Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dividend Policy , Index Labeling Effect , Investment , and Cash Flow Duration

This dissertation consists of two essays on corporate policy. The first chapter analyzes whether being labeled a “growth” firm or a “value” firm affects the firm’s dividend policy. I focus on the dividend policy because of its discretionary nature and the link to investor demand. To address endogeneity concerns, I use regression discontinuity design around the threshold to assign firms to each category. The results show that “value” firms have a significantly higher dividend payout about four percentage points than growth firms. This approach establishes a causal link between firm “growth/value” labels and dividend policy. The second chapter develops investment policy model which associated with duration of cash flow. Firms are doing their business by operating a portfolio of projects that have various duration, and the duration of the project portfolio generates different duration of cash flow stream. By assuming the duration of cash flow as a firm specific characteristic, this paper analyzes how the duration of cash flow affects firms’ investment decision. I develop a model of investment, external finance, and savings to characterize how firms’ decision is affected by the duration of cash flow. Firms maximize total value of cash flow, while they have to maintain their solvency by paying a fixed cost for the operation. I empirically confirm the positive correlation between duration of cash flow and investment with theoretical support. Financial constraint suffocates the firm when they face solvency issue, so that model with financial constraint shows that the correlation between duration of cash flow and investment is stronger than low financial constraint case.
Reactive thrombocytosis and erythrocyte sedimentation rate in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis

This study aimed at assessing the reactive thrombocytosis and erythrocyte sedimentation rate in patients with pulmonary tuberculosis living in Port Sudan City, Red Sea State, Sudan. This study covers the period from June 2006 up to December 2008 at Port Sudan Tuberculosis Diagnostic Center. Hundred newly discovered Ziehl Neelsen stain positive males (77%) and females (23%) were randomly selected to be the study sample and fifty apparently healthy adult males (76%) and females (24%) were also randomly selected to be the control group of the study. The ages of the patients ranged from 14 to 70 years old. Thrombocytosis was detected in 20% of the patients. The erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) was increased in 100% of the patients. The changes in these parameters (platelets count and ESR) may reflect a reaction to the inflammatory condition. Therefore, in endemic areas, the presence of such hematological peripheral blood changes may raise the suspicion of pulmonary tuberculosis. Key words: Tuberculosis, thrombocytosis, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), Port Sudan.
Pedagogic Barriers in Cameroon Inclusive Classrooms: The Impact of Curriculum, Teachers’ Attitudes and Classroom Infrastructures

This study sought to examine if the curriculum, infrastructures and teachers’ attitudes may influence school exclusion amongst disabled pupils. Three hypotheses were formulated based on the three variables: curriculum (teaching programmes), infrastructures and teachers’ attitudes. 150 public primary school personnel from 12 primary schools in Yaounde, Mfoundi IV Sub- Division of the Centre Region of Cameroon were involved in this survey. A questionnaire was used for data collection. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. The results show that there was a significant impact of curriculum and teachers’ attitudes on inclusive classroom but there was no significant impact with respect to the infrastructure variable. Considering that infrastructure variables have no impact, we still recommend that good quality and relevant infrastructure be put in place and also teachers’ programme and training be revised to enhance the pedagogic skills that may include handing individual pupils’ differences in inclusive classrooms.
Operational recognition of high precipitation efficiency and low echo centroid convection

A rarely studied cause of flash flooding—the leading cause of weather-related fatalities in the United States—is from a type of convective cell called a low-echo centroid (LEC), where most of the reflectivity is within the warm portion of the cloud-bearing layer. Since the inception of the LEC classification, the definition has remained ambiguous and difficult to quantify. Operational identification of LEC convection is critical to anticipating flash flooding, because rainfall estimates from the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler often are too low. Four LEC convective cases are examined in order to refine the definition and to provide the characteristic features of these storms. From the sample events, two types of LEC storms were identified that shared features that would assist in their operational identification. Analyses indicated that radar reflectivity 60 dBZ should exist within the cell, the cell should possess a long-lived steady-state reflectivity of 45–55 dBZ, and the LEC cell should have increasing reflectivity as height decreases. The development of a system to assist operational forecasters in identification of the atmospheric parameters favoring LEC convection, and the real-time recognition of LEC events to support flash-flood-warning decision making, is an important effort to reducing unwarned and/or unexpected flooding events.
The Unfolding of the Relational Operant: A Real-time Analysis Using Electroencephalography and Reaction Time Measures

The current study attempted to capture in real time the unfolding of the relational operant using electroencephalography (EEG) and reaction time measures. Participants were exposed to relational pretraining to establish the contextual cues of Same and Opposite for two arbitrary stimuli. These cues were then used to establish a series of contextually controlled discriminations in order to create a simple relational network among a series of arbitrary stimuli. During the test for derived relations of Same and Opposite, EEG and reaction time measures were recorded for each indi- vidual test task during the acquisition of a stable derived relational response pattern. Participants were then exposed to an identical set of relational training and testing tasks with the important difference that an entirely different set of stimuli was used. EEG and reaction time measures were again recorded during the relational test phase. Results showed that reaction times decreased for all subjects across successive test tasks and from the first to the second stimulus set. EEG data also suggested that there was increasingly less higher cognitive activity during the derivation of successive stimulus relations within and across stimulus sets. Taken together these findings provide support for the idea that derived relational responding can be viewed as an operant activity that both develops and generalizes.
Exploring and Using the Magnetic Methods

The Earth is principally made up of three parts: core, mantle and crust (Fig. 1). As understood today, right at the heart of the Earth is a solid inner core composed primarily of iron. At 5, 700°C, this iron is as hot as the Sun’s surface, but the crushing pressure caused by gravity prevents it from becoming liquid. Surrounding this is the outer core, a nearly 2, 000 km thick layer of iron, nickel, and small quantities of other metals. Lower pressure than the inner core means the metal here is fluid. Differences in temperature, pressure and composition within the outer core cause convection currents in the molten metal as cool, dense matter sinks while warm, less dense matter rises. This flow of liquid iron generates electric currents, which in turn produce magnetic fields (Earth’s field). These convection processes in the liquid part of core (outer core) give rise to a dipolar geomagnetic field that resembles that of a large bar magnet aligned approximately along the Earth’s rotational axis. The mantle plays little part in the Earth’s magnetism, while interaction of the past and present geomagnetic field with the rocks of the crust produces magnetic anomalies recorded in detailed when surveys are carried out on or above the Earth’s surface.
Impact of alternative fuels on the PM emissions characteristics of gas turbine engines

The growth in the commercial aviation sector has raised concerns about the impact of emissions from aircraft operations on local and regional air quality, climate change, and health-related effects. The lack of Particulate Matter (PM) emissions data from gas turbine engines coupled with the increasing interest in the use of alternative fuels as a potential emissions mitigation strategy are the motivating factors behind this thesis. A total of seven peer-reviewed archival journal publications form the basis of this work. It commences with two field studies that were performed at the Oakland International Airport and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport to measure the characteristics of aircraft engine specific PM emissions at the engine exit plane and in the near field as the exhaust plume expands and cools. Having characterised the PM emissions from various aircraft gas turbine engine types, the significant impact that alternative fuels can have on the PM emissions characteristics was explored and the results were correlated with fuel properties. A new robust and standardised methodology for the measurement of non-volatile PM emissions is described, and its reproducibility against other systems is demonstrated. Finally this standardized system was used in a detailed examination of the impact of fuel composition on the characteristics of the emitted non-volatile PM from a gas turbine engine. These publications and the resulting data improved the characterisation and quantification of PM emissions for a wide variety of gas turbine engines burning conventional and alternative fuels. PM emissions from aircraft gas turbine engines at airports were found to have bimodal size distributions, consisting of a nucleation mode with volatile PM and an accumulation mode with volatile PM condensed on the surface of non-volatile PM. Fuel properties were found to have a significant impact on the production of PM. The reductions in PM emissions with alternative fuels were best correlated with fuel hydrogen content. The data and analysis from these publications will be used to improve/validate current environmental impact predictive tools with real world aircraft gas turbine engine specific PM emissions inputs and develop effective emissions mitigation strategies.
Contiguity and non-reconstruction results for planted partition models: the dense case

We consider the two block stochastic block model on $n$ nodes with asymptotically equal cluster sizes. The connection probabilities within and between cluster are denoted by $p_n:=\frac{a_n}{n}$ and $q_n:=\frac{b_n}{n}$ respectively. Mossel et al.(2012) considered the case when $a_n=a$ and $b_n=b$ are fixed. They proved the probability models of the stochastic block model and that of Erd{\"o}s-R{\'e}nyi graph with same average degree are mutually contiguous whenever $(a-b)^2 2(a+b)$. Mossel et al.(2012) also proved that when $(a-b)^2 2(1-p)(a_n+b_n)$. Further we also prove it is impossible find an estimate of the labeling of the nodes which is positively correlated with the true labeling whenever $(a_n-b_n)^2< 2(1-p)(a_n+b_n)$. The results of this paper justify the negative part of a conjecture made in Decelle et al.(2011) for dense graphs.
An empirical test of exogenous growth models: Evidence from three southern African countries

This paper aims to empirically investigate the relevance of exogenous growth models in explaining economic growth in three Southern African countries, using the recently developed ARDL bounds-testing approach. Furthermore, the relevance of the convergence hypothesis in these study countries is tested using an extended exogenous growth model. The study results reveal that the predictions of the Solow and augmented Solow growth models are consistent in the three study countries, and that the convergence hypothesis holds. However, when additional factors are taken into account in exogenous growth models, the response of income per capita due to changes in investment and human capital development is slow in economies with low income per capita, such as Malawi and Zambia, compared to South Africa, which is ranked as an economy with a high income per capita. This study has important policy implications in these study countries. These implications include the need for policy makers to ensure that macroeconomic stability is encouraged by reducing government consumption, inflation, and population growth; and by promoting trade in order to allow for the diffusion of technologies from abroad.
Thirteen Years of Aerosol Radiative Forcing in Southwestern Iberian Peninsula

ABSTRACTNotable uncertainties in the aerosol impact on the Earth's radiative budget still remain, mainly at local scales. This study aims to accurately quantify the shortwave aerosol radiative forcing (ARF) and its efficiency (ARFE) at Evora (Portugal, Southwestern Europe). This is an interesting region affected by different aerosol types and sources. Towards this goal, ARF and ARFE are calculated for Evora during thirteen years (2003–2015), which is the longest period ever analyzed for this region. For this calculation, the most updated AERONET data have been used to simulate irradiance with the libRadtran code. Thus, 1676 daily values were analyzed, obtaining a mean ARF of –7.4 W m–2 at the Earth's surface (SURF) and –1.1 W m–2 at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), indicating a cooling of the Earth–atmosphere system. The difference in ARF between TOA and SURF indicates a mean net gain of 6.3 W m–2 for the atmosphere. While no ARF seasonal pattern is observed at the TOA, a clear seasonal cycle is detected at the SURF with the most negative values occurring in summer. On the other hand, ARFE shows mean values of –62.7 W m–2 τ–1 at the SURF and –14.3 W m–2 τ–1 at the TOA. Results show that ARFE highly depends on the aerosol single scattering albedo, showing opposite behavior at the SURF and at the TOA. The large temporal variability detected in the aerosol properties in the region of study confirms the general need for long time series of measurements to achieve an accurate estimation of the ARF and ARFE.
Badges for Digital Policy Literacy

Previous work on digital policy literacy in relation to youth and privacy highlights that youth need to comprehend policy processes, the political economy of media systems, and sociotechnical infrastructures. Understanding in these domains is necessary for youth to negotiate both their social and informational privacy and to engage with the terms of service of the platforms they regularly use. In this article, we examine the digital policy literacy implications of a codesign project with eight teenagers whose goals were to create prototype-level open badges relevant to digital privacy in the Canadian context. We argue that codesign, informed by the culture of open source software, empowerment approaches to privacy education, and connected learning can provide new avenues to enhance digital policy literacy among youth.
Dynamical mass determination for the very low mass stars LHS 1070 B and C

We followed the relative orbit of the close pair of very late-type stars in the nearby triple system LHS 1070 during the past seven years. These observations are used to derive the astrometric elements of the orbit. Using the period of $16.1 \pm 1.4$ years and assuming the distance of 7.39 pc given by van Altena ([CITE]) to be exactly correct, the combined mass of components B and C is 0.138 ± 0.003 $M_{\odot}$. Otherwise, this mass scales with the third power of the distance, which presently is not known to better than 9% . The dynamical mass would equal the combined mass of $0.161 \pm 0.002$ $M_{\odot}$ derived from the theoretical mass-luminosity relation of Baraffe et al. ([CITE]) and Chabrier et al. ([CITE]) for a 5% larger distance of 7.78 pc. A critical comparison with the theoretical relations therefore has to await more precise parallax determinations for this comparatively faint system with visual magnitude $V = 15.3$. The wide orbit of component A around the center of mass of components B and C cannot yet be determined from our measurements. However, we can show that it is probably co-planar with the close pair orbit and should have a period in the range 60-1000 years.
Linear instabilities in the wakes of cylinders with triangular cross-sections

The wakes of flows past bluff bodies are known to undergo several transitions leading to turbulence, each incurring changes to the dynamics of the flow. The initial transition to threedimensional flow for several cylindrical geometries manifests as coherent structures along the cylinder span and have been the focus of many investigations. This transition and its associated instability modes are investigated numerically for flows past a cylinder with triangular cross-section at various inclinations using Floquet stability analysis. The instabilities are shown to be strongly dependent on the cylinder inclination, producing a dominant synchronous instability mode consistent with the synchronous Mode A and the subharmonic Mode C at various cylinder inclinations. The neutral stability threshold ranges approximately from 100 < Reh < 140, where h is the projected frontal height of the cylinder; and the wavelengths of the instabilities ranging approximately between 4h–6h for the synchronous mode and approximately 2h for the subharmonic mode at transition for various cylinder inclinations.
Personal and Employment Outcomes of Person-Centered Career Planning

Florida State University Abstract: This study examined effects of person-centered planning on career choice and employment outcomes attained by 83 supported employees. Choice was measured by analyzing degree of match between employees' career preferences and their current employment. High and moderate levels of preference match were attained by 72 (83%) of employees studied. Wages and length of employment did not differ significantly by level of match. These employment outcomes tended to favor employees in high and moderate match groups, however. Imple- mentation and evaluation issues related to person-centered planning were further examined through a focus group of service providers. Responses identified measuring effectiveness of person-centered planning, supporting training and commitment of service providers, collaborative problem solving, and continuous process improve- ment as issues requiring further research. Person-centered planning has become a widely used tool in both education and adult programs serving individuals with develop- mental disabilities. In school settings, person- centered planning has been used to gather information and plan supports in programs focusing on inclusion of students who were deaf and blind (Perlroth, Pumpian, Hesche, & Campbell, 1993); to enhance student and family participation in educational planning (Getzel & deFurs, 1997; Whitney-Thomas, Shaw, Honey, & Butterworth 1998); and to encourage student-focused transition plan- ning (Hagner, Helm, & Butterworth, 1996; Miner & Bates, 1997). Artesani and Mallar (1998) utilized person centered planning to assist in the functional assessment of challeng- ing behaviors in general education settings. In adult programs, person-centered plan- ning has been used to determine employment preferences (Everson & Reid, 1997) and to assist in the development of employment sup- ports (Abrams, DonAroma, & Karan, 1997). Reid, Everson, and Green (1999) utilized a person-centered method to assess the pre- ferred leisure activities of adults with pro- found and multiple disabilities. Heller, Miller,
The Influence of Servant Leadership on Employee Trust in a Leader and Commitment to the Organization

Servant leadership is a concept that has garnered attention from researchers in the past decade. Servant leadership requires leaders to rely on one-on-one communication in order to understand the abilities, needs, desires, goals, and potential of their followers and ultimately bring the best out of those individuals. It is noted from the extant literature that, with the knowledge of each follower’s unique characteristics and interests, leaders can assist their followers in achieving their potential. This study investigates the mediating role of employee trust in the leader on the relationships between servant leadership and employee commitment to the organization. Three research hypotheses are posited and empirically tested using a sample data of 150 from certain sectors in South Africa’s Gauteng Province. The results indicate that servant leadership positively influences employee trust in the leader and employee commitment to the organization in a significant way. Servant leadership implications of the findings are discussed and limitations and future research directions are indicated. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013. v4n14p405
Impact of biomass burning on soil microorganisms and plant metabolites: A view from molecular distributions of atmospheric hydroxy fatty acids over Mount Tai

Biomass burning events (BBEs) in the North China Plain is one of the principal sources of airborne pollutants in China and also for the neighboring countries. To examine the impact of BBEs on soil bacteria and other higher plant metabolites, their tracer compounds, hydroxy fatty acids (FAs), were measured in the bulk particulate matter (total suspended particles (TSP)) over Mount Tai during the period of wheat residue burning in June 2006. Higher inputs of epicuticular waxes and soil microorganisms during high BBEs (H; 6–14 and 27 June) relative to low BBEs (L; 15–26 and 28 June) were characterized by increased concentrations of homologous series of α‐(C9–C32), β‐(C9–C32), and ω‐(C12–C28) hydroxy FAs in TSP samples. However, their relative abundances were not significantly different between H‐BBEs and L‐BBEs, suggesting their common source/transport pathways. We also found higher concentrations of trehalose and mannitol (tracers of soil microbes), and levoglucosan (tracer of biomass combustion) during H‐BBEs than L‐BBEs. These results are consistent with hydroxy FAs, suggesting that they are associated with biomass combustion processes of agricultural wastes as well as re‐suspension of mineral dust and plant pathogens. In addition, enhanced concentrations of endotoxin and mass loading of Gram‐negative bacteria during H‐BBEs (117 endotoxin units (EU) m−3 and 390 ng m−3, respectively) were noteworthy as compared to those in L‐BBEs (22.5 EU m−3 and 75 ng m−3, respectively). Back trajectory analysis and fire spots together with temporal variations of hydroxy FAs revealed an impact of biomass burning on emissions and atmospheric transport of bacteria and plant metabolites.