Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Target Language Use in EFL Classrooms: Turkish EFL Teachers’ Beliefs and Practices

Considering the teacher talk as the main input in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms, this descriptive study aimed to elucidate the beliefs and practices of Turkish EFL teachers regarding their use of a foreign language, namely English (L2) in their classrooms by taking into account school types, experience, and travelling abroad as variables. Accordingly, 308 EFL teachers from different regions of Turkey were given a questionnaire with two parts, firstly beliefs and then practices, to clarify this prominent issue. The results indicated the high level of teacher awareness about the necessity for using L2 for several reasons but without dismissing the use of their native language, namely Turkish (L1). Conversely, the study highlighted the clashes between their espoused beliefs and practices. Furthermore, being more experienced teachers and working in primary or high schools were not reported as significant factors in teacher agency in making language choices to teach L2 whereas working in state or private schools and visiting English speaking countries revealed significant differences in the beliefs and practices of the teachers with regard to their use of L2 to teach L2. The results were discussed with suggestions to maximize L2 use in EFL classrooms.
Novel Applications of a Thermally Tunable Bistable Buckling Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) Microfabricated Membrane

Abstract : Buckled membranes are commonly used microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) structures. Recent work has demonstrated that the deflection and stiffness of these membranes can be tuned through localized joule heating. These devices were implemented into the design and fabrication of two novel device applications, a tunable pressure sensor and a steerable micromirror. A differential pressure across the membrane causes de reflection, up or down, which can be measured and related to a specific pressure. By tuning the stiffness of the membrane, its pressure response is varied providing a wider range of application for the pressure sensor. A 2.0mm by 2.0mm square membrane demonstrated a 60 percent decrease in pressure sensitivity from 1.433m/psi to 0.55m/psi. A steerable micromirror was realized by selectively heating a single quadrant of a buckled membrane, localized heating results in membrane de deflection constrained to that quadrant.
Field and Laboratory Evaluation of a Reflective Crack Interlayer in New Jersey

A research effort consisting of both field and laboratory testing was undertaken to evaluate reflective crack relief interlayer (RCRI) mixes as a means of mitigating reflective cracking in composite pavements. Extensive field testing that included falling weight deflectometer (FWD) and weigh-in-motion (WIM) sensors was used to establish applied loads and the resultant movements in the pavement structure. The resultant field movements were used to establish testing parameters for the laboratory study. The purpose of the laboratory program was to evaluate the reflective cracking potential through bending and expansion-contraction-type movements of plant-produced asphalt mixes consisting of different aggregate gradations and asphalt binder types commonly used in New Jersey for portland cement concrete pavement overlays. Results indicate that the combination of FWD and WIM data can provide valuable information for establishing realistic parameters for laboratory validation of asphalt mixes. The laboratory study clearly illustrated the benefit of using RCRI mixes that consist of a fine aggregate gradation and polymer-modified asphalt binders to minimize reflective cracking potential. However, future efforts should include more fatigue-resistant mixes that would overlay the RCRI mixtures, as well as efforts to ensure better construction practices during their placement.
Horizontal hoops in non-seismically designed beam–column joints

Tests on full-scale reinforced concrete exterior beam–column joints with non-seismic design under reversed cyclic loading were carried out. The seismic behaviour of these non-seismically designed beam–column joints was investigated, where the effects of horizontal hoops in joint on the seismic performance and the shear strength of the joints were emphasised. It is shown that the horizontal transverse reinforcement provided in the beam–column joints with non-seismic design improves effectively the seismic behaviour and enhances the joint shear strength. It is found that to provide horizontal hoops in non-seismically designed exterior joints with a hoop ratio of greater than 0.4% may have less effect on the enhancement of the shear strength of the joints. This hoop ratio may hence be considered as one of the design criteria of the non-seismically designed exterior beam–column joints.
Sustainable operational lane capacity for highways

The concept of capacity plays a fundamental role within the transportation profession since it is applied in planning, design and operational condition of virtually every road. This paper reports on an in-depth statistical analysis has been carried out for 160 sites across the UK strategic motorway network and 32 sites for trunk roads data to produce a reliable estimation of sustainable lane capacity. Geometric parameters and traffic conditions impacting on capacity have been taken into consideration. The formulation of capacity for motorways and trunk roads has then been produced. The deviation between the link capacities has been found to be significant. It is also found that a number of geometric and locational factors are the explanation to the variations. It is concluded that the average sustainable capacity of a motorway lane is 1780 vehicles/h (2000 passenger car unit per hour with a standard deviation of 130 vehicles/h). The trunk road capacity is evaluated as 1520 vehicles/h with a standard devia.
Compact internal multiband antenna for mobile phone and WLAN standards

A novel internal planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) suitable for handset terminals is presented. The structure combines shorted parasitic patches, capacitive loads and slots to achieve multiband operation. This compact antenna operates in the GSM, DCS, PCS, UMTS, HIPERLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a bands within 2.5:1 voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) and with good efficiency.
Chaotic radar systems

The paper describes a radar system based on a chaotic microwave generator and an inverse system to reconstruct the radar pulse signal. Chaotic microwave communication systems offer the possibility of adopting spread spectrum techniques at microwave frequencies with greater noise immunity. Synchronised chaotic systems offer high security. The microwave generator used is based on a frequency multiplier chain and is designed to give any required frequency.
Building employee job satisfaction

© 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ert.20063 As the economy gains momentum and businesses begin expanding once again, employers are recognizing the increasing importance of retaining their top performers. The key to keeping these valued employees is maintaining a high level of job satisfaction. As human resources professionals, you play an integral role in ensuring the appeal of your firm’s work environment. The practices, policies, and programs that your group establishes are the foundation for efforts throughout the organization to maintain high morale and retain staff. Most people do not leave their employers for one reason alone. Many issues generally shape an individual’s perceptions about his or her position and the company as a whole. Building job satisfaction therefore requires a multipronged approach. Following are strategies that are designed to improve employee motivation and, ultimately, retention rates.
Optimization and reliability evaluation of a laser inner lead bonding process

A series of designed experiments have been performed to determine the process window for laser inner lead bonding (ILB). The parameters studied were power, pulse time and lead contact. Bond pull tests were used as the monitor for these evaluations. The results of the experiments have demonstrated that the laser bonding process is very insensitive to wide variations in the parameters studied. Laser-bonded test devices have been subjected to extended high temperature storage and temperature cycle tests and compared to conventional thermo-compression (TC) bonded devices under the same conditions. By comparison to the TC-bonded devices, laser bonded samples have lower average bond pull failure strength, but exhibit a more uniform strength distribution and a slower rate of decline in bond pull strength over time in either of the stress tests. Cratering, which is a bond pull test failure mode that becomes increasingly significant over time at test for the TC-bonded devices, is almost totally absent from the laser-bonded samples. >
Analytic Model for Aircraft Survivability Assessment of a One-on-One Engagement

Aircraft survivability assessment is one of the most important steps of the aircraft survivability project. Many models were developed to assess one-on-one engagement aircraft survivability; however, most of them belong in the simulation category. Based on the theory of stochastic duel, this paper constructs an analytic model for engagement-level aircraft survivability assessment. The analytic model explicitly represents the encounter process between the aircraft and the weapon system, such as target detection, acquisition and firing, and reloading and firing. The general solution of aircraft survival probability is obtained in quadrature form and the explicit expression is derived from a particular detection-time distribution and a firing-time distribution. According to this model, not only can the aircraft survival probability be calculated, but the survivability contour maps can also be easily plotted with the mean time of detection, the single-shot kill probability, and other parameters. The numerical examples and analysis of the results show that the model is reasonable and effective.
Unsupervised Representation Transfer for Small Networks: I Believe I Can Distill On-the-Fly

A current remarkable improvement of unsupervised visual representation learning is based on heavy networks with large-batch training. While recent methods have greatly reduced the gap between supervised and unsupervised performance of deep models such as ResNet-50, this development has been relatively limited for small models. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised learning framework for small networks that combines deep self-supervised representation learning and knowledge distillation within one-phase training. In particular, a teacher model is trained to produce consistent cluster assignments between different views of the same image. Simultaneously, a student model is encouraged to mimic the prediction of on-the-ﬂy self-supervised teacher. For effective knowledge transfer, we adopt the idea of domain classiﬁer so that student training is guided by discriminative features invariant to the representational space shift between teacher and student. We also introduce a network driven multi-view generation paradigm to capture rich feature information contained in the network itself. Extensive experiments show that our student models surpass state-of-the-art ofﬂine distilled networks even from stronger self-supervised teachers as well as top-performing self-supervised models. Notably, our ResNet-18, trained with ResNet-50 teacher, achieves 68.3% ImageNet Top-1 accuracy on frozen feature linear evaluation, which is only 1.5% below the supervised baseline.
On the Application of Continuous Deterministic Reinforcement Learning in Neural Architecture Search

Architecture evaluation is a major bottleneck of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Recent trends have seen a shift in favor of weight-sharing networks capable of superimposing all possible candidate architectures in a search space. Nevertheless, this technique is not beyond reproach, and has already encountered significant criticism. Of these is the ability of weight-sharing supernets to accurately represent the characteristics of a single discrete architecture when they are purposefully designed to mimic the behaviour of many. As the cost of NAS evaluation decreased, the complexity of search algorithms has grown. In this thesis, we explore the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in the problem space of weight-sharing NAS. Specifically, we focus on the usage of deterministic agents operating in a continuous action space. First, analogous to gradient-based optimization, we train both the supernet and agent simultaneously and interface them accordingly. Our agent consists of an actor-critic framework, where the actor generates architectures based on the teachings of the critic. Rewards are calculated to encourage the selection and further improvement of high-performance
Numerical investigation of the cavitational behaviour into a storage pump at off design operating points

The paper presents a new method for the analysis of the cavitational behaviour of hydraulic turbomachines. This new method allows determining the coefficient of the cavitation inception and the cavitation sensitivity of the turbomachines. We apply this method to study the cavitational behaviour of a large storage pump. By plotting in semi-logarithmic coordinates the vapour volume versus the cavitation coefficient, we show that all numerical data collapse in an exponential manner. This storage pump is located in a power plant and operating without the presence of the developed cavitation is vital. We investigate the behaviour of the pump from the cavitational point of view while the pump is operating for variable discharge. A distribution of the vapour volume upon the blade of the impeller is presented for all the four operating points. It can be seen how the volume of vapour evolves from one operating point to another. In order to study the influence of the cavitation phenomena upon the pump, the evolution of the pumping head against the cavitation coefficient is presented. That will show how the pumping head drops while the cavitation coefficient decreases. From analysing the data obtained from the numerical simulation it results that the cavitation phenomena is present for all the investigated operating points. By analysis of the slope of the curve describing the evolution of the vapour volume against the cavitation coefficient we determine the cavitation sensitivity of the pump for each operating point. It is showed that the cavitation sensitivity of the investigated storage pump increases while the flow rate decreases.
Enabling Device-to-Device (D2D) Communication for the Next Generation WLAN

Device-to-device (D2D) communication technology is widely acknowledged as an emerging candidate to alleviate the wireless traffic explosion problem for the next generation wireless local area network (WLAN) IEEE 802.11ax. In this paper, we integrate D2D communication into IEEE 802.11ax for maximizing the spectrum efficiency. Due to the spectrum scarcity, the number of available resource units (RUs) is typically less than D2D pairs and stations (STAs), which makes the management of spectrum resources more complex. To tackle this issue, we design an efficient resource management algorithm for uplink random access and resource allocation in D2D-enabled 802.11ax, which provides more channel access and resource reuse opportunities for STAs and D2D pairs. Specifically, we propose an enhanced back-off mechanism and derive the optimal contention window (CW) by a theoretical model, which improves the uplink random access efficiency. To tackle the complex interference problem in RU scheduling phase, we develop an efficient and low-complexity resource allocation algorithm based on the maximal independent set (MIS), which can schedule multiple D2D pairs to share the same RU with the specific STA. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the network performance in terms of system throughput, collision rate, complete time, and channel utilization.
Low-mixing coaxial nozzle for effective personalized ventilation

The aim of this work was to study the performance of a novel coaxial nozzle for personalized ventilation that can be used as an add-on to ceiling diffuser. The coaxial nozzle minimizes air entrainment between the central fresh air stream and the room air. It allows effective delivery of clean air to the breathing zone while the recirculated conditioned air is supplied to the space by the associated ceiling diffuser. Detailed 3-D Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed and numerical results on velocity, temperature, and CO2 concentration fields agreed well with experimentally measured values. The effect of the jet flow rate, temperature, and inclination angle on air quality at the breathing zone of the occupant was then investigated. The proposed coaxial personalized ventilation achieved high air quality in the breathing zone demonstrated by a personal exposure effectiveness of 32% at fresh airflow rate of 10 L s−1 per person. It contributed also to the attainment of temperature differences up to 2℃ between the occupant’s microenvironment and the rest of the room air leading to considerable energy savings compared to the mixed convection air conditioning.
Perceived usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use for Adoption Technology LCC Card: Case Study Paddy Farmers Northern Iran

This study examined the Paddy Farmer perceived usefulness and ease of use of the technology LCC cards of villages Roudsar city in northern Iran, was conducted in 2013. Statistical population of all rice farmers were living in the city Roudsar province (15693 people). Sample size for this study comprised 400 patients who were randomly selected. The main tool for data collection was a questionnaire containing closed questions. Content validity of (apparent) questionnaire was determined by university faculty experts and Agricultural Organization. Validity of the questionnaire, 30 questionnaires was distributed among the study sample, Cronbach's alpha value of 0.91 respectively. Data were analyzed using SPSSwin16. Statistical methods were used. Results showed that the highest perceived usefulness of LCC card technology for optimal use of fertilizer was the best and the least necessity for rice fields paddy fields in the LCC c ards. Understanding cards LCC technology easier to use in paddy fields were raised.
Prediction of Noise Sources in Axial Compressor from URANS Simulation

As part of a larger aeroacoustic study focused on rotor–stator interaction noise, the unsteady flow in a single-stage axial compressor is achieved by a numerical Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes simulation. The flowfield is precisely analyzed and assessed by comparing it with available experimental and numerical data. Specifically, the rotor wakes correctly agree with previous laser Doppler anemometry measurements. The unsteady flow, especially the potential effects created by the stator vanes, is then investigated, showing that the stator potential field is responsible for a major secondary tonal noise source on the rotor blades. The rotor wake velocity and turbulent content correspond to the excitations for tonal and broadband noise, respectively. They are greatly influenced by the vane potential effects and, to a lesser extent, by their convection with the mean flow. Two methods of extraction are surveyed along the whole span, showing the need to consider the blockage induced by the stator on the wakes.
Impact of Total Quality Management on Home-Buyer Satisfaction

Providing superior quality and keeping customers satisfied are rapidly becoming the ways construction companies differentiate themselves from competitors. Many companies are, however, frustrated in their efforts to improve quality and customer satisfaction through the implementation of total quality management (TQM). The primary objective of this study was to increase understanding of how TQM affects home-buyer satisfaction. For the first time an empirical study has confirmed that implementation of TQM is positively associated with home-buyer satisfaction. Supplier quality management has emerged as the most important factor in shaping home-buyer satisfaction, but it is the area in which home builders do not practice extensively.
Contrasting scaling relationships of extreme precipitation and streamflow to temperature across the United States

Recent studies have reached inconsistent conclusions from scaling analysis about whether flood or extreme precipitation is more sensitive to warming climate. To explain the reasons behind the inconsistency, here we first used scaling analysis to illustrate how extreme daily precipitation and streamflow scale with daily air temperature across the Continental United States (CONUS). We found both similar and opposite scaling in extreme precipitation and streamflow. It indicates based on scaling analysis, the sensitivity of extreme streamflow to warming climate can be either similar, higher or lower to that of extreme precipitation. We further explored why there are contrasting scaling relationships in the CONUS. Generally, the similar scaling was found in regions where the timing of extreme precipitation and streamflow is correspondent, as well as with similar temporal evolution in extreme event timing and magnitude, e.g., the west coast and southern plains, implying extreme precipitation is the dominant driver of local floods. However, for regions with dissimilar scaling in extreme precipitation and streamflow (e.g., Rocky Mountains, southern plains), the characteristics of extreme streamflow show large difference to those of extreme precipitation, and the temporal evolution of extreme streamflow timing and magnitude are more correlated with factors/processes such as soil moisture and snowmelt. This study reflects that the contrasting scaling relationships of extreme precipitation and streamflow are oriented from the local hydro-climatological specifics. Using scaling analysis to compare the sensitivity of extreme precipitation and streamflow to warming climate is not suitable. Instead, we should focus more on local flood generating mechanisms or flood drivers when investigating floods in the changing climate.
Haploidentical Bone Marrow Transplant with Treosulfan- Fludarabine- TBI conditioning in Pediatric Familial HLH with Compound Heterozygote STXBP2 Mutation- A Case Report and Review of Literature

Familial hempophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (FHLH) is a rare life threatening hyperinflammatory clinical syndrome requiring a high level of clinical suspicion for rapid and appropriate diagnosis and appropriate management. STXBP2 gene mutation or FHL5 may have a varied presentation with predominant gastrointestinal symptoms such as chronic enteropathy along with hematologic symptoms. Allogenic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation remains the only curative treatment or this condition. Treosulfan, Fludarabine, TBI myeloablative conditioning for pediatric FHLH is a promising alternative to busulfan based regimens with lower toxicity, excellent donor chimerism and better overall survival.