Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative study of infant and child mortality: The case of Kenya and South Africa

Comparisons of infant and child mortality between populations, both within and between countries, are important because they highlight causative factors of mortality, which can be addressed by health policies and programmes seeking to reduce high mortality at the young ages. Such information is useful for demographic assessment of the population and the evaluation of health policies and programmes. This study undertakes a comparative analysis of neonatal, post-neonatal and child mortality using the 1998 South African Demographic and Health Survey and the 2003 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey. Two methods of analysis are used in this study. First variations in infant and child mortality levels by population groups are investigated through bivariate analysis which forms the basis for the logistic analysis. The results from the bivariate analysis show the existence of linkages between mother’s and partner’s levels of education, literacy, urban/rural place of residence, ethnicity, birth order, age of mother at the time of birth of child, age of mother at first marriage, mother’s occupation, water supply and health facilities and their children’s survival chances. Logistic analysis revealed that ethnicity, type of toilet facilities, literacy and birth order explain most of the variations in infant and child mortality in Kenya while mother’s educational attainment and type of toilet facilities were the main variables of importance for South Africa. These findings have important implications on efforts to reduce gaps in mortality differentials. For example the existing socio-economic and demographic differentials in infant and child mortality in the two countries can be reduced through provision of equitable high quality education, proper sanitation, discouragement of early marriage and early childbearing among others.
The effect of student engagement on final grades, attendance and student experiences in large classroom in an undergraduate biology course at Memorial University

Especially during the first year in university absenteeism can have detrimental effects on grades, and I have witnessed this while teaching large undergraduate Biology classes. According to pedagogical literature altering teaching methods from lecturing toward engaging teaching, which applies various active teaching methods in the university classroom, can enhance learning, student participation, decrease absenteeism, and improve critical thinking and problem solving skills. In this research study, I used a combination of active learning activities and engaging teaching to prevent absenteeism, in an attempt to improve grades, and to enhance interest in Biology among students in large first year Introductory Biology classes. Results show that students were less absent from the class that used engaging teaching methods. Also, the conceptual understanding test showed a significant difference in pre- and post-test grades between the classes, the engagement class having the highest improvement. The student CLASSE survey indicated more interaction between faculty and students in the section that was taught using engaging methods. According to student focus group interviews, students in the engagement class appreciated the class activities and reported benefits for learning.
Does consumer sentiment predict consumer spending in Malaysia? an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach

The purpose of this paper is to determine the nature of relationship between consumer sentiment and consumer spending in the Malaysian context. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology is employed to test this relationship, controlling for information in other financial and economic indicators. The stability of the functions is tested by CUSUM and CUSUMQ and no structural break was found. Overall, the results show that the Consumer Sentiment Index does not have any predictive value on consumer spending either in the shortrun or in the long-run, although a cointegrating relationship exists between the variables.
Electricity Consumption and Economic Growth: Long-Term Co-Integrated Analysis on Turkey

Energy and especially electricity consumption is a variable that can be also considered as the indication of the social development as far as economic growth is concerned. Energy, as the input of the industry and other production branches, is an indication for the production increase; and also for consumption with regards to raising the living standards of the consumers. In literature with its situation, it is argued that the electricity consumption is included the mutual causality relation with the growth data in a long-term. As there are several empirical studies that support this hypothesis, in some economies, especially it may sometimes be concluded that the data of the energy utilization in the production area can negatively affect growth in the long-term. Therefore, the literature does not come to the agreed results for the relation between these two variables. In this study, the causality relations have been analyzed by dividing the electricity consumption into three categories; residential, industrial and others, based on the data of the Turkish economy. In the lights of the obtained findings, it is concluded that in long term, there is at most one long-term co-integrating vector between GDP and electricity consumed in residential and industrial areas and also two-way causality relation between GDP and electricity consumed in these sectors. In this case, electricity consumption can be considered as an indicator for both growth and social development.
Determinants of Short-term Volatility at the Warsaw Stock Exchange: In-sample vs. Out-of-sample Forecasts from Factor and Predictive GARCH Models *

The paper presents factor and predictive GARCH(1,1) models of the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) main index WIG. An approach where the mean equation of the GARCH model includes a deterministic part is applied. The models incorporate such explanatory variables as volume of trade and major international stock market indices. The paper exploits the direction quality measures that can be used as alternative measures to evaluate model goodness of fit. Finally, the in-sample versus the out-of-sample forecasts from the estimated models are compared and model forecasting performance is discussed.
Contracting debt and the quality of financial reporting in private firms

This study investigates whether the quality of firms’ financial reporting is influenced by the contracting of debt, using data on Portuguese private firms from 2013 to 2015. More specifically, the study uses earnings smoothing, magnitude of absolute discretionary accruals, and timeliness of disclosure as proxies for financial reporting quality. I find that private firms which contract more debt exhibit higher levels of financial reporting quality. Additionally, firms that contract larger amounts of debt and with a good financial performance tend to exhibit lower quality financial reporting. The results provide strong evidence that private firms have an interest in camouflaging their performance in the presence of higher levels of bank debt.
ACCURACY , CLARITY , AND READABILITY ( ACR ) IN HISTORICAL

Historical novel translation requires an advanced competence of translator in relation with the translation quality: how accurate, clear, and readable the translator tries to deliver the writer’s original message to his/her translation version for the readers. The more accurate, clear, and readable the translator’s version is, the easier comprehension of the text will be. This paper was an outline of descriptive research which has been conducted to analyze the translation quality assessment in translating historical romance novel Taj: A Story of Mughal India into Taj: Tragedi Di Balik Tanda Cinta Abadi by Maria M. Lubis. There were three variables factors used; the two novels as objective factor, the translator as genetic factor, and the raters as affective factor to analyze, compare, rate, and score the translation quality. The sentences, clauses, phrases that consisted Indian cultural terms from the two novels were chosen as the data. From the analysis, it was found that the translation quality of this translated novel is accurate, high clear, and high readable obviously effected by an eligible translator who has high level competence and performance in translating the novel.
Effectiveness of Systematic Desensitization through Eye Movement and Reprocessing on Reducing Severity of Major Depression in Women

The present study aims at measuring the effectiveness of systematic desensitization through eye movement and reprocessing (EMDR) on reducing the severity of major depression. EMDR is a kind of hybrid treatment which relates traumas and disorders to the way the brain processes and stores data, uses behavioral techniques such as simultaneous exposure to intentional and rapid movements of pupil and deals with cognitive restructuring. Methodology: experimental design of single subject was administered on four people suffering from major depression over five sessions using multi-step baseline design. Follow-ups happened quarterly and annually. Data collection tools included a self-made demographic inventory, depression and distress inventory and EMDR treatment tool and measurement scales of cognition validity and SUD. Findings: EMDR caused significant changes in both reduction of major depression and SUD and increase of higher level of trust in validity cognition. Conclusion: the results suggested that EMDR was effective in decreasing the rate of depression severity through cognitive and emotional reprocessing of traumatic memories and changing patients’ bias via building trust in validity cognition to the point that the intervention effect was maintained after three months and one year follow-ups.
Biometric Fish Classification of Nordic Species Using Convolutional Neural Network with Squeeze-and-Excitation

Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) is a technique within convolutional neural networks (CNN) that can be applied to existing CNNs by applying fullyconnected layers between convolutional layers and merging the outputs. SE was the winning architecture of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) in 2017. In this thesis, we propose a CNN using the SE architecture for classifying images of fish. Previous work in the field relies on applying filters to the images to separate the fish from the background or sharpen the images by removing background noise. The images from the dataset are extracted from underwater cameras and contain noise, which is why classifying these images is challenging. Different from conventional schemes, this approach is divided into two classification problems. The first approach is to classify fish from the Fish4Knowledge dataset without using image augmentation, and the second is to classify fish from a new dataset consisting of Nordic species. We name the first approach pre-training, and the second post-training. The weights from pre-training are applied to post-training. Our solution achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.27% accuracy on the pre-training. The accuracy on the post-training is lower with an accuracy of 83.68%. Experiments on the post-training with image augmentation yields an accuracy of 87.74%, indicating that the solution is viable with a larger dataset.
Interactive comment on “ Characterization of the sources and processes of organic and inorganic aerosols in New York City with a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer ” by Y .-L

This paper discusses observations of the atmospheric aerosol at a location in the city of New York, NY during the summer of 2009. There are a number of components to this paper, but a significant focus is the analysis of the high resolution aerosol mass spectra using PMF and other techniques. The strength’s of the paper are in the analysis of the high resolution mass spectra and discussion of diurnal variations of the analyzed components of the organic aerosol. There are also some weaknesses in my view as discussed in the major comments that follow. Major comments : 1) On page 22677, section 2.3. 1 you indicate that you use a CE of 0.5 across the entire dataset. This is a critical assumption that is not justified in the discussion. In one sentence (lines 8-11), the authors suggest that transmission and oven bounce issues are corrected by the simple application of a constant factor of 2. The atmospheric aerosol is composed of a variety of compounds (as you demonstrate) and size distributions. There have been many lab measurements that indicate the CE of pure dry ammonium sulphate is in the area of 0.25, whereas sulphuric acid is close to unity. AMS calibrations are done with pure ammonium nitrate in part because its CE is close to 1.0. Some studies have looked at the CE for pure organics, but organic components are many and varied. As well, evidence is mounting for the presence of organics in crystalline forms in the atmosphere and in general particle phases vary with ambient relative humidity and temperature (e.g. Matthew et al., AST, 2008). Particularly in urban areas, significant particle mass can reside in particles near the transmission limits of the AMS (as the authors demonstrate). Compositions vary with particle size also. So why should the CE for AMS’ be a constant at 0.5?
The Role of Personality Factors in Repeated Route Choice Behavior: Behavioral Economics Perspective

This paper is based on an in-laboratory experiment and aims to explore the impact of various personality factors on route-choice behavior in the presence of partial pre-trip travel time information. Specifically, these factors are geographic ability and sensation seeking characteristics. The results show that while the variables related to perceived and realized travel times are important, the personality factors are also significant. Drivers with lower geographic abilities tended to use the main route more often and to switch their routes less often, compared to those with higher capabilities. Drivers who scored higher on sensation seeking tended to switch their routes more frequently, compared to other drivers.
The Distribution of Individual Conformity under Social Pressure

This paper studies the aggregate distribution of declared opin- ions and behavior when heterogeneous individuals make the trade- obetween being true to their private opinions and conforming to an endogenous social norm. The model sheds light on how various punishment regimes induce conformity or law obedience, and by whom, and on phenomena such as societal polarization, unimodal concentration and alienation. In orthodox societies, in- dividuals will tend to either fully conform or totally ignore the social norm, while individuals in liberal societies will tend to com- promise between these two extremes. Furthermore, the degree of orthodoxy determines whether those who fairly agree with the norm or those who strongly disapprove it will conform. Like- wise, the degree of liberalism determines which individuals will compromise the most. In addition, orthodox societies may adapt norms that are skewed with respect to the private opinions in
An XMM-Newton view of FeKα in high-mass X-ray binaries

The work of A.G. G. has been supported by the Spanish MICINN under FPI Fellowship BES-2011-050874 associated to the project AYA2010-15431. This work was supported partially by the Generalitat Valenciana project number GV2014/088 and by the Vicerectorat d’Investigacio, Desenvolupament i Innovacio de la Universitat d’Alacant under grant GRE12-35. J.J.R.R. acknowledges the support by the Matsumae International Foundation fellowship No14G04.
Effects of Deposition Time on the Morphology, Structure, and Optical Properties of PbS Thin Films Prepared by Chemical Bath Deposition

Lead sulfide thin films were prepared by chemical bath deposition (CBD) on both glass and Si (100) substrates. XRD analysis of the PbS film deposited at 25°C showed that the prepared films have a polycrystalline structure with (200) preferential orientation. Larger grains could be obtained by increasing the deposition time. The prepared films were also chemically characterized using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), which confirmed the presence of lead and sulfur as PbS. While energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) technique was used to verify the stoichiometry of the prepared films. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to study the change in the films’ morphology with the deposition time. The effect of the deposition time, on both optical transmittance in the UV-Vis-NIR region and the structure of the film, was studied. The obtained results demonstrated that the optical band gap decreased when the thickness increased.
Numerical solution of the radiative transfer equation: X-ray spectral formation from cylindrical accretion onto a magnetized neutron star

Context. Predicting the emerging X-ray spectra in several astrophysical objects is of great importance, in particular when the observational data are compared with theoretical models. This requires developing numerical routines for the solution of the radiative equation according to the expected physical conditions of the systems under study. Aims. We have developed an algorithm solving the radiative transfer equation in the Fokker-Planck approximation when both thermal and bulk Comptonization take place. The algorithm is essentially a relaxation method, where stable solutions are obtained when the system has reached its steady-state equilibrium. Methods. We obtained the solution of the radiative transfer equation in the two-dimensional domain defined by the photon energy E and optical depth of the system τ using finite-differences for the partial derivatives, and imposing specific boundary conditions for the solutions. We treated the case of cylindrical accretion onto a magnetized neutron star. Results. We considered a blackbody seed spectrum of photons with exponential distribution across the accretion column and for an accretion where the velocity reaches its maximum at the stellar surface and at the top of the accretion column, respectively. In both cases higher values of the electron temperature and of the optical depth τ produce flatter and harder spectra. Other parameters contributing to the spectral formation are the steepness of the vertical velocity profile, the albedo at the star surface, and the radius of the accretion column. The latter parameter modifies the emerging spectra in a specular way for the two assumed accretion profiles. Conclusions. The algorithm has been implemented in the xspec package for X-ray spectral fitting and is specifically dedicated to the physical framework of accretion at the polar cap of a neutron star with a high magnetic field (>10 12 G). This latter case is expected to
Testing subhalo abundance matching in cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations

Subhalo abundance matching (also known as SHAM) is a technique for populating simulated dark matter distributions with galaxies, assuming a monotonic relation between a galaxy’s stellar mass or luminosity and the mass of its parent dark matter halo or subhalo. We examine the accuracy of SHAM in two cosmological smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations, one of which includes momentum-driven galactic winds. The SPH simulations indeed show a nearly monotonic relation between stellar mass and halo mass provided that, for satellite galaxies, we use the mass of the subhalo at the epoch zsat when it became a satellite. In each simulation, the median relation for central and satellite galaxies is nearly identical, though a somewhat larger fraction of satellites is outliers because of stellar mass loss. SHAM-assigned masses (at z= 0–2), luminosities (R-band at z= 0) or star formation rates (at z= 2) have a 68 per cent scatter of 0.09–0.15 dex relative to the true simulation values. When we apply SHAM to the subhalo population of a collisionless N-body simulation with the same initial conditions as the SPH runs, we find generally good agreement for the halo occupation distributions and halo radial profiles of galaxy samples defined by thresholds in stellar mass. However, because a small fraction of SPH galaxies suffer severe stellar mass loss after becoming satellites, SHAM slightly overpopulates high-mass haloes; this effect is more significant for the wind simulation, which produces galaxies that are less massive and more fragile. SHAM recovers the two-point correlation function of the SPH galaxies in the no-wind simulation to better than 10 per cent at scales 0.1 2 h−1 Mpc, but overpopulation of massive haloes increases the correlation function by a factor of ∼2.5 on small scales. The discrepancy in the wind simulation is greatly reduced if we raise the stellar mass threshold from 6 × 109 to 3 × 1010 M⊙; in this case SHAM overpredicts the SPH galaxy correlation function by ∼20 per cent at r < 1 h−1 Mpc but agrees well with SPH clustering at larger scales.
Predation on naked protozoan microzooplankton by fish larvae

To evaluate the role of fish larvae as a link between the microbial loop and higher trophic levels, predation of protozoan zooplankton by young larvae was investigated. More than 400 individual fish larvae with total lengths of less than ca 10 mm in 52 different taxonomic groups were collected at different sampling times from several coastal regions, and the gut contents of larvae were examined under epifluorescence microscopy after staining with DAPI. Among numerous fragments of copepod nauplii, many flagellate-like cells with a size of 5 μm and ciliate-like cells with a size of 20 to 30 μm were frequently recognized. The number of protozoan cells varied significantly from one larva to another. Some individuals had more than 60 protozoa, while others contained none at all. The amount of protists contained in the gut of larvae depended on the fish species and did not show any trend with the body or mouth sizes of larvae, nor the sampling site or season. Fish taxa were divided into 3 groups depending on the amount of protists in the gut: 'abundant', 'moderate', and 'none'. The Acanthopterygii group contained the highest concentration of protozoa. Results of the present study suggested that fish larvae of some taxonomical groups were important predators of protozoa and may be an important link between the microbial loop and the grazing food chain.
Establishment of Approximate Analytical Model of Oil Film Force for Finite Length Tilting Pad Journal Bearings

Tilting pad bearings offer unique dynamic stability enabling successful deployment of high-speed rotating machinery. The model of dynamic stiffness, damping, and added mass coefficients is often used for rotordynamic analyses, and this method does not suffice to describe the dynamic behaviour due to the nonlinear effects of oil film force under larger shaft vibration or vertical rotor conditions. The objective of this paper is to present a nonlinear oil force model for finite length tilting pad journal bearings. An approximate analytic oil film force model was established by analysing the dynamic characteristic of oil film of a single pad journal bearing using variable separation method under the dynamic oil film boundary condition. And an oil film force model of a four-tilting-pad journal bearing was established by using the pad assembly technique and considering pad tilting angle. The validity of the model established was proved by analyzing the distribution of oil film pressure and the locus of journal centre for tilting pad journal bearings and by comparing the model established in this paper with the model established using finite difference method.