Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Purchasing power parity in belt and road initiative countries relative to China

This paper used the Panel KSS unit root test accompanied by a Fourier function and Sequential Panel Selection Method (SPSM) to check the non-stationary properties of purchasing power parity (PPP) in Belt and Road Initiative (B&R) countries relative to China. The authors classified B&R into 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) and Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) to discuss the differences in PPP between the two groups. Stationary and non-stationary series in SREB and MSR can be picked out through this approach, which provided evidence that PPP holds in most countries in both regions. However, the percentage of countries that support PPP in MSR is higher, which is mainly due to closer unimpeded trade, facilities connectivity, policy coordination and financial integration between MSR countries and China. Hence, the main policies implicate that the equilibrium exchange rate can be determined by PPP, and it is unfeasible to obtain abnormal gains from arbitrage in exchanged commodities in the majority of B&R countries.
A Psychophysical Study of Two-Person Manual Material Handling Tasks

Over the past ten years, there has been extensive work performed on the development of guidelines for manual material handling tasks both within individual companies and within governmental agencies. However, these guidelines address only individual, one-person lifting tasks. In both manufacturing and service industries, there are many team lifting tasks, such as furniture moving and at loading docks. This paper presents the results of a study that used psychophysical methods to investigate lifting tasks that require two workers. In addition to simple lifting tasks, the study also compared one and two-person carrying tasks. The results of the study indicate that subjects' judgments of their lifting capability are significantly greater for the two-person lifts than for the individual lifts. The same relationship was observed for the carrying tasks. These results and conclusions are important to consider when it is necessary to extrapolate from the conditions used in the development of manual material handling guidelines to other situations such as team lift carrying tasks.
Visions of Research in Music Education

This paper examines students’ perceptions of parental involvement in and support for their learning a musical instrument. It draws from a self-completed questionnaire given to 356 young instrumental learners attending Grades 4 to 13 in Hong Kong schools. The findings fall within three categories: the relationship between students’ school grade and their perceived parental support for learning an instrument; the extent to which the students perceived their parents’ involvement and support in terms of physical and financial assistance; and the extent of perceived parental support for students’ desire to enter the music profession. Despites a general positive student perception of parental attitudes toward musical activities, students saw their personal interest in music, their motivation to practice, their intent to pursue a career in music, and the influence of their instrumental tutors as crucial factors to their learning an instrument. 1 Ho: Parental Support and Student Learning Published by OpenCommons@UConn, 2011
Value Chain Analysis of Eucalyptus Wood Products in the Blue Nile Highlands of Northwestern Ethiopia

Eucalyptus wood products contribute significantly to the income of smallholder growers in many parts of Ethiopia. This has incentivized smallholders to convert arable lands to Eucalyptus plantation. Given the limited attention and availability of empirical evidence, this study examined the Eucalyptus wood products value chain in terms of the actors engaged, the type and importance of channels, margins analysis and the overall value chain governance in the main Eucalyptus growing areas of the Blue Nile highlands of Northwestern Ethiopia in 2019/2020. Sources of data were randomly selected 388 Eucalyptus grower households and 166 Eucalyptus wood traders, complemented by an interview with key informants, group discussions and direct observations. The results reveal that a total of 2,051,114.75 m3 of Eucalyptus wood was produced in the study area and Eucalyptus plantations are expanding over crop lands at a rate of 102.35 ha a year on average. Many actors involved handle a large volume of wood in eight main channels with a high disparity in the shares of the margins. We found that Eucalyptus is the main source of cash earning, contributing about 45.76% to the total annual income of smallholder growers. Little policy attention, a lack of sectoral integration, missing infrastructure and an absence of modern wood processing factories are among the key challenges impeding the performance of the wood sector value chain. There are however existing opportunities for the development of the wood sector value chain such as favorable growing conditions and the spectacular growing demand for wood products. The study provides valuable insights about the wood sector value chain and actions towards ensuring sustainable value chains and the commercialization of the sector.
Demand Forecasting : Evidence-based Methods

We looked at evidence from comparative empirical studies to identify methods that can be useful for predicting demand in various situations and to warn against methods that should not be used. In general, use structured methods and avoid intuition, unstructured meetings, focus groups, and data mining. In situations where there are sufficient data, use quantitative methods including extrapolation, quantitative analogies, rule-based forecasting, and causal methods. Otherwise, use methods that structure judgement including surveys of intentions and expectations, judgmental bootstrapping, structured analogies, and simulated interaction. Managers’ domain knowledge should be incorporated into statistical forecasts. Methods for combining forecasts, including Delphi and prediction markets, improve accuracy. We provide guidelines for the effective use of forecasts, including such procedures as scenarios. Few organizations use many of the methods described in this paper. Thus, there are opportunities to improve efficiency by adopting these forecasting practices.
Retraction Retracted: Scolopendra subspinipes mutilans L. Koch Ameliorates Rheumatic Heart Disease by Affecting Relative Percentages of CD4CD25FoxP3 Treg and CD4IL17 T Cells

Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine has retracted the article titled “Scolopendra subspinipes mutilans L. Koch Ameliorates Rheumatic Heart Disease by Affecting Relative Percentages of CD4CD25FoxP3 Treg and CD4IL17T Cells” [1] at the request of the authors, due to the errors in data collection and analysis. "e authors have identified that the ELISA kit used to measure the concentration of IL-6 expired in July 2016 causing this result to be unreliable. Additionally, the authors note that 100mg of SSLK powder was administered to patients, while the recommended dose as per the Chinese Pharmacopoeia 2000 Edition is 3–5 g [2]. "e authors apologised for this error, which they feel invalidates the conclusions and cannot be corrected. With the agreement of the editorial board and the authors, the article is retracted from the journal.
Low-frequency noise characterization of self-aligned AlGaAs-GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors with a noise corner frequency below 3 kHz

To find dominant 1/f noise sources, generalized noise analyses have been performed for self-aligned AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT's). For shorted base-emitter condition, the resistance fluctuation 1/f noise is dominant, while for open base-emitter condition, the base-emitter current 1/f noise is dominant. The collector-emitter 1/f current noise, though generally considered an important noise source, is negligible. The resistance 1/f noise stems mainly from the emitter resistance fluctuation. Our noise-reduction work is focused on the reduction of the base-emitter current 1/f noise. We have investigated the base-emitter-current noise properties as a function of emitter-base structure and surface passivation condition. It is found that the surface-recombination 1/f noise can be significantly reduced by the heterojunction launcher of the abrupt junction with 30% aluminum mole fraction emitter. The depleted AlGaAs ledge surface passivation further suppresses the surface-recombination currents. Consequently, we have achieved a very low 1/f noise corner frequency of 2.8 kHz at the collector current density of 10 kA/cm/sup 2/. The dominant noise source of the HBT is not a surface-recombination current, but a bulk current noise. This is the lowest 1/f noise corner frequency among the III-V compound semiconductor transistors, and is comparable to those of low-noise Si bipolar junction transistors (BJTs).
Response of Mung Bean Varieties (Vigna radiata L.) to Application Rates and Methods of Blended NPS Fertilizer at Humbo

Mung bean is among the important dry-land legumes in the country and in the study area. However, the productivity of the crop is constrained by biotic and abiotic factors, mainly poor soil fertility, lack of adaptable varieties, and peer agronomic practices. Field trial was initiated at Humbo District with the objective of investigating the rate of NPS-blended fertilizer and application methods on overall performance of mung bean (Vigna radiata L.) varieties. The treatments comprised factorial combination of four rates of NPS (0, 50, 100, and 150 kg ha−1), two types of application methods (broadcasting and drilling), and two mung bean varieties (Shewa Robit and N-26) laid out in RCBD with three replications. Analysis of variance revealed that NPS rates and varieties significantly affected phenology and yield components. Application methods affected yield and thousand-seed weight. Two-way interaction of NPS rates with varieties significantly influenced plant height and pod plant−1. Three-way interactions also significantly influenced aboveground dry biomass and grain yield. The greatest dry biomass (4273.7 kg ha−1) and grain yield (1539.2 kg ha−1) were produced by N-26 variety with fertilizer composed of NPS at 150 kg ha−1 using the drill application method. Partial budget analysis also revealed that the highest (ETB 46,934.4 ha−1) net benefit was obtained at 100 kg NPS ha−1 with variety N-26 from the drilled method. Hence, growing N-26 with 100 kg NPS ha−1 applied using the drilling method of fertilizer application was found as the most suitable treatment combination to improve the income of farmers and increase productivity of mung bean.
Characteristics of Vaginal Delivery with Ripening and Intravaginal Misoprostol Induction in Sanglah General Hospital

Ripening is a cervical softening process where this process plays an essential role in cervical dilation. Meanwhile, labor induction is a process to start labor before there are signs of delivery with the help of medical pharmacology or medical action with the ultimate goal of giving birth to the baby and the placenta. Ripening and induction are urgently needed in various obstetric cases such as term pregnancy, hypertension in pregnancy, and premature rupture of membranes. Various types of induction methods can be selected according to their efficiency and safety, namely oxytocin, dinoprostone (prostaglandin E2), and misoprostol (prostaglandin E1). However, the current use of misoprostol is preferred because it is cheap, stable at room temperature, accessible storage, and easy to use for cervical ripening and labor induction. This study aimed to find out the characteristics of vaginal delivery with intravaginal misoprostol induction at Sanglah General Hospital Denpasar. This was a retrospective descriptive study involving women who delivered vaginally with intravaginal misoprostol induction in the delivery room of Sanglah General Hospital Denpasar from June 1, 2017 to May 31, 2019including with the sampling total. Maternal age, gestational age, parity, rupture of membranes history, pelvic score, and birth weight data were collected from medical records. The data were analyzed by using the SPSS. This study included 37 cases of vaginal misoprostol induction in Sanglah General Hospital Denpasar (60.66%) out of a total of 61 cases of labor induction. The success rate of labor induction with misoprostol was 72.97%.
Monitoring, Disclosure, and Retaliation

I analyze the effects of retaliation concerns on optimal contracts in a hierarchy consisting of a principal, a monitor, and an agent. With probability m, the monitor observes a signal about the agent’s effort and decides whether to reveal it to the principal. With probability (1−m), the monitor is uninformed. The agent retaliates against the monitor whenever the disclosed signal reduces his compensation from the no disclosure benchmark. Retaliation inflicts losses on the monitor and the principal directly. I show that the optimal contract pools moderately (potentially all) bad performances with the uninformative signal realization. The empirical literature demonstrates that performance evaluations are lenient, and supervisors are reluctant to provide poor ratings. I show that this pattern can stem from retaliation concerns.
Car-Following Behavior Analysis from Microscopic Trajectory Data

The development of accurate and robust models in the field of car following has suffered greatly from the lack of appropriate microscopic data. Because of this lack, little is known about differences in car-following behavior between individual driver–vehicle combinations. This paper studies the car-following behaviors of individual drivers by making use of vehicle trajectory data extracted from high-resolution digital images collected at a high frequency from a helicopter. The analysis was performed by estimating the parameters of different specifications of the well-known Gazis–Herman–Rothery car-following rule for individual drivers. This analysis showed that a relation between the stimuli and the response could be established in 80% of the cases. The main contribution of this paper is that considerable differences between the car-following behaviors of individual drivers could be identified. These differences are expressed as different optimal parameter values for the reaction time and the sensitivity, as well as different car-following models that appear to be optimal on the basis of the data for individual drivers.
Overprotection and overcontrol in childhood: An evaluation on reliability and validity of 33-item Expanded Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-33), Chinese version

Overprotection and overcontrol from parents or other family members, which are not rare in the Chinese culture, have been suggested to be traumatic experiences for some children. However, research on overprotection/overcontrol is much rarer in China compared with other childhood trauma subtypes. One of the possible reasons for this is the lack of easy and feasible screening tools. In this study, we therefore translated and validated a Chinese version of the 33-item Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-33), which was expanded from the widely-used 28-item CTQ with an additional overprotection/overcontrol subscale. A total of 248 young healthy participants were recruited and completed the Chinese version of CTQ-33, and 50 of them were retested after an interval of two weeks. At baseline, all participants also completed the 9-item Patient Health Questionnaire and the 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale to assess their depression and anxiety, respectively. Our main findings include that: (1) the Chinese version of CTQ-33 showed a good internal consistency (Cronbach's coefficient = 0.733) and an excellent test-retest reliability over a two-week period (ICC = 0.861); (2) the previously reported significant associations between the overprotection/overcontrol and other subtypes of childhood trauma (abuse and neglect), as well as psychopathological conditions such as depression can all be replicated using the Chinese version of CTQ-33. These results suggest that the Chinese version of CTQ-33 would be a promising tool for assessing various subtypes of childhood adversities, especially the overprotection/overcontrol experiences in Chinese populations.
SET Women and Careers: a case study of senior female scientists in the UK

Very few studies of senior female scientists have been conducted in the UK. This chapter explores the careers of thirteen senior female scientists in a UK public sector organisation where men dominate. These women operate within a context which reinforces, ‘think management, think male’ (Schein 2007). Despite this, these women followed traditional career paths of science qualifications and employment. Whilst many parallels can be drawn with other women in SET, these women buck the trend. They have achieved senior positions and unusually long lengths of service, post-childbirth, despite little help from mentors and support networks. Although their experiences of gender relations were variable and they have limited strategic leadership career options, they have sustained a positive work orientation and a strong desire to reputation-build. Notwithstanding their failure so far to break through the glass ceiling, they hold the potential to be role models for others in SET.
InstancePose: Fast 6DoF Pose Estimation for Multiple Objects from a Single RGB Image

6DoF object pose estimation depends on positional accuracy, implementation complexity and processing speed. This study presents a method to estimate 6DoF object poses for multi-instance object detection that requires less time and is accurate. The proposed method uses a deep neural network, which outputs 4 types of feature maps: the error object mask, semantic object masks, center vector maps (CVM) and 6D coordinate maps. These feature maps are combined in post processing to detect and estimate multi-object 2D-3D correspondences in parallel for PnP RANSAC estimation. The experiments show that the method can process input RGB images containing 7 different object categories/ instances at a speed of 25 frames per second with competitive accuracy, compared with current state-of-the-art methods, which focus only on some specific conditions.
Approximating Logarithmic Spirals by Quarter Circles

The approximation of a golden logarithmic spiral by quarter circles is well known. Starting from this, we show that any logarithmic spiral can be approximated by quarter circles in a similar way. Using our construction on a rectangle with aspect ratio √ φ and performing a coordinate reparametrization, we obtain an aesthetic partition of the plane as our main artwork.
Perturbed Self-Distillation: Weakly Supervised Large-Scale Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation has wide applications. Current popular researches mainly focus on fully supervised learning which demands expensive and tedious manual point-wise annotation. Weakly supervised learning is an alternative way to avoid this exhausting an-notation. However, for large-scale point clouds with few labeled points, the network is difficult to extract discriminative features for unlabeled points, as well as the regularization of topology between labeled and unlabeled points is usually ignored, resulting in incorrect segmentation results.To address this problem, we propose a perturbed self-distillation (PSD) framework. Specifically, inspired by self-supervised learning, we construct the perturbed branch and enforce the predictive consistency among the perturbed branch and original branch. In this way, the graph topology of the whole point cloud can be effectively established by the introduced auxiliary supervision, such that the in-formation propagation between the labeled and unlabeled points will be realized. Besides point-level supervision, we present a well-integrated context-aware module to explicitly regularize the affinity correlation of labeled points. Therefore, the graph topology of the point cloud can be further refined. The experimental results evaluated on three large-scale datasets show the large gain (3.0% on average) against recent weakly supervised methods and comparable results to some fully supervised methods.
DerechoDDS: Strongly Consistent Data Distribution for Mission-Critical Applications

Mission-critical applications frequently rely on communication middleware products, enabling ease of deployment, component integration, and proven dependability. However, existing communication middleware options present limitations such as weak consistency guarantees, reflecting concerns about overheads for strong forms of assurance. The hardware landscape is now evolving: hardware-based kernel bypass technologies like Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) offer faster communication with near-perfect reliability. This paper introduces DerechoDDS, an implementation of the OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) layered over Derecho, an open-source library embodying a new approach to atomic multicast that maps efficiently to RDMA (or TCP emulations of RDMA). We first describe how DerechoDDS maps the standard DDS API on the Derecho library to achieve a zero-copy data path among remote entities. Then, we propose a novel QoS policy to control the level of consistency for data distribution. We demonstrate that DerechoDDS offers comparable or substantially higher performance than today's major DDS implementations, while simultaneously strengthening guarantees. Even when configured for strong consistency, DerechoDDS achieves high performance.
Content Validation of an Algorithm for the Assessment, Management and Monitoring of Drug-Induced QTc Prolongation in the Psychiatric Population

Background QTc interval (QTcI) prolongation leads to serious complications, making it a concern for clinicians. Assessing the risk of QTcI prolongation in the psychiatric population is important because they are exposed to multiple medications known to increase the risk of life-threatening arrhythmias. Aim The study aims to validate the content of an algorithm for the assessment, management and monitoring of drug-induced QTc prolongation in the psychiatric population. Methodology Qualitative semi-structured interviews of cardiologists, to gather information regarding their approach in assessing the risk of drug-induced QTc prolongation at the time of prescribing. After the interview, an orientation to the algorithm was provided with a link to a cross-sectional, anonymous survey. The online survey included quantitative and qualitative components to gather feedback on the relevance and appropriateness of each step in the algorithm. Results Interview responses were incorporated into 4 themes. Responses indicated a lack of a unified protocol when assessing QTcI prolongation, which supports the need of an algorithm that includes a verified risk scoring tool. Quantitative survey results showed a mean score ranging from 3.08 to 3.67 out of 4 for the appropriateness of the algorithm’s steps, 3.08 to 3.58 for the safety and 3.17 to 3.75 for the reliability of references used. Additional analysis using the modified kappa and I-CVI statistical measures indicate high validity of contents and high degree of agreement between raters. As per the open-ended questions, cardiologists supported the implementation of the algorithm; however, they recommended simplification of the steps as they appear to be cumbersome. Conclusion The results demonstrate that the implementation of the algorithm after minor alterations can prove to be useful as a tool for the risk assessment of QTc prolongation. Further validation of the algorithm with mental health pharmacists and clinicians will be conducted as a separate phase of the study.