Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New Route to Synthesize of Graphene Nano Sheets

Synthesis of graphene nano sheets were carried out by using new route and ammonia as well as to produce gram scale graphene. Graphene nano sheets was characterized by using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD), and Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-Ray (SEM-EDX). The results of XRD showed that the reemergence of diffraction lines C(002) at 2θ =26.5°, and the distance between the planes is 3.35 Å, which shows the typical structure of graphite and multiple layer of graphene. The results of SEM-EDX showed that the particle size and the graphene nano sheets has a smaller pore size and uniform and randomly arranged aggregates with a thin layer which is closely related to one another. Graphene nano sheets has small size or shape is small and thin also aggregate related with each other.
Migraine in Children: A Medical and Psychiatric Study

Forty-seven migrainous children were examined medically, neurologically and psychiatrically and compared with matched controls from a dental clinic. One in six children suffered from more than one type of migraine. There was a wide variation in age of onset and the frequency and duration of attacks varied considerably. An “emotional upset” was the most frequently reported (86%) precipitating factor. Most children responded to simple therapeutic measures and detailed instructions about the timely use of medication. A significantly higher proportion of migrainous children than their controls showed signs of a neurotic disorder (mainly anxiety or depression) and had had a higher prevalence of neurotic disorder in the previous year. This increased prevalence was found to be associated with a disturbed parental relationship and certain factors related to their mothers (age, “malaise” score). A prospective study of an epidemiological sample based on systematic observation rather than recollections and opinions is likely to yield more conclusive results.
A conceptual framework to investigate the optimisation of financial incentive mechanisms in construction projects

Implementation of financial incentive mechanisms in the contractual arrangements of a construction project can impact significantly on the motivation of contractors and hence project performance. Positive incentives (as a component of the project delivery strategy) aim to motivate contractors to align their goals with those of the client, via a financial reward. These incentive mechanisms take many forms in construction contracts, including: profit sharing in cost plus incentive contracts, bonus performance provisions attached to various lump sum and cost reimbursable contracts, and multiple financial incentive mixes. The optimisation of financial incentive mechanisms depends greatly on how they are designed in the context of specific project environments. For example, if the client/contractor relationship is poor, the contractor may perceive the financial incentive as calculative and hostile, and therefore will be less committed to the client’s goals than the incentives intended. In order to establish a starting point for further research into this topic area, this paper outlines the results of an international review of the literature on financial incentive contract types and the factors that influence the motivation of contract agents under these arrangements. The paper then goes on to propose an analytical framework that is to be used in the evaluation of optimal financial incentive mechanisms in construction projects, drawing on economic and psychological motivational theories. The findings of this review provide a sound basis for the empirical work to follow in a PhD project investigating the optimisation of financial incentive mechanisms in the Australian commercial building industry.
Provision of Mental Health Care Services to Deaf Individuals Using Telehealth

The deaf population has traditionally been marginalized and underserved when it comes to mental health services. The inequity is partly due to a general lack of knowledge about hearing loss and a shortage of linguistically and culturally qualified clinicians in most parts of the United States. Providing access to qualified clinicians via video conferencing technology has been proposed as a possible solution to the inequity problem. This article describes the unique characteristics of the deaf community, explores the benefits and challenges in using telehealth with the deaf population, and discusses current research in this area. The main goal of this article is to educate mental health professionals, stakeholders, and administrators regarding an underutilized videophone infrastructure that exists for the deaf population. The authors also emphasize the need for further research to better understand and service the unique mental health needs of deaf individuals.
Default Risk and Collateral in the Absence of Commitment

Default risk is an important concern for lenders and is a main reason they require borrowers to pledge collateral. There are two reasons for this. The first is that collateral provides some incentive for the borrower to not strategically default. The second is that, in the event of default, the lender can liquidate the collateral and salvage some value from the failed credit relationship. This paper provides a model to study properties of allocations that arise when collateral is part of an optimal lending contract that looks much like a repurchase agreement. In particular, a lack of commitment to future actions implies that collateral must be used to alleviate strategic default. Moreover, because collateral is held by lenders during the credit relationship, there is also a potential incentive for lenders to default on returning collateralized assets. Thus, the optimal contract requires the satisfaction of an incentive constraint for the lender, in addition to the one that must be satisfied for the borrower. The paper then discusses how the need to satisfy both constraints places certain restrictions on the allocations that arise when collateral is part of an optimal contract. We conclude by comparing the allocation to a world where agents can commit to future actions.
The Role of Sponsorship in the Marketing Communications Mix

This article examines the development of commercial sponsorship as a legitimate marketing communications option available to management. Initial attention focuses on the causes of sponsorship emergence, the current developments in this growing industry and the prospects therein. Sponsorship's role on behalf of management is then discussed in terms of potential objectives and target audiences. Sponsorship management issues in terms of selection, implementation and results evaluation are subsequently examined.
IDE-Based Learning Analytics for Computing Education

In recent years, learning process data have become increasingly easy to collect through computer-based learning environments. This has led to increased interest in the field of learning analytics, which is concerned with leveraging learning process data in order to better understand, and ultimately to improve, teaching and learning. In computing education, the logical place to collect learning process data is through integrated development environments (IDEs), where computing students typically spend large amounts of time working on programming assignments. While the primary purpose of IDEs is to support computer programming, they might also be used as a mechanism for delivering learning interventions designed to enhance student learning. The possibility of using IDEs both to collect learning process data, and to strategically intervene in the learning process, suggests an exciting design space for computing education research: that of IDE-based learning analytics. In order to facilitate the systematic exploration of this design space, we present an IDE-based data analytics process model with four primary activities: (1) Collect data, (2) Analyze data, (3) Design intervention, and (4) Deliver intervention. For each activity, we identify key design dimensions and review relevant computing education literature. To provide guidance on designing effective interventions, we describe four relevant learning theories, and consider their implications for design. Based on our review, we present a call-to-action for future research into IDE-based learning analytics.
Sign language localization: Learning to eliminate language dialects

Machine translation of sign language into spoken languages is an important yet non-trivial task. The sheer variety of dialects that exist in any sign language makes it only harder to come up with a generalized sign language classification system. Though a lot of work has been done in this area previously but most of the approaches rely on intrusive hardware in the form of wired or colored gloves or are specific language/dialect dependent for accurate sign language interpretation. We propose a cost-effective, non-intrusive webcam based solution in which a person from any part of the world can train our system to make it learn the sign language in their own specific dialect, so that our software can then correctly translate the hand signs into a commonly spoken language, such as English. Image based hand gesture recognition carries sheer importance in this task. The heart of hand gesture recognition systems is the detection and extraction of the sign (hand gesture) from the input image stream. Our work uses functions like skin color based thresholding, contour detection and convexity defect for detection of hands and identification of important points on the hand respectively. The distance of these important contour points from the centroid of the hand becomes our feature vector against which we train our neural network. The system works in two phases. In the training phase the correspondence between users hand gestures against each sign language symbol is learnt using a feed forward neural network with back propagation learning algorithm. Once the training is complete, user is free to use our system for translation or communication with other people. Experimental results based on training and testing the system with numerous users show that the proposed method can work well for dialect-free sign language translation (numerals and alphabets) and gives us average recognition accuracies of around 65% and 55% with the maximum recognition accuracies rising upto 77% and 62% respectively.
Learning Style Preferences and Implications for Training Programs in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry

Abstract The learning style of an individual plays a significant role in shaping and building important skill attributes and attitudes that profoundly influence a person's management style. Given the wide diversity in the nature and level of managerial tasks in the hospitality and tourism industry, it is important to understand how learning style of students and managers could be used to develop appropriate training programs for creative and innovative service delivery needed by the industry. In addition, while there is substantial evidence of strong managerial and entrepreneurial skills in the industry in Asia, there exists little or no knowledge on how these abilities were developed. The main objective was to investigate the learning styles of the hospitality and tourism students and managers in the Asian region and examine differences and similarities across countries, occupational levels and sectors of the hospitality and tourism industry. Different learning styles, which include Activist, Reflector, Theorist, and Pragmatist, are investigated in this study based on an approach used by Honey and Mumford (1986). The results of this study provide some useful practical information on how Asian students and managers in the hospitality and tourism industry integrate information, perceive risks, make decisions, and commit to courses of action based on their different learning styles. While there was no strong evidence of active risk-taking behavior reflected in their learning styles, the findings in this study revealed the existence of a strong pragmatic attitude and some inclination towards reflective and theorist type behavior among the respondents. An important implication of the study is that with skillful matching of the learning activities to preferred learning styles, useful entrepreneurial abilities could be developed as the respondents mature in the workforce.
Cannabinoid‐mediated neuroprotection following interferon‐gamma treatment in a three‐dimensional mouse brain aggregate cell culture

Multiple sclerosis is increasingly recognized as a neurodegenerative disease which is triggered by inflammation in the central nervous system (CNS). Demyelination‐associated axonal or neuronal damage is a primary cause of disability and has thus far not been successfully targeted by available drug therapies. The neuroprotective properties of both endogenous and administered cannabinoids have been shown in in vivo and in vitro models of CNS damage following excitotoxic, oxidative, traumatic and ischaemic insults, with a predominantly apoptotic effector mechanism. In this study a foetal mouse telencephalon aggregate cell culture system was developed to compare tissue from cannabinoid receptor 1 knockout mice with wildtype counterparts. Aggregate formation and neurofilament/myelin basic protein accumulation were dependent on the age of foetal dissection and species used. Following treatment with interferon‐γ, levels of myelin basic protein, neurofilament, neuronal dephosphorylation and caspase 3 activation were assessed in telencephalon tissue in vitro. Cytokine treatment resulted in significant loss of the neuronal marker neurofilament‐H in cannabinoid receptor 1 knockout cultures but not in wildtypes, indicating that presence of the cannabinoid receptor 1 gene can be neuroprotective. Caspase 3 activation was higher in cultures from knockout animals, indicating an apoptotic mechanism of cell death. Dephosphorylated neurofilament levels were significantly elevated in knockout mice, lending support to the premise that neurofilament dephosphorylation is a marker for neuronal damage. Taken together, these results indicate that neuroprotection could be elicited through the cannabinoid receptor 1, and point towards a potential therapeutic role for cannabinoid compounds in demyelinating conditions such as multiple sclerosis.
Sales Quotas: Unintended Consequences on Trust in Organization, Customer-Oriented Selling, and Sales Performance

Despite a growing strategic, operational, and research spotlight on relational building and retention in recent years, practitioners must balance this vision with commonly critical selling practices and needs (i.e., obtain sales quota while building and retaining customer relationships). In such an environment, this paper proposes that marketers can prosper if they more fully understand the connections between sales quotas and other important organizational issues (i.e., trust in the organization, customer-oriented selling, and sales performance). The significance of sales quotas as a directing force has been noted by researchers and practitioners for some time. Yet beyond their obvious influence (e.g., as sales goals), little is understood as to what extent these frequently utilized performance objectives connect and impact other critical organizational issues within the selling group. Using a sample of 345 business-to-business salespeople, this study explores how the application of sales quotas have far-reaching organizational implications, beyond goal setting and reward mechanisms, to include issues of organizational trust, customer-oriented selling, and sales performance. To explore these connections, a model grounded in both sales force control theory and goal-setting theory is developed and then tested using structural equation modeling. The results suggest that perceptions of quota difficulty are negatively related to salespeople's trust in the organization and their sales performance, and trust in the organization positively affects customer-oriented selling, which positively affects sales performance. Detailed managerial implications and research opportunities offered by the findings are presented.
SERVQUAL: Can It Be Used to Differentiate Guest’s Perception of Service Quality of 3 Star from a 4 Star Hotel

A 3-star and 4-star rated hotel, what do they mean? Are there significant perceived differences between the ratings? This research work investigates on what customers think of the quality of service of 3-Star and 4-Star hotel using SERVQUAL measures. In spite of the criticality of service quality, there are still misunderstanding about the perception of quality of service between the hotel and their customer, where research has shown that many service organizations develop their own perception of customer needs. The respondents for this study were the customers of the 3 and 4 stars hotels. Data were collected through a self-administered survey SERVQUAL questionnaire distributed to the respondents based on convenient random sampling method. Data were then analyzed statistically using the linear regression and independent t-Test from the SPSS package to determine how service quality is related to hotel guest’s satisfaction, and the differences between 3-Star and 4-Star hotel respectively. Practical business strategy implications of this study are highlighted.
Evaluation of GPU-Based Empirical Mode Decomposition for Off-Line Analysis

SUMMARY In off-line analysis, the demand for high precision signal processing has introduced a new method called Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), which is used for analyzing a complex set of data. Unfortunately, EMD is highly compute-intensive. In this paper, we show parallel implementation of Empirical Mode Decomposition on a GPU. We propose the use of “partial+total” switching method to increase performance while keeping the precision. We also focused on reducing the computation complexity in the above method from O(N) on a single CPU to O(N/P log (N)) on a GPU. Evaluation results show our single GPU implementation using Tesla C2050 (Fermi architecture) achieves a 29.9x speedup partially, and a 11.8x speedup totally when compared to a single Intel dual core CPU.
Hypnotic color blindness and performance on the stroop test

Abstract A suggestion for hypnotic color blindness was investigated by administering a reverse Stroop color-naming task. Prior to the suggestion for color blindness, participants learned associations between color names and shapes. Following the color blindness suggestion, participants were required to name the shapes when they appeared in colors that were either congruent or incongruent with the learned associations. The 18 high hypnotizable participants who passed the suggestion were slower to name (a) shapes in which the color name was incongruent with the color in which it was printed, (b) “unseen” rather than “seen” shapes, and (c) color-incongruent shapes that were printed in the color in which they were “color-blind. ” These patterns are discussed in terms of potential cognitive and social mechanisms that may mediate responses to hypnotic color blindness.
Waist circumference is superior to weight and BMI in predicting sexual symptoms, voiding symptoms and psychosomatic symptoms in men with hypogonadism and erectile dysfunction

Waist circumference is considered a useful predictor of obesity‐associated cardiovascular risk, but its use as an indicator of sexual health status and quality of life (QoL) in hypogonadal men is unknown. We investigated whether three measurements of obesity, weight, body mass index and waist circumference, correlate with the International Index of Erectile Function‐5 (IIEF‐5), the Aging Males’ Symptoms (AMS) and the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) questionnaires. A total of 261 patients were enrolled in a prospective study on hypogonadism treatment with intramuscular long‐acting testosterone undecanoate. Patients with total testosterone ≤3.5 ng ml−1 were enrolled, and baseline demographic data were recorded. Patient's response to IIEF, IPSS and AMS standardised questionnaires was recorded to evaluate health‐related QoL. The mean length of treatment and follow‐up was 4.7 years (max 6 years). ANOVA regression analysis showed that waist circumference was significantly inversely proportional to IIEF‐5 and directly proportional to AMS and IPSS. Weight was inversely proportional to IIEF and directly proportional to IPSS but not associated with AMS. BMI had no proportionality to measurements of sexual function and quality of life. These results suggest that among weight, BMI and waist circumference, the latter is the best predictor of health‐related QoL in men with hypogonadism.
Financial Literacy and Credit Cards: A Multi Campus Survey

In America, credit cards on campus have been a disaster, leaving students buried in debt before graduation, often with little hope of paying off the debt before high fees and interest double the amount. This research details a multi-campus survey of current American college students and their use of credit cards. In the current project, we surveyed business students across five campuses in the United States (n=725) in fall, 2009. We found significant differences between students on their knowledge of credit cards and several demographic factors. We conclude by discussing the implications for further research in this area.
Pilot Trial of OnabotulinumtoxinA (Botox) in Moderate to Severe Restless Legs Syndrome

ABSTRACT Objective: To evaluate the potential of onabotulinum toxin A (Botox®, Allergan, Inc., Irvine, California) in the treatment of restless legs syndrome (RLS). Methods: A single-arm, open-label pilot trial of onabotulinum toxin A was conducted to determine its usefulness as an injectable treatment for RLS. Results: The primary outcome measure, change in score on the International Restless Legs Syndrome Scale, showed a statistically significant improvement in RLS during the first 4 weeks after treatment. Two of the secondary outcome measures, pain (measured using a visual analog scale) and patients’ global impression of severity of illness also showed improvement. Conclusions: Onabotulinum toxin A warrants further study in RLS. Increasing the drug dosage, changing the dosing schedule, and increasing the number of injection sites may result in greater activity and longer duration of action.
On the Rényi Divergence and a Related Problem on the Joint Range of Relative Entropies

This paper starts with a study of the minimum of the Renyi divergence, subject to a fixed (or minimal) value of the total variation distance. Relying on the solution of this minimization problem, and using a simple identity which expresses the Renyi divergence as a linear combination of relative entropies, a related problem on the joint range of relative entropies is solved in this work. Its solution provides an exact characterization of this joint range where three probability distributions are involved in the formulation of this problem, subject to a constraint on the total variation distance between two of these distributions. As a byproduct of this characterization, we provide a geometric interpretation of the minimal Chernoff information subject to a minimal total variation distance. Following a recent work by Gil et al., new relations between the Renyi divergence and the centered moments of the log-likelihood ratio are explored.