Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Determinants of Capital Structure: Evidence from Ghanaian Firms

This paper investigates the determinants of capital structure using dataset from 33 listed and non-listed companies during the period 2003 – 2007 in Ghana. A multiple regression analysis of pooled-cross sectional and time-series observations have been employed in the analysis. The results identify long-term debt to be irrelevant component of capital structure of large unquoted and quoted firms in Ghana as there is a greater reliance on equity. Furthermore, profitability, size, business risk and tangible assets have positive correlation with level of gearing of companies in Ghana. On the other hand, growth, and tax indicate a negative correlation with the level of gearing. Keywords: Capital structure, financing decisions, listed, non-listed, Ghana.
The player development pathway: a biomechanical perspective

The purpose of this paper is to challenge biomechanists to think more about how they may assist coaches to enhance the player development pathway (11 – 15 – 18 year old). It is imperative we play an integral role in creating the appropriate ‘learning environment’, by providing a sound theoretical framework with respect to; task decomposition (practice using the appropriate lead-up drills), together with skill and practice variability. Biomechanists must also understand how variables change over the development pathway if they are to assist coaches structure the optimal learning environment. This paper will discuss the above with specific references to a number of sporting activities.
STUDY OF MICROBIAL CONTAMINATION OF BROILERS IN MODERN ABATTOIRS IN KHARTOUM STATE

This study was carried out to investigate the contaminating microorganisms that can be found on the breast, legs and backs of broilers during processing. A total of 81 swab samples from 27 carcasses were collected randomly from chicken carcasses slaughtered at modern poultry abattoir in Khartoum State, the Sudan. The samples were taken from 9 Critical Control Points (CCPs), namely; after bleeding with feathers, after scalding, after defeathering, after evisceration, after spray wash, after chilling and packing, workers’ hand, knives and Scalding water. Total Viable Count (TVC) was carried for each sample besides isolation and identification of contaminating bacteria. The study revealed a statistically significant difference at P-value (p≤ 0.05) in the 9 CCPs between the legs, backs and breast respectively. The isolated bacteria were Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus albus and Salmonella species. Sudanese abattoirs may reflect the hygienic status of chicken meat production in the developing countries and the implementation of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) in poultry industry is extremely important, because it involves the constant monitoring of all steps of the process.
The asymmetric nature of fiscal decentralization: theory and practice

A relevant mismatch between tax and expenditure decentralization characterizes many industrialized countries. The former is usually less pronounced than the latter, resulting in asymmetric fiscal decentralization arrangements. We investigate the nature of this asymmetry using a theoretical framework that explains why it is difficult to tackle it, despite a consensus on the benefits of a well-balanced decentralization process. We find that asymmetry is intrinsic to fiscal decentralization, even in a scenario where clear advantages from well-developed decentralized systems arise. This implies that both empirical and theoretical contributions would benefit by taking into account the welfare-reducing asymmetric nature of fiscal decentralization.
Six Thinking Hats and Social Workers' Innovative Competence: An Experimental Study

Employees, no doubt, are the main force in organizations, and their innovative behaviours are vital for outcome efficacy. Innovative organisations, therefore, need creative employees who generate new ideas for product or process of innovation. This study investigated the effect of six thinking hats creativity technique on innovative competence of social worker. A pretest-post-test quasi-experimental design was adopted for the study. Forty-eight (48) participants chosen among social workers in two randomly selected Non Governmental Organisations participated in the study. Data were collected using Innovative Competence Scale. Analysis of variance was employed for data analysis with significant level fixed at 0.05. Findings from the study revealed that the treatment significantly affect participants’ innovative competence. Based on the results, the study recommended that creativity be integrated into the training programmes for personnel in the workplace. Keywords: Creativity, Innovative Competence, Six Thinking Hats, Social Workers
Understanding watershed hydrogeochemistry: 2. Synchronized hydrological and geochemical processes drive stream chemostatic behavior

Why do solute concentrations in streams remain largely constant while discharge varies by orders of magnitude? We used a new hydrological land surface and reactive transport code, RT‐Flux‐PIHM, to understand this long‐standing puzzle. We focus on the nonreactive chloride (Cl) and reactive magnesium (Mg) in the Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory (SSHCZO). Simulation results show that stream discharge comes from surface runoff (Qs), soil lateral flow (QL), and deeper groundwater (QG), with QL contributing >70%. In the summer, when high evapotranspiration dries up and disconnects most of the watershed from the stream, Cl is trapped along planar hillslopes. Successive rainfalls connect the watershed and mobilize trapped Cl, which counteracts dilution effects brought about by high water storage (Vw) and maintains chemostasis. Similarly, the synchronous response of clay dissolution rates (Mg source) to hydrological conditions, maintained largely by a relatively constant ratio between “wetted” mineral surface area Aw and Vw, controls Mg chemostatic behavior. Sensitivity analysis indicates that cation exchange plays a secondary role in determining chemostasis compared to clay dissolution, although it does store an order‐of‐magnitude more Mg on exchange sites than soil water. Model simulations indicate that dilution (concentration decrease with increasing discharge) occurs only when mass influxes from soil lateral flow are negligible (e.g., via having low clay surface area) so that stream discharge is dominated by relatively constant mass fluxes from deep groundwater that are unresponsive to surface hydrological conditions.
Linking soil organic carbon stocks to land-use types in a Mediterranean agroforestry landscape.

In agroforestry landscapes, land use, and the associated management practices exert strong impacts upon soil organic carbon stocks. Data on the soil organic carbon were collected for different land-use types within a small watershed, El Salado, located in Lanjaron (SE Spain). Eight land-use types namely: farmland planted in olive, almond, and cereals; forest with Pinus halepensis Mill. and Pinus sylvestris L. stands; shrubland; grassland; as well as abandoned farmland were taken into consideration. Of the land-use types investigated, forest, shrubland, as well as grassland exhibited the highest average soil organic C stocks (100-63 Mg ha -1 ) in contrast with the abandoned farmland (28 Mg ha -1 ), with farmland representing a go-between situation (51-49 Mg ha -1 ). The environmental factors precipitation, temperature, and elevation significantly influenced (P< 0.01) the soil organic C stock, with the contents tending to be higher in mountain soils with respective intermediate values of 600-800 mm, 10-15oC, and 1,000-1,500 m asl. Thus, the present approach offers a comparison of C-sequestration patterns as related to the land-use types in a Mediterranean agroforestry landscape, where the main challenge is to integrate the forest trees and the crops within their harmonious interacting combinations.
Basal friction of Fleming Glacier, Antarctica – Part 2: Evolution from 2008 to 2015

Abstract. The Wordie Ice Shelf–Fleming Glacier system in the southern Antarctic Peninsula has experienced a long-term retreat and disintegration of its ice shelf in the past 50 years. Increases in the glacier velocity and dynamic thinning have been observed over the past two decades, especially after 2008 when only a small ice shelf remained at the Fleming Glacier front. It is important to know whether the substantial further speed-up and greater surface draw-down of the glacier since 2008 is a direct response to ocean forcing, or driven by feedbacks within the grounded marine-based glacier system, or both. Recent observational studies have suggested the 2008–2015 velocity change was due to the ungrounding of the Fleming Glacier front. To explore the mechanisms underlying the recent changes, we use a full-Stokes ice sheet model to simulate the basal shear stress distribution of the Fleming system in 2008 and 2015. This study is part of the first high resolution modelling campaign of this system. Comparison of inversions for basal shear stresses for 2008 and 2015 suggests the migration of the grounding line ∼9 km upstream by 2015 from the 2008 ice front/grounding line positions, which virtually coincided with the 1996 grounding line position. This migration is consistent with the change in floating area deduced from the calculated height above buoyancy in 2015. The retrograde submarine bed underneath the lowest part of the Fleming Glacier may have promoted retreat of the grounding line. Grounding line retreat may also be enhanced by a feedback mechanism upstream of the grounding line by which increased basal lubrication due to increasing frictional heating enhances sliding and thinning. Improved knowledge of bed topography near the grounding line and further transient simulations with oceanic forcing are required to accurately predict the future movement of the Fleming Glacier system grounding line and better understand its ice dynamics and future contribution to sea level.
Use of Different Types and Amounts of Dietary Fats to Redesign Pork

Title: Use of different types and amounts of dietary fats to redesign pork. Background: Using high energy fat-supplemented diets in pork production can offer several economic advantages to producers when fat sources are cost effectively priced. Because of a decreased heat increment, dietary fat supplementation allows a greater proportion of dietary calories to be available for tissue synthesis when pigs are maintained at or above the thermo neutral zone. Previous research has indicated that diets that have increasing dietary saturated fatty acids (SFA) cause hypercholesterolemia, atherosclerosis development, and greater coronary heart disease risk in humans. When dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) are substituted for saturated fatty acids (SFA), decreased blood cholesterol concentration occurs. This information has caused the consumer to question the consumption of meat products, such as pork, which are perceived as being rich in SFAs. The objective of this study was to alter the polyunsaturated (PUFA) to saturated fatty acid (SFA) ratio in pork for better human nutrition. Methods and findings: Pigs were fed either choice white grease or soybean oil at 10, 20, 30, or 40% of total dietary calories. All diets were based on corn and soybean meal. The study used 54 pigs with six pigs per treatment. Initial and slaughter weights were 54 and 110 kg, respectively. Skeletal muscle samples were taken from the longissimus dorsi, biceps femoris, and triceps brachii muscles. Adipose tissue samples were taken from the outer, middle, and inner 10th rib backfat layers, perirenal adipose tissue, and an inter muscular adipose deposit within the ham. Total lipids were extracted; fatty acid methyl esters were formed by trans esterification and quantified by gas chromatography. Adding choice white grease or soybean oil to diets fed growing swine did not alter animal growth rates. The PUFA from the outer 10th rib backfat layer showed linear increases (P < 0.05) when pigs were fed diets with increasingly greater soybean oil content, whereas the backfat from pigs fed diets containing greater choice white grease contents resulted in a linear increase (P < 0.05) of monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA). Including soybean oil in the low-fat control diet at 30 and 40% increased the PUFA to SFA ratios (P:S) to 0.9 and 1.26 (P < 0.05), respectively, in longissimus muscle. The MUFA content in the longissimus muscle was decreased by 30% (P < 0.05) with the 40% soybean oil diet. Myristate, palmitate, and total SFA in longiIIssimus muscle decreased 27 (P < 0.05), 30 (P < 0.05), and 29% (P < 0.05), respectively, with the 40% soybean oil diet. Conclusions: Including choice white grease in the diet had minimal effects on the unsaturated to SFA muscular lipid ratios. In conclusion, high fat diets rich in unsaturated fatty acids can be used effectively to redesign pork for consumers wanting to decrease their consumption of saturated fatty acids.
Homomorphic Hashing 2 . Coreference Resolution : Background and Challenges at Scale Coreference resolution

Locality sensitive hashing schemes such as simhash provide compact representations of multisets from which similarity can be estimated. However, in certain applications, we need to estimate the similarity of dynamically changing sets. In this case, we need the representation to be a homomorphism so that the hash of unions and differences of sets can be computed directly from the hashes of operands. We propose two representations that have this property for cosine similarity (an extension of simhash and angle-preserving random projections), and make substantial progress on a third representation for Jaccard similarity (an extension of minhash). We employ these hashes to compress the sufficient statistics of a conditional random field (CRF) coreference model and study how this compression affects our ability to compute similarities as entities are split and merged during inference. We also provide novel statistical analysis of simhash to help justify it as an estimator inside a CRF, showing that the bias and variance reduce quickly with the number of bits. On a problem of author coreference, we find that our simhash scheme allows scaling the hierarchical coreference algorithm by an order of magnitude without degrading its statistical performance or the model’s coreference accuracy, as long as we employ at least 128 or 256 bits. Angle-preserving random projections further improve the coreference quality, potentially allowing even fewer dimensions to be used.
Contractions with Polynomial Characteristic Functions II. Analytic Approach

The simplest and most natural examples of completely nonunitary contractions on separable complex Hilbert spaces which have polynomial characteristic functions are the nilpotent operators. The main purpose of this paper is to prove the following theorem: Let $T$ be a completely nonunitary contraction on a Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$. If the characteristic function $\Theta_T$ of $T$ is a polynomial of degree $m$, then there exist a Hilbert space $\mathcal{M}$, a nilpotent operator $N$ of order $m$, a coisometry $V_1 \in \mathcal{L}(\overline{ran} (I - N N^*) \oplus \mathcal{M}, \overline{ran} (I - T T^*))$, and an isometry $V_2 \in \mathcal{L}(\overline{ran} (I - T^* T), \overline{ran} (I - N^* N) \oplus \mathcal{M})$, such that \[ \Theta_T = V_1 \begin{bmatrix} \Theta_N & 0 0 & I_{\mathcal{M}} \end{bmatrix} V_2. \]
The chemical composition of a regular halo globular cluster: NGC 5897

We report for the first time on the chemical composition of the halo cluster NGC 5897 (R⊙ = 12.5 kpc), based on chemical abundance ratios for 27 α-, iron-peak, and neutron-capture elements in seven red giants. From our high-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectra obtained with the Magellan/MIKE spectrograph, we find a mean iron abundance from the neutral species of [Fe/H] = − 2.04 ± 0.01 (stat.) ± 0.15 (sys.), which is more metal-poor than implied by previous photometric and low-resolution spectroscopic studies. The cluster NGC 5897 is α-enhanced (to 0.34 ± 0.01 dex) and shows Fe-peak element ratios typical of other (metal-poor) halo globular clusters (GCs) with no overall, significant abundance spreads in iron or in any other heavy element. Like other GCs, NGC 5897 shows a clear Na–O anti-correlation, where we find a prominent primordial population of stars with enhanced O abundances and approximately solar Na/Fe ratios, while two stars are Na-rich, providing chemical proof of the presence of multiple populations in this cluster. Comparison of the heavy element abundances with the solar-scaled values and the metal-poor GC M15 from the literature confirms that NGC 5897 has experienced little contribution from s-process nucleosynthesis. One star of the first generation stands out in that it shows very low La and Eu abundances. Overall, NGC 5897 is a well behaved GC showing archetypical correlations and element-patterns, with little room for surprises in our data. We suggest that its lower metallicity could explain the unusually long periods of RR Lyr that were found in NGC 5897.
Is Korea Catching Up? An Analysis of the Labour Productivity Growth in South Korea

Comparing the Korean labour productivity growth in the last two decades with the Japanese and US labour productivity growth, data confirm a process of catching up in several important manufacturing sectors. The paper investigates its determinants using a non-neoclassical model. Investments in skills and capabilities are found to be crucial in explaining this trend. Important policy implications for developing countries are then discussed. In the long run, a targeted education policy with government intervention and a strong emphasis on technical education can give high pay-offs. This conclusion holds in particular when the aim of the country is to compete in the international markets, not along the low road to competitiveness, based on squeezing wages and profit margins, but along the high road (i.e. improving productivity, wages and profits).
Building a Sector Reputation: The Strategic Communication of National Higher Education

ABSTRACT What characterises strategic communication aimed at building the reputation of an entire public subsector? This is the main question for this study, pursued through content analysis of one-stop web portals for national higher education from the 21 countries listed in the Times Higher Education’s Top 150 Universities ranking. Findings show that strategic communication is formed by national governments to depict their higher education sector as a coherent whole without letting prominent universities “represent” the higher education sector. The tension between similarity and difference that often occurs in public sector reputation-building is handled partly by emphasising similarity concerns in the structure and format of the presentations, and partly by emphasising differentiation concerns in the contents of the presentations. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies addressing either the reputation management and branding efforts of single institutions, specific public sector entities, or those of nations, this study shows how higher education reputation-building integrates these different levels through strategic communication.
Uncertainty as a Factor in Investment Decisions: The Case of the Russian Federation's Regions

This paper argues that although the bulk of the literature tends to focus on regulatory uncertainty stemming from formal practices, uncertainty that comes from unpredictable informal practices surrounding regulation is an underexplored additional form of regulatory uncertainty. The paper uses the results of empirical analysis of several unique firm-level data sets to argue that firms in Russian institutional environments adapt to informal practices of business-government interactions, so long as these practices are predictable. The paper draws a distinction between differences in levels of relatively well-ordered (and often centralized) and therefore predictable corruption - a predictable component of the cost of doing business - and variation in experiences with corruption, which often results from decentralized, unconstrained ("administrative") corruption and the rent-seeking incentives of lower level officials. It argues that a significant obstacle to investment decisions at the regional level is not so much formal or informal rules per se, but lack of predictability of their application. It also examines in-country inconsistency in property rights enforcement as another source of underexplored regulatory uncertainty tied to informal practice. Unlike administrative corruption, inconsistent property rights enforcement is a fundamental, existential threat to businesses. To test this hypothesis, the paper draws on a measure that captures private "raiders'" attacks on firms -- hostile, often violent takeovers of firms by outsiders aided and often abetted by law enforcement agencies. The paper argues that the greater is the number of raider attacks for a given region, the greater is the uncertainty and the less likely is investment.
Integrating Innovation Diffusion Theory and the Technology Acceptance Model: The adoption of blockchain technology from business managers’ perspective

Financial technology (FinTech) is the new business model and technology which aims to compete with traditional financial services and blockchain is one of most famous technology use of FinTech. Blockchain is a type of distributed, electronic database (ledger) which can hold any information (e.g. records, events, transactions) and can set rules on how this information is updated. The most well-known application of blockchain is bitcoin, which is a kind of cryptocurrencies. But it can also be used in many other financial and commercial applications. A prominent example is smart contracts, for instance as offered in Ethereum. A contract can execute a transfer when certain events happen, such as payment of a security deposit, while the correct execution is enforced by the consensus protocol. The purpose of this paper is to explore the research and application landscape of blockchain technology acceptance by following a more comprehensive approach to address blockchain technology adoption. This research is to propose a unified model integrating Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) model and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to investigate continuance intention to adopt blockchain technology.
Preparation and In Vitro Release of Drug-Loaded Microparticles for Oral Delivery Using Wholegrain Sorghum Kafirin Protein

Kafirin microparticles have been proposed as an oral nutraceutical and drug delivery system. This study investigates microparticles formed with kafirin extracted from white and raw versus cooked red sorghum grains as an oral delivery system. Targeted delivery to the colon would be beneficial for medication such as prednisolone, which is used in the management of inflammatory bowel disease. Therefore, prednisolone was loaded into microparticles of kafirin from the different sources using phase separation. Differences were observed in the protein content, in vitro protein digestibility, and protein electrophoretic profile of the various sources of sorghum grains, kafirin extracts, and kafirin microparticles. For all of the formulations, the majority of the loaded prednisolone was not released in in vitro conditions simulating the upper gastrointestinal tract, indicating that most of the encapsulated drug could reach the target area of the lower gastrointestinal tract. This suggests that these kafirin microparticles may have potential as a colon-targeted nutraceutical and drug delivery system.