Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Economic Sanctions and Government Spending Adjustments: The Case of Disaster Preparedness

Economic sanctions research suggests that sanctioned countries’ overall economic costs tend to be low. This article argues that, despite this, sanction costs can force the governments of these countries to reallocate budget resources from low-priority spending categories to other categories in an effort to minimize their political costs. One such low-priority category is disaster preparedness and mitigation. The authors show that economic sanctions lead to reduced disaster preparedness spending and, as a result, increase the scale of economic and human losses generated by natural disasters in sanctioned countries.
Motivations and benefits of quality management systems in social services: mediation of the implementation process

Recent times have seen many social service organisations (SSOs) implementing quality management systems based on certifiable standards. However, little is known about the benefits of such systems, as well as to what factors influence them. To investigate this issue, the aim of this study is threefold: to analyse the composition of the benefits that SSOs may achieve with the implementation of the European Quality in Social Services (EQUASS) standard; to analyse the impact of both internal and external motivations on the benefits of the EQUASS standard; and to analyse the mediation of the implementation process of the standard between the motivations and the benefits. A questionnaire-based survey was used to collect data from 196 European SSOs. Data were analysed via factor analysis and structural equation modelling. Results show that the benefits are multidimensional, consisting of society, customer, operational, employee, and economic domains. Other findings reveal that internal and external motivations positively affect overall benefits, internal motivations positively affect the implementation process, and the implementation process positively influences overall benefits. The key insight is that internal motivations have a direct positive influence on overall benefits and an indirect positive influence through the mediation of the implementation process. Managerial and research implications of these findings are discussed.
Physical and CFD Modeling of the Effect of Top Layer Properties on the Formation of Open‐Eye in Gas‐Stirred Ladles With Single and Dual‐Plugs

In secondary steelmaking, the optimal size and position of open‐eye is important for effective alloying practice. In the current work, the effect of the top layer thickness and density on the formation of open‐eye in a gas stirred ladle was investigated. A one‐fifth scale water model of 150‐ton ladle was established with single and dual plug configurations for the physical modeling measurements. Air, water and three different oils were used to simulate the argon, liquid steel and slag in the water model, respectively. A transient Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model based on Eulerian Volume of Fluid (VOF) approach was developed for numerical modeling of the fluid flow behavior. The physical modeling results show that the relative open‐eye area decreases from 46.7 to 5.6% when top layer thickness was increased from 0.75 to 7.5 cm using a gas flow rate of 7.5 NL min−1. The effect of the number of plugs on the open‐eye area for the same range of top layer thickness mentioned above was also studied. The relative open‐eye area generated due to the gas injection through the dual plugs decreased from 49.9 to 5.8%. To study the effect of top layer properties, rapeseed oil, castor oil and paraffin oil were employed for studying the effect of density and dynamic viscosity on the open‐eye formation. The results revealed that a larger open‐eye is formed when the density is increased. Furthermore, it was found out that the density of the upper phase dominates the open‐eye formation while dynamic viscosity has only minor effect. The results obtained from numerical simulations and physical modeling were found to be in good agreement.
Investigation of Training Order Effects on Artificial Neural Networks for Image Recognition

The stochastic gradient descent algorithm for training neural networks is widely used in many machine learning, especially deep learning tasks. The stochastic gradient descent algorithm operates by choosing a small fraction of the training data, called a mini-batch, at each iteration to compute an approximation of the gradient of the objective function to be optimized. In practice, researchers tend to use small batch sizes, and the training data fed into the neural network is usually of various categories and is in random order. Researchers have shown the advantages of smaller sizes of mini-batches quantitatively, yet in the past, there were very few formal investigations into the question of how the order of training data would affect the training efficiency and generalizability of the neural network. To gain more insight into this problem, we have investigated effects of training order and the composition of a mini-batch by conducting a series of controlled experiments. In our experiments, we retrained an existing neural network model for object recognition with images from the ImageNet dataset and from a newly-collected dataset called the Toy-Box dataset. We investigated using optimization techniques like genetic algorithms and simulated annealing to optimize the order of training data. Also, we compared training efficiency for different compositions of mini-batches.
Intonational patterns and comprehension in Broca's aphasia

The goal of the study is to determine whether the deficit is syntactic in nature and that aphasic individuals preserve their phonological abilities intact. This has important implications, since it contributes to achieve a more complete characterization of agrammatic comprehension and to report new data from the Romance languages. Here, an experimental task is designed and carried out with six catalan Broca's aphasics, in order to find out whether they preserve their phonological skills. The results establish that Catalan aphasics' comprehension does not result from a phonological impairment
The Polarization Myth: Occupational Upgrading in Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, 1992–2015

The consensus view in economics is that labor markets are polarizing as job creation takes place in high-skilled and low-skilled occupations, while jobs shrink in midskilled ones. The authors argue that, in theoretical terms, polarization runs counter to all the trends that shaped the job structure over the past decades: skill-biased technological change, the international division of labor, and educational expansion. The authors then show that the polarization thesis does not hold empirically. They use the European Labor Force Survey to analyze occupational change for Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom from 1992 to 2015 and define good and bad occupations with four alternative indicators of job quality: earnings, education, prestige, and job satisfaction. Job growth was by far strongest in occupations with high job quality and weakest in occupations with low job quality, regardless of the indicator used. The authors find clear-cut occupational upgrading for Germany, Spain, and Sweden. In the United Kingdom, the data support the polarization thesis when job quality is measured with earnings. If job quality is defined with education, prestige, or job satisfaction, the results show occupational upgrading. In all four countries, production workers and office clerks lost ground, whereas employment strongly expanded in the salaried (upper) middle class among managers and professionals.
Exploring links between national climate strategies and non-state and subnational climate action in nationally determined contributions (NDCs)

ABSTRACT Non-state and sub-national actors (e.g. companies, civil society, cities and regions, collectively referred to as ‘NSAs’) could bridge the ambition gap left by insufficiently ambitious nationally determined contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. Increasing effective non-state and sub-national contributions could both support NDCs’ implementation and spur ambitious updates to these national climate action plans. The impact of NSAs depends partly on whether and how national climate strategies recognize them. Yet, systematic knowledge about the extent to which national governments envisage a role for non-state and sub-national climate action is scarce. How do governments refer to NSAs in their NDCs; and what capacities, functions, and in which sectors do they envisage non-state contributions? We apply structural topic modelling (STM), an efficient quantitative text analysis technique seldom used in global climate governance research, to 147 NDCs to explore whether and how national governments incorporate non-state and subnational contributions into their international climate commitments. Using this method, we identify key topics for non-state and subnational engagement in NDCs, including vulnerability and adaptation, monitoring, general and sector-specific collaboration, and policy support. We find that developing countries overwhelmingly reference NSAs more frequently than developed countries. We also find predominantly negative trade-offs in how countries link to NSAs, suggesting countries tend to mention NSAs’ contributions in specific roles rather than across multiple sectors. Our findings suggest there is scope for countries to broaden their linkage to NSAs in their updated NDCs to further catalyze engagement. Key policy insights Linkages to NSA initiatives (including cities, regions, businesses or civil society) in NDCs under the Paris Agreement are mostly made by developing countries. Developing countries describe NSAs primarily in the context of vulnerability and adaptation policy implementation, while developed countries mainly describe these actors’ role as collaborators across a range of functions. Closer coordination between NSAs and national governments, to fully leverage NSA contributions to NDCs, can be achieved by explicitly outlining NSAs’ contributions in future updates of NDCs.
Comparison Between Fones Method and Modified Bass Method 
of Toothbrushing for Children with Down Syndrome in 
West Java, Indonesia

Background and Aim: Down syndrome (DS) is a delayed physical and mental development caused by an abnormality in chromosome 21, resulting in the presence of three chromosomes (trisomy 21). Several methods of toothbrushing, such as the Scrub, Bass, Charters, Fone’s, Roll, and Stillman’s methods have been introduced. The aim of this study was to evaluate oral hygiene levels after toothbrushing with the Fone’s and the modified Bass methods in children with DS. Materials and Methods: This interventional study comprised 15 children (10 boys and 5 girls) aged 7-12 years (purposive sampling). Oral hygiene was assessed using the Simplified Oral Hygiene Index (OHI-S) method introduced by Greene and Vermillion. The results were analyzed using Student’s t-test. Results: Oral hygiene indices were 2.96 and 1.57 before and after using the Fone’s method, respectively (P=0.00), and 2.55 and 2.16 before and after using the modified Bass method, respectively (P=0.00). A significantly increased level of oral hygiene was noted with the Fone’s method (1.39) when compared to the modified Bass method (0.39) of toothbrushing (P=0.00). Conclusion: Both the Fone’s and the modified Bass methods of toothbrushing can improve the oral hygiene of children with DS, with the Fone’s method appearing to be more effective than the modified Bass method.
First Results of Phytoplankton Spatial Dynamics in Two NW-Mediterranean Bays from Chlorophyll-a Estimates Using Sentinel 2: Potential Implications for Aquaculture

Shellfish aquaculture has a major socioeconomic impact on coastal areas, thus it is necessary to develop support tools for its management. In this sense, phytoplankton monitoring is crucial, as it is the main source of food for shellfish farming. The aim of this study was to assess the applicability of Sentinel 2 multispectral imagery (MSI) to monitor the phytoplankton biomass at Ebro Delta bays and to assess its potential as a tool for shellfish management. In situ chlorophyll-a data from Ebro Delta bays (NE Spain) were coupled with several band combination and band ratio spectral indices derived from Sentinel 2A levels 1C and 2A for time-series mapping. The best results (AIC = 72.17, APD < 10%, and MAE < 0.7 mg/m3) were obtained with a simple blue-to-green ratio applied over Rayleigh corrected images. Sentinel 2–derived maps provided coverage of the farm sites at both bays allowing relating the spatiotemporal distribution of phytoplankton with the environmental forcing under different states of the bays. The applied methodology will be further improved but the results show the potential of using Sentinel 2 MSI imagery as a tool for assessing phytoplankton spatiotemporal dynamics and to encourage better future practices in the management of the aquaculture in Ebro Delta bays.
A Perspective on the Relevance and Public Reception of Psychological Science

In this short commentary, data from the website Reddit is used to examine how people receive social psychological research. The data show that people care greatly about research dealing with humans: links tagged as psychology, social sciences, and health are upvoted more than other categories on Reddit. Within the category of psychology, articles were coded based on the topic of research. Articles dealing generally with social psychological topics are among the highest in number and upvotes on the subreddit r/Science. Many posts were upvoted tens of thousands of times. However, upvotes on Reddit are unrelated to scientific publishing metrics (e.g., impact factor, journal rankings, and citations), suggesting a disconnect between what psychologists and Redditors may see as relevant. These findings also highlight some points for reflection. For example, psychologists may benefit from thinking about the purpose, goals, and beneficiaries of the research they pursue. Additionally, the level of attention that some psychological research receives has implications for transparent research practices. Researchers have a responsibility to ensure that findings are reported accurately and transparently because, whether scientists like it or not, people care about psychological research, they share it, and use it in their lives.
2D+3D Indoor Scene Understanding from a Single Monocular Image

Scene understanding, as a broad field encompassing many subtopics, has gained great interest in recent years. Among these subtopics, indoor scene understanding, having its own specific attributes and challenges compared to outdoor scene understanding, has drawn a lot of attention. It has potential applications in a wide variety of domains, such as robotic navigation, object grasping for personal robotics, augmented reality, etc. To our knowledge, existing research for indoor scenes typically makes use of depth sensors, such as Kinect, that is however not always available. In this thesis, we focused on addressing the indoor scene understanding tasks in a general case, where only a monocular color image of the scene is available. Specifically, we first studied the problem of estimating a detailed depth map from a monocular image. Then, benefiting from deep-learning-based depth estimation, we tackled the higher-level tasks of 3D box proposal generation, and scene parsing with instance segmentation, semantic labeling and support relationship inference from a monocular image. Our research on indoor scene understanding provides a comprehensive scene interpretation at various perspectives and scales. For monocular image depth estimation, previous approaches are limited in that they only reason about depth locally on a single scale, and do not utilize the important information of geometric scene structures. Here, we developed a novel graphical model, which reasons about detailed depth while leveraging geometric scene structures at multiple scales. For 3D box proposals, to our best knowledge, our approach constitutes the first attempt to reason about class-independent 3D box proposals from a single monocular image. To this end, we developed a novel integrated, differentiable framework that estimates depth, extracts a volumetric scene representation and generates 3D proposals. At the core of this framework lies a novel residual, differentiable truncated signed distance function module, which is able to handle the relatively low accuracy of the predicted depth map. For scene parsing, we tackled its three subtasks of instance segmentation, semantic labeling, and the support relationship inference on instances. Existing work typically reasons about these individual subtasks independently. Here, we leverage the fact that they bear strong connections, which can facilitate addressing these subtasks if modeled properly. To this end, we developed an integrated graphical model that reasons about the mutual relationships of the above subtasks. In summary, in this thesis, we introduced novel and effective methodologies for each of three indoor scene understanding tasks, i.e., depth estimation, 3D box proposal generation, and scene parsing, and exploited the dependencies on depth estimates of the latter two tasks. Evaluation on several benchmark datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of our algorithms and the benefits of utilizing depth esti-
The impact of monetary incentives on creativity: An fMRI study

This study investigated the effects of monetary incentives on creativity. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect brain activity during a mechanical task and a creative task, the results provided neurobiological evidence that monetary incentives can increase job creativity and output quantity by suppressing brain activity in areas that are unrelated to creative thinking and repetitive movements, respectively. We also find that the effects of monetary incentives were moderated by participants’ intrinsic interest in the task. Participants who were more (less) interested in the task exhibited weaker (stronger) activation in creativityrelated brain areas when they were given a stronger monetary incentive. These findings suggest that monetary incentives and intrinsic interest are substitutional. A fixed wage may be more appropriate for people who enjoy their work, whereas incentive-based pay may be more appropriate for people who do not have a direct interest in their job.
A decoupled designing approach for sampling consensus of multi‐agent systems

This paper introduces the motion‐planning approaches to solve the distributed consensus problems via sampling measurements. First, for first‐order multiagent systems, a class of sampled‐data–based algorithms are developed with arbitrary sampling periods, which solve the asymptotic consensus problem under both directed fixed and random switching topologies. Then, a new kind of distributed consensus algorithms is designed based on sampling measurements for second‐order multiagent systems. Under both the directed fixed and periodical switching topologies, asymptotic consensus problems of second‐order multiagent systems can be solved by using the proposed algorithms. Compared with existing continuous‐time consensus algorithms, one of remarkable advantages of proposed algorithms is that the sampling periods, communication topologies, and control gains are decoupled and can be separately designed, which relaxes many restrictions in controller designs. Finally, some numerical examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the analytical results.
Schülerinnen und Schüler mit sonderpädagogischem Förderbedarf im Bereich emotionale und soziale Entwicklung und ihre Peers im inklusiven Unterricht

Zusammenfassung. In der vorliegenden Untersuchung wurde der Frage nachgegangen, ob sich Schülerinnen und Schüler mit dem sonderpädagogischen Förderbedarf im Bereich emotionale und soziale Entwicklung (SPF ESE) im inklusiven Unterrichtssetting in der sozialen Partizipation, in der Schuleinstellung sowie im schulischen Selbstkonzept von ihren Mitschülerinnen und Mitschülern ohne SPF unterscheiden. An einer Stichprobe von N = 872 Schülerinnen und Schülern (davon n >= 38 Schülerinnen und Schüler mit SPF ESE) der 2. und 3. Klassen wurde der Fragebogen zur Erfassung der emotionalen und sozialen Schulerfahrungen (FEESS 3 – 4; 62-1 Rauer & Schuck, 2003) mit den Skalen soziale Integration, Klassenklima, Gefühl des Angenommenseins, Schuleinstellung und Selbstkonzept der Schulfähigkeit erhoben. Verglichen mit einer durch Propensity Score Matching gebildeten Kontrollgruppe wiesen Schülerinnen und Schüler mit SPF ESE signifikant negativere Werte in den Bereichen soziale Integration, Klassenklima und schulischem Selbstkonzept auf. Die Ergebnisse werden in Bezug auf die Notwendigkeit der spezifischen Betrachtung bestimmter Förderschwerpunkte und vor dem Hintergrund der Ziele inklusiven Unterrichts im sozial-emotionalen Bereich diskutiert.
BILATERAL JUMP PERFORMANCE IS NOT RELATED TO KINETIC ASYMMETRY IN ELITE AMERICAN FOOTBALL PLAYERS

Monitoring kinetic asymmetry may provide coaches with a modifiable variable to improve performance. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence and relationship of kinetic asymmetry during a countermovement jump (CMJ) and jumping performance. 26 elite American football players performed drop jumps onto an electronic timing mat and CMJ onto a force plate. Kinetic asymmetry was assessed calculating a symmetry index (SI) from inter-limb peak vertical ground reaction forces at propulsion during the CMJ. Pearson correlation coefficients quantified relationships between SI, reactive strength and jump height from the drop jumps, and jump height from the CMJ, p<. 05. 9/26 (34.6%) participants exhibited SI of >10%. SI was not significantly associated with any variables. p>. 05. Players may compensate for asymmetry in a manner that preserves performance.
Countering Moral Hazard in Higher Education: The Role of Performance Incentives in Need-Based Grants

Using a unique reform in the Spanish financial aid program, I estimate the impact of need-based grants on student achievement and dropout decisions under different intensities of academic requirements. Utilizing comprehensive administrative data from a large university, I exploit sharp discontinuities in the grant eligibility formula to identify the effect of aid on student outcomes. I find that aid eligibility has no effect on student outcomes when the academic requirements are comparable with most existing national grant schemes worldwide. In contrast, I find that need-based grants have strong positive impacts on student performance and degree completion when they are combined with more demanding academic requirements.
Testing the long-run PPP for Turkey: new evidence from the Fourier quantile unit root test

ABSTRACT This study analyses the long-run validity of the purchasing power parity (PPP) between Turkey and its major trading partners (China, Euro Area, Russia, United Kingdom, and United States) by using the Fourier quantile unit root test. Fourier quantile unit root test results show that PPP is valid for all countries. Additionally, the Fourier quantile unit root test presents more evidence in favour of the PPP hypothesis in comparison to conventional and other Fourier-type unit root tests.