Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The inter-relation between alcohol and cigarette consumption in the UK

This study investigates the inter-relation between alcohol and cigarette consumption in the UK by estimating cigarette demand equations using data from the General Household Survey. The explicit recognition of a two-stage consumption process provides added realism. It is found that cigarettes have a negative own-price elasticity, but a positive cross-price elasticity with respect to alcohol. This suggests that cigarettes and alcohol are substitutes in demand, meaning that a rise in the price of alcohol increases smoking. The result is robust to inclusion of individual-specific variables and the effects of any particular year. Such a result implies that government pricing policies aimed at curbing smoking consumption could increase alcohol consumption. In contrast to most studies on this topic, this study uses individual-level data to allow analysis of the effect of age, gender, and education and income levels on UK cigarette consumption.
F2F/CMC Peer Writing Consultant/Tutee Perceived Satisfaction Introduction

The writing process is open-ended in that there is no definitive answer (Barilea & Dursob, 2002). In a sense, the writing process could also be defined as an ill defined problem that requires dynamic degrees of collaborative interaction and cognitive evaluation to craft possible solutions. This complexity makes the task of learning to write competently dependant on interaction and feedback with people that can help a student understand the dynamics of the writing process. Peer tutoring has become a popular method for providing that help. Traditionally peer tutoring happened face to face in a classroom setting, or face to face after class. And school environments still rely primarily on F2F interactions (Van der Meijden & Veenman, 2005). A review of the literature on peer reviews, collaborative writing and problem solving as they relate to the available modes of communication (F2F, asynchronous CMC and synchronous CMC) reveals a transitionary continuum from a dichotomous view pitting the value of F2F communication against the value of CMC communications, to a more integrated process view of communication modes. One of the primary criteria addressed by many studies has been the perceived satisfactions of participants in peer tutoring, collaborative writing and problem solving interactions that utilize various modes of communication.
Preselection Bandits

In this paper, we introduce the Preselection Bandit problem, in which the learner preselects a subset of arms (choice alternatives) for a user, which then chooses the final arm from this subset. The learner is not aware of the user's preferences, but can learn them from observed choices. In our concrete setting, we allow these choices to be stochastic and model the user's actions by means of the Plackett-Luce model. The learner's main task is to preselect subsets that eventually lead to highly preferred choices. To formalize this goal, we introduce a reasonable notion of regret and derive lower bounds on the expected regret. Moreover, we propose algorithms for which the upper bound on expected regret matches the lower bound up to a logarithmic term of the time horizon.
Growth Relationship Revisited: New Insights from the Time-Varying Cointegration Approach

1 King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, P.O. Box 88550, Riyadh 11672, Saudi Arabia. Also Department of Statistics and Econometrics, Azerbaijan State University of Economics (UNEC), Istiqlaliyyat Str. 6, Baku AZ1141, Azerbaijan. Corresponding author: e-mail: jeyhun.mikayilov@kapsarc.org. 2 University of Derby, Kedleston Road Derby, DE22 1, United Kingdom. 3 King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, P.O. Box 88550, Riyadh 11672, Saudi Arabia. Also Institute of Control Systems, Institute of Cybernetics, B. Vahabzade Str. 9, Baku AZ1141, Azerbaijan. 4 The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of their affiliated institutions. Abstract
Genetic polymorphism analysis of 5' untranslated region of thyroglobulin gene in Bali cattle (Bos javanicus) from three different regions of Indonesia

The g.422C>T nucleotide variations in the 5’ untranslated region (5’UTR) of TG gene (called as TG5) has been reported to be associated with level in intramuscular fat (IMF) content or marbling in beef cattle. The objective of this study was to confirm genetic polymorphism of TG5 gene in Bali cattle populations from three different regions as the main resources of Bali cattle in Indonesia. A total of 200 head of Bali cattle have been performed genotyping on TG5 gene using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment lenght polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) method and sequence analysis. Results of the study confirmed that TG5 was monomorphic in Bali cattle wherever their origin regions. Moreover, nine candidate SNPs were detected within 5’UTR of TG gene in Bali cattle compared to Genbank reference sequences, although no SNP variations among Bali cattle sample studied. The new other genetic markers within an entire TG gene suggested to be explored and verified for their polymorphisms in Bali cattle. The nine candidate SNPs were also required further verification and validation in a larger sample to be regarded as new SNPs between Bali cattle and Genbank reference sequences.
The Resilient Organization: A Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Communication on Team Diversity and Team Performance

The Input-Process-Output framework is adopted to examine the impact of diversity attributes (the input) on communication (the process) and their influence on performance (the outcome), to understand the internal group/team working mechanisms of organizational resilience. A meta-analysis of 174 correlations from 35 empirical studies undertaken over 35 years (1982-2017) showed that members of a team who have different experiences are more likely to share information and communicate openly when they deal with a task that requires collaboration outside the team. This supports the view that organizations are more resilient by being more closely connected with the external environment. Differences in social categories tend to favor openness of communication, especially in the case of age diversity and race/ethnicity diversity. An increase in openness of communication is likely to enhance team performance, particularly for small and medium sized teams operating in manufacturing industries, while frequency of communication can be beneficial for both large and medium sized teams working in the high technology industry. The positive workings of these associations form the resilient organization.
Predicting the June 2013 European Flooding based on Precipitation, Soil Moisture and Sea Level Pressure

AbstractOver recent decades Europe has experienced heavy floods, with major consequences for thousands of people and billions of euros worth of damage. In particular, the summer of 2013 flood in central Europe showed how vulnerable modern society is to hydrological extremes and emphasized once more the need for improved forecast methods of such extreme climatic events. Based on a multiple linear regression model, it is shown here that 55% of the June 2013 Elbe River extreme discharge could have been predicted using May precipitation, soil moisture, and sea level pressure. Moreover, the model was able to predict more than 75% of the total Elbe River discharge for June 2013 (in terms of magnitude) by also incorporating the amount of precipitation recorded during the days prior to the flood, but the predicted discharge for the June 2013 event was still underestimated by 25%. Given that all predictors used in the model are available at the end of each month, the forecast scheme can be used to predict extreme .
Review of “Learning from Untrusted Data,” Charikar, Steinhardt, and Valiant CS 229T: Statistical Learning Theory

Despite many previous work that put emphasis on the case when α ≈ 1, the authors focus on the case when α 1. In particular, the authors contend two frameworks accommodated to the presence of significant fraction of arbitrary (or adversarial) data: the list-decodable and the semi-verified learning models. Roughly speaking, list-decodable algorithm returns a list of possible answers while semi-verified algorithm returns a single answer but is allowed to peek at a few “verified” data points. The formal definition of both settings follows.
Exploring the influence of professional development on teacher careers : developing a path model approach

This paper develops a path model of professional development (PD) to explore the relationship between teacher PD and teacher careers and retention. A focussed literature review frames the study, which is based on a survey of 500+ teachers and interviews with 25 teachers. The findings provide evidence of the influence of PD on intermediate outcomes within the model and some evidence of influence on career progression. The paper concludes that a path model can provide a useful frame for examining the influence of PD on career, but the approach is limited given the complex, situated nature of teachers' careers.
Exciton absorption of perpendicularly polarized light in carbon nanotubes

Optical absorption in carbon nanotubes for polarization perpendicular to the tube axis is studied taking account of exciton effects. Although a strong depolarization effect tends to shift the position to the higher energy side and suppress the intensity, excitons manifest themselves as prominent peaks because of their large binding energy. The resulting absorption energy is closer to that associated with that of the second gap for light polarized parallel to the axis.
Unsupervised Geometry-Aware Deep LiDAR Odometry

Learning-based ego-motion estimation approaches have recently drawn strong interest from researchers, mostly focusing on visual perception. A few learning-based approaches using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) have been re-ported; however, they heavily rely on a supervised learning manner. Despite the meaningful performance of these approaches, supervised training requires ground-truth pose labels, which is the bottleneck for real-world applications. Differing from these approaches, we focus on unsupervised learning for LiDAR odometry (LO) without trainable labels. Achieving trainable LO in an unsupervised manner, we introduce the uncertainty-aware loss with geometric confidence, thereby al-lowing the reliability of the proposed pipeline. Evaluation on the KITTI, Complex Urban, and Oxford RobotCar datasets demonstrate the prominent performance of the proposed method compared to conventional model-based methods. The proposed method shows a comparable result against SuMa (in KITTI), LeGO-LOAM (in Complex Urban), and Stereo-VO (in Oxford RobotCar). The video and extra-information of the paper are described in https://sites.google. com/view/deeplo.
Continuum results for light hadrons from 2+1 flavor DWF ensembles

From simultaneous fits to the data from the 2+1 flavor DWF ensembles generated by the RBC and UKQCD collaborations at two different lattice spacings, we present preliminary continuum results for light hadrons. We focus on light pseudoscalar decay constants and quark masses. Several approaches to the calculation of the lattice spacing are discussed and the errors associated with the chiral extrapolation are explained. We make use of reweighting in the dynamical strange quark mass such that our ensembles have a self-consistently determined strange quark mass.
Potential of zinc solubilizing Bacillus strains to improve rice growth under axenic conditions.

Rice is the 2 most important staple food and cereal grain after wheat in Pakistan (Pakistan Economics Survey,20182019) and more than 3 billion people in the world consume it as their staple food (Salvatierra-Rojas et al., 2017). It is a good source of carbohydrates and consists of protein, fat, fiber and sugar contents. Its grains also contain vitamin E, vitamin B, riboflavin, folate, niacin, thiamine, and pantothenic acid along with important minerals like calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, manganese and zinc (USDA, 2016). Zinc is an important micronutrient that is essential not only for the proper functioning and for optimum growth of crop plants but for human and microorganisms throughout their life cycle (Shaikh and Saraf, 2017). In plants, it is required to produce phytohormones, chlorophyll and starch synthesis (Rehman et al., 2018), metabolism and oxidation of carbohydrates and nitrogen, protein synthesis, photosynthesis, resistance against stress and diseases, and pollen formation (Cakmak, 2008; Gurmani et al., 2012). Plants are the source of entrance of zinc in humans so its deficiency in plants leads to the deficiency in humans that is harmful for vital body organs (Devi et al., 2014). Zn deficiency is ranked as 4 important micronutrient deficient in human (Zhang et al., 2011) and affected the approximately two billion people in the world (Devi et al., 2014). In Pakistan, about 40% of women and children are suffering from zinc deficiency (GOP, 2009). Globally, its deficiency caused the 18% malaria, 16% respiratory disorder and 10% diarrhea with 800,000 deaths in a year (WHO, 2012). Pakistani soils are approximately 70% zinc deficient due to the alkaline and calcareous nature, low organic matter, and high pH and calcium carbonate contents in the soil (Imran et al., 2014; Hussain et al., 2018). Zinc solubilizing bacteria (ZSB) solubilize the insoluble zinc compounds in soil so it becomes available for plant uptake (Mumtaz et al., 2017). Rhizobacteria produce several organic acids (Fasim et al., 2002; Saravanan et al., 2007) that can decrease the soil pH and increase Zn availability (Havlin et al., 2005). Rhizobacteria also secrete the chelating ligands, vitamins, amino acids that have been reported to solubilize Zn from insoluble forms available in soil (Saravanan et al., 2004). Zinc solubilizing strains from different rhizobacterial genera like Bacillus (Mumtaz et al., 2017, 2018), Pseodomonas (Bapiri et al., 2012), Gluconacetobacter (Intorne et al., 2009), Burkholderia and Serratia (Dinesh et al., 2015) have been reported. Mumtaz et al. (2017) reported that thirteen isolates out of seventy were able to solubilize zinc under in vivo studies in plate assay. Pak. J. Agri. Sci., Vol. 57(4), 1057-1071; 2020 ISSN (Print) 0552-9034, ISSN (Online) 2076-0906 DOI: 10.21162/PAKJAS/20.9988 http://www.pakjas. com.pk
ElasticCopyset: An Elastic Replica Placement Scheme for High Durability

Distributed key-value stores (KVSs) are a standard component for data management for applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. Replica placement schemes for KVSs on IaaS have to be adapted to on-demand node addition and removal, as well as, to handle correlated failures of the physical hardware underlying the cloud. Currently, while placement strategies exist for handling correlated failures, they tend to rely on static mapping of data to nodes, which is ineﬃcient for an elastic system. This paper presents ElasticCopyset, a novel replica placement scheme, which ﬁlls in the gap of providing eﬃcient elasticity while maintaining high data durability when multiple nodes simultaneously fail. We experimentally demonstrate that ElasticCopyset maintains a close to minimised probability of data loss at correlated failures under diﬀer-ent scenarios, and exhibits better scalability and elasticity than state-of-the-art replica placement schemes.
Global and Regional Financial Integration of Asian Stock Markets

Financial integration has been an issue of enduring interest in Asia especially in the aftermath of Asian financial crisis, 1997; and central to the empirical research on this topic is the question: “how financial integration is actually measured, and which type of financial markets can conveniently reflect the interconnection between Asia and the World”. In an attempt to explore some of the dimensions of this complex structure of global and regional financial integration, this paper thus, measures the existence and the level of inter-linkages among the equity markets of Asia with the world and the Asian region by deploying the methodology of beta and sigma convergence.
ECLIPSE: An Extreme-Scale Linear Program Solver for Web-Applications

Key problems arising in web applications (with millions of users and thousands of items) can be formulated as Linear Programs (LP) involving billions to trillions of decision variables and constraints. Despite the appeal of LP formulations, solving problems at these scales appears to be well beyond the capabilities of existing LP solvers. Often ad-hoc decomposition rules are used to approximately solve these LPs, which have limited optimality guarantees and lead to a sub-optimal performance in practice. In this work, we propose a distributed solver that solves a perturbation of the LP problems at scale via a gradient-based algorithm on the smooth dual of the perturbed LP with computational guarantees. The main workhorses of our algorithm are distributed matrix-vector multiplications (with load balancing) and efficient projection operations on distributed machines. Experiments on real-world data show that our proposed LP solver, ECLIPSE, can solve problems with 10 decision variables – well beyond the capabilities of current solvers.
Status and Vocal Accommodation in Small Groups

Sociological research on vocal dynamics demonstrates that as actors engage in conversation, their vocal frequencies tend to converge over time. Previous scholars have theorized that patterns of vocal accommodation serve as a mechanism through which speakers non-consciously communicate perceptions of each other’s relative status. In this article I discuss existing evidence linking vocal accommodation to status perceptions. Next, I report results from a laboratory experiment in which I test the proposed causal link between status and vocal accommodation by randomly assigning members of dyadic task groups to occupy either a higher or lower status position and assessing patterns of vocal accommodation. Results support the theorized causal relationship between group status structure and vocal accommodation. I argue that, as an unobtrusive and non-conscious indicator of status, vocal accommodation is a valuable, yet underused tool for assessing group status structures in a wide variety of situations and regarding many substantive sociological questions.
Explicative Factors Driving the Tomato Consumption in the Mediterranean Basin: A Panel Data Approach

This chapter studies the consumer behavior of the tomato market in six Mediterranean countries, four of them belong to the European Union, EU—Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal, one to North Africa—Morocco, a highly competitive market with a major trade agreement with the EU since 2004, and another in Asia—Turkey. The main objective of the chapter is to analyze which are the most important explanatory factors, of a series of 13, that explain tomato consumption in the Mediterranean Basin. These factors, which are assumed as significant, are analyzed with an approach that uses panel data (fixed effects) models, a type of models that has clear advantages over the traditional meth -odologies. The r esults show significant differences between countries , that there are empirical evidence between consumption of tomatoes and price, imports and exports, production, growth area, technological developments and euro-dollar exchange rate; some importance lies on the EU-Morocco trade agreement; less empirical evidence was found between consumption and the exchange rates of the Turkish and Morocco curren- cies (Turkish pound and the Morocco dirham).
Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development

Turkish Adaptation of the Juhnke–Balkin Life Balance Inventory Mehmet Akif Karaman, Richard S. Balkin & Gerald A. Juhnke To cite this article: Mehmet Akif Karaman, Richard S. Balkin & Gerald A. Juhnke (2018) Turkish Adaptation of the Juhnke–Balkin Life Balance Inventory, Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development, 51:3, 141-150, DOI: 10.1080/07481756.2017. 1308226 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07481756.2017. 1308226
Physical and Metals Impact of Traditional Gold Mining on Soils in Kombo-Laka Area (Meiganga, Cameroon)

Concentrations of metals (As, Cr, Cd, Fe, Ni, Pb, Sb, and Zn) in soil samples from Kombo-Laka were investigated. The area under study is subjected to traditional gold mining and receives various wastes from miners and mining activities. Direct observations on the field displayed the destruction of soils by this activity. An assessment of pollution was performed using an Enrichment Factor (EF) and geoaccumulation index (Igeo). Levels of As, Cr, Cd, Cu, Pb and Sb in soil samples were above average in the Upper Continental Crust (UCC). EF revealed anthropogenic sources for Cd, As and Sb in these soils. Igeo indicates that Kombo-Laka soils are moderately to extremely polluted with As and Sb. There are high to very high positive correlations among the metals suggesting their possible common sources. This study reveals that traditional gold mining activities in the area are harmful to the environment.
Rapid Emergency Medicine Score as a Predictive Value for 30-day Outcome of Nonsurgical Patients Referred to the Emergency Department

ABSTRACT Background and aims Multiple scoring systems are designed and prepared nowadays that can be used to determine and predict the severity, morbidity, and mortality rate of patients. Among them, the rapid emergency medicine score (REMS) system has been designed to predict the motility of nonsurgical patients admitted to the emergency department (ED). This study was performed with the aim of evaluating the predictive value of REMS in the mortality rate of nonsurgical patients. Materials and methods This study was carried out in 2017 among 300 nonsurgical patients referred to the ED. Data were collected using a checklist containing two parts of demographic information and REMS scale. Results Based on the results, we found a significant correlation between the duration of hospitalization and other parameters of the study. The results of this study indicated that the REMS of patients increased by 11%, 3%, and 5%, per each unit rise in patient’s age, heart rate, and respiratory rate, respectively. On the contrary, 12% and 22% decrements for every unit increase in SPO2 and GCS levels were observed, respectively. All the reported findings were statistically significant. Conclusion In sum, the outcomes of the present study corroborate the REMS system as a successful scale in predicting mortality and the duration of hospitalization in nonsurgical ED patients. How to cite this article Ala A, Vahdati SS, Jalali M, Parsay S. Rapid Emergency Medicine Score as a Predictive Value for 30-day Outcome of Nonsurgical Patients Referred to the Emergency Department. Indian J Crit Care Med 2020;24(6):418–422.
Formation and photocatalytic activity of BaTiO 3 nanocubes via hydrothermal process

We reported a facile hydrothermal approach to synthesize BaTiO3 nanocubes with controlled sizes for degradation of methylene blue (MB). The nanocubes with reaction time of 48 hours exhibited the highest photocatalytic efficiency, owing to their narrower size distribution and better crystallinity compared to those of 24 hours and, at the meantime, smaller particle size than those of 72 hours. This work also demonstrated the degradation of methylene orange (MO) using BaTiO3 nanocubes synthesized for 48 hours. Compared with the removal of MB, BaTiO3 had lower photocatalytic activity on MO, mainly due to the poorer absorption behavior of MO on the surface of BaTiO3 nanocubes. The degradation efficiency for each photocatalytic reaction was calculated. The possible mechanism of the photocatalytic decomposition on MB has been addressed as well.