Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Students’ acceptance of WhatsApp as teaching and learning tool in distance higher education in sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract Many educators are concerned about students’ use of WhatsApp for learning purposes, especially in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study applied the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model to examine factors that predict distance students’ acceptance of WhatsApp for learning. Correlational design was employed. Questionnaires were used to collect data from 273 undergraduate and post-graduate diploma distance students in Ghana. Data were analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results showed that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions are significant predictors of distance students’ intentions to use WhatsApp to support learning. However, mobile phone self-efficacy without mediation was not a significant predictor of behavioral intention. Finally, use behavior was significantly predicted by behavioral intention but not facilitating conditions. It was recommended, among other things, that before adopting WhatsApp for instructional activities, management and faculties of educational institutions should ensure the availability of suitable conditions such as WhatsApp-supported mobile devices for students’ use.
Differences in Willingness to Undergo BRCA1/2 Testing and Risk Reducing Surgery among the General Public, Cancer Patients, and Healthcare Professionals: A Large Population-Based Survey

We aimed to understand the decision-making process related to the willingness to undergo BRCA1/2 genetic testing, risk-reducing salpingo-oophorectomy (RRSO), or risk-reducing mastectomy (RRM) among the general public, cancer patients, and healthcare professionals in South Korea. In total, 3444 individuals (1496 from the general public, 1500 cancer patients, 108 clinicians, and 340 researchers) completed a survey addressing genetic testing and related risk management options in a hypothetical scenario. Differences in intent and associated factors for undergoing the above procedures or sharing test results were analyzed. Overall, 67% of participants were willing to undergo BRCA1/2 testing, with proportions of the general public (58%), cancer patients (70%), clinicians (88%), and researchers (90%). The willingness to undergo RRSO was highest among clinicians (58%), followed by among patients (38%), the general public (33%), and researchers (32%) (p < 0.001). Gender, age, education level, and household income were associated with willingness to undergo genetic testing, RRM, and RRSO (p < 0.05). The intent for undergo genetic testing, RRM, and RRSO were affected by many factors. Finally, 69% of the general public intended to share information with family, while this percentage was 92%, 91%, and 94% for patients, clinicians, and researchers, respectively (p < 0.05). These results highlight the requirement for developing targeted educational materials and counseling strategies for facilitating informed decision making.
Long-Term Field Rutting and Moisture Susceptibility Performance of Warm-Mix Asphalt Pavement

Although warm-mix asphalt (WMA) has been used in pavement construction in recent years, the long-term field performance of WMA pavements has not been studied extensively. In response, this study investigated 28 pavement projects in the United States, covering different climate zones, WMA technologies, service years, pavement structures, and traffic volume levels. The long-term field rutting performance between WMA pavements and hot-mix asphalt (HMA) pavements was compared. Field samples were extracted for laboratory experiments. Significant determinants (engineering or material properties) that correlate with rutting performance also were investigated. A simple rutting resistance index obtained from the Hamburg wheel-tracking test was found to be the significant determinant (material property) that correlates best with field rutting performance. The significant mix design parameters that affect the rutting resistance index were analyzed to suggest a better rutting-resistant mix design. In addition, no moisture damage or raveling was observed for the selected projects in the field. Therefore, the moisture susceptibility of the mixes was evaluated in regard to the stripping inflection point of field cores as obtained from the Hamburg wheel-tracking test results. It was found also that most of the mixes that did not include an antistripping agent exhibited a stripping inflection point, suggesting the need for the addition of an antistripping agent in pavement mixtures.
A leak tight design methodology for large diameter flanges based on non-linear modelling and analysis

PCB Luyt Leak tight design methodology for large diameter flanges based on non-linear modelling and analysis Page ii Title: A leak tight design methodology for large diameter flanges based on non-linear modelling and analysis Author: Mr Pieter C. B. Luyt Institute: Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, University of Pretoria Supervisor: Prof. Nico J. Theron Co-supervisor: Mr Francesco Pietra
Poziom sprawności fizycznej studentów kierunku fizjoterapii Akademii Medycznej w Gdańsku a ich opinia wobec różnych form aktywności ruchowej

This work describes the analysis of physical fitness and expectations of the first year students of physiotherapy from the Medical University of Gdansk regarding various forms of physical activity included in the obligatory study program. The research included 82 students (61 female, 21 male; aged 19-22). It was conducted in academic years of 2004/05 and 2005/06. To evaluate physical fitness selected tests were taken out of International Physical Fitness Test (IPFT). They were carried out twice during the academic year (October, May). Physical fitness level was measured using: flexibility test (trunk bend); abdominal muscles endurance test (sit-ups); arms and shoulders endurance lest (shaft overhang and elevating); hand muscle strength lest (dynamometer); running speed test and agility test (shuttle test 4x10). Students opinions and their expectations regarding physical classes included in the obligatory study program were measured with a diagnostic sounding. Statistical analysis of physical fitness test results in students after second the stage of the research showed advancement of average results in a considerable number of physical tests both in female and male students. The obtained lest results sugest that physiotherapy students already in on the first stage of education consciously, participate in physical fitness classes and various forms of physical activity included in the obligatory study program. The maintenance and improvement of students' physical fitness level were also influenced by their considerably large involvement and participation in various types of physical classes outside the university. Out of the questionnaires results it is known that 43% of all researched students participate in well organized recreation - sport activities such as: swimming, volleyball, basketball, football, tennis, spon aerobics, athletics. And 40% actively spend their free time on: morning gymnastic, cycling, mountain trips, skiing and others. The students in their opinion stress that the most important aims of physical fitness education and various forms of activity are: enhancing the level of physical fitness and forming motor skills as factors necessary in the preparation process for the physiotherapist role. They also think that active participation in various sport disciplines or recreation activities both at the university and out side, will give an opportunity to complete experiences and enlarge knowledge on physical culture, the elements of which take central place in the arsenal of rehabilitation measures. In the students' opinion constant care about their own physical fitness and physical activity is the element conditioing good health and effective professional activity.
Shaping Noise for Robust Attributions in Neural Stochastic Differential Equations

Neural SDEs with Brownian motion as noise lead to smoother attributions than traditional ResNets. Various attribution methods such as saliency maps, integrated gradients, DeepSHAP and DeepLIFT have been shown to be more robust for neural SDEs than for ResNets using the recently proposed sensitivity metric. In this paper, we show that neural SDEs with adaptive attribution-driven noise lead to even more robust attributions and smaller sensitivity metrics than traditional neural SDEs with Brownian motion as noise. In particular, attribution-driven shaping of noise leads to 6.7%, 6.9% and 19.4% smaller sensitivity metric for integrated gradients computed on three discrete approximations of neural SDEs with standard Brownian motion noise: stochastic ResNet-50, WideResNet-101 and ResNeXt-101 models respectively. The neural SDE model with adaptive attribution-driven noise leads to 25.7% and 4.8% improvement in the SIC metric over traditional ResNets and Neural SDEs with Brownian motion as noise. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose the use of attributions for shaping the noise injected in neural SDEs, and demonstrate that this process leads to more robust attributions than traditional neural SDEs with standard Brownian motion as noise.
The Race Between Education, Technology, and Institutions

I attempt to synthesize the neoclassical and institutional perspectives on the evolution of wage inequality in the US. I estimate an extended version of the canonical model incorporating the real minimum wage and show that changes in supply (education), demand (technology), and the minimum wage (institutions) each play central roles in shaping the evolution of the U.S. college premium between 1963 and 2017. I generalize the model’s theoretical foundation to include monopsony power, minimum wages, and unemployment; derive the reduced-form estimating equation; and show that its coefﬁcients have simple theoretical interpretations. Finally, I use the model to quantify the impact of changes in the minimum wage on real wages and broader patterns of inequality across more disaggregated groups. applies when using Autor et al.’s (2008) data. The coefﬁcient on the real minimum wage is negative and signiﬁcant and similar to my baseline estimate across all speciﬁcations up to and including a sextic polynomial of time except for the case of a third-degree polynomial of time, in which case the coefﬁcient on the real minimum wage insigniﬁcant and small.
Addressing imPAIRED observations

A major problem in robotics is that models trained in simulation do not transfer well to real-world settings. Some approaches exist to make this transition more successful, such as Active Domain Randomization (ADR) where a model learns to change the domain in which the main RL agent’s environment, generating a series of increasingly difﬁcult domain shifts. This technique is related to Curriculum Learning (CL), wherein agents are trained on progressively more complicated tasks in order to "ﬂatten" their learning curve, enabling them adapt to new, more complex environments efﬁciently. PAIRED by Dennis et al. [2020] is a recent advancement in CL which allows curricula to be generated automatically. PAIRED works in a similar way to ADR in that it generates tasks that are just outside of the agent’s current capabilities. In this work, we combine both approaches. We hypothesized that by allowing the adversarial environment designer to alter the representation (i.e. colour) of each block type as observed by the RL agent, it would achieve greater robustness and generalizability. However, simply changing the observation scheme of the RL agent from three ﬁxed block types to a larger set of distinct colours, led to an unexpected diminishing of performance. In fact, the essential results of Dennis et al. [2020] itself were unable to be reproduced under this new observation scheme. This demonstrates a crucial failure case of the original work, and indicates the need for further research into adversarial control of observation domain. Nonetheless, our results reﬂect higher robustness for agents trained in an adversarial observation domain versus the PAIRED baseline, illustrating the potential of this new training paradigm.
FuseBot: RF-Visual Mechanical Search

—Mechanical search is a robotic problem where a robot needs to retrieve a target item that is partially or fully-occluded from its camera. State-of-the-art approaches for me- chanical search either require an expensive search process to ﬁnd the target item, or they require the item to be tagged with a radio frequency identiﬁcation tag (e.g., RFID), making their approach beneﬁcial only to tagged items in the environment. We present FuseBot, the ﬁrst robotic system for RF-Visual mechanical search that enables efﬁcient retrieval of both RF-tagged and untagged items in a pile. Rather than requiring all target items in a pile to be RF-tagged, FuseBot leverages the mere existence of an RF-tagged item in the pile to beneﬁt both tagged and untagged items. Our design introduces two key innovations. The ﬁrst is RF-Visual Mapping , a technique that identiﬁes and locates RF-tagged items in a pile and uses this information to construct an RF-Visual occupancy distribution map. The second is RF-Visual Extraction , a policy formulated as an optimization problem that minimizes the number of actions required to extract the target object by accounting for the probabilistic occupancy distribution, the expected grasp quality, and the expected information gain from future actions. We built a real-time end-to-end prototype of our system on a UR5e robotic arm with in-hand vision and RF perception modules. We conducted over 180 real-world experimental trials to evaluate FuseBot and compare its performance to a state-of-the-art vision-based system named X-Ray [10]. Our experimental results demonstrate that FuseBot outperforms X-Ray’s efﬁciency by more than 40% in terms of the number of actions required for successful mechanical search. Furthermore, in comparison to X-Ray’s success rate of 84%, FuseBot achieves a success rate of 95% in retrieving untagged items, demonstrating for the ﬁrst time that the beneﬁts of RF perception extend beyond tagged objects in the mechanical search problem.
Visible School Security Measures across Diverse Middle and High School Settings: Typologies and Predictors

ABATRACT Many U.S. schools attempt to create safe learning environments by implementing visible security measures such as cameras, metal detectors, and security personnel. This study explored utilization patterns of visible security measures and several associated predictors. Data included school administrator and student responses from multiple waves of two nationally representative surveys. Three latent classes of visible security measures were identified. Membership in the heaviest security latent class was most likely among large urban high schools in the South and was associated with student race/ethnicity and school disorder. Implications for research on effectiveness of visible security measures are discussed.
Talent Allocation in the Indian Economy: Measurement and Policy Implications

When individuals are not engaged in occupations according to their ability or ‘talent’, we observe talent misallocation in an economy. This paper shows that talent allocation improved in India over 1983-2012. To explain this, I compute similarity indices and examine the patterns in educational attainment and wages for marginalised (relative to privileged) gender and caste groups. I then use the reduced form approach to relate these indices with talent allocation. The paper’s findings suggest that the improvement in talent allocation is correlated with the decline in labor market discrimination and barriers to educational attainment towards marginalised groups. Furthermore, using the decomposition technique, I find that convergence in educational attainment among these two barriers accounts for most of the improvement in talent allocation.
Stronger protection or technological revolution: what is behind the recent surge in patenting?

We investigate the cause of an unprecedented surge of U.S. patenting over the past decade. Conventional wisdom points to the estab-lishment of the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit by Congress in 1982. We examine whether this institutional change, which has benefited patent holders, explains the burst in US. patenting. Using both international and domestic data on patent applications and awards, we conclude that the evidence is not favorable to the conventional view. Instead, it appears that the jump in patenting reflects an increase in U.S. innovation spurred by changes in the management of research. received useful suggestions Klenow the Carnegie-Rochester Conference. thank University Microeco-nomics Seminar, the NBER Group Meeting, the NBER Science and Technology Policy Meeting for comments, and especially Zvi Griliches, Adam Jaffe, Scott Stern, and Mehmet Yorukoglu. We thank Adam Jaffe for generously sharing entity-level patenting data. Financial Science Foundation and Harvard Business School’s Division of Research.
Detecting Seismic Waves Induced By Blast Operations At A Limestone Quarry By Means Of Different Transducer Mounting

The use of explosives to fragment the rock is very widespread in quarrying activities. This technology produces significant environmental impacts due to ground vibrations generated by blasting operations. In order to characterize this phenomenon, accurate measurements of seismic waves are required and one of the most critical aspects in field tests is represented by the coupling method between the transducers and the soil. This phenomenon may generate the distortion of the recorded waveform thus affecting the affordability of the sample itself. Moreover, the decoupling assumes a growing importance in those sites where the rock is not outcropping and the transducer is buried. For this purpose, different methods are tested in an opencast limestone quarry in the centre of Italy. Firstly, ground vibrations in terms of peak particle velocity (PPV) were recorded according with the method suggested in UNI 9,916 and consisting in burying the detectors into the soil at a suitable depth. Secondly, the same parameters were recorded by means of transducers fixed to the ground with some sand bags thus maintaining the proper adherence. Finally, the data obtained through these two different methods are compared and discussed.
Robotic Surveillance and Deployment Strategies

Author(s): Patel, Rushabh | Advisor(s): Bullo, Francesco | Abstract: Autonomous mobile systems are becoming more common place, and have the opportunity to revolutionize many modern application areas. They include, but are not limited to, tasks such as search and rescue operations, ad-hoc mobile wireless networks and warehouse management; each application having its own complexities and challenging problems that need addressing. In this thesis, we explore and characterize two application areas in particular. First, we explore the problem of autonomous stochastic surveillance. In particular, we study random walks on a finite graph that are described by a Markov chain. We present strategies that minimize the first hitting time of the Markov chain, and look at both the single agent and multi-agent cases. In the single agent case, we provide a formulation and convex optimization scheme for the hitting time on graphs with travel distances. In addition, we provide detailed simulation results showing the effectiveness of our strategy versus other well-known Markov chain design strategies. In the multi-agent case, we provide the first characterization of the hitting time for multiple random walkers, which we denote the "group hitting time". We also provide a closed form solution for calculating the hitting time between specified nodes for both the single and multiple random walker cases. Our results allow for the multiple random walks to be different and, moreover, for the random walks to operate on different subgraphs. Finally, we use sequential quadratic programming to find the transition matrices that generate minimal "group hitting time". Second, we consider the problem of optimal coverage with a group of mobile agents. For a planar environment with an associated density function, this problem is equivalent to dividing the environment into optimal subregions such that each agent is responsible for the coverage of its own region. We study this problem for the discrete time and space case and the continuous time and space case. For the discrete time and space case, we present algorithms that provide optimal coverage control in a non-convex environment when each robot has only asynchronous and sporadic communication with a base station. We introduce the notion of coverings, a generalization of partitions, to do this. For the continuous time and space case, we present a continuous-time distributed policy which allows a team of agents to achieve a convex area-constrained partition in a convex workspace. This work is related to the classic Lloyd algorithm, and makes use of generalized Voronoi diagrams. For both cases we provide detailed simulation results and discuss practical implementation issues.
Analyzing the Tradeoff Between Efficiency and Flexibility in Cellular Manufacturing Systems

A limitation of Group Technology (GT) based cellular manufacturing systems is that their limited routing flexibility offsets the setup and material handling efficiencies they offer. Virtual Cellular Manufacturing (VCM) systems do not encounter the problem of limited routing flexibility but do not yield the same efficiencies as GT based cellular systems. This study compares the performance of a GT based cellular manufacturing system that utilizes operations overlapping to further improve material flow efficiency with that of a virtual cellular manufacturing system. Results suggest that while the use of operations overlapping in a GT based cellular manufacturing system can to some extent compensate for the system’s low routing flexibility, it cannot fully overcome the high flow time variance that results from the permanent dedication of machine resources. As a result, GT based cellular manufacturing performs comparably to VCM only under a limited set of conditions.