Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Study on the Effect of Different Shear Reinforcement Shapes on Shear Failure Behavior and Internal Crack Pattern of RC Beams

Various types of shear reinforcement are used for example general closed stirrup and reinforcement bar with mechanical anchor. However, most standards and specifications take only the cross-sectional area of the vertical components of the reinforcement components into account when determining their effect, such as on shear crack development and shear strength. Consequently, the full effect of different shear reinforcement shapes on the shear failure behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) beams is not clear. In this study, differences in shear failure behavior of RC beams using three types of shear reinforcement (closed stirrups, U-shaped stirrups, and rod-shaped reinforcements with mechanical anchor) were investigated by carrying out loading experiments. The three-dimensional displacement distribution on the side faces of each beam and the internal crack patterns were obtained. It was clarified that there is a clear difference in internal crack pattern and spreading deformation behavior according to shear reinforcement shape, and this influences the shear strength of the RC beam.
The Relationship Between Perceptions of Multicultural Competence and Democratic Values

The present study aims to determine the perceptions of multicultural competence and democratic values of science teachers in schools where international students study and to find out whether there is a relationship between them. The study surveyed 436 secondary school science teachers in the Western Black Sea region in the 2018–2019 academic year. Data were collected using the Perceptions of Multicultural Competence Scale and the Democratic Values Scale. We found positive and moderate relationship between teachers’ perceptions of multicultural competence and their democratic values. As teachers’ democratic values increased, their perceptions of multicultural competence increased, and as their democratic values decreased, their perceptions of multicultural competence decreased as well. Understanding teachers’ opinions about democratic values, justice, respect for differences, and equality reveals an important relationship between their multicultural competence and their democratic values.
Audit Partner Ethnicity and its Relation to Client Pairing, Audit Quality, and Work-Related Repercussions

We find that even though ethnic minority audit partners (those of Asian, Black, or Hispanic origin) represent a low proportion of U.S. audit partners, audit partner ethnicity is significantly related to three important audit phenomena. First, consistent with the homophily principle, ethnic minority audit partners are likely to be assigned to clients whose senior leadership includes ethnic minorities. Second, using multiple audit quality measures, we find that audit partners of ethnic minority are associated with higher audit quality. Third, despite the higher audit quality they provide, we find that compared to White partners, ethnic minority audit partners are less likely to work in the more prestigious audit offices. In addition, ethnic minority audit partners are more likely to be replaced following negative audit outcome, namely, a financial restatement than their White counterparts. Taken together, those two results point to potential ethnicity-based repercussions in the audit profession. Our findings have important implications for the PCAOB, audit firms, audit clients, other related parties, and society, especially given the effort of audit firms to improve ethnic diversity.
Epidemiology of atypical parkinsonian syndromes

Atypical parkinsonism or atypical parkinsonian syndromes (APS) refer to a group of neurodegenerative disorders which mimic typical Parkinson's disease but poorly respond to levodopa treatment and deteriorate faster. APS are very rare and among them, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), multiple system atrophy (MSA), and corticobasal degeneration (CBD) are the three relatively better characterized entities. The prevalence estimates of PSP, MSA, or CBD are mostly <10/105, and the incidence estimates are around 1/105 person-year; both estimates remain stable over the past few decades. The age at onset is relatively young for MSA at late 50s, followed by CBD at early 60s, and then PSP at late 60s. The gender difference is not significant in APS, although slight female predominance in CBD has been reported in literature. Little is known about genetic and environmental risk factors for PSP, MSA, and CBD; although the COQ2 mutation has been identified as a genetic risk for MSA, familial cases are extremely rare. Survival after symptom onset is generally within 10 years, but cases with longer disease duration do exist. Respiratory infection remains the major cause of death for APS, but cardiac arrest should be particularly considered in MSA. In addition to disease rarity, the phenotype–pathology discrepancy in APS makes the epidemiological studies even more challenging. Including biomarkers in future diagnostic criteria and establishing disease registry for collecting sufficient number of APS cases may increase the likelihood of finding modifiable risk factors for prevention and intervention.
Revisiting the ideas of trees as templates and the competition paradigm in pairwise analyses of ground-dwelling ant species occurrences in a tropical forest

A challenge for studies on the organization of ant assemblages in forest ecosystems is to disentangle the causal effects of species occurrences. The structural and functional attributes of trees can act as environmental filters for ground-dwelling ant species influencing resource availability and the microclimate. The biotic interactions, especially competition, can work together with plant characteristics influencing ant species occurrences. To test the importance of tree traits and species interactions on co-occurrence patterns of ants, we collected ground- dwelling ants, with pitfalls and litter sampling, beneath the canopies of four tree species during the rainy and dry seasons in a restored forest. We used five predictors (tree identity, crown size, trunk circumference, litter depth, and leaves density) to model the presence probabilities of ants . Hence, we applied habitat constrained null models in pairwise analyses to disentangle the causal effects of ants co-occurrences. The random pattern predominated in the assemblages, making up 96% of all possible species pairs combinations. Overall, 50% of the species pairs that showed nonrandomness in the ant occurrences were interpreted as resulting from environmental filters, 36% as negative associations and 14% as positive associations. Additionally, we found that the effects of season and the sampling technique on the ant assemblages were also important. We suggest that the ideas of the trees as templates and the paradigm of competition are both useful for understanding pairwise occurrence patterns in ant assemblages, and can be tested using tree traits as predictors in ant species distribution models for running constrained null models.
Evaluation of Biostimulation Efficacy on the Reinforcement of Calcareous Sand

Calcareous sand is widely distributed on the continental shelf and along the coast and has a low mechanical strength and a high compressibility. The use of biostimulation to activate and enrich ureolytic bacteria induces mineralization to strengthen calcareous sand and has the advantages of being environmentally friendly and less expensive than alternatives. In this study, reinforcement tests and evaluations of calcareous sand columns were carried out to study the effects of different biostimulation schemes on reinforcement. First, six different biostimulation schemes were used to stimulate and enrich ureolytic bacteria in calcareous sand, and the number of bacteria, pH, and urea concentration in the sand columns were biochemically monitored. Then, calcium ions were introduced into the sand columns to induce calcium carbonate precipitation. Finally, the reinforcement effect was evaluated according to the results of mechanical property tests, including mineralization product detection and microbial community change analysis, of the calcareous sand. The results show that (1) the concentrations of yeast extract (YE) and NH4Cl in the biostimulation scheme can significantly affect the stimulation results, in which the best conditions are a YE concentration of 0.2 g/L, an NH4Cl concentration of 100 mM, and an initial pH value of 9.0; and (2) the greater the content and distribution of newly formed calcium carbonate in calcareous sand is, the better the reinforcement effect is. In addition, biostimulation changed the microbial community composition in the calcareous sand, making ureolytic bacteria the new dominant population, which is more conducive to urea decomposition and calcium carbonate formation.
Family Ownership Structure, Independent Directors, and Independent Commissioners: Effects on Leverage

Research aims : The purpose of this research was to examine the direct relationship between family ownership structure and leverage as well as the indirect impact of independent commissioners and independent directors on the relationship between family ownership structure and leverage. Design/Methodology/Approach : This research applied a purposive sampling technique that resulted in 22 Indonesian manufacturing public firms operating from 2010 to 2018 as the research sample. The panel data were collected from Thomson Reuters, and family ownership data were manually collected from company annual reports. This research employed multiple regression analysis with four models. Research findings : The results indicated that family ownership structure was negatively significant to leverage. The independent director was not proven to strengthen the relationship between family ownership structure and leverage but rather was partially proven to do so yet the independent commissioner could not strengthen the relationship between family ownership structure and leverage. Theoretical contribution/ Originality : This research was contributed to develop the relationship between ownership structure in family companies by involving independent commissioners and independent directors. Practitioner/Policy implication : This research’s result can help companies make financing decisions and mitigate agency problems. Research limitation/Implication : The limitations of this research were the sample only focused on manufacturing public firms and Indonesia Stock Exchange has implemented regulations to eliminate the rule requiring each company to have an independent director, which became effective as of December 28, 2018.
Mapping Instructional Barriers during COVID-19 Outbreak: Islamic Education Context

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is currently the most potent threat to educational systems, a crisis that may become disastrous. For the current study, a qualitative design within a case study tradition was implemented to investigate instructional barriers during COVID-19 faced by Indonesian teachers in Islamic boarding schools (Pesantren). Within this study, we applied a purposeful convenient sampling in which the access was obtained through communication with the principals of two Pesantren. Seven invited participants with more than ten years of teaching experience agreed to participate. Semi-structured interviews were addressed for data collection; each interview lasted from 40 to 50 min. The interviews were conducted in the participants’ mother tongue to provide an in-depth understanding of their perceptions, ideas, and arguments regarding instructional barriers during the COVID-19 outbreak. The thematic analysis revealed three major findings regarding the barriers; technological barriers, financial barriers, and pedagogical barriers affecting instructional activities in the two Pesantren. Based on the three themes, the development of a qualitative conceptual map of teachers’ instructional barriers was finalized. Recommendations are also proposed by the participants and the study for the betterment of Indonesian Islamic education facing future similar outbreaks.
Ramadan Effect: A Structural Time-Series Test

This study investigates whether religious belief creates stock market return seasonality, focusing on the Muslim holy month “Ramadan". We use long-term data from 12 stock markets in countries with a high Muslim majority. Using a structural time-series model that takes into account a “trend component" and a stochastic “seasonal component”, we find no significant evidence of Ramadan return seasonality for the 12 stock markets over the long-term. This result suggests that there is no trend component for Ramadan effect and that Ramadan returns seasonality vanish in the long-term.
Cross-cultural differences in children’s conceptualizations of happiness at school

ABSTRACT Children’s happiness at school has been mainly investigated from a quantitative perspective, largely overlooking what children understand by happiness and whether their conceptualizations are shaped by culture. Hence, in the present study, using a quantification of qualitative data, we investigated whether English (n = 421, M = 10.63 years, 223 girls) and Spanish (n = 223, M = 11.13 years, 112 girls) children reported different conceptualizations of happiness at school. Results showed that English children defined happiness at school as experiencing autonomy, non-violence, and having a positive relationship with teachers. On the other hand, Spanish children mentioned more harmony and having leisure time, as compared to English children. Finally, compared to boys, girls mentioned more in their definitions emotional support, having a positive relationship with teachers, and experiencing competence. The obtained findings are discussed in light of previous well-being literature taking into account the role of culture and the school context in both countries.
DADA: Driver Attention Prediction in Driving Accident Scenarios

Driver attention prediction is becoming an essential research problem in human-like driving systems. This work makes an attempt to predict the driver attention in driving accident scenarios (DADA). However, challenges tread on the heels of that because of the dynamic traffic scene, intricate and imbalanced accident categories. In this work, we design a semantic context induced attentive fusion network (SCAFNet). We first segment the RGB video frames into the images with different semantic regions (i.e., semantic images), where each region denotes one semantic category of the scene (e.g., road, trees, etc.), and learn the spatio-temporal features of RGB frames and semantic images in two parallel paths simultaneously. Then, the learned features are fused by an attentive fusion network to find the semantic-induced scene variation in driver attention prediction. The contributions are three folds. 1) With the semantic images, we introduce their semantic context features and verify the manifest promotion effect for helping the driver attention prediction, where the semantic context features are modeled by a graph convolution network (GCN) on semantic images; 2) We fuse the semantic context features of semantic images and the features of RGB frames in an attentive strategy, and the fused details are transferred over frames by a convolutional LSTM module to obtain the attention map of each video frame with the consideration of historical scene variation in driving situations; 3) The superiority of the proposed method is evaluated on our previously collected dataset (named as DADA-2000) and two other challenging datasets with state-of-the-art methods.
Immersion of grains in a liquid along an inclined plane

Grain material delivered from combine harvesters to post-harvest processing points is a mixture of grain, weed and harmful impurities. Toxic ergot sclerotia are among the harmful impurities. Modern grain cleaning machines do not provide the separation of toxic ergot from grain material in one technological process. This is due to the closeness of the most toxic of ergot sclerotia and the of the grain. Ergot sclerotia are less dense than grain. Then the release of ergot from grain in one technological process is possible in an aqueous solution of salt. To develop a device for cleaning grain material by density in a liquid, practical experiments were carried out to supply grains of winter rye varieties Falenskaya 4 with a moisture content of 14% to an inclined plate placed in water. This plate mimicked the sloping bottom of an ergot seed separator. The statistical results of the experiments are presented by the distributions of the proportion of immersion of winter rye grains in water (ρzh = 1000 kg/m3) over the surface of the inclined plate from the angle α of its inclination to the horizon. It has been established that 100% immersion of the grains in water occurs at an angle of inclination of the plate of 60°. When developing a machine for the extraction of ergot from rye grain, the angle of inclination of the bath bottom must be taken at least 65° to the horizon for guaranteed immersion of grains in an aqueous solution of salt.
Chemical characterization of oil from four Avocado varieties cultivated in Morocco

The notable growth in the use of avocado oil in the nutritional and cosmetic field was the main objective to valorize the oil production of important varieties of avocados existing in Morocco by analyzing its chemical composition in fatty acids, sterols, tocopherols and its physico-chemical properties. Oleic acid is the main fatty acid in the oil; they constitute between 50 and 65% of the total fatty acids. The study of the unsaponifiable fraction revealed that avocado oil contains 3259.9–5378.8 mg/kg sterols and 113.13–332.17 mg/kg tocopherols. Chemo-metric tools were employed in manner optimization, such as principal component analysis, agglomerative hierarchical clustering, analysis of variance, and classification trees using Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector. Chemo-metric tools revealed a difference in the composition of fatty acid, sterols, and tocopherol of avocado oil samples. This difference resulted from a variety of avocado fruits. Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) method was efficient distinguishing avocado oil samples based on fruit variety using fatty acids, tocopherols, sterol compositions and total sterol. Principal component analysis (PCA) method allowed the distinction the set avocado oil dataset based on fruit varieties, supplied a correct discrimination rate of 95.44% for avocado fruit varieties using the fatty acid. Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) carried out using the same variables, also provided an acceptable classification rate of 50% for avocado fruit varieties using the total tocopherol content. Besides, a comparative study of the physico-chemical properties in terms of acidity index, saponification index, iodine index, chlorophylls, carotenoids, and methyl and ethyl esters was performed.
Optimized alkali-catalyzed transesterification of wild mustard (Brassica juncea L.) seed oil

ABSTRACT Biodiesel was developed from a non-edible oil source, i.e., wild mustard (Brassica juncea L) oil through optimized alkali-catalyzed transesterification with methanol using potassium hydroxide as a catalyst. Biodiesel yield of (95.54 % with 96.72 % w/w ester content) was obtained under optimal conditions of 0.75 % KOH w/w of oil, 6:1 methanol to oil molar ratio, 60°C temperature, and a duration of 45 min. Properties of wild mustard (Brassica juncea L) oil biodiesel were determined and found to be within the limits of ASTM D6751 specifications. As a result, wild mustard (Brassica juncea L), as an agricultural crop, might be a reasonable feedstock for biodiesel production.
Combustion technique synthesis of lead-free piezoelectric bismuth sodium titanate-bismuth potassium titanate–barium titanate ceramics

ABSTRACT Fabrication of lead-free piezoelectric ceramic bismuth sodium titanate–bismuth potassium titanate–barium titanate, focusing on the morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) between the rhombohedral and tetragonal phases was studied. a[0.935(Bi0.5Na0.5)TiO3-0.065BaTiO3]-(1-a)[0.8(Bi0.5Na0.5)TiO3-0.2(Bi0.5K0.5)TiO3]; BNBK ceramics with 0 ≤ a ≤ 1 were successfully fabricated using the combustion technique. All BNBK samples were sintered at 1150 °C for 2 h. The effect of a changing on the phase formation, microstructure, dielectric properties and piezoelectric properties of perovskite BNBK ceramics were investigated. XRD results of BNBK ceramics with 0 ≤ a ≤ 1 showed the rhombohedral-tetragonal morphotropic phase boundary (MPB). The SEM results showed the average grain size is between 1.18 and 2.56 µm. The effect of the a content had no influence on the tendency of grain sizes. The maximum density, shrinkage, dielectric constant at Curie temperature (ϵr), remanent polarization (Pr), coercive field (Ec) and piezoelectric constant (d33) were found from BNBK ceramic with a = 1, which is around 5.76 g/cm3, 18.43%, 6503, 15.4 μC/cm2, 20.1 kV/cm and 289 pC/N, respectively.
A Bio-inspired Routing Optimization in UAV-enabled Internet of Everything

: Internet of Everything (IoE) indicates a fantastic vision of the future, where everything is connected to the internet, providing intelligent services and facilitating decision making. IoE is the collection of static and moving objects able to coordinate and communicate with each other. The moving objects may consist of ground segments and flying segments. The speed of flying segment e.g., Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs) may high as compared to ground segment objects. The topology changes occur very frequently due to high speed nature of objects in UAV-enabled IoE (Ue-IoE). The routing maintenance overhead may increase when scaling the Ue-IoE (number of objects increases). A single change in topology can force all the objects of the Ue-IoE to update their routing tables. Similarly, the frequent updating in routing table entries will result more energy dissipation and the lifetime of the Ue-IoE may decrease. The objects consume more energy on routing computations. To prevent the frequent updation of routing tables associated with each object, the computation of routes from source to destination may be limited to optimum number of objects in the Ue-IoE. In this article, we propose a routing scheme in which the responsibility of route computation (from neighbor objects to destination) is assigned to some IoE-objects in the Ue-IoE. The route computation objects (RCO) are selected on the basis of certain parameters like remaining energy and mobility. The RCO send the routing information of destination objects to their neighbors once they want to communicate with other objects. The proposed protocol is simulated and the results show that it outperform state-of-the-art protocols in terms of average energy consumption, messages overhead, throughput, delay etc.