Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beyond emotional support: predictors of satisfaction and perceived care quality following the death of a baby during pregnancy

Abstract Objectives To investigate which objective (actions/interventions) and subjective (perceptions of care quality) outcomes of care following stillbirth or termination of pregnancy predict perceived care quality. Methods A cross-sectional descriptive study using an anonymous online survey. The population was women who had experienced a stillbirth or termination of pregnancy from ≥16 weeks of gestation, in the Spanish health system. Multiple sequential regression analysis was used to identify predictors of perceived care quality (satisfaction, willingness to recommend, competence and ability to provide loss-focused care). Results Results from 610 women were analysed. A significant regression equation (p<0.001) was found in each of the objective only and objective-subjective models. In the case of overall care (satisfaction-recommend composite), 72.0% of variance (adj. R2) was explained. In general, subjective evaluations of care are more potent predictors of perceived care quality than objective care interventions (e.g. autopsy performed). Feeling free to ‘express emotions’, ‘teamwork between doctors and nurses/midwives’, and ‘being well-informed of all steps and procedures’ were the three strongest predictors, followed by perception of ‘medical negligence’. Information provision and loss-focused interventions had the weakest influence, except in the specific ‘loss-focused’ model. Conclusions The results indicate that the ‘atmosphere’ of care is a transversal dimension related to the context of loss and trauma and has the single greatest influence on perceptions of care quality. It is necessary to use a specific ‘loss-focused’ care variable to adequately capture perceptions of the quality of bereavement care and a custom scale to measure the influence of care interventions on perceived quality.
Corporate Tax Aggressiveness and Corporate Investment Expenditure in Nigeria and Ghana

Abstract This paper analyzes the effect of cash flow from corporate tax aggressiveness on corporate investment expenditure in Nigeria and Ghana from 2010 to 2017. The sampled outcome is measured by estimating pooled ordinary least squares, as well as random and fixed effects models. The study uses dynamic models to draw significance because it corrects for endogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, serial correlation, and heteroscedasticity by including instruments that are uncorrelated with the regressors in the underlying routine during estimation. The corporate tax aggressiveness indicators are tax saving, effective tax rate, book-tax difference, and temporary tax difference - with firm size as the control variable. Findings, among others, reveal that tax aggressiveness has a statistically significant influence on corporate investment expenditure in both countries. This provides evidence that tax aggressiveness is positive and that its coefficients are statistically significant to the tax aggressiveness variables; in particular, tax saving and effective tax rate maintained consistent positive and statistically significant relationships to corporate investment expenditure across all model specifications. In other words, an increase in tax saving and effective tax rate boost the total and new investment expenditure in both countries. Other findings show that a large difference between income reported on financial statements and income reported on tax return reduces corporate total and new investment expenditure in both countries. Furthermore, a proportionate increase in investment maintenance expenditure occurs when a book-tax gap changes in Nigeria. This is because managers reduce taxable income in order to increase investment maintenance expenditure. For the control variables, firm size boosts corporate investment expenditure in both countries.
Effect of Real Estate News Sentiments on the Stock Returns of Swedbank and SEB Bank

Abstract This paper explores the effect of real estate news sentiment on the stock returns of Swedbank and SEB Bank, which are leading banks in Sweden and the Baltic region. For this purpose, we have selected sentiments from news about real estate in the markets of these banks in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania between 4 January 2016 and 19 February 2019. Estimation results showed that sentiments about the housing market affect stock returns for both banks, and the effect is different for positive and negative news. We also found that there is a difference in the stock returns of these banks in terms of when and to what extent they react to news coming from the Baltic States and Sweden. Moreover, we found that the number of negative news affects the stock returns of the banks more than the strength of the news. We also apply several GARCH specifications to explore if negative and positive news affect the volatility processes to some extent. We found out that the volatilities are explained better by the GJR-GARCH and NAGARCH models. Overall, the volatility of SEB stock returns depends more on the news sentiments compared to the volatility of Swedbank stock returns.
Virtual body anthropomorphism increases drift in self‐location: Further support for the humanoid shape rule

Previous studies on bodily self‐consciousness (BCS) have shown that self‐location and body ownership are prone to changes based on the perceptual appearances of the fake virtual body. In the current study with 36 participants, we assessed the influence of virtual avatar anthropomorphism and the synchronicity of the visuo‐tactile stimulation on self‐location using a virtual reality full‐body illusion experiment. During the experiment, half of the participants observed a gender‐matched full‐body humanoid avatar from a first‐person perspective (1PP) and the other half observed a less anthropomorphic full‐body cubical avatar from 1PP while they were receiving synchronous and asynchronous visuo‐tactile stimulation. Results showed a significant main effect of the synchronicity of the visuo‐tactile stimulation and avatar body type on self‐location but no significant interaction was found between them. Moreover, the results of the self‐report questionnaire provide additional evidence showing that participants who received synchronous visuo‐tactile stimulation, experienced not only greater changes in the feeling of self‐location, but also, increased ownership, and referral of touch. Our results provided further support for the previous findings that showed evidence for the effect of virtual avatar appearance on BCS.
Reverse transition of a turbulent spiral Poiseuille flow at $Ta=1500$

Abstract Direct numerical simulations of a turbulent spiral Poiseuille flow (SPF) in a narrow-gap geometry at low Taylor number have been performed to analyse the reverse transition dynamics. The presently investigated SPF results from a Taylor–Couette arrangement with a rotating inner cylinder and a stationary outer one, subject to a time-constant axial pressure gradient. Keeping fixed the Taylor number and reducing the axial Reynolds number, several flow regimes have been obtained until a complete laminarization occurred. In agreement with previous experimental evidence, it has been found that the laminar state is achieved at a Reynolds number significantly smaller than the corresponding non-rotating value. Moreover, the route to turbulence suppression has been shown to differ in the two cases, as confirmed by the increased Reynolds number friction coefficient envelope. The differences occurring in the reverse transition process between SPF and plain Poiseuille flow are attributed to a modification of the isotropy of the Reynolds stress tensor, caused by an alteration of the velocity pressure-strain redistribution mechanisms.
A natural variation-based screen in mouse cells reveals USF2 as a regulator of the DNA damage response and cellular senescence

Cellular senescence is a program of cell cycle arrest, apoptosis resistance, and cytokine release induced by stress exposure in metazoan cells. Landmark studies in laboratory mice have characterized a number of master senescence regulators, including p16INK4a, p21, NF-kB, p53, and C/EBPβ. To discover other molecular players in senescence, we developed a screening approach to harness the evolutionary divergence between mouse species. We found that primary cells from the Mediterranean mouse Mus spretus, when treated with DNA damage to induce senescence, produced less cytokine and had less-active lysosomes than cells from laboratory M. musculus. We used allele-specific expression profiling to catalog senescence-dependent cis-regulatory variation between the species at thousands of genes. We then tested for correlation between these expression changes and interspecies sequence variants in the binding sites of transcription factors. Among the emergent candidate senescence regulators, we chose a little-studied cell cycle factor, USF2, for molecular validation. In acute irradiation experiments, cells lacking USF2 had compromised DNA damage repair and response. Longer-term senescent cultures without USF2 mounted an exaggerated senescence regulatory program—shutting down cell cycle and DNA repair pathways, and turning up cytokine expression, more avidly than wild-type. We interpret these findings under a model of pro-repair, anti-senescence regulatory function by USF2. Our study affords new insights into the mechanisms by which cells commit to senescence, and serves as a validated proof of concept for natural variation-based regulator screens.
Fault-tolerant sliding mode attitude tracking control for flexible spacecraft with disturbance and modeling uncertainty

This article investigates the attitude tracking control problem for a class of flexible spacecraft with a redundant four reaction wheels’ setting. In this study, inertia uncertainties, external disturbance, wheel torque saturation, and configuration misalignment are taken into account simultaneously. Two types of sliding mode controllers are presented to solve this design problem. First, supposing the norm upper bound of external disturbances, bounds of inertia, and input uncertainties are available, a terminal sliding mode attitude tracking control strategy is developed, where the controller and steering laws are synthesized together. Second, supposing these norm upper bounds are unavailable, an adaptive control law is designed to cope with attitude tracking problem. Under both control schemes, the system trajectory can be ensured to arrive on the specified sliding surface in finite time. Finally, an illustrative example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed attitude tracking control methodologies.
Improving teaching and learning process of pastry and bakery using learner centered approaches

i DEDICATION . iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT . iv LIST OF FIGURES. vii LIST OF TABLES. viii CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1 Background of the Study . 1 1.2 Uganda’s Current Education System . 5 1.3 Personal and Professional Back ground . 7 1.4 Problem Statement . 10 1.5 Explanation of the Problem Statement . 10 1.6 Objectives of the Study . 11 1.7 Organization of the Report . 11 CHAPTER TWO: DIDACTICAL RELATIONS MODEL . 14 2.1 Overview. 14 2.2 Pupils’ Learning Resources . 15 2.3 Pedagogical Frame Work/ Conditions and Scope . 17 2.4 Goals and Objectives . 19 2.5 Educational Content/ Subject Matter . 20 2.6 Learning Process . 21 2.7 Evaluation . 23 2.8 Summary of Chapter two (2) . 24 CHAPTER THREE: THEORY . 25 3.1 Overview. 25 3.2 Vocational Education . 25 3.3 The Teaching and Learning process . 27 3.4 Briquette making . 34 3.5 Summary of Chapter Three (3) . 37 CHAPTER FOUR: METHODOLOGY . 39 4.1 Overview. 39 4.2 Research Design . 39 4.3 Action Research Approach . 39 4.4 Sample population . 41 4.5 Data collection instruments . 42 4.5. 1 Interviews: . 42 4.5. 2 Observation . 44
Programmable neural logic

Circuits of threshold elements (Boolean input, Boolean output neurons) have been shown to be surprisingly powerful. Useful functions such as XOR, ADD and MULTIPLY can be implemented by such circuits more efficiently than by traditional AND/OR circuits. In view of that, we have designed and built a programmable threshold element. The weights are stored on polysilicon floating gates, providing long-term retention without refresh. The weight value is increased using tunneling and decreased via hot electron injection. A weight is stored on a single transistor allowing the development of dense arrays of threshold elements. A 16-input programmable neuron was fabricated in the standard 2 /spl mu/m double-poly analog process available from MOSIS. A long term goal of this research is to incorporate programmable threshold elements, as building blocks in Field Programmable Gate Arrays.
Tradeoffs Between a 2+1 Lane Road Design and a Narrow 2+2 Lane Road Design

This thesis looks at the tradeoffs between a 2+1 lane road design and a narrow 2+2 lane road design, taking into account elements like design, traffic safety, capacity and level of service, costs and non-monetized impacts. The tradeoffs are discussed through a literature review, level of service calculations according to the Highway Capacity Manual and a case study examining a narrow 2+2 road configuration built within Norway. The results of this research indicate that when considering safety alone, the 2+1 lane road design has a slight advantage over the narrow 2+2 lane road design regarding traffic safety because of wider lanes and shoulders, assumed lower mean speed and possibly less rutting. The size of the presumed safety advantage is not possible to quantify from the content of this thesis. Focusing on capacity and level of service, the narrow 2+2 lane road design provides higher capacity than what the 2+1 lane road design can offer. Whether the higher capacity and level of service make the narrow 2+2 lane road design more economical beneficial (as part of a benefit cost analysis) than the 2+1 lane road design depend on the expected amount of traffic. As long as the average travel speed, which is dependent on volume, for the 2+1 lane road was not significantly lower than for the narrow 2+2 lane road design, the 2+1 lane road design resulted in the highest benefit-cost ratio for the case scenarios. When it comes to the non-monetized impacts, there are such small differences between the two designs that there is no basis to distinguish them. Other elements like location of the road and route alignment are more likely to have a bigger impact when less than two meters separates the cross section widths.
Futurelab: Personalisation and Digital Technologies

The 'Personalisation and Digital Technologies' report moves the personalisation debate forward by focusing specifically on the potential of digital technologies in four key areas: enabling learners to make informed educational choices; diversifying and acknowledging different forms of skills and knowledge; creating diverse learning environments; and developing learner-focused forms of assessment and feedback. The report also contains a Learner's Charter, which sets out a series of entitlements that young people should expect from their learning if it were personalised. (http://futurelab.org.uk/research/personalisation/report_01.htm)
Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? An Analysis of Pension Structure and Retirement Timing

: Over the last two decades, twenty-two states have moved away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pension systems and toward pension plan structures like the defined contribution (DC) plans now prevalent in the private sector. Others are considering such a reform as it is seen as a means of limiting future pension funding risk. It is important to understand the implications of such reforms for end-of-career exit patterns and workforce composition. Empirical evidence on the relationship between pension plan structure and retirement timing is currently limited, primarily because, most state pension reforms are so new that few employees enrolled in those alternative plans have reached retirement age. An exception, and the subject of our analysis, is the teacher retirement system in Washington State, which introduced a hybrid DB-DC plan in 1996 and allowed employees in its traditional DB plan to transfer into the new plan. Our analysis focuses on a years-of-service threshold, the crossing of which grants employees early retirement eligibility and, in many cases, a large upward shift in retirement wealth. The financial implications of crossing this threshold are far greater under the state’s traditional DB plan than under the hybrid plan. We find that employees are responsive to crossing the years-of-service threshold, but we fail to find significant evidence that the propensity to exit the workforce varies according to plan enrollment. Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), which is funded by a consortium of foundations. For more information about CALDER funders, see www.caldercenter. org/about-calder. We thank the Washington State Department of Retirement Services for providing data necessary for pursing this work. All opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders or the institutions to which the authors are affiliated.
Meeting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions goals with the international air pollution provision of the clean air act

We explore economic, distributional and health consequences of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions objectives that could be achieved using Section 115 of the Clean Air Act (international air pollution), which has only recently received detailed legal analysis as a potential U.S. climate policy tool. Under it a national emissions target could be allocated among the states. This illustrative analysis considers 45% and 50% reductions of energy and industry-related CO2 emissions by 2030, below 2005 levels, via a model rule. Different approaches (based on legal precedent) for the interstate allocation are considered, along with alternative rates of technology improvement. The detail needed to analyze this approach is provided by MIT’s U.S. Regional Energy Policy model (30 individual states and multi-state regions), with its electricity sector replaced by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Renewable Energy Development System (ReEDS). Air quality benefits are estimated using modeling tools developed by academic researchers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Three-quarters of emissions reductions in 2030 come in the electric sector, while reductions elsewhere illustrate the efficiency advantage of a multi-sector policy. With all states participating in allowance trading, the resulting national emissions price is lower than in older assessments. The difference is due to lower growth expectations, recent state policies, falling costs of low carbon technologies, and an improved representation of electric system flexibility by the ReEDS model. Even ignoring climate and air quality benefits, economic welfare grows at near the baseline rate for all regions regardless of the interstate allocation approach. When states distribute allowance revenue to residents on an equal per-capita basis, the policy is welfare improving to the lowest income quintile in all regions. Aggregation of control costs, the mortality effects of reduced particulates, and the value of avoided climate damages yields positive national net benefits in all cases.
On the influence of an elastic film to the attenuation of wave motion between viscous and moving ideal fluid

The regularities of wave motion along the interface of viscous and ideal liquids along which the surfactant is distributed are investigated in theory. The relationship between the decay decrements of capillary–gravitaty waves and the nature of maxima and minima surfactant concentration redistribution is established. The phenomenon has been analized in depend on the film elasticity in the presence of tangential velocity discontinuity at the boundary of the media. Influence of the tangential velocity gap on the relationship is established.
On the Effect of Stellar Activity on Low-resolution Transit Spectroscopy and the use of High Resolution as Mitigation

We present models designed to quantify the effects of stellar activity on exoplanet transit spectroscopy and atmospheric characterization at low (R = 100) and high (R = 100,000) spectral resolution. We study three model classes mirroring planetary system archetypes: a hot Jupiter around an early-K star (HD 189733 b); a mini-Neptune around an early-M dwarf (K2-18 b); and terrestrial planets around a late-M dwarf (TRAPPIST-1). We map photospheres with temperatures and radial velocities (RV) and integrate specific intensity stellar models. We obtain transit spectra affected by stellar contamination, the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect (RME), and center-to-limb variations (CLV). We find that, at low resolution, for later-type stars, planetary water features become difficult to distinguish from contamination. Many distributions of unocculted active regions can induce planetary-like features of similar amplitudes in the case of a late-M dwarf. Atmospheric characterization of planets around late-type stars will likely continue to suffer from degeneracy with stellar activity unless active regions' parameters can be constrained using additional information. For the early-K star, stellar contamination mostly manifests itself through a slope at optical wavelengths similar to Rayleigh scattering. In all cases, contamination induces offsets in measured planet radii. At high resolution, we show that we can determine the origin of H2O and CO detection signals and lift the degeneracy observed at low resolution, provided sufficient planet RV variation during transit and adequate correction for the RME and CLV when required. High-resolution spectroscopy may therefore help resolve issues arising from stellar contamination for favorable systems.
Prediction in challenging situations: Most bilinguals can predict upcoming semantically-related words in their L1 source language when interpreting

Abstract Prediction is an important part of language processing. An open question is to what extent people predict language in challenging circumstances. Here we tested the limits of prediction by asking bilingual Dutch native speakers to interpret Dutch sentences into their English counterparts. In two visual world experiments, we recorded participants’ eye movements to co-present visual objects while they engaged in interpreting tasks (consecutive and simultaneous interpreting). Most participants showed anticipatory eye movements to semantically-related upcoming target words in their L1 source language during both consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. A quarter of participants during simultaneous interpretation however did not move their eyes, an extremely unusual participant behaviour in visual world studies. Overall, the findings suggest that most people predict in the source language under challenging interpreting situations. Further work is required to understand the causes of the absence of (anticipatory) eye movements during simultaneous interpretation in a substantial subset of individuals.
Impact of substrate concentration on granular fermentation for caproic acid production

Recently, our laboratory demonstrated the feasibility of high rate caproic acid production, up to 13.7 g·L·d from a biorefinery sidestream, by chain elongating granular biofilms in an expanded granular sludge bed reactor. In this study, we investigated the effect of substrate concentration on this system as a crucial first step towards feedstock diversification. We observed improved aggregation and granulation with decreasing substrate concentrations, leading to higher retained biomass concentrations. Conversely, higher substrate concentrations led to larger granules. Additionally, we found that caproic acid product selectivity remained constant at 48 ± 3% with increasing substrate concentration, up until 50 gCOD·L, after which product toxicity exerted by high caproic acid concentrations shifted the selectivity towards butyric acid.