Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors Affecting Public Sector Investment in the Livestock Industry in Malaw

The dominant narrative is that public financing and investment in the public sector depend on the political leadership of the government executive because of the incentives gained in public finance management. The executive arm of the government includes elected political leaders and technocrats. Using the case of the agricultural sector, this paper examines the role of technocrats and elected leadership in investment choices. This paper uses, in support of quantitative findings, qualitative evidence from a case study designed in the Department of Animal Health and Livestock Development in Malawi. The variables were used to analyze the quantitative data, and content analysis was used for qualitative data. The finding reveals that seniority, authority, political affiliation, and technical expertise of civil servant leadership significantly influence public investment choices in the livestock sector in Malawi. Both elected political executives and technocrats had self-interests in delivering goods with swift and visible returns. The study concludes that Malawi's public sector investment arena is a ‘war zone’ with various actors vying for dominance. The paper recommends a critical review of the reforms in the livestock sector to bring the investment culture on course in Malawi. More studies are needed to resolve issues around privatization models of services in the livestock sector and the role of government and transactional actors.
Interrelationships of Marcellus Shale gas production to frac-induced microseismicity, interpreted minor faults and fractures zones, and stimulated reservoir volume, Greene County, Pennsylvania

AbstractThe data we analyzed are from a Marcellus Shale gas field in Greene County, southwestern Pennsylvania. We first investigated the relationship between microseismic event trends and discontinuities extracted from 3D seismic data and their relationship to SH max. This analysis was followed by an examination of the relationship of cumulative gas production to radiated energy, stimulated reservoir volume (SRV), and energy density (ED). We have determined that microseismic event trends observed in multiwell hydraulic fracture treatments were similar to the trends of interpreted small faults and fracture zones extracted from 3D seismic coverage of the area. Hydraulic fracture treatments conducted in six laterals produced clusters of microseismic events with an average trend of N51°E and, to a more limited extent, N56°W. The N51°E microseismic event trend coincided closely with the average N52°E trend of interpreted minor faults and fracture zones extracted from the 3D seismic data. That relationship sugg.
A Clinical-Community Comparison of Parent-Child Emotion Conversations About the Past and the Anticipated Future

This study aimed to assess differences in emotion and elaboration quality between clinical and community child cohorts in both past reminiscing and future worry conversations. We analyzed 54 Australian parents (46 mothers, 8 fathers) and their 8- to 12-year-old children ( M = 9.63, SD = 1.29; 28 boys, 26 girls) in reminiscing interactions. Dyads were recruited from local schools (community cohort, n = 26) or a children’s psychology clinic waitlist (clinical cohort, n = 28). Clinical cohort children engaged in less emotion exploration in both past and future conversations, as did parents for future conversations. Elaboration quality did not differ. Parent-son dyads differed in the clinical cohort, exhibiting significantly lower emotion resolution than the community cohort, or parent-daughter dyads when discussing past events. These findings suggest that discussing anticipated negative events may be a relevant point of family-based intervention for anxious children. Additionally, this study highlights the importance of parent-son emotional discussion.
Universality of the quantum energy flux at the inner horizon of asymptotically de Sitter black holes

Recently, it was found that the energy flux of a free scalar quantum field on a Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter spacetime has a quadratic divergence towards the inner horizon of the black hole. Moreover, the leading divergence was found to be state independent as long as the spectral gap of the wave equation on the spacetime is sufficiently large. In this work, we show that the latter result can be extended to all subextremal Reissner-Nordström-de Sitter and subextremal Kerr-de Sitter spacetimes with a positive spectral gap.
The monopole h-invariants from a topological perspective

We study the monopole h-invariants of 3-manifolds from a topological perspective based on Lidman and Manolescu's description of monopole Floer homology in terms of Seiberg-Witten-Floer homotopy types. We investigate the possible dependence on the choice of coefficients and give proofs of several properties of the h-invariants which are well known to experts, but hard to track down in the literature.
Primordial Orbital Alignment of Sednoids

We examined the past history of the three most detached trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs)—Sedna, 2012 VP113, and Leleakuhonua (2015 TG387)—the three clearest members of the dynamical class known as sednoids, with high perihelia distances q. By integrating backward their nominal (and a set of cloned) orbits for the solar system’s age, we surprisingly find that the only time all their apsidal lines tightly cluster was 4.5 Gyr ago, at perihelion longitude ϖ of 200°. This “primordial alignment” is independent of the observational biases that contribute to the current on-sky clustering in the large-semimajor-axis Kuiper Belt. If future sednoid discoveries confirm these findings, this strongly argues for an initial event during the planet formation epoch, which imprinted this particular apsidal orientation on the early detached TNO population. Their apsidal orientations were then subsequently modified only by the simple precession from the four giant planets (and weakly by the galactic tide). If other sednoids also cluster around the same primordial value, various models suggesting a still present planet in the outer solar system would be incompatible with this alignment. We inspected two scenarios that could potentially explain the primordial alignment. First, a rogue planet model (where another massive planet raises perihelia near its own longitude until ejection) naturally produces this signature. Alternatively, a close stellar passage early in solar system history raises perihelia, but it is poor at creating strong apsidal clustering. We show that all other known 35 < q < 55 au TNOs are either too perturbed or orbits are still too uncertain to provide evidence for or against this paradigm.
Contrasting styles of volcanic activity as observed by remote sensing: The cases of Lascar, Llaima and Villarrica volcanoes, Chile

The most active voJcano in Central Volcanic Zone (CVZ) is Lascar Volcano (230:22'S-67°44'W) (Francis & Rothery, 1987), a composite voJcano formed by andesitic and dacitic lava and pyroclastic flows, and occasional basaltic andesites lava flows (Gardeweg et al., 1998). Its historie activity have been explosive principally (vulcanian and subplinian eruptions) and is related to viscous lava dome growth and collapse cycles (Matthews et al., 1997). The largest historical eruption took place in April 1993 (subplinian eruption), which produced eruptive column that extended up to 20 km and pyroclastic flows that extended up to 7.5 km of the summit (Gardeweg & Medina, 1994). The more active voJcanoes in Southern VoJcanic Zone (SVZ) are Villarrica and L1aima voJcanoes (Moreno & Fuentealba, 1994). ViUarrica Volcano (390:25'S-71 °57'W) is a stratocone built over two calderas, with more than 30 adventitious eruptive centers (Moreno, 1998), formed by basaltic and andesitic lava and pyroclastic flows (Gonzalez-Ferran, 1995). In its summit crater there is a small and continuously active lava lake (Ortiz et al., 2003; Calder et al, 2004). Since 1558,59 important eruptions have been reported (Petit-Breuilh, 1994), with hawaiian, phreatomagmatic, vuJcanian and strombolian eruptions (Moreno, 1998). ViUarrica VoJcano eruptions have emitted lava flows as long as 18 km (Ortiz et al., 2003) and important lahars (» 20 km) have been formed by glaciers melting (Gonzalez-Ferran. 1995). One of most important historical eruptions occurred in 1971 (Gonzalez-Ferran, 1995). L1aima Volcano (38°42'S-71 °44'W) is a complex composite-shield volcano, with a buried caldera and 40 parasitic scoria cones, formed by basaltic and andesitic lava flows, andesitic pyroclastic flows and, dacitic surge and pumice fall deposits (Naranjo & Moreno, J991). Since 1640, about 47 eruptions have been reported, with phreatornagmatic, strombolian and subplinian eruptions (N aranjo & Moreno, 1991; Gonzalez-Ferran, 1995). At least, 10 eruptions have emitted voluminous lava flows and pyroclasts, also lahars have been formed by glaciers melting (Moreno & Fuentealba, 1994), being the 1957 eruption the biggest historie eruption (Naranjo & Moreno, 1991). In this work, are characterized the contrasting styles of voJcanic activity of these three volcanoes, correlated the voJcanic activity with satellite responses and determined the causes of thermal anornaly for each one, using radiance data from Landsat TM and ETM+ images, between December 1984 and December 2001.
Remittances and Migrants’ Education: Do Higher-Educated Current Migrants Send More Flow of Remittance? Evidence from Egypt

: The relationship between the issue of migration and development has been discussed since the 1980s; The highly skilled migration a ff ects the sending country, in particular, it has been suggested that remittances, as the main positive e ff ect, while the loss of human capital as a main negative e ff ect. Theoretically, there are several reasons to believe that there will be di ff erences between the remit-ting patterns of higher-educated emigrants and less-educated emigrants. On one hand, several factors would tend to lead highly skilled migrants to be more likely to remit a larger amount of remittances. This study aims to address the experimental research question as to whether the remittance inflows to Egypt increase with migrants’ education level that means do higher-educated current migrants send more remittance flows comparing with less-educated migrants? using The Egypt Household International Migration Survey (Egypt-HIMS 2013). This study applies two multiple regression models. The main finding of this study is that there is a significant positive e ff ect of education on remittances that means more educated migrants remit more. This result due to that higher-educated current migrants are likely to work better jobs and earn more comparing with less-educated current migrants. Also, higher-educated (skilled) migrants are less likely to be illegal migrants, and more likely to have “bank accounts, lowering the financial transactions costs of remitting”. Besides, the vice majority of Egyptian current migrants go to Arab countries and unaccompanied by their families, so they have to send remittances to share their earnings abroad with their household members.
Soybean maturity group tradeoffs: Irrigation, weed control, and nitrogen fixation

This thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter I introduces the rationale behind the study and gives a brief overview of the overall study covering weed control, irrigation needs and nitrogen fixation amounts across soybean maturity group. Chapter II will go into further detail outlining the first applied experiment dealing with weed control and irrigation issues. Alternative weed control methods are analyzed in conjunction with irrigation risk analysis across soybean maturity group in response to agricultural issues of glyphosate resistance and declining ground water supply in the Arkansas delta region. Chapter III will jointly examine irrigation application amounts and nitrogen fixation amounts across soybean maturity group to establish tradeoffs of yield impacts from irrigation while trying to address greenhouse gas emissions stemming from agricultural production. Chapter IV offers concluding notes, study limitations and suggests areas of further research. This thesis is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council. Thesis Director:
Big Data Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) in Indonesian state-owned financial services and banking

The aim of this study in general is to examine the influence of perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived risk on intention to use. The subject of this study is the account officer of the big data user of a state-owned company in Malang, East Java, Indonesia. Specifically, this research has the purpose of finding out both the simultaneous and partial influence of perceived use, perceived usefulness, and perceived risk on the intention to use the big data of State-Owned Bank customers. This study is a survey employing both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. The samples of the subjects used were 95 account officers of a state-owned bank in East Java who used customer big data. The analysis conducted in this study included multiple linear regression testing and hypothesis testing for both simultaneous and partial The result of the F testing indicates that collectively, the perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived risk variables have a simultaneous and positive influence on the intention to use the customer's big data. However, based on the T-test, it was observed that perceived usefulness is the only variable that has a partial influence on the intention to use the big data of the customers. While the other two variables, perceived ease of use and perceived risk, were found to have no significant influence on the intention to use the bank’s customers' big data.
Koopman Spectral Linearization vs. Carleman Linearization: A Computational Comparison Study

Nonlinearity presents a significant challenge in problems involving dynamical systems, prompting the exploration of various linearization techniques, including the well-known Carleman Linearization. In this paper, we introduce the Koopman Spectral Linearization method tailored for nonlinear autonomous dynamical systems. This innovative linearization approach harnesses the Chebyshev differentiation matrix and the Koopman Operator to yield a lifted linear system. It holds the promise of serving as an alternative approach that can be employed in scenarios where Carleman linearization is traditionally applied. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this linearization approach for several commonly used nonlinear dynamical systems.
Lagomorph distribution across Little Karoo vegetation types

With the exception of the riverine rabbit (Bunolagus monticularis), lagomorphs in the Karoo are regarded as widely distributed. Previous research has shown that although lagomorphs prefer grass species for forage, they also utilize large amounts of browse. Given the large variation among vegetation types within the Little Karoo it is unlikely that the common lagomorphs are as evenly distributed as assumed. Evidence from dung counts suggests that lagomorphs preferentially use grassy vegetation types and that dung counts are correlated with the amount of grass in an area.
The historical place of the ‘Friedman—Phelps’ expectations critique

Abstract The ‘expectations critique’, usually attributed to Friedman or Phelps and dated towards the end of the 1960s, in fact originates much earlier. And rather than being an insight properly attributable to a particular individual, it was, by that time, a commonplace of economic discussion. This much is easy to establish. It is argued that the common attribution arises at least in part because the Keynesians unwisely chose to express their disagreement with Freidman in terms of expectations rather than in terms of the existence of the natural rate of unemployment. As a result, 40 years later, it has become hard to see that two separate points ever existed.
Observations of the flow of abyssal water through the Samoa passage

Abstract During the fall of 1994 a conductivity–temperature–depth/hydrographic survey was carried out as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment one-time survey, Line P15N. The survey included standard water properties required by WOCE. Line P15N extended southward from the Aleutian Islands along 165°W into the vicinity of the Samoa Passage. The line was adjusted to follow the axis of the passage, and time was found to complete a cross-section survey across the passage. This paper will present geostrophic computations of flow velocities through the gap, including transport estimates, and will present longitudinal plots of properties. The longitudinal plots show evidence of hydraulic control at the sill in the Samoa Passage. A best estimate of northward transport of water colder than 1.2°C (potential temperature) is determined to be 8.4 Sv.
Effect of stubble breaking and ploughing at different depths on cultivation of peas

Field trials were conducted over the period 1998-2001 at the Voke Branch of the Lithuanian Institute of Agriculture on a sandy loam Haplic Luvisol (LVh). Pea's precrop was winter rye. Crop residues were returned to the soil; straw was chopped at harvest. The aim of the investigation was to determine the effect of stubble breaking, ploughing at different depths on the weediness of cultivated crop, as well as on the crop yield. Most couch-grass (Elytrigia repens (L.) Nevski) infested were unbroken-stubble and shallow-ploughed plots. It caused a yield reduction by 11-20%. The lowest numbers of weeds were counted and the highest pea's yield was obtained on broken stubble, 0.22-0.25 m depth ploughed.
Preliminary and Incomplete Comments Welcome Is Information Risk ( PIN ) Priced ?

Several recent papers assume that private information (PIN), proposed by Easley and O’Hara (2002, 2004), is a priced risk factor. We investigate the properties of the PIN factor and find that although PIN characteristics predict future returns only for small firms, the average PIN factor loading for small firms is counter-intuitively negative whereas loadings for large firms are positive. Following Daniel and Titman (1997), we also test whether characteristics associated with PIN or PIN factor loadings predict returns. Results suggest when the PIN characteristic is held constant, increasing PIN loadings is not associated with increased average returns. Our findings cast doubt on whether PIN is a priced risk factor. We thank our respective schools for financial support. We acknowledge helpful comments from Hemang Desai, Gil Sadka, Lakshmanan Shivakumar and K.R. Subramanyam. All errors are ours.
Trust, Accountability, and Autonomy in Knowledge Graph-based AI for Self-determination

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have emerged as fundamental platforms for powering intelligent decision-making and a wide range of Artificial Intelligence (AI) services across major corporations such as Google, Walmart, and AirBnb. KGs complement Machine Learning (ML) algorithms by providing data context and semantics, thereby enabling further inference and question-answering capabilities. The integration of KGs with neuronal learning (e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs)) is currently a topic of active research, commonly named neuro-symbolic AI. Despite the numerous benefits that can be accomplished with KG-based AI, its growing ubiquity within online services may result in the loss of self-determination for citizens as a fundamental societal issue. The more we rely on these technologies, which are often centralised, the less citizens will be able to determine their own destinies. To counter this threat, AI regulation, such as the European Union (EU) AI Act, is being proposed in certain regions. The regulation sets what technologists need to do, leading to questions concerning: How can the output of AI systems be trusted? What is needed to ensure that the data fuelling and the inner workings of these artefacts are transparent? How can AI be made accountable for its decision-making? This paper conceptualises the foundational topics and research pillars to support KG-based AI for self-determination. Drawing upon this conceptual framework, challenges and opportunities for citizen self-determination are illustrated and analysed in a real-world scenario. As a result, we propose a research agenda aimed at accomplishing the recommended objectives.
Label-Only Model Inversion Attacks via Knowledge Transfer

In a model inversion (MI) attack, an adversary abuses access to a machine learning (ML) model to infer and reconstruct private training data. Remarkable progress has been made in the white-box and black-box setups, where the adversary has access to the complete model or the model's soft output respectively. However, there is very limited study in the most challenging but practically important setup: Label-only MI attacks, where the adversary only has access to the model's predicted label (hard label) without confidence scores nor any other model information. In this work, we propose LOKT, a novel approach for label-only MI attacks. Our idea is based on transfer of knowledge from the opaque target model to surrogate models. Subsequently, using these surrogate models, our approach can harness advanced white-box attacks. We propose knowledge transfer based on generative modelling, and introduce a new model, Target model-assisted ACGAN (T-ACGAN), for effective knowledge transfer. Our method casts the challenging label-only MI into the more tractable white-box setup. We provide analysis to support that surrogate models based on our approach serve as effective proxies for the target model for MI. Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing SOTA Label-only MI attack by more than 15% across all MI benchmarks. Furthermore, our method compares favorably in terms of query budget. Our study highlights rising privacy threats for ML models even when minimal information (i.e., hard labels) is exposed. Our study highlights rising privacy threats for ML models even when minimal information (i.e., hard labels) is exposed. Our code, demo, models and reconstructed data are available at our project page: https://ngoc-nguyen-0.github. io/lokt/
Improved Bayesian Regret Bounds for Thompson Sampling in Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we prove the first Bayesian regret bounds for Thompson Sampling in reinforcement learning in a multitude of settings. We simplify the learning problem using a discrete set of surrogate environments, and present a refined analysis of the information ratio using posterior consistency. This leads to an upper bound of order $\widetilde{O}(H\sqrt{d_{l_1}T})$ in the time inhomogeneous reinforcement learning problem where $H$ is the episode length and $d_{l_1}$ is the Kolmogorov $l_1-$dimension of the space of environments. We then find concrete bounds of $d_{l_1}$ in a variety of settings, such as tabular, linear and finite mixtures, and discuss how how our results are either the first of their kind or improve the state-of-the-art.