Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular characterization and species composition of anopheline vectors of malaria along an altitudinal gradient on the highlands of Mambilla Plateau Northeast, Nigeria

Diversity of species arises majorly from speciation and this has serious epidemiological implications to disease transmission. The study aimed to determine the species of anopheline vectors of malaria present in five locations along with different altitudes on the highlands of Mambilla Plateau Nigeria. These are; Nguroje (1,885 m), Yelwa (1,674 m), Gembu (1,584 m), Kakara (1,496 m) and Mayo-selbe (484 m) above sea level. Samples were collected by Center for Disease Control (CDC) light trap, Pyrethrum Spray Catches (PSC) and others were reared from larvae. A total of 878 female anopheline mosquitoes comprising of five species namely; Anopheles gambiae sl 757(86.22%), Anopheles coustani 73(8.31%), Anopheles funestus 29(3.30%), Anopheles pharoensis 18(2.05%) and Anopheles rufipes 1(0.11%). Mayo-selbe had the highest species abundance of 572 but lowest species diversity index of 0.24 An. gambiae dominated over other anopheline species 0.76. Yelwa had the least abundance but very high diversity index of 0.81 dominance was 0.41. Out of the 757 An. gambiae tested by Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), 712(94.06%) were An. gambiae s.s. , 192(25.37%) were M form and 520(68.69%) were S form. There was a very strong positive correlation between the M and S forms. As the M forms increase along the locations so also the S forms, r2 = 0.94204.
A CAYLEY-HAMILTON AND CIRCULANT APPROACH TO JUMP SUMS

Define the Pascal Triangle jump sum by [ n k ] j = ∑ m≡k (j) ( n m ) , with m ≡ k (j) meaning, as usual, m ≡ k (mod j), and with with ( n m ) = 0, if either m < 0 or m > n. The jump sum function adds every j-th entry in the n-th row of Pascal’s Triangle starting at column k. The jump sum has been studied by several authors over the last 2 decades. Both recursions and explicit formulae have been given as well as several interesting number-theoretic applications. Varied proof methods have been presented including inductive, combinatoric, generatingfunction, and Riordan-array proofs. The goal of this paper is to provide an extremely compact proof of the recursions satisfied by the jump-sum functions using (i) the theory of circulant matrices and (ii) an extension of the Cayley-Hamilton Theorem that studies the values of a polynomial whose zeroes are some, but not all, eigenvalues of a matrix evaluated at that matrix. This matrix approach allows us to derive closed functional forms for some coefficients in the recursions.
Security Analysis and Improvement of a Multi-Factor Biometric-Based Remote Authentication Scheme

Since the advent of the Internet technology, many remote user authentication protocols have been designed and developed which makes secure communication between a user and a server possible over an insecure channel. One of the first multi-factor biometric-based authentication scheme is known as the Li-Hwang protocol. Since then, there have been many analyses and improvements on the protocol to make it more secure. The most recently enhanced multi-factor biometricbased authentication has been proposed by Park et al. However, this research shows that several weaknesses can still be found including an attack on the integrity of a protocol message, the possibility of a replay attack and the lack of proof of message authenticity. This research, therefore, proposes an improved multi-factor biometric-based authentication scheme which has also been proved secure, using the GNY logic, against the mentioned attacks.
REDUCED MODEL-ERROR SOURCE TERMS FOR FLUID FLOW

It is well known that the wide range of spatial and temporal scales present in geophysical flow problems represents a (currently) insurmountable computational bottleneck, which must be circumvented by a coarse-graining procedure. The effect of the unresolved fluid motions enters the coarse-grained equations as an unclosed forcing term, denoted as the ’eddy forcing’. Traditionally, the system is closed by approximate deterministic closure models, i.e. so-called parameterizations. Instead of creating a deterministic parameterization, some recent efforts have focused on creating a stochastic, data-driven surrogate model for the eddy forcing from a (limited) set of reference data, with the goal of accurately capturing the long-term flow statistics. Since the eddy forcing is a dynamically evolving field, a surrogate should be able to mimic the complex spatial patterns displayed by the eddy forcing. Rather than creating such a (fully data-driven) surrogate, we propose to precede the surrogate construction step by a procedure that replaces the eddy forcing with a new model-error source term which: i) is tailor-made to capture spatially-integrated statistics of interest, ii) strikes a balance between physical insight and data-driven modelling , and iii) significantly reduces the amount of training data that is needed. Instead of creating a surrogate for an evolving field, we now only require a surrogate model for one scalar time series per statistical quantity-of-interest. Our current surrogate modelling approach builds on a resampling strategy, where we create a probability density function of the reduced training data that is conditional on (time-lagged) resolved-scale variables. We derive the model-error source terms, and construct the reduced surrogate using an ocean model of two-dimensional turbulence in a doubly periodic square domain.
Stereo Matching using HSAD-Hessian OpenSURF Technique

Stereo matching algorithms are based on image segments estimate disparities using local window-based stereo matching methods, and subsequently refine the disparity estimates by introducing smoothness constraints and performing image segmentation. However, such algorithms are sensitive to different image conditions i.e. rotation, scale, occlusion, blurring, illumination, clutter, etc. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes an approach that incorporates the open SURF (Speeded –Up Robust Feature) algorithm to determine the disparity obtained by matching depth points between stereo image pairs. The open SURF algorithm uses a Hessian matrix for depth point detection. Hessian Matrix minimizes the filtering process and speeds up the search for correspondences in stereo image pairs. Then, the open SURF algorithm is integrated with the SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences), local block-matching stereo matching Algorithm to obtain the disparity estimate of each pixel. This HSAD-Hessian-Open SURF algorithm generates highly accurate disparity map with different image conditions. This technique gives a real time performance. Results show that the proposed algorithm is more robust against different image conditions than existing segment based algorithms. All experiments were implemented in MATLAB.
Gross Domestic Product and Foreign Direct Investment: Empirical Evidence from Vietnam

Foreign direct investment contributes to stimulating sustainable economic growth of each country, but economic growth plays an important role in attracting foreign direct investment. The empirical method was employed on a secondary time series data set during the period 2003-2018 to determine the impact of gross domestic product at current prices on foreign direct investment in Vietnam using a linear approach. The empirical results find that the relationship between gross domestic product and foreign direct investment is a positive sign at 1% significant level. Moreover, the study also shows that business freedom index and investment freedom index has a positive effect on foreign direct investment at 5% significant level. Based on the findings, the article recommends that Vietnam continues to seek positive solutions to enhance the economic growth rate, continuation in investment and business liberalization.
The Value of Privacy: Evidence from Online Borrowers

This paper studies the value of privacy for individuals, using data from large-scale field experiments that vary disclosure requirements for loan applicants and loan terms on an online peer-to-peer lending platform in China. I find that loan applicants attach positive value to personal data: Lower disclosure requirement in the loan application process significantly increases the application completion rates. To further quantify the monetary value of personal data and the welfare impact of various disclosure policies, I develop a structural model linking individuals’ disclosure, borrowing, and repayment decisions. Using detailed application-level data, I estimate that social network ID and employer contact are valued at 230 RMB (i.e., $33 or 0.7 average daily salary in China), accounting for 8% of the average net present value of a loan for successful borrowers. Requiring social network ID and employer contact decreases borrower welfare by 13%, and costs the platform $0.5 in expected revenue per applicant. JEL Classification: D14, D18, G23 ∗HEC Paris, 1 rue de la libération, 78350 Jouy-en-Josas, France; email: huan.tang@hec.edu. I am grateful to my committee members Johan Hombert (advisor), Jean-Edouard Colliard, Denis Gromb, and Boris Vallée. I also thank Will Cong (discussant) and the participants at FIRS 2019, HEC Paris PhD workshop, HEC Paris brownbag for useful comments. This research received financial support from the GREGHEC (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes en Gestion à HEC Paris) and the French National Research Agency (l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche) through Project F-STAR (ANR-17-CE26-0007-01). All errors are my own.
Analysis of energy and greenhouse gas emissions of rice straw to energy chain in Egypt

Rice straw as a source of energy could substitute for fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Thus, the aim of this paper was to analyze the energy and GHG emissions of rice straw to the energy chain in Egypt. The analysis was performed starting from paddy production, straw collection and transportation, and energy generation for two scenarios: power plant and anaerobic digestion plant. The results showed that the paddy production and transportation stage represented the highest contribution of the total energy consumption and GHG emissions for the two scenarios, respectively. The energy potential was estimated with 4193 GWh electricity and 25,647 × 106 MJ of biogas energy. It was also found that use of rice straw as an energy source could reduce the use of fossil fuel and mitigate air pollution from direct burning of rice straw by 3 Mt CO2-eq of GHG emissions.
Research on the Effect of Supervisor Feedback for Undergraduate Thesis Writing

The guidance effect of teacher feedback in contemporary English writing has been a hot topic for research. More and more researches focus on the effect of teacher feedback in senior high schools or universities. This research analyzed the supervisor feedback on 32 undergraduate thesis revisions from 8 students from three aspects: error feedback, non-error feedback and the focus of supervisor feedback. The results show that both error feedback and non-error feedback can significantly improve the overall expression of papers; while their focuses are quite distinctive. Suggestions on how to optimize teacher feedback are put forward.
Mobility-Aware Dynamic Taxi Ridesharing

Taxi ridesharing becomes promising and attractive because of the wide availability of taxis in a city and tremendous benefits of ridesharing, e.g., alleviating traffic congestion and reducing energy consumption. Existing taxi ridesharing schemes, however, are not efficient and practical, due to they simply match ride requests and taxis based on partial trip information and omit the offline passengers, who hail a taxi at roadside with no explicit requests to the system. In this paper, we consider the mobility-aware taxi ridesharing problem, and present mT- Share to address these limitations. mT-Share fully exploits the mobility information of ride requests and taxis to achieve efficient indexing of taxis/requests and better passenger-taxi matching, while still satisfying the constraints on passengers’ deadlines and taxis’ capacities. Specifically, mT-Share indexes taxis and ride requests with both geographical information and travel directions, and supports the shortest path based routing and probabilistic routing to serve both online and offline ride requests. Extensive experiments with a large real-world taxi dataset demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of mT-Share, which can response each ride request in milliseconds and with a moderate detour cost. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, mT-Share serves 42% and 62% more ride requests in peak and non-peak hours, respectively.
Rational medicine prescription interventions in various countries: a systematic review

1 Department of Health Services Management, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, iran University of Medical sciences, tehran, iran 2 health Management and economics research Center, department of health disaster Management, School of Health Management and Information Sciences, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3 Department of Pharmacoeconomics and Pharmaceutical Management, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical sciences, tehran, iran 4 Pharmaceutical Management and Economics Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Understanding Ineffectiveness of the Application-Level Fault Injection

Extreme-scale applications are at a significant risk of being hit by soft errors on supercomputers, as the scale of these systems and the component density continues to increase. In order to better understand soft error vulnerabilities in those applications, the application-level fault injection is widely employed to evaluate applications. This poster reveals that the application-level fault injection has some inherent uncertainties due to the random nature of fault injection. First, the fault injection result has a strong correlation with the number of fault injection tests. What is a good number of fault injection tests is uncertain. Second, given a specific application, the fault injection result can vary as the input problem of the application varies. How to interpret the fault injection result is uncertain. Those uncertainties can make fault injection ineffective for accurately modeling application vulnerability.
THE USE OF LEVETIRACETAM TO TREAT TICS IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS WITH TOURETTE SYNDROME

Tics are a common disorder in children. Some available drugs have unacceptable side effects, and thus alternative treatments are needed. Levetiracetam is an antiepileptic drug reported to be useful for the treatment of tics. Patients age 18 years and younger with tics and Tourette syndrome were enrolled in this prospective, open-label study. Seventy patients were treated with levetiracetam as monotherapy for four years. The initial dose of levetiracetam was 250 mg/day. The dose was titrated over three weeks to 1,000 to 2,000 mg/day. Clinical outcomes were assessed with the Clinical Global Impression Scale, Yale Global Tic Severity Scale, Revised Conners' Parent Rating Scale, and Revised Conners' Teacher Rating Scale. After four years of treatment with levetiracetam, all 70 patients showed some improvements based on the scales used. A total of 49 patients improved with regard to behavior and school performance. Levetiracetam was generally well tolerated. Despite the limitations of open-label studies, these results suggest that levetiracetam may be useful in treating tics in children and adolescents. Given its established safety profile, levetiracetam is a candidate for further study.
The effectiveness of Morocco’s industrial policy in promoting a national automotive industry

Since the 1980s, international production patterns have fundamentally changed, creating opportunities for developing countries to integrate into global value chains (GVCs). Morocco, which is among the first countries in the Middle East and North Africa to pursue an export-led economic policy, has used this opportunity, among others, to develop an automotive supplier industry, which became one of the country’s industrial lead-sectors. This paper analyses how industrial policy and industry-level dynamics contributed to the emergence of an automotive supplier industry. We find that, although Morocco achieved its overall goal of establishing such an industry, this industry remains limited to low-value activities. With the aim of deepening the level of integration into GVCs and acquiring a dynamic competitive advantage in the automotive sector, the nature and objective of industrial policy in Morocco has changed in the past couple of years. Instead of focusing primarily on its labour-cost advantage to attract lead-firms to localise in Morocco, decision-makers currently are taking a more systemic approach to industrial policy, focusing on fostering synergies across sectors, creating ecosystems for different parts of the value chain, and using targeted support measures for enhancing workforce capabilities and competencies. We find evidence for a tendency towards the co-design of policy measures by public and private stakeholders, which, if it persists, could lead the way towards a more effective industrial policy. The main challenge for the future of the automotive sector in Morocco lies in a stronger inclusion of local firms in the value chain and a gradual shift towards higher value added. This will require a stronger focus on developing advanced technological skills and a higher level of investment in research and development.
Model prediction of contaminant transport in porous soil

The general objective of the study was prediction of contaminant transport in porous soil. Standard laboratory experiment where performed to monitor the movement of nitrate transport in porous soil and to predict the concentration of pollutants at different depth at time interval of 3days, 9days, 15days, 21days and 27days respectively. Soil samples were collected at different depth and this was carried out for a period of five months. The concentration of contaminants increases with increased in days of sample collection. Therefore, to investigate the flow of the contaminant in porous soil, the model developed shows the simulation values that were compared with experimental values. Results shows that they were in good agreement with R ranging from 0.807 to 0.81. The developed model will be a useful tool in monitoring flow of contaminant transport in a porous soil. ANALYSIS VOL. 4, 2018 ISSN 2394–3750 EISSN 2394–3769 SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY &
Indri at TREC 2008: Million Query (1MQ) Track

This work details experiments carried out using the Indri search engine for the ad hoc retrieval task in the TREC 2008 Million Query Track. We investigate comparing baseline runs on a stopped and unstopped corpus to a run utilizing a Dependence Model based on proximity features and a run using inferior smoothing through an intentionally poor choice of μ. The paper presents an evaluation of the results of these four different approaches.
How Much Does Imprecision in Accounting Measurement Enhance Value?

Theory on real effects suggests that more precise accounting does not necessarily improve investment efficiency. However, with investment efficiency mostly unobservable, empirical assessment of the theory is rare. This paper develops an empirical framework based on Kanodia, Singh, and Spero (2005) to structurally estimate the effect of imprecision in accounting measurement on investment efficiency. My estimates suggest that imprecision in accounting measurement has mitigated over-investment in capital expenditures and R&D by 28.6% and 4.9%, respectively. On average, firms still over-invest relative to the first-best full-information benchmark. In counterfactual analyses, my estimates suggest that the optimal investment efficiency could be achieved by reducing the current accounting precision by 4 percentage points (19.5 percentage points) in capital expenditures (R&D), which would increase investor welfare by 4.2% (22%). My study is among the first to provide a quantitative assessment of real effects and presents early evidence of excessive precision in accounting measurement.
Individual, Community and Societal Effects of the Global Financial Crisis: a Bioecological Model

Prior research suggests that the current economic crisis has negative impacts on population mental health, while some studies show that the recession also causes positive effects. This paper aims to understand the individual, community and societal effects of the global financial crisis by examining several studies using the bioecological model. The analysis suggests that coping methods for the global financial crisis are highly associated with: social policies and labour market programmes, social support, employment status and individual vulnerability.
Factor Allocation and Firm-Level Productivity Dynamics in Luxembourg’s Manufacturing Sector∗

This paper analyzes productivity dynamics in Luxembourg’s manufacturing sector using firm-level data for the period from 1996 to 2009. The aim is to understand the driving forces of productivity growth and derive policy suggestions to cope with the slowdown in the aggregate productivity in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. The findings show that the efficiency in the allocation of production factors has an important role in shaping the time path of aggregate productivity. The long-term transformation in the production structure of the economy from steel manufacturing to financial services combined with the economic slowdown of 2001-2002 derives the inefficient producers share down in the manufacturing sector. This leads to allocative efficiency gains and a rapid growth in the aggregate productivity of the manufacturing sector. In the period after 2007, however, the allocative efficiency falls rapidly followed by negative growth in productivity, which necessitates immediate policy actions toward facilitating the reallocation of production factors.
Performance of Laterite Soil Stabilized with Lime and Cement as a Road Foundation

As many areas in west Papua region are covered by the laterite soil and noticeable shortage of stones and sand, further study and development are required on the work of using lime and cement for soil mechanical properties improvement. Laboratory and field testing programs were conducted to evaluated lime-cement treated laterite soil for application in the evaluation procedures of pavement structures. The laboratory program consisted of performing unconfined compression test on lime-cement treated laterite soil. The field testing program included conducting in-situ tests of Light Weight Deflectometer (LWD), and field CBR. Based on the performance of the treated laterite soil observed in the present study it can be suggested that the treated laterite soil with lime and cement content of 12% and 5%, respectively, can be employed as a pavement foundation layer to bear the vehicle loads.
Dundee Discussion Papers in Economics Market Structure and Fiscal Policy Effectiveness

In a monopolistic competition macromodel with endogenous market structure, the fiscal multiplier is shown to consist of two components. One component depicts the response of output to a fiscal expansion through the conventional channels that disregard the role of market imperfections and a second one captures the effect of both firms’ market power and the policy induced change in the market structure. The latter effect – which is missing from the existing studies – is shown to be quite crucial in raising the fiscal multiplier even above unity, and also in improving consumers’ welfare when the labour market is competitive.