Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Proto-Governance of Minecraft Servers

There is a widespread assumption that the times when self-regulating internet communities allowed users to experiment with new forms of societal organization are over. Today, many commercial platforms impose rules on ‘their’ communities and leave little room for users to organize themselves. And yet, there are still environments that allow freedom for communities to explore new forms of living together. One of these environments is the multiplayer online game Minecraft. In Minecraft, players, not the game company, manage their servers through traditional legal instruments and software plugins. This provides us with the rare opportunity to examine self-made rulesets without first having to disentangle them from the non-negotiable rules of the commercial platform. We carried out an exploratory qualitative analysis of a selection of rulesets and focus on two major aspects related to server governance: the interplay between traditional legal rules and algorithmic governance mechanisms and the forms of government that players establish. We found that written and encoded rules seem to complement but not replace each other. Minecraft servers are mostly “benevolent dictatorships,” with some server rulesets indicating a willingness of staff to abide by power-limiting rules in similar ways as constitutional documents limiting the power of the monarch.
Cheap Talk under Ambiguity: The IPCC in Climate-Change Agreements

This paper shows that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can take advantage of her position over the report of climate knowledge to mitigate the inefficiency of the level of green house gases emissions in international environmental agreements (IEA). I model an IEA as a game of contribution to a public bad. In reporting confidence levels over the theories that could predict the impact of emissions, the IPCC plays a cheap talk game with IEA participants. The presence of ambiguity over these theories allows to account for a unique sequential equilibrium in the game under standard assumptions. This result sheds new light upon the role of scientific advising in uncertainty, supporting the view that it can contribute to restore economic efficiency.
Challenges and strategies of research engagement among Master of Education students in Uganda

Dennis Zami Atibuni*1, Grace Milly Kibanja2, David Kani Olema1, Joseph Ssenyonga3, and Steffens Karl4 1Busitema University, Nagongera Campus, Faculty of Science and Education, Department of Education, P.O. Box 236, Tororo; 2Makerere University, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Psychology, Department of Educational, Organisational, and Social Psychology, P.O. Box 7062, Kampala 3Mbarara University of Science and Technology, Faculty of Science, Department of Educational Foundations and Psychology, P.O. Box 1410, Mbarara. 4Universtatzu Koln, Institut III – Allgemeine Didaktik und Schulforschung, Padagogische Psychologiemit den Schwerpunkten Mediendidaktik, Albertus-Magnus Platz, 50923, Koln.
Assessment of neuroprotective effect of ascorbic acid against manganese dichloride induced cerebellar damage in female Wistar rats

*Corresponding Author Email: kudigheudoh@gmail.com Manganese is an essential trace element that can elicit a variety of toxic responses upon prolonged exposure to elevated concentrations. The present study investigated the protective effects of ascorbic acid against cerebellar damage by manganese dichloride tetrahydrate in female Wistar rats. Thirty female Wistar rats weighing between 133 268g were divided into six groups lettered A to F. Group A served as the control group administered volumes of distilled water equal to those in treated groups. The test groups B, C, D, E and F were administered respectively with: ascorbic acid at 100mg/kg; manganese dichloride tetrahydrate at 148.4mg/kg; Manganese dichloride tetrahydrate at 445.2mg/kg; manganese dichloride tetrahydrate at 148.4mg/kg and ascorbic acid at 100mg/kg; and manganese dichloride tetrahydrate at 445.2mg/kg and ascorbic acid at 100mg/kg. The administration was by oral gavage for 18 days. The rats were euthanised by chloroform inhalation on the 19th day. The brain of each rat was removed, weighed and processed for H&E. The group administered with only ascorbic acid showed significant increase in body weight change, whereas the groups administered with MnCl2.4H2O with or without ascorbic acid showed significant decrease in body weight. Organo-somatic index increased in the group administered with only ascorbic acid at 100mg/kg of body weight and significantly decreased in the group administered with low dose of MnCl2.4H2O at 148.4 mg/kg and ascorbic acid at 100 mg/kg. Histological results revealed increase in Purkinje cells in group treated with ascorbic acid at 100 mg/kg of body weight, whereas the groups administered with MnCl2.4H2O with or without ascorbic acid showed neurodegenerative changes. In conclusion, the administration of ascorbic acid did not completely reverse the effects of MnCl2.4H2O as revealed in body weight and neurodegenerative changes in the cerebellum.
Perception of public service employees on performance appraisal management in Muheza District, Tanzania

*Corresponding Author E-mail: molleleliphas1976@gmail.com This paper investigates the perception of public service employees on performance appraisal management system in Muheza District in Tanzania. The target population was 2232 employees and a sample of 339 was randomly selected. The questionnaire and interview schedules were validated by experts before actual data collection. Cronbach’s Alpha ranging between 0.76 and 0.95 ensured acceptable reliability of the questionnaire. The study concludes that though training and development are perceived to be essential for effective job performance, their modalities were not effective. Also, though promotion is perceived to be an important ingredient for effective individual performance, appraisal recognition seemed to lead employees to get satisfied with their jobs. Since training and development are essential for effective job performance, management in the public service should ensure that modalities of training and development are effectively planned while training and development policy are linked to individual performance. Finally, management should promote employees regularly as promotion is perceived to be an important ingredient for effective individual performance, something which may increase their productivity.
The pen is migthier than the sword: How third-party advice or sanction impact on pro-environmental behavior

It is well recognized that incentives can influence the cooperation of individuals in providing public goods. The aim of this study is to experimentally adapt a Public Good Game (PGG) to the environmental issue of waste management. We report an experiment in which players have to cooperate in order to reduce the cost of waste sorting treatment. We consider a traditional PGG with groups of 4 players, and where an additional player that plays the role of the third-party is introduced in each group in the incentivized treatments. The third-party has either the possibility to advise on the desirable individual contribution (Treatment 1), or to collectively punish the non cooperative behaviors by increasing the tax rate (Treatment 2). Furthermore, participants are asked to perform an effort task to increase their given initial endowments, and a measure of social preferences through a Social Value Orientation test (SVO). We find that both the advice and the threat of sanction increase significantly the average level of individual contributions. However, we see that once the sanction is applied, it has no significant effect in increasing cooperation, quite the contrary. Moreover, we find results in line with (Becker, 1974)’s altruism hypothesis that high income individuals contribute more in absolute value compared to low income ones.
Neuro-Genetic Fusion Approach for Neonatal Disease Diagnosis: A Decision Support System

In the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) neural network based applications are one of the most useful and vastly used data mining tools for making decision and prediction of disease in medicine. Feature selection of attributes and preprocessing are the vital parts of model selection in Artificial Neural Network (ANN). It may be prolonged also due to the selection of input features in Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) Model. Input attributes also determines the number of layers to be used and number of neurons requires for each layer. Thus selecting the best features among the various inputs is of immense significance in this field, without avoiding the accuracy. This chapter represents the fusion approach of integrating Batch Back Propagation Neural Network (B-BPNN) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) towards developing the decision support system for neonatal disease diagnose. Selection for attribute subsets has done by the Attribute Subset Evaluator (ASE) using genetic algorithm. Selected subset then preprocessed and analyzed for choosing best network architecture. Batch back propagation training algorithm used in this study to train the network using various training algorithm parameters. Experimental results reflect better classification accuracy after comparing different studies.
CableMon: Improving the Reliability of Cable Broadband Networks via Proactive Network Maintenance

Cable broadband networks are one of the few “last-mile” broadband technologies widely available in the U.S. Unfortunately, they have poor reliability after decades of deployment. Cable industry proposed a framework called Proactive Network Maintenance (PNM) to diagnose the cable networks. However, there is little public knowledge or systematic study on how to use these data to detect and localize cable network problems. Existing tools in the public domain have prohibitive high false-positive rates. In this paper, we propose CableMon, the first publicdomain system that applies machine learning techniques to PNM data to improve the reliability of cable broadband networks. CableMon uses statistical models to generate features from time series data and uses customer trouble tickets as hints to infer abnormal thresholds for these generated features. We use eight-month of PNM data and customer trouble tickets from an ISP to evaluate CableMon’s performance. Our results show that 81.9% of the abnormal events detected by CableMon overlap with at least one customer trouble ticket. This ticket prediction accuracy is four times higher than that of the existing public-domain tools used by ISPs. The tickets predicted by CableMon constitute 23.0% of the total networkrelated trouble tickets, suggesting that if an ISP deploys CableMon and proactively repairs the faults detected by CableMon, it can preempt those customer calls. Our current results, while still not mature, can already tangibly reduce an ISP’s operational expenses and improve customers’ quality of experience. We expect future work can further improve these results.
Bullying and its risk factors among elementary school children in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

1Graduates, Health Education program, Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, Princess Noura Bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 2Department of Health Sciences, Faculty of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences, Princess Noura Bint Abdulrahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 3Department of Public Health, Community, Environment and Occupational Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Suez Canal University, Egypt.
Foreign Direct Investment and Uncertainty: Evidence from French Multinational Firms

This paper studies the impact of uncertainty on the returns of French Direct Investment (DI) assets abroad and its impact on the internationalization strategy of French firms. We build a data-set of firm level assets and flows (including income) between 2000 and 2014 and match it with key country-specific uncertainty indicators. The results show that country-specific uncertainty has a significant and negative short-term impact on the yields of foreign affiliates. Following an uncertainty shock, French firms seem to be mostly either unwilling or unable to reallocate their assets internationally; whereas they respond to changes in the host country’s growth rate or in the average return. However, country-specific shocks do seem to have a negative impact on their share in the over-all firm FDI portfolio. It suggests that firms allocate further investments to supposedly less uncertain destinations. We also look at the idiosyncratic return volatility of french multinationals and provide some evidence that it is correlated with the worsening of financial conditions in the destination country.
The Accounting Review Vol . 92 , No . 2 March 2017 Institutional Ownership and Corporate Tax Avoidance : New Evidence American Accounting Association

We provide new evidence on the agency theory of corporate tax avoidance (Slemrod 2004; Crocker and Slemrod 2005; Chen and Chu 2005) by showing that increases in institutional ownership are associated with increases in tax avoidance. Using the Russell index reconstitution setting to isolate exogenous shocks to institutional ownership, and a regression discontinuity design that facilitates sharper identification of treatment effects, we find a significant and discontinuous increase in tax avoidance following Russell 2000 inclusion. The tax avoidance involves the use of tax shelters, and immediate benefits include higher profit margins and likelihood of meeting or beating analyst expectations. Collectively the results shed light on the effect of increased ownership concentration on tax avoidance.
Comparative study between two innovative clusters in Morocco and Italy

The paper takes place in the research field of the European project â€œCluster Development Medâ€ (Horizon 2020) focusing on the innovation and technology in the sustainable development area. Authors suggest a comparative study, which allows selecting the most innovative clusters in Morocco and Italy, and making comparisons between and within them. The analysis defines the weaknesses and strengths in the both examined clusters and embrace three dimensions of cluster activity, so called, â€œHumain and Material Resources, Activities, Processes and strategiesâ€ . In this paper, we start by giving a global presentation of Moroccan clusters, their history and geolocation. As a first case of study, we focused on the â€œMaroc Numeric Clusterâ€ (MNC) manely on its limitations and weaknesses. Thus, in the second case study, we present a cluster that is the beating heart of Italian excellence in the energy sector (Lombardy Energy Cleantech Cluster LE2C). The aim of this paper is to present the LE2C strengths and successful strategies in order to adapt them to the MNC cluster so that it can promote and accelerate again with a successfull proccess.
Impact of Facebook Usage on Firm’s Performances among Malaysian Chinese Retailers

Social media including Facebook has been acknowledged to play a vital role in firms achieving superior performance. Malaysia is a multicultural country in which the Malaysian Chinese are considered to be the most successful entrepreneurs. There is, however, a lack of research regarding the influence of Facebook usage on firm performance among Malaysian Chinese retailers. As such, this study had two aims. Firstly, the study investigated the influence of compatibility, cost effectiveness, trust, and interactivity on Facebook usage among Malaysian Chinese retailers. Secondly, the study assessed the impact of these retailers’ Facebook usage on their perceived financial performance, perceived non-financial performance, perceived business growth, and perceived performance relative to competitors under the moderating impact of market turbulence. This study developed a conceptual model based on the Strategic Contingency Theory (SCT) and Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory, and used a structured survey instrument to gather data. Using non-probability sampling techniques, 129 Malaysian Chinese retailers from Kuala Lumpur and Selangor were recruited for the study. Data was analysed using PLS-SEM techniques. The results showed that only compatibility, cost effectiveness, and interactivity have a statistically significant positive influence on Facebook usage, which in turn has a statistically significant positive influence on the retailers’ perceived financial performance, perceived non-financial performance, perceived business growth, and perceived performance relative to competitors. Moreover, market turbulence was only found to be a moderator that improves the impact of Facebook usage on perceived financial performance, perceived business growth, and perceived performance relative to competitors, but not perceived non-financial performance. These findings contribute to current literature and provide insights into the role and importance of Facebook usage on firm performance among Malaysian Chinese retailers, possibly encouraging more retailers to deploy social media in their business processes
Ecotoxicity of local and industrial refined kerosene on key environmental pollution monitor, Nitrobacter sp. in tri-aquatic systems in Nigeria

*Corresponding Authors E-mail: renner4nrior@gmail.com, lawrenceamadi@ymail.com Nitrification process involves Nitrobacter species and their growth and activities in the microenvironment when impacted negatively would consequently adversely affect soil fertility. In view of the significance of this process, the toxicity of local refined kerosene (LRK) and industrial refined kerosene (IRK) on a key environmental pollution monitor, Nitrobacter was investigated. LRK and IRK were apportioned into six sets for each of the experiments using tri-aquatic systems or microcosms of freshwater (FW), marine water (MW) and brackish water (BW) at percentage concentrations of; 0, 3.25, 6.5, 12.5, 25 and 50 into which the test organism (Nitrobacter sp.) was inoculated at intervals of; 0, 4, 8, 12 and 24hours. Toxicity results indicated that the sensitivity of the test organism was a function of both the contact time and concentrations, and also reflected lethal effects of the pollutants/toxicants (kerosene). The outcome of percentage median lethal concentration (%LC50) on Nitrobacter sp. in the triaquatic microcosms with pollutants were as follows; in IRK + FW 34.41 < in IRK + MW 37.89 < in LRK + FW 39.43 < in IRK + BW 40.99 < in LRK + MW 41.56 < in LRK + BW 45.35. This study revealed that IRK + FW microcosm was the most toxic (LC50) whereas LRK + BW microcosms was the least toxic. The inability of the organism to thrive well at kerosene concentration above 1% (v/v) is a warning signal of serious environmental pollution problem which could affect aquatic life forms and eventually humans. However, due to high fatality rate inherent from the use of LRK (though not reported here) and its toxicity to microbial life, it is hereby advocated that the public should rather resort to use IRK products.
Socio-economic impact of cystic echinococcosis (CE) on Agro-pastoral communities of South Darfur State, Sudan

Abakar, A. Dawoud1* ; Abd Almalaik, A.Aballaha2; Elmahdi, I.Elhag3 ; Mohammed, A. A2; Kern, Peter4; Romig, Thomas5 1Department of Medical Parasitology, Faculty of Medical Laboratory University of Gezira 2Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Nyala, Sudan. 3Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, University of Gezira, P.O. Box 20, Wad Medani, Sudan. 4Diseases Comprehensive Infectious Diseases Center Div. Infectious Diseases University Hospital and Medical Center Albert-Einstein-Allee 23 D-89081 Ulm 34, 5Department of Parasitology 220B, University of Hohenheim, EmilWolff-Strasse 70599 Stuttgart, Germany. *Corresponding Author Email: adamd@ufg.edu. sd Cystic echinococcosis is an important zoonotic infection which imparks serious effects on human and his domesticated animals. The disease is maintained by a cycle involves dog and ruminant association. The current study is the first investigation to provide an assessment of socio-economic impacts of CE on the Agro-pastoral system of husbandry among agro-pastoral community of south Darfur, one of known endemic areas for CE in Sudan. In this study, the key factors for the development and persistence of CE were identified. The socio-economic consequences impact on livestock husbandry and human, beside the role of chemotherapy for animals against infections in the study area were estimated. The annual financial loss in animal production due to edible organs condemnation and cost of control of CE by chemotherapy for the study period was estimated to be 38682492.3, 6713390.5, 7213173.9 and 175180.9 USD per annum for cattle, sheep, goats and camel respectively, with general 52784237.2 USD per annum. Whilst, in human the cost of computed tomography (CT) was estimated to be 85.5 USD and for Ultrasonography (US) was 12 USD per case. The cost of surgery vary from 2906 to 9059.8 USD per surgical case. Our estimates may reflect some of the aspect true socio-economic impact in this area. This first estimates illustrates that CE is a public and environmental actual difficulty in Sudan and we will focus in future on public health policy.
The EU’s Framing of the Mediterranean (1990-2002): Building a Euro-Mediterranean Partnership

This paper looks into what was a defining phase for Euro-Mediterranean relations. In the 1990s the Mediterranean was presented as a source of threat, but also as a need for engagement due to proximity and interdependence. The Mediterranean was also seen as an opportunity and a responsibility. Through its engagement with the Mediterranean the EU emphasized its identity as a transformative actor, linking trade liberalization and political transformation. This contributed to a gradual de-politicization and, above all, the technocratization of EuroMediterranean practice. Another constant feature of this period was securitization, particularly after the attacks of September 11. The seeds of existing debates on how the EU should deal with its Southern Neighbourhood were planted in this period. By looking at the institutional, political and intellectual debates of the 1990s, we can trace back some of the conceptualizations that still shape the European vision of the Mediterranean but also of itself.
Anchoring effect of VSL estimates on previous studies

In this paper, I propose a test for a publication bias suggested by Viscusi and Masterman [2017]. This bias arises from the selection of estimates based on their distance from the usual range in the literature. It implies that, in a given research area, there is a progressive concentration of estimates around this range as the literature grows. I test this hypothesis using OECD meta-data on VSL elicited via stated preferences. Using interquantile regression, I am able to model semi-parametrically the dispersion of estimates as a function of the number of prior studies, controlling for confounding factors. Consistently with the hypothesis, my results show a decrease in the dispersion for the lower part of the conditional distribution. I find no significant pattern for the upper part of the conditional distribution. This result has two implications. First, there is a systematic underestimation of the variance of mean estimates in meta-analyses of VSL. Second, there is an upward bias in the mean estimate of VSL metaanalyses due to the asymmetry of the selection pattern. Both implications might also affect meta-analyses in other research areas.