Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intangible Investment and Technical Efficiency: The Case of Software-Intensive Manufacturing Firms in Turkey

This chapter analyzes the effect of intangible investment on firm efficiency with an emphasis on its software component. Stochastic production frontier approach is used to simultaneously estimate the production function and the determinants of technical efficiency in the software intensive manufacturing firms in Turkey for the period 2003-2007. Firms are classified based on the technology group. High technology and low technology firms are estimated separately in order to reveal differentials in their firm efficiency. The results show that the effect of software investment on firm efficiency is larger in high technology firms which operate in areas such as chemicals, electricity, and machinery as compared to that of the low technology firms which operate in areas such as textiles, food, paper, and unclassified manufacturing. Further, among the high technology firms, the effect of the software investment is smaller than the effect of research and development personnel expenditure. This result shows that the presence of R&D personnel is more important than the software investment for software intensive manufacturing firms in Turkey.
Coping With Behavioral and Organizational Barriers to Diversity in the Workplace

Research in social psychology reveals that discrimination as a stressor is linked to adverse physical and psychological effects on those targeted, through the effects of cumulative, recurring and often ambiguous incidents. Stress that results from the impact of subtle forms of exclusion and discrimination can give rise to increased illness, loss of productivity and escalating health costs. This article explores how minority and female faculty and staff facing subtle behavioral and organizational barriers to inclusion in the higher education workplace can develop effective coping strategies to deal with these obstacles and how human resource professionals can help those affected by discrimination.
Single-Spin Relaxation in a Synthetic Spin-Orbit Field

Strong magnetic field gradients can produce a synthetic spin-orbit interaction that allows for high fidelity electrical control of single electron spins. We investigate how a field gradient impacts the spin relaxation time T_1 by measuring T_1 as a function of magnetic field B in silicon. The interplay of charge noise, magnetic field gradients, phonons, and conduction band valleys leads to a maximum relaxation time of 160 ms at low field, a strong spin-valley relaxation hotspot at intermediate fields, and a B^4 scaling at high fields. T_1 is found to decrease with lattice temperature T_lat as well as with added electrical noise. In comparison, samples without micromagnets have a significantly longer T_1. Optimization of the micromagnet design, combined with reductions in charge noise and electron temperature, may further extend T_1 in devices with large magnetic field gradients.
Outcrop-Subcrop Sequence and Diagenesis of Upper Jurassic Arab-Hith Formations, Central Saudi Arabia

Outcrop-subcrop of the Upper Jurassic Arab-Hith Forma- f tions in central Saudi Arabia were studied in detail. The Arab Formation is t mostly poorly exposed owing to the extensive slumping, collapsing and i brecciation resulted from the dissolution of the interbedded anhydrite units. Except for an excellent exposure at Dahl Hit and limited exposurest o :I the east of AI-Hair and Al-Badi (Fig. 3),. the Hith outcro~ had been re- I moved totally by underground water solutIon of the anhydnte. 1 A composite stratigraphic sequence of the Arab and Hith was established I: fro~ the outcrop-subc~o~ relationship. Fo.ur carbonate u~its have been recogrnzed; the basal UnIt IS generally persIstent and undIsturbed, whereas . ' three other units are mostly made of slumped, contorted and fractured 1, limestones as well as of brecciated limestone. While most of the coarse- I grained limestone of the Arab in the outcropping area underwent leaching t and recrystallization, the rocks in the subcrop were leached, recrystallized I anddolomitized. 1 Dissolution of the Arab- Hith anhydrite units has caused serious geotech- Ii nical problems such as slumping, brecciation, cavities, vugs and fractures of I the rocks in the outcrop-subcrop areas. Presence of vertical fractures and . J po~sible presence of permeability barriers to the east of the Sulaiy (Lower r Cretaceous) escarpment seem to have caused the rise of the underground water table in the Riyadh area, which may further introduce potential health hazards by vertical charging of the sewage water into the underlying Riyadh Aquifer.
Significance of limnetic organic aggregates (lake snow) for the sinking flux of particulate organic matter in a large lake

The abundance, composition and bacterial colonization of macroscopic organic aggregates (lake snow) were studied from March until November 1993 in Lake Constance, Germany. In addition, the concentration of particulate organic carbon (POC) and the amount, composition, and bacterial colonization of particulate matter (PM) collected in a sediment trap deployed at 50 m were investigated. The seasonal and vertical dynamics of lake snow and of sinking PM were closely linked to those of phytoplankton blooms in spring, summer, and fall and to sedimentation losses of zooplankton during the clear-water phase. POC in lake snow comprised between 0.15 and 28%) of total POC in the surrounding water. On the other hand, sinking losses of POC bound in lake snow as estimated from the abundance, POC content and potential sinking rates of lake snow comprised much higher percentages, indicating the significance of these aggregates for the POC sinking flux. Particulate combined amino acids comprised 8 to 51 '! 6 of lake snow POC and were turned over in <20 h as determined from high rates of aminopeptidase activity. A rapid release of dissolved amino acids from sediment trap material into the surrounding water was shown experimentally indicating that the rapid POM decomposition in the aphotic zone leads to a supply of dissolved organic matter (DOM) to planktonic bacteria at this depth. However, In the same type of experiments we found that dissolved amino acids were taken up by the bacteria associated with the settled matenal when it was deprived of labile organic substrates. This finding complicates the l-way concept of bacterially mediated interactions between POM and DOM in aquatic environments.
Discriminative Feature Representation for Person Re-identification by Batch-contrastive Loss

In the past few years, person re-identiﬁcation (reID) has developed rapidly due to the success of deep convolutional neural networks. The softmax loss function is an important component for learning discriminative features. However, the classiﬁer trained by the soft-max loss is diﬃcult to distinguish the hard samples. In this work, we introduce a new auxiliary loss function, called batch-contrastive loss, for person reID to further separate the features of diﬀerent identities and pulls the features of same identity closer. Furthermore, the proposed loss function does not rely on the pairwise or triplet sampling which is commonly used in the Siamese model. We test our loss function on two large-scale person reID benchmarks, Market-1501 and DukeMTMC datasets. Under the combination of the batch-contrastive loss and the softmax loss, even only employing the generic L2-distance metric, we can achieve competitive results among the state-of-the-arts.
The rate of increase of real continuous solutions of certain algebraic functional equations

In this equation, and throughout this paper, P(t, u, v) denotes a polynomial in the variables t, u, v, with real coefficients, and b(t) is a function which is positive and continuous for t greater than or equal to some positive number a. The results presented below generalize those of 0. E. Lancaster [4], and S. M. Shah [6; 7], who discussed the case in which 8(t) is constant for t> a. Their work, in turn, was a natural sequel to the striking results of Borel [1], and Lindelof [5], on algebraic differential equations('). For convenience in stating the results obtained in this paper, let us introduce the following definition. A real function u(t) will be said to be a continuous solution of an equation (1.1) if there exists a number b >a such that u(t) is continuous and is a solution of (1.1) for all t>b. The main object of this paper is to show that, provided b(t) is positive and continuous for t_a and provided t+8(t) is monotonic increasing for t_a, every continuous solution of an equation of the form in (1.1) must satisfy a relation of the form
Upwind Scheme for Cell-Centered Finite Volume Method

Abstract—An essential component of a finite volume method (FVM) is the advection scheme that estimates values on the cell faces based on the calculated values on the nodes or cell centers. The most widely used advection schemes are upwind schemes. These schemes have been developed in FVM on different kinds of structured and unstructured grids. In this research, the physical influence scheme (PIS) is developed for a cell-centered FVM that uses an implicit coupled solver. Results are compared with the exponential differencing scheme (EDS) and the skew upwind differencing scheme (SUDS). Accuracy of these schemes is evaluated for a liddriven cavity flow at Re = 1000, 3200, and 5000 and a backwardfacing step flow at Re = 800. Simulations show considerable differences between the results of EDS scheme with benchmarks, especially for the lid-driven cavity flow at high Reynolds numbers. These differences occur due to false diffusion. Comparing SUDS and PIS schemes shows relatively close results for the backward-facing step flow and different results in lid-driven cavity flow. The poor results of SUDS in the lid-driven cavity flow can be related to its lack of sensitivity to the pressure difference between cell face and upwind points, which is critical for the prediction of such vortex dominant flows.
The role of highly oxygenated molecules (HOMs) in determining the composition of ambient ions in the boreal forest

Abstract. In order to investigate the negative ions in the boreal forest we have performed measurements to chemically characterise the composition of negatively charged clusters containing highly oxygenated molecules (HOMs). Additionally, we compared this information with the chemical composition of the neutral gas-phase molecules detected in the ambient atmosphere during the same period. The chemical composition of the ions was retrieved using an atmospheric pressure interface time-of-flight mass spectrometer (APi-TOF-MS) while the gas-phase neutral molecules (mainly sulfuric acid and HOMs) were characterised using the same mass spectrometer coupled to a nitrate-based chemical ionisation unit (CI-APi-TOF). Overall, we divided the identified HOMs in two classes: HOMs containing only carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen-containing HOMs or organonitrates (ONs). During the day, among the ions, in addition to the well-known pure sulfuric acid clusters, we found a large number of HOMs clustered with nitrate (NO3−) or bisulfate (HSO4−), with the first one being more abundant. During the night, the distribution of ions, mainly composed of HOM clustered with NO3−, was very similar to the neutral compounds that are detected in the CI-APi-TOF as adducts with the artificially introduced primary ion (NO3−). For the first time, we identified several clusters containing up to 40 carbon atoms. These ions are formed by up to four oxidised α-pinene units clustered with NO3−. While we know that dimers (16–20 carbon atoms) are probably formed by a covalent bond between two α-pinene oxidised units, it is still unclear what bonding formed larger clusters. Finally, diurnal profiles of the negative ions were consistent with the neutral compounds revealing that ONs peak during the day while HOMs are more abundant at night-time. However, during the day, a large fraction of the negative charge is taken up by the pure sulfuric acid clusters causing differences between ambient ions and neutral compounds (i.e. less available charge for HOM and ON).
Measuring non-local Lagrangian peak bias

We investigate nonlocal Lagrangian bias contributions involving gradients of the linear density eld, for which we have predictions from the excursion set peak formalism. We begin by writing down a bias expansion which includes all the bias terms, including the nonlocal ones. Having checked that the model furnishes a reasonable t to the halo mass function, we develop a 1-point cross-correlation technique to measure bias factors associated with 2 -distributed quantities. We validate the method with numerical realizations of peaks of Gaussian random elds before we apply it to N-body simulations. We focus on the lowest (quadratic) order nonlocal contributions 2 10(k1 k2) and 01[3(k1 k2) 2 k 2 k 2 ], where k1, k2 are wave modes. We can reproduce our measurement of 10 if we allow for an oset between the Lagrangian halo center-of-mass and the peak position. The sign and magnitude of 10 is consistent with Lagrangian haloes sitting near linear density maxima. The resulting contribution to the halo bias can safely be ignored for M = 10 13 M =h, but could become relevant at larger halo masses. For the second nonlocal bias 01 however, we measure a much larger magnitude than predicted by our model. We speculate that some of this discrepancy might originate from nonlocal Lagrangian contributions induced by nonspherical collapse.
Influence of SiC reinforcement particles on the tribocorrosion behaviour of Al–SiCp FGMs in 0.05M NaCl solution

The main aim of this work was to study and understand the influence of SiC particles on the corrosion and tribocorrosion of Al-matrix composite materials. For that, Al–SiCp functionally graded composites were produced by centrifugal casting and different SiCp contents were achieved. Their mechanical properties were improved by age-hardening heat treatments. The tribocorrosion behaviour was studied in 0.05M NaCl solutions using a reciprocating motion tribometer involving an alumina ball sliding against the Al-based samples. Above critical SiC particles' content the matrix alloy surface was found to be protected against wear by SiC particles protruding from the surface. Below this threshold content, the SiC reinforcement was inefficient and the wear rate of the composite was the same as the non-reinforced alloy.
Sacral Nerve Stimulation and Fecal Incontinence: Current Uses and Emerging Trends

C l i n M e d International Library Citation: Hrabe JE, Gurland B, Hull TL (2016) Sacral Nerve Stimulation and Fecal Incontinence: Current Uses and Emerging Trends. Obstet Gynecol Cases Rev 3:088 Received: March 06, 2016: Accepted: May 18, 2016: Published: May 21, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Hrabe et.al, This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Hrabe et.al, Obstet Gynecol cases Rev 2016, 3:88 Volume 3 | Issue 5
Orifice impedance under grazing flow: Modal expansion approach

Acoustic lining is used in jet engines to reduce noise radiation. The liners consist of up to several layers of perforated plate backed with honeycomb structure. A key aspect in their performance is the in uence of the grazing ow on the perforates' impedance. In our research we concentrate on the effect of ow on a single orifice. Comparison of previous experiments with existing theory was unsatisfactory. Especially we concluded that the boundary layer thickness of the grazing ow is an important factor. In this paper we present a theoretical model, which accounts for boundary layer characteristics. Two parallel 2D ducts with partially an interconnection, representing the orifice domain, are considered. The eigen modes in the ducts and orifice domain are solved numerically for any given ow profile. By subsequent matching of the modal expansions of the acoustical field between the domains, the acoustic impedance of the orifice is determined. Comparison with impedance tube measurements shows reasonably good agreement for both resistance and end correction. However, numerical convergence of the model is not yet established.
PHYLOGENETIC POSITION OF THE FRESHWATER ANOMURAN FAMILY AEGLIDAE

Abstract We sequenced approximately 2,000 nucleotides of the 18S ribosomal DNA gene to test previous morphological hypotheses concerning family and superfamily relationships within the Anomura. Twelve new sequences from the superfamilies Galatheoidea, Paguroidea, Hippoidea (all Anomura), and Callianassoidea (Thalassinidea) were generated, and these were combined with three previously published sequences from GenBank to estimate phylogenetic relationships among these taxa. Our results show a clear separation of the Aeglidae from the other galatheoid families, which form a sister group with the Paguroidea. Within the Galatheoidea, chirostylids and porcellanids are sister groups. Hippoidea was revealed as the most basal taxon within the anomurans.
Geographical and industrial spillovers in entry decisions across export markets

This article addresses sequential entry decisions in export markets. It focuses on externalities derived from previous export activity in countries close to those for which a potential entry decision is made (geographical spillovers) and externalities derived from previous presence of other firms in the same industry (industrial spillovers). The empirical analysis uses Spanish microdata for the period 2000–2010 in a firm decision model that also integrates country and industry characteristics. The results suggest that these two types of spillovers have a positive effect in explaining entry decisions in new export markets, though both are smaller in magnitude than the effects coming from previous presence in the same specific destination.
Lethal and sublethal effects of the naturally derived insecticide spinosad on parasitoids of Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae)

Laboratory studies were performed on the lethal and sublethal effects of spinosad on three important species of parasitoids attacking Spodoptera frugiperda (J.E. Smith) in Mexico. Reproduction of the braconid Chelonus insularis (Cresson), on treated egg masses was completely eliminated at 200 parts per million (ppm) and reduced by ∼70% at 20 ppm compared to the controls. Adult C. insularis did not avoid contact with residues on maize (200 ppm), but suffered a 7-day reduction in longevity after contact with residues. Initial toxicity of spinosad applied to a natural host of S. frugiperda was concentration dependent and resulted in 23 to 100% mortality of the eulophid Euplectrus plathypenae Howard at 25 to 200 ppm, respectively. The survival of Eu. plathypenae was initially reduced, especially in males, following contact with field weathered residues on maize (200 ppm). However, survival of both sexes rapidly returned to control values on foliage sampled after rainfall. A similar effect was observed in the mortality response of female Eu. plathypenae exposed to residues on sorghum. The ichneumonid Eiphosoma vitticolle Cresson did not avoid reproduction in S. frugiperda larvae that were externally contaminated with 200 ppm spinosad, although all spinosad-treated hosts died before the parasitoid progeny could develop. We use these results to predict the impact of spinosad applications on the foraging and reproduction of these parasitoids in the field. Such predictions require validation by field studies.
Economic Potential of Non-timber Forest Products in Nepal: Myth or Reality?

This paper analyses the ongoing discourses and practices regarding the promotion of Non-timber Forest Products (NTFPs). It assesses the existing claims and actual realization of economic potential of NTFPs. NTFP management has been receiving increasing attention in the last few years. Donors, development agencies and user groups have involved with great enthusiasm in different aspects of NTFP promotion, taking this as a panacea for poverty reduction. A critical analysis of the current scale of production and management of NTFPs shows that a misplaced optimism regarding NTFPs' economic potential prevails. The optimistic scenario appears to have been promoted by some development agencies partly to promote their own development enterprises. Moreover, due to the constraining regulations and bureaucratic hurdles surrounding timber trade, both development agencies and users are left without any commercial opportunities to harness NTFPs. Consequently, it appears that the overemphasis on NTFPs has replaced the discourse on timber management. It is argued that NTFP management should be understood as complementary to timber management and not as a substitute for the potential of timber. Although NTFPs have comparative advantage in the high mountain region, timber management yields far more income than NTFPs, particularly in the Terai. Key words : NTFPs, economic potential, discourse, Nepal. Full text is available at the ForestAction website Journal of Forest and Livelihood 7(1) December 2008 pp.36-48
The Impact of Teachers' Age, Gender and Experience on the Use of Information and Communication Technology in EFL Teaching.

The integration of information and communication technology (ICT) into language teaching and learning depends on many factors. Some of these factors are associated with teachers. Teachers play a crucial role in the integration of ICT. This study investigates the impact of teacher's age, experience, and gender on the integration of ICT into language teaching. This study utilized a mixed-method approach of investigation, which applies both qualitative and quantitative methods. The instruments used for data collection were a survey and an interview. The survey was administered to 46 in-service EFL teachers working at Najran University, Saudi Arabia. Ten out of these participants were interviewed. The results indicate that there is no significant difference in using ICT between the two groups of teachers according to their age and experience. However, the results indicate that there is a difference between male and female teachers in using ICT in language teaching. Female teachers reported less use of ICT in their instruction than male teachers. Some suggestions are offered to improve the situation of ICT integration into language learning in EFL contexts.
Decentralized Caching Schemes and Performance Limits in Two-Layer Networks

We study the decentralized caching scheme in a two-layer network, which includes a server, multiple helpers, and multiple users. Basically, the proposed caching scheme consists of two phases, i.e., placement phase and delivery phase. In the placement phase, each helper/user randomly and independently selects contents from the server and stores them into its memory. In the delivery phase, the users request contents from the server, and the server satisfies each user through a helper. Different from the existing caching scheme, the proposed caching scheme takes into account the pre-stored contents at both helpers and users in the placement phase to design the delivery phase. Meanwhile, the proposed caching scheme exploits index coding in the delivery phase and leverages multicast opportunities, even when different users request distinct contents. Besides, we analytically characterize the performance limit of the proposed caching scheme, and show that the achievable rate region of the proposed caching scheme lies within constant margins to the information-theoretic optimum. In particular, the multiplicative and additive factors are carefully sharpened to be $\frac{1}{48}$ and 4, respectively, both of which are better than the state of arts. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed caching scheme compared with the state of arts.