Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of alcohol control policies with adolescent alcohol consumption and with social inequality in adolescent alcohol consumption: A multilevel study in 33 countries and regions

Background Previous research found inconsistent associations between alcohol control policies and socio- economic inequality with adolescent drinking outcomes. This study expands the focus beyond individual associations to examine whether a combination of policies is related to socioeconomic inequality in adolescent drinking outcomes and whether this relationship varies across survey years. Methods Multilevel modelling of 4 waves of repeat cross-sectional survey data (2001/02, 2005/06, 2009/10, and 2013/14) from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study was carried out. The sample was composed of 671,084 adolescents (51% girls) aged 11, 13, and 15 (mean age=13.58; SD=1.65) from 33 European and North American countries/regions. The dependent variables were lifetime alcohol consumption, weekly alcohol consumption, and lifetime drunkenness. Independent variables were of three types: individual- level variables (age, sex, Family Affluence Scale, and the Perceived Family Wealth), time-level variable (survey year), and context-level variables (minimum legal drinking age, physical availability, advertising restrictions, a total alcohol policy index, and affordability of alcohol). Results The total alcohol policy index showed a negative relationship with both lifetime and weekly con- sumption. Higher affordability of alcohol was related to higher lifetime and weekly consumption and higher lifetime drunkenness. Family Affluence Scale was positively related to all three alcohol measures and Perceived Family Wealth was negatively related to lifetime drunkenness, with these associations increasing across survey years. The total alcohol policy index buffered the associations of Family Affluence Scale and Perceived Family Wealth with adolescent drinking outcomes. Conclusion A combination of alcohol control policies is more effective in reducing adolescent drinking outcomes than single policy measures. Reducing the affordability of alcohol stood out as the most successful single measure. Socioeconomic inequalities (i.e. higher alcohol consumption and drunkenness in adolescents with higher family affluence and higher drunkenness in adolescents perceiving their families to be poor) have persisted and even increased across survey years. A combined alcohol control policy can help in tackling them.
The Influence of Service Quality on Word-Of-Mouth Participants Through Institution Images, Customer Relationship Management and Satisfaction of Participants in Private Vocational Training Institutions in Bakorwil I East Java

The research objective is to determine the effect of service quality on the word-of-mouth of participants through the image of the institution, customer relationship management and participant satisfaction at private worker training institutions (LPKS) in Bakorwil I East Java. A total of 1,118 populations and with the Slovin formula, a total sample of 295 respondents were participants of the LPKS Hospitality and Cruise Ship training institutions in Bakorwil I East Java in 2018. Sampling used proportional random sampling. Analysis using SEM. The results showed that: 1). Service quality affects the image of the institution, CRM, and participant satisfaction. 2). The image of the institution influences the satisfaction of the trainees, and WOM. 3). CRM has no significant effect on the satisfaction of trainees, and significant on WOM trainees. 4). The satisfaction of the participants has an effect on the WOM of LPKS training participants. Given the large role of the institution's image of WOM, it is recommended that companies always maintain and enhance the image of the institution, because the image has an important role in building the impression obtained by someone about the company based on one's knowledge and experience of the company whether the company is good or not. Suggestions for other researchers should be made to increase the scope of research, taking into account broader areas, as well as grouping and segregation of respondents by district / city in East Java, so that a clearer picture of WOM participants in Private Work Training (LPKS) is obtained.
21st Century Coach Leadership Style towards Football Players’ Motivation in Malaysian Sports Schools

Malaysia has taken a rigorous approach to improving the quality and performance of its football teams. To match the strength of world-class football teams, the nation has taken a strategic approach by developing players’ potential through the grassroots level. These players are brought together in sports schools across the country and trained by experienced coaches to showcase their talents, potentials, skills, and performance. Therefore, this study identifies the relationship between coach leadership style and the motivation of football players in sports schools. Furthermore, the study explores the dimensions of coach leadership style that have a high impact on improving player motivation. In this regard, a total of 313 footballers participating in the under-14 football tournament organized by the ministry of education and the national football development programme (NFDP) from sports schools across Malaysia surveyed as respondents. The findings show that there is a moderate positive relationship between coach leadership style and football players’ motivation. Dimensions such as democratic and social consideration have a significant impact on increasing football players’ motivation in sports schools. In conclusion, the football coach is the most crucial person in ensuring the motivation of football players at a high level. They have to use all of their existing skills to build a strong, motivated team and never tire of it when facing tough moments in the game.
ANTIFUNGAL PROPERTIES OF CHITOSANS

Chitosan, a natural polymer derived from chitin by deacetylation, has proved antifungal activity against numerous type of fungi. The most accepted mechanisms of action of chitosan and chitosan based materials against fungal cell are briefly presented. The influence on antifungal activity of molecular weight of the polymer, the degree of deacetylation, pH, the influence of various type of derivatization and forms of presentation were also considered. Due to the lack of consistency of the published paper in this field, but especially because the antifungal activity of a product depend greatly on the tested specie, a prediction of the efficacy of chitosan based material cannot be made.
E-Assessment in Higher Education: A Review

The improvement of technology and e-learning systems, has resulted in a high demand for ways and means of assessing students in such a system. Assessment is indeed a critical part of the teaching and learning process in any higher education institution. The aim of this study is to provide a discussion on e-assessment which focuses on concepts such as definitions of e-assessment; e-assessment delivery platforms, tasks that can be accessed through e-assessment; benefits and challenges of e-assessment and principles of e-assessment. It is concluded that e-assessment can be effective if the assessment is credible and lecturers make a concerted effort to create assessment that is authentic, consistent, transparent and practicable. Higher-order assessment tasks can also be assessed through e-assessment.
Realized Volatility When Sampling Times are Possibly Endogenous 3 1

When estimating integrated volatilities based on high-frequency data, simplifying assumptions are usually imposed on the relationship between the observation times and the price process. In this paper, we establish a central limit theorem for the Realized Volatility in a general endogenous time setting. We ∗We are grateful to Andrew Patton and Neil Shephard, and the participants of the Stevanovich Center CREATES 2009 conference and the Fourth Annual SoFiE Conference for their comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong under grants GRF 602710 and GRF 606811 (Li and Zheng), and the National Science Foundation under grants DMS 06-04758, SES 06-31605, and SES 11-24526 (Mykland and Zhang) is also gratefully acknowledged. Address correspondence to: Xinghua Zheng, Department of ISOM, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong; (852) 2358 7750 or email: xhzheng@ust.hk. 1 also establish a central limit theorem for the tricity under the hypothesis that there is no endogeneity, based on which we propose a test and document that this endogeneity is present in financial data.
Investigation of early soot formation process in a diesel spray flame via excitation—emission matrix using a multi-wavelength laser source

Abstract In order to investigate the early soot formation processes in diesel combustion, spectral analysis of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) formed in the early soot formation region in a diesel spray flame was conducted via the excitation—emission matrix (EEM) technique using a multi-wavelength laser source. The experiments were conducted using an optically accessible constant volume combustion vessel under diesel-like conditions (ambient temperature, Ta = 750–1130 K and ambient pressure, Pa = 2.0–3.0 MPa) at different ambient oxygen concentrations (10–21 per cent). The PAHs formed in a diesel spray flame in the combustion vessel were excited by a coherent multi-wavelength ‘rainbow’ laser light (mainly 266, 299, 342, and 398 nm, total 20 mJ) generated by converting the fourth harmonic (266 nm, 60 mJ) of a pulsed neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd:YAG) laser using a Raman cell frequency converter filled with hydrogen (500 kPa). The spectra of laser-induced fluorescence from the PAHs excited by the different laser wavelengths in the flame were simultaneously captured with a spectrometer and an intensified charge-coupled device (ICCD) camera as EEM images. The EEM measured in diesel spray flames at different ambient temperatures and oxygen concentrations revealed that the timing and the region for PAH growth and soot particle formation are delayed and extended downstream at lower ambient temperatures and oxygen concentrations. At an ambient temperature of 940 K and an ambient oxygen concentration of 21 per cent, a variety of PAHs are detected around the ignition timing in the central region of the diesel spray flame and the PAHs grow into larger PAHs and soot particles as the combustion process progresses. At a lower ambient temperature of 750 K or lower ambient oxygen concentrations down to 10 per cent, the fluorescence from PAHs is detected in the central region of the diesel spray flame before the ignition timing and the intensity and the spectral characteristics of the PAH fluorescence do not change for a longer period until they are finally converted to soot particles in the downstream regions in the spray flame.
Velocity ratio effect on flow structures of non-parallel planar starting jets in cross-flow

Abstract The interaction between starting jets and a steady cross-flow with a zero-pressure-gradient, turbulent boundary layer is studied experimentally. A device typically used in flow control applications is employed as jets of compressed air are injected into the cross-flow through a rectangular high-aspect-ratio outlet. Investigating different velocity ratios between starting jets and cross-flow within the interval $r=u_{jet}/U_\infty =2.4, \ldots ,11$, we identify two regimes of different flow structure appearance, transferring the classification map applicable to parallel circular starting jets in cross-flow established by Sau & Mahesh (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 604, 2008, pp. 389–409). At $r<4$, the vorticity associated with the upstream part of the starting jet is cancelled by the cross-flow boundary layer. Hairpin vortices are observed. At $r>4$, the starting jets penetrate through the boundary layer, and vortex rings are generated. They are asymmetric in shape as the windward vortex ring core is thinner due to the interaction with the cross-flow. As the limiting case of zero cross-flow ($r\rightarrow \infty$) is approached, the asymmetry decreases and the formation time corresponding to maximum vortex ring circulation converges to the characteristic value of $t^*\approx 12$ recently determined for this type of non-parallel planar starting jets when emitted into quiescent surroundings (Steinfurth & Weiss, J. Fluid Mech., vol. 903, 2020, A16). The findings presented in the current article can promote the sophisticated selection of actuation parameters in active mixing and separation control.
REAL-TIME COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS FLOW RESPONSE VISUALISATION AND INTERACTION APPLICATION BASED ON AUGMENTED REALITY

The behaviour of fluid flow is a complex paradigm for cognitive interpretation and visualisation. Engineers need to visualise the behaviour mechanics of flow field response in order to enhance the cognitive ability in problem solving. Therefore, mixed reality related technology is the solution for enhanced virtual interactive learning environment. However, there are limited augmented reality platforms on fluid flow interactive learning. Therefore, an interactive education application is proposed for students and engineers to interact and understand the complex flow behaviour pattern subjected to elementary geometry body relative to external flow. This paper presented the technical development of a real-time flow response visualisation augmented reality application for computational fluid dynamics application. It was developed with the assistance of several applications such as Unity, Vuforia, and Android. Particle system modules available in the Unity engine were used to create a two-dimensional flow stream domain. The flow visualisation and interaction were limited to two-dimensional and the numerical fluid continuum response was not analysed.The physical flow response pattern of three simple geometry bodies was validated against ANSYS simulated results basedon visual empirical observation. The particle size and number of particles emitted were adjusted in order to emulate the physical representation of fluid flow. Colour contour was set to change according to fluid velocity. Visual validation indicated trivial dissimilarities between FLUENT generated results and flow response exhibited by the proposed augmented reality application.
Evaluation of the Perceptions of Employees on the Effectiveness of Performance Improvement Plans by Commercial Banks in Busia, Kenya

This study intended to evaluate the perception of employees on the administration of the PIP in commercial banks located in Busia Town in Busia County. The following set of research questions guided the study: What is the employees’ perception on the effectiveness of the implementation of the PIP; What are the employees’ perceptions of the various aspects of the Performance improvement plans; To what extent do selected factors affect the employees’ performance that can lead to PIP administration; To what extent has the implementation of PIP helped employees in improving selected performance indicators; To what extent has the PIP addressed selected performance indicators; What are the alternative methods or measures to Performance improvement plans that can be adopted by the commercial banks and What are the differences in the perceptions of the employees on the effectiveness of the PIP when compared by Gender, Levels of education, type of training and prior knowledge of Performance improvement plans in Commercial banks in Busia County? This study adopted the evaluation research design and targeted all the permanent employees deployed to the various bank branches within Busia Town. The study adopted the use of questionnaires in gathering the required data and used both the descriptive and inferential research methods in analyzing the data. The study has established that the respondents are positive about various elements of the PIP, the PIP have managed to help the employees improve in their areas of operations and the organizations should consider alternative performance management methods. Keyword: Performance Improvement plan; performance
Leveraging Unlabeled Data for Watermark Removal of Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks have achieved tremendous success in various ﬁelds; however, training these models from scratch could be computationally expensive and requires a lot of training data. Therefore, recent work has explored different watermarking techniques to protect the pre-trained deep neural networks from potential copyright infringements. Although several existing techniques could effectively embed such watermarks into the DNNs, they could be vulnerable to ad-versaries who aim at removing the watermarks. In this work, we demonstrate that a carefully-designed ﬁne-tuning method enables the adversary with limited training data to effectively remove the watermarks, without compromising the model functionality. In particular, leveraging auxiliary unlabeled data signiﬁcantly decreases the amount of labeled training data needed for effective watermark removal, even if the unlabeled data samples are not drawn from the same distribution as the benign data for model evaluation.
Influence of Herding Behavior on Investment Decision of SMEs in Bomet County, Kenya

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play an essential role in economic development as part of entrepreneurship. They provide goods and services, enhance competition, foster innovation and generate employment. The objective of the study was to determine the influence of herding behavior on investment decision in SMEs in Bomet County. The study targeted 4196 SMEs registered in Bomet County of which 108 were selected using stratified random sampling. Reliability of the research instrument was calculated using Cronbach‟s coefficient alpha. Primary data was used to obtain the required information by the use of questionnaires. Data obtained was analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential statistics with aid of Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) software version 21 and presentation through tables and summary made in percentages and proportions. The correlation coefficient analysis revealed herding behavior had a positive correlation relationship on the dependent variable. The findings from the multiple linear regression analysis showed that herding behavior had a negative beta of 0.146 this showed it has a negative impact on investment decision hence not significant. The study hence concluded that herding behavior is not an important factor in influencing investment decisions of SMEs in Bomet County. The study recommended that investors not to imitate others but to trust themselves in making their own personal decisions and also the government to implement more policies which boosts the growth of SMEs and further research to be done other factors influencing investment decisions.
Real-time Traffic State Assessment using Multi-source Data

6 Introduction and Literature Review . 6 Mean Speed Calculation Methods . 9 Mean Speed for Probe Vehicles . 11 Evaluation of Accuracy . 16 Conclusions . 23 CHAPTER II. EVALUATION OF CROWDSOURCED EVENT REPORTS FOR REALTIME IMPLEMENTATION – SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL ACCURACY ANALYSIS 25 Abstract . 26 Introduction . 26 Literature Review . 27 Methodology . 29 Results . 32 Real-Time Implementation . 39 Conclusion . 41. 26 Introduction . 26 Literature Review . 27 Methodology . 29 Results . 32 Real-Time Implementation . 39 Conclusion . 41 CHAPTER III. A CALIBRATION-FREE FREEWAY INCIDENT DETECTION ALGORITHM BASED ON REAL-TIME TRAFFIC STATUS SELF-ASSESSMENT . 43 Abstract . 44 Introduction . 44 Literature Review . 45 Methodology . 47 Case Study . 49 Conclusion and Future Work . 57. 44 Introduction . 44 Literature Review . 45 Methodology . 47 Case Study . 49 Conclusion and Future Work . 57 CHAPTER IV. DYNAMIC TRAFFIC QUEUE-END DETECTION USING WAZE JAM REPORTS . 58 Abstract . 59 Introduction and Literature Review . 60 Methodology . 62 Application: Case Study of Knoxville . 68 Results . 69 Conclusion and Future Work . 76. 59 Introduction and Literature Review . 60 Methodology . 62 Application: Case Study of Knoxville . 68 Results . 69 Conclusion and Future Work . 76 CONCLUSION . 78 REFERENCES . 81 APPENDIX . 88 VITA. 90
Frailty Models for the Control Time of Wildland Fires in the Former Intensive Fire Management Zone of Ontario, Canada

Using the control time of a forest or wildland fire, defined as the time from the start of suppression action to the time that it is declared under control, we extend the analysis from Morin et al. (2015) to investigate spatial trends in forest fire survival probability across Ontario’s Intensive Fire Management Zone for the period 1989 to 2004. The fire management compartments (FMCs) described in Woolford et al. (2009) form the spatial units of analysis. Spatial differences are explored in our study region by using proportional hazards shared frailty models which incorporate a random effect to modify the hazard for fires within each FMC. Estimates of this excess risk are used to visualize spatial patterns. We show that the frailty models achieve better fit, as compared to the models without frailty terms, and that the model assumptions are suitable for these data. Visualizing the estimated FMC-specific frailties suggest the following: lightning-caused fires in a region of northwestern Ontario have experienced shorter control times than comparable lightning fires that occur elsewhere; and, people-caused fires in that same region in northwestern Ontario as well as a region of southern Ontario may also have experienced shorter control times than comparable people-caused fires that have occurred elsewhere.
SAMNet: Stereoscopically Attentive Multi-Scale Network for Lightweight Salient Object Detection

Recent progress on salient object detection (SOD) mostly benefits from the explosive development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, much of the improvement comes with the larger network size and heavier computation overhead, which, in our view, is not mobile-friendly and thus difficult to deploy in practice. To promote more practical SOD systems, we introduce a novel Stereoscopically Attentive Multi-scale (SAM) module, which adopts a stereoscopic attention mechanism to adaptively fuse the features of various scales. Embarking on this module, we propose an extremely lightweight network, namely SAMNet, for SOD. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed SAMNet yields comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while running at a GPU speed of 343fps and a CPU speed of 5fps for $336 \times 336$ inputs with only 1.33M parameters. Therefore, SAMNet paves a new path towards SOD. The source code is available on the project page https://mmcheng.net/SAMNet/.
Testing and evaluating real driving emissions with PEMS

Testing of real driving emissions (RDE) with portable emission measuring system (PEMS) in an appropriate road circuit became an obligatory element of new type approval of passenger cars since September 2017. In several projects the Laboratory for Exhaust Emissions Control (AFHB) of the Berne University of Applied Sciences (BFH) performed comparisons on passenger cars with different PEMS’s on chassis dynamometer and on road, considering the quality and the correlations of results. Particle number measuring systems (PN PEMS) were also included in the tests. The present paper informs about influences of E85 on RDE on two flex-fuel-vehicles, discusses some aspects of different ways of evaluation with different programs, shows comparison of different types of PN PEMS and represents the effects of simulation of slope on the chassis dynamometer.