Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Lower Hybrid Drive in Solar Magnetic Reconnection Regions: Implications for Electron Acceleration and Solar Heating

Abstract Lower hybrid (LH) drive involves the resonant acceleration of electrons parallel to the magnetic field by lower hybrid waves, often driven by ions with ring or ring-beam distributions. Charge-exchange between hydrogen atoms and protons with relative motions perpendicular to the magnetic field leads to ring distributions of pickup ions, with concomitant perpedicular ion ‘heating’. This paper considers the combination of LH drive and charge-exchange in the outflow regions of magnetic reconnection sites in the solar chromosphere and lower corona, showing that the combined mechanism naturally predicts major perpendicular ion heating and parallel electron acceleration, and exploring the mechanism’s relevance to specific solar reconnection phenomena, heating of the solar atmosphere, and production of energetic electrons that generate solar radio emission. Although primarily qualitative, analysis shows that the mechanism has numerous attractive aspects, including perpendicular ion heating that increases linearly with ion mass, parallel electron acceleration, predicted ion and electron temperatures that span those of the chromosphere and lower corona, and parallel electron speeds spanning those for type III bursts. Applications to chromospheric explosive events and low-lying active regions, and to heating the chromosphere, appear particularly suitable. Sweeping of plasma frozen-in to chromospheric and coronal magnetic field lines across the neutral atmosphere due to motions of sub-photospheric fields represents an obvious and important generalisation of the mechanism away from reconnection sites. The requirements that the neutrals not be strongly collisionally coupled to the plasma and that sufficient neutrals are available for charge-exchange restricts the LH drive mechanism to above the photosphere but below where the corona is essentially fully ionised. LH drive may thus be important in heating the chromosphere and low corona while other heating mechanisms dominate at higher altitudes. Although attractive thus far, quantitative analyses of LH drive in these contexts are necessary before definitive conclusions are reached.
Employee Benefits Accounting, Its Impact on the Market Share Price, the Volume of Credit Facilities and Deposits

This study aims to examine the impact of employee benefitsaccounting (direct and indirect compensation) on (market price, volume of credit facilities and volume of deposits). The study community is represented by commercialbanks listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE), all the continuous banks whose financial data were available during the study period (2007-2015) were selected represented in (13) banks. In order to realize the objectives of the study, the study was based on qualitative data and analytical descriptive method (Panel Data), (E-Views) economic statistics software was used to test hypotheses. The results of the study showed that there is a statisticallysignificant impact on both typesof employees compensations as a whole (direct and indirect) on the market share price, the volume of credit facilities and the volume of deposits. While the results of the study confirmed that the indirect compensation has not got an impact on the volume of customer deposits when it is measured separately. Finally, the study recommended the need to apply good systems that take into account the interest of both the employers and employees for the positive impact on the market share price, the volume of credit facilities and the volume of deposits.
Alcohol induced severe hypertriglyceridemia in HIV/HCV coinfected patient – case report

Alcohol use is one of the most prominent causes of dyslipidemia. The effects of alcohol on lipid metabolism are diverse: it induces synthesis of triglycerides, formation of very low density cholesterol and stimulates lipolysis in fatty tissue. HIV infection also predisposes to lipid disturbances resulting from direct influence of the virus as well as from the action of antiretroviral drugs, however coinfection with HCV is considered to be protective against significant dyslipidemia in some cases. Hypertriglyceridemia is a risk factor of cardiovascular disease and severe form is considered to be at increased risk for acute pancreatitis. 36-years old HIV/HCV coinfected patient was diagnosed with severe hypertriglyceridemia exciding 8000 mg/dL. Periodic alcohol abuse was stated. Fenofibrate initiation and antiretroviral therapy switch did not influence the lipid levels significantly. Increase in lipids levels occurred simultaneously with periods of alcohol abuse. In conclusion, HIV/HCV coinfection does not seem to influence severe dyslipidemia induced by alcohol use.
Microstructure of industrially produced reduced and low fat Turkish white cheese as influenced by the homogenization of cream

The microstructure and fat globule distribution of reduced and low fat Turkish white cheese were evaluated. Reduced and low fat cheeses were manufactured from 1.5% and 0.75% fat milk respectively which were standardized unhomogenized and homogenized cream in a dairy plant. Homogenized and non-homogenized creams and cheese whey were analyzed for fat globule distribution and cheese samples were also analyzed for microstructure characteristics. According to the results, the homogenization of cream decreased the size of fat globules; and showed that a large number of fat particles were dispersed in the in matrix and improved the lubrication of cheese microstructure. According to the micrographs for the fat, which was not removed, they exhibited a more extended matrix with a few small fat globules compared to the defatted micrographs. Homogenization of cream produces small fat globules and unclustured fat globules were found in the resulting whey. These results are important for dairy processors for using cream homogenization as a processing tool at the industrial level.
Deep learning for pedestrians: backpropagation in CNNs

The goal of this document is to provide a pedagogical introduction to the main concepts underpinning the training of deep neural networks using gradient descent; a process known as backpropagation. Although we focus on a very influential class of architectures called "convolutional neural networks" (CNNs) the approach is generic and useful to the machine learning community as a whole. Motivated by the observation that derivations of backpropagation are often obscured by clumsy index-heavy narratives that appear somewhat mathemagical, we aim to offer a conceptually clear, vectorized description that articulates well the higher level logic. Following the principle of "writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is", we try to make the calculations meticulous, self-contained and yet as intuitive as possible. Taking nothing for granted, ample illustrations serve as visual guides and an extensive bibliography is provided for further explorations. (For the sake of clarity, long mathematical derivations and visualizations have been broken up into short "summarized views" and longer "detailed views" encoded into the PDF as optional content groups. Some figures contain animations designed to illustrate important concepts in a more engaging style. For these reasons, we advise to download the document locally and open it using Adobe Acrobat Reader. Other viewers were not tested and may not render the detailed views, animations correctly.)
Pan–African granulites of Madagascar and southern India: Gondwana assembly and parallels with modern Tibet

Granulites of the southern East African Orogen formed by continental collision during Gondwana assembly. The highest metamorphic gradients of 25–50 °C km−1 were attained at 0.58–0.53 Ga in a microcontinental block that was sandwiched between two collisional sutures and is now exposed in Madagascar and southern India. The 50 Myr duration of extreme pressure–temperature (P–T) conditions and lack of coeval mantle magmatism suggest that metamorphism was driven by radiogenic heat accumulation beneath a long–lived orogenic plateau. Bounding sutures most likely record transfer of this microcontinent across the Neoproterozoic Mozambique Ocean, analogous to Gondwanan terranes that crossed Tethys before final India–Asia collision and, like Tibet, these sutures mark the edges of a plateau that formed following terminal ocean closure and collision. Both sutures record moderate metamorphic gradients of 15–25 °C km−1 but with quite different ages. Metamorphism along the western suture at 0.65–0.61 Ga followed the end of magmatism in an adjacent 0.85–0.65 Ga ocean–arc terrane. It has an anti–clockwise P–T path that reflects preferential thickening of the hot arc during early stages of collision, and dates ocean closure at the western suture. Metamorphism along the eastern suture at 0.53–0.51 Ga has a clockwise P–T path and is widely assumed to date terminal collision in the East African Orogen. However, this event was coeval with rapid exhumation of granulites in the adjacent plateau and is more likely to reflect reactivation of a much older eastern suture during plateau collapse. Great care should be taken when using metamorphism to date ocean closure in ancient orogens. Rocks with hot metamorphic gradients give poor age constraints on initial collision because peak T is attained >50 Myr after ocean closure if radioactivity is a major part of the heat budget. Suture zone rocks with moderate metamorphic gradients can provide more reliable estimates for the time of ocean closure but are also prone to later reactivation in orogens with protracted histories.
Product Market Predatory Threats and the Use of Performance-sensitive Debt

We use a variant of the Hotelling (1929) model to illustrate that, when a firm faces hard payment constraint(s), financially strong rivals may adopt predatory strategies to drive the firm out of the product market and hence to obtain extra profit from enhanced market power later on. Predation is more likely to occur if the payment constraint is contingent on the firm’s performance. The model predicts that higher predatory threats in the product market reduce firm’s use of performance-sensitive debt and this effect should be more pronounced for small firms with large growth opportunities. Through a sample of over 16,000 bank loans to U.S. borrowers in 1997-2008, we find empirical evidence to support these model predictions.
Mean reversion in unemployment: new findings from the Baltic tigers

AbstractThe tendency of the unemployment rate to revert to the mean value or the natural rate of unemployment has been one of the most discussed topics in macroeconomics. This study focused on three Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – as case studies to investigate unemployment dynamics. Three unit root tests were performed for this purpose: 1) the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test, 2) the Seemingly Unrelated Regressions Augmented Dickey-Fuller (SURADF) test and 3) the Fourier Augmented Dickey-Fuller (FADF) test. The null hypothesis was that unemployment in the Baltic countries is a unit root process. As the findings revealed, the ADF test and the SURADF test failed to reject the null hypothesis of a unit root for all the three Baltic countries. However, the nonlinear FADF test could not reject the null hypothesis for Lithuania. This means that unemployment in Lithuania could be described as a stationary process. As such, it has the tendency to revert to a sustainable level. By contrast, u.
Survey of the Teaching of Pronunciation in Adult ESL Programs in Canada, 2010

This follow-up study reexamines the state of the teaching of pronunciation in ESL classes across Canada. The purpose of the survey was twofold: to gain a snapshot of current practices and to compare this with the picture of 10 years ago. We based the current work on Breitkreutz, Derwing, and Rossiter’s (2001) survey asking teachers about resources, approaches, and beliefs about teaching pronunciation. We also asked for background information about the instructors’ formal education and teaching experience. For the most part, instruction in pronunciation in Canada has not changed substantially in the last decade. More training opportunities are available, although these are still not enough according to many of our respondents. The number of pronunciation courses offered in English-as-asecond-language (ESL) programs has also increased. Teachers’ beliefs about pronunciation instruction remained largely the same, with a similar focus on suprasegmentals and segmentals. However, we did find a slight difference in how teachers approached these two aspects of pronunciation. Ten years ago, teachers reported emphasizing both aspects in class, whereas today there seemed to be a slightly greater focus on segmentals. Finally, we offer several recommendations for TESL programs, ESL programs, and ESL instructors.
A theoretical explanation for the Central Molecular Zone asymmetry

It has been known for more than thirty years that the distribution of molecular gas in the innermost 300 parsecs of the Milky Way, the Central Molecular Zone, is strongly asymmetric. Indeed, approximately three quarters of molecular emission comes from positive longitudes, and only one quarter from negative longitudes. However, despite much theoretical effort, the origin of this asymmetry has remained a mystery. Here we show that the asymmetry can be neatly explained by unsteady flow of gas in a barred potential. We use high-resolution 3D hydrodynamical simulations coupled to a state-of-the-art chemical network. Despite the initial conditions and the bar potential being point-symmetric with respect to the Galactic Centre, asymmetries develop spontaneously due to the combination of a hydrodynamical instability known as the “wiggle instability” and the thermal instability. The observed asymmetry must be transient: observations made tens of megayears in the past or in the future would often show an asymmetry in the opposite sense. Fluctuations of amplitude comparable to the observed asymmetry occur for a large fraction of the time in our simulations, and suggest that the present is not an exceptional moment in the life of our Galaxy.
A Closer Look at Information Systems Graduate Preparation and Job Needs: Implications for Higher Education Curriculum Enhancements

A historical review of the literature surrounding IS skill requirements was conducted for this study to provide thechanges in IS over the past several decades. Providing a historical look at the literature will place into perspective thefact that the field changes rapidly, causing the need for the IS professional to also continuously change. The resultsof the investigation revealed that a consensus exists regarding the perceptions of the skills needed for the IS worker.
The Impact of Public Employment: Evidence from Bonn

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic geography model in which public sector employment in a city can crowd out private employment through higher wages and house prices, but also generates potential productivity and amenity spillovers. We find that relative to a control group of cities, Bonn experiences a substantial increase in public employment. However, this results in only modest increases in private sector employment with each additional public sector job destroying around 0.2 jobs in industries and creating just over one additional job in other parts of the private sector. We show how this finding can be explained by our model and provide several pieces of evidence for the mechanisms emphasised by the model.
Seasonal Abundance of Mosquitoes in Jizan Province

Effect of climatic factors on mosquitoes abundance in Jizan province was studied through this research reporting that rainfall rate was the most effective and significant factor (P>0.01, r= 0.459), as well as, the presence of two peaks of mosquito activity which were attained yearly (February–April and July–September) after a rainy season in the frequently visited sites. On the other hand, mosquito activity was increased in occasionally visited sites in winter rather than that of summer season.
D boundary recovery by constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization

Three-dimensional boundary recovery is a fundamental problem in mesh generation. In this paper, we propose a practical algorithm for solving this problem. Our algorithm is based on the construction of a constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization (CDT) for a set of constraints (segments and facets). The algorithm adds additional points (so-called Steiner points) on segments only. The Steiner points are chosen in such a way that the resulting subsegments are Delaunay and their lengths are not unnecessarily short. It is theoretically guaranteed that the facets can be recovered without using Steiner points. The complexity of this algorithm is analyzed. The proposed algorithm has been implemented. Its performance is reported through various application examples.
Divide-and-Conquer With Sequential Monte Carlo

ABSTRACT We propose a novel class of Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms, appropriate for inference in probabilistic graphical models. This class of algorithms adopts a divide-and-conquer approach based upon an auxiliary tree-structured decomposition of the model of interest, turning the overall inferential task into a collection of recursively solved subproblems. The proposed method is applicable to a broad class of probabilistic graphical models, including models with loops. Unlike a standard SMC sampler, the proposed divide-and-conquer SMC employs multiple independent populations of weighted particles, which are resampled, merged, and propagated as the method progresses. We illustrate empirically that this approach can outperform standard methods in terms of the accuracy of the posterior expectation and marginal likelihood approximations. Divide-and-conquer SMC also opens up novel parallel implementation options and the possibility of concentrating the computational effort on the most challenging subproblems. We demonstrate its performance on a Markov random field and on a hierarchical logistic regression problem. Supplementary materials including proofs and additional numerical results are available online.
Clinical Effectiveness and Nephrotoxicity of Aerosolized Colistin Treatment in Multidrug-Resistant Gram-Negative Pneumonia

Background: Colistin (polymyxin E) is active against multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria (MDR-GNB). However, the effectiveness of inhaled colistin is unclear. This study was designed to assess the effectiveness and safety of aerosolized colistin for the treatment of ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) caused by MDR-GNB. Methods: In this retrospective longitudinal study, we evaluated the medical records of 63 patients who received aerosolized colistin treatment for VAP caused by MDR-GNB in the medical intensive care unit (MICU) from February 2012 to March 2014. Results: A total of 25 patients with VAP caused by MDR-GNB were included in this study. The negative conversion rate was 84.6% after treatment, and acute kidney injury (AKI) occurred in 11 patients (44%, AKI group). The average length of MICU stay and colistin treatment-related factors, such as daily and total cumulative doses and administration period, were not significantly different between groups. In-hospital mortality tended to be higher in the AKI group (p = 0.07). Multivariate analysis showed that a body mass index less than 18 was an independent risk factor of mortality (odds ratio [OR] = 21.95, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.59-302.23; p = 0.02). Notably, AKI occurrence was closely related to the administration of more than two nephrotoxic drugs combined with aerosolized colistin (OR = 15.03, 95% CI 1.40-161.76; p = 0.025) and septic shock (OR = 8.10, 95% CI 1.40-161.76; p = 0.04). Conclusions: The use of adjunctive aerosolized colistin treatment appears to be a relatively safe and effective option for the treatment of VAP caused by MDR-GNB. However, more research on the concomitant use of nephrotoxic drugs with aerosolized colistin will be necessary, as this can be an important risk factor of development of AKI.
Effects of application of exogenous NO on the physiological characteristics of perennial ryegrass grown in Cd-contaminated soil

A pot experiment was conducted to study the effects of sodium nitroprusside (SNP, a nitric oxide [NO] donor) on cadmium (Cd) toxicity in ryegrass plants. In the present study, ryegrass plants subjected to Cd toxicity were treated with different concentrations of SNP (50, 100, 300 and 500 µM), SNP solution was poured into Cd-contaminated soil every seven days. Cd treatment inhibited the plants growth and the absorption of micronutrients, increased accumulation of Cd in both shoots and roots. In Cd-treated plants, the activities of antioxidant enzymes and the contents of proline, soluble protein and ascorbic acid (AsA) decreased dramatically, whereas the accumulation of superoxide anion (O2.-), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and malondialdehyde (MDA) increased significantly. Addition of SNP significantly decreased O2. -, H2O2 and MDA accumulation in both shoots and roots of Cd-stressed plants, decreased the transport of Cd from roots to shoots, alleviated the inhibition of Ca, Fe, Mg and Zn absorption induced by Cd and promoted the plant growth. In SNP-treated plants, the chlorophyll content, the contents of proline, soluble protein and ascorbic acid, and the activities of superoxide dismutase, peroxidase and catalase increased considerably. Addition of 300 µM SNP had the most significant alleviating effect against Cd toxicity while the addition of 500 µM SNP had no significant effect with Cd treatment. Based on these results, we concluded that the optimal concentrations of exogenous SNP could alleviate Cd induced stress and promote ryegrass plant growth.
The extent of managers’ motivation as a determinant of leadership quality

Abstract Motivating to perform remains a very inspiring field of scientific studies. In spite of extensive research in this field, some areas, of niche nature, that require exploration can be identified. Motivating the managers is one of such areas, less popular but of tremendous importance in the process of managing a contemporary organisation. This article is theoretical and empirical. It was written to present the original results of empirical research focused on assessment of the motivation impact of 47 financial and non-financial tools by several hundred Polish managers. The research tool used in the study process was the questionnaire prepared by the author of this paper. Key preferences of the group of employees are an important source of information required in the process of optimising the effectiveness of managing the human capital and an entire organisation.