemistry and physics, micrometeorology, forest ecology and ecophysiology. The main objective of the centre is to study the importance of aerosol particles on climate change. Our scientiﬁc approach that starts from basic nucleation theories, is followed by detailed aerosol dynamic/atmospheric chemistry models and well-deﬁned laboratory experiments, and ends with wide continuous ﬁeld measure-ments in our research stations and 3D modelling. During the last years the joint efforts within our centre of excellence and the Nordic centres of excellence BACCI (devoted to atmospheric physics and chemistry) and NECC (devoted to carbon balance of northern ecosystems) have increased strongly. A thorough understanding of physi-cal, meteorological, chemical and ecophysiological processes obtained by individual research groups lays the foundation of a unique possibility to study biosphere–aero-sol–cloud–climate interactions, or the interplay between carbon exchange, BVOC emissions and formation of new aerosol particles. The necessary requirement is jointly working, real inter-, multi- and cross disciplinary teams. The core of activities is in continuous measurements and database of atmospheric and ecological mass ﬂuxes and aerosol precursors and CO
Benefits of Biotic Pollination for Non-Timber Forest Products and Cultivated Plants

Biodiversity supplies multiple goods and services to society and is critical for the support of livelihoods across the globe. Many indigenous people depend upon non-timber forest products (NTFP) and crops for a range of goods including food, medicine, fibre and construction materials. However, the dependency of these products on biotic pollination services is poorly understood. We used the biologically and culturally diverse Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in India to characterise the types of NTFP and crop products of 213 plant species and asses their degree of dependency on animal pollination. We found that 80 per cent of all species benefited from animal pollination in their reproduction, and that 62 per cent of crop products and 40 per cent of NTFP benefited from biotic pollination in their production. Further we identified the likely pollinating taxa documented as responsible for the production of these products, mainly bees and other insects. A lower proportion of indigenous plant products (39 per cent) benefited from biotic pollination than products from introduced plants (61 per cent). We conclude that pollinators play an important role in the livelihoods of people in this region.
Designing the User Interface (3rd Ed.)

Designing the User Interface is intended primarily for designers, managers, and evaluators of interactive systems. It presents a broad survey of designing, implementing, managing, maintaining, training, and refining the user interface of interactive systems. The book's second audience is researchers in human-computer interaction, specifically those who are interested in human performance with interactive systems. These researchers may have backgrounds in computer science, psychology, information systems, library science, business, education, human factors, ergonomics, or industrial engineering; all share a desire to understand the complex interaction of people with machines. Students in these fields also will benefit from the contents of this book. It is my hope that this book will stimulate the introduction of courses on user-interface design in all these and other disciplines. Finally, serious users of interactive systems will find that the book gives them a more thorough understanding of the design questions for user interfaces. My goals are to encourage greater attention to the user interface and to help develop a rigorous science of user-interface design.
Knowledge Creation in Family Businesses and Its Importance for Building and Sustaining Competitive Advantage during and after Succession

The family business’s tacit knowledge, embedded in its founder, and its transmission is found to be important for building and sustaining competitive advantage since this type of knowledge is difficult to trade and imitate, scarce, appropriable and specialized. The purpose of our research was to broadening our understanding of family businesses tacit knowledge and its creation during the succession process by applying the concept of knowledge creation through so called SECI process. The case study-based findings showed that founders and successors find mentoring, internal/individual training, and involving in the meetings with business partners as the most used knowledge creating activities. We suggest that tacit knowledge creation during succession should be placed in broader context of organizational knowledge creation in order to raise the total quality of successor’s knowledge and adding new knowledge thus contributing to building family business’s competitive advantage.
FACTORS INFLUENCING QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG INFERTILE WOMEN

Background and Aim : Fertility is highly valued in most cultures, and the desire to have a child is essential for human motivation. Studies have shown that infertility has negative effects on quality of life. However, recognition of factors influencing quality of life may be useful in planning to improve it. The aim of this study was to investigate quality of life and influential factors among infertile women. Material and Method : This study had correlational design in which 3 types of questionnaires was used to collect data about demographic factors, quality of life and irrational parenthood cognitions of the participants. One hundred forty seven infertile women without known physical or psychological disorders, selected by continuous sampling method, filled out questionnaires. Results : Regarding the findings, the quality of life of 48.3%, 36.1% and 15.6% of samples were good, fair and poor, respectively. Also, statistically meaningful relationship were found between quality of life and history of infertility treatment (P= 0.011), strength of desire to have child (P<0.0001), previous pregnancy outcome (P=0.04), and irrational parenthood cognitions (P<0.0001) . Conclusion : Quality of life of infertile women could be affected by the irrational parenthood cognitions mostly. So, identifying this group would result in better management for allocation of appropriate counseling. The researchers suggest comparative study of quality of life between infertile and fertile women.
Payout Policy and Owners’ Interests: Evidence from German Savings Banks

The savings banks' decision to distribute profits among their public owners is strongly regulated by law in order to guarantee their adequate funding via retained profits. However, the legal scope is reluctantly exhausted. In this study we examine the determinants of the savings banks' payout decision in more detail. We find that besides internal determinants also external factors regarding the savings bank's public owner have strong explanatory power. The better the financial situation of the public owner, the less likely is the savings bank to distribute profits and to increase payouts, respectively.
Aquatic Living Resources Bioaccumulation and ultrastructural alterations of gill and liver in Asian sea bass , Lates calcarifer ( Bloch ) in sublethal copper exposure

Bioaccumulation and ultrastructural alterations in gill and liver tissues of 3-month old Asian sea bass, Lates calcarifer, in response to copper were studied by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Fishes were exposed to two sublethal concentrations of copper (6.83 ppm and 13.66 ppm) for a period of 28 days. Accumulation of copper were higher in the liver followed by gills. The damaging effects of the histoarchitecture of gill tissues in coper-exposed sea bass were hypertrophy and hyperplasia of epithelial cells, severe oedema, telangiectasia and secondary lamellar fusion. In addition extensive vasodilation with stretching and necrosis of pillar cells were also noted. The liver showed hydropic swelling of hepatocytes with nuclear pyknosis and chromatin condensation. Blood congestion in sinusoids and accumulations of lipid droplets in the hepatocytes at higher concentrations were observed.
Effects of Soil Application of Neem on Some Biological Characteristics of Myzus persicae (Sulzer) (Hemiptera: Aphididae)

The study investigated the effect of soil application of neem at different concentrations on lifetable parameters of Myzus persicae (Sulzer) (Hemiptera: Aphididae). After pepper seedlings were transplanted to pots of 1.5 L, the pepper plants had been divided into five different groups to be watered with only irrigation water (as control) and irrigation water containing 250, 500, 750 and 1000 mg L-1 of neem. Based on the results, intrinsic rate of increase (rm), net production rate (R0) and mean generation time (T0) ranged from 0.039 to 0.352 female/female/day, 1.700 to 57.295 female/female and 11.503 to 15.086 days respectively. Doubling time (T2) and finite rate of increment (λ) ranged from 1.970 to 17.915 days and 1.039 to 1.422 individual/female/day, respectively. Consequently, the effect of neem on biological characters of the pest was increased in response to the increase in neem concentration applied systemically through plant root.
Corporate Environmental Performance, Disclosure and Leverage: An Integrated Approach

Corporate capital financing decisions are an integral part of overall corporate strategy. This study analyses the effect of environmental performance and disclosure on the capital structure of U.S. firms in the electric utility industry. The hypothesized relationships account for endogeneity in the three factors of strategy and are estimated using a simultaneous equations model. Our results suggest that firms with lower toxics emissions exhibit higher leverage and voluntary disclosure and that leverage is negatively associated with disclosure.
Citotoxic activity evaluation of essential oils and nanoemulsions of Drimys angustifolia and D. brasiliensis on human glioblastoma (U-138 MG) and human bladder carcinoma (T24) cell lines in vitro

The species Drimys angustifolia Miers and D. brasiliensis Miers, commonly known as "casca-de-anta", have in their leaves essential oils that can confer cytotoxic effects. In this study, we evaluated the citotoxic effects of the volatile oils from these two species. We also proposed a nanoemulsion formulation for each of the species and assessed the in vitro cytotoxicity on U-138 MG (human glioblastoma) and T24 (human bladder carcinoma) cell lines. The plant chemical composition was evaluated by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometer. Furthermore, the nanoemulsions were prepared and characterized. Our results showed that; bicyclogermacrene (19.6%) and cyclocolorenone (18.2%) were the most abundant for the D angustifolia oil and D brasiliensis oil, respectively. Both nanoemulsions, D angustifolia and D brasiliensis appeared macroscopically homogeneous and opalescent bluish liquids, with nanometric mean diameters of 168 nm for D brasiliensis and 181 nm for D angustifolia. The polydispersity indices were below 0.10, with an acid pH of 4.7-6.3, and negative zeta potentials about -34 mV. The results of transmission electron microscopy showed that droplets are present in the nanometer range. Only the D brasiliensis oil was efficient in reducing the cell viability of both U-138 MG (42.5%±7.0 and 67.8%±7.8) and T24 (33.2%±2.8, 60.3%±1.6 and 80.5%±8.8) cell lines, as assessed by MTT assay. Noteworthy, similar results were obtained with cell counting. Finally, D brasiliensis oil incubation caused an increase of annexin-V and propidium iodite population, according to evaluation by cytometry analysis, what is characteristic of late apoptosis. The results presented herein lead us to consider the potential therapeutic effects of the essential oils and nanoformulations as novel strategies to inhibit tumor growth.
Characterization of Electrical Transport in Lsmo with Enhanced Temperature of Metal-Insulator Transition

Characterization of Electrical Transport in Lsmo with Enhanced Temperature of Metal-Insulator Transition We have studied La0.67Sr0. 33MnO3 (LSMO) thin films with temperature of metal-insulator (TMI) transition enhanced to above 400 K, and we estimated characteristic electrical transport mechanisms for these films. We have fitted the measured resistivity vs. temperature ρ(T) dependence in a wide temperature range 4-500 K using different mechanisms of the electrical transport in different parts of ρ(T). In addition to the narrow temperature range around TMI very well agreement was found. We found out that the Debye's temperature was also increased (ΘD ≈ 840 K) probably due to the change in crystallization of LSMO films.