Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Financing Constraints, Earning Quality and Investment Efficiency: Evidence from Africa

This study investigates the effect of financing constraints on investment efficiency in developing countries and how this relationship is conditional to the earning quality. We use the non-financial firms from 15 Africa countries from 2009 to 2018. We employed panel data analysis and classified the sample into a financially constrained and unconstrained firm to analyze this relationship. The results show that financing constraints affect investment efficiency; this effect is more pronounced in constrained firms than unconstrained firms. We evidenced that investment efficiency is more sensitive to cash flows for the financially constrained firm than the unconstrained firms. Our findings also posit that constrained firms are more likely to overinvest than unconstrained firms because of their internal cash flows. In contrast, unconstrained firms are more likely to under invest than constrained firms.
Comparison of seismic performances of reinforced concrete frames strengthened by different techniques

THE AIM OF THIS STUDY IS TO COMPARE THE SEISMIC PERFORMANCES OF STRENGTHENING TECHNIQUES APPLIED TO REINFORCED CONCRETE (RC) NON-DUCTILE FRAMES WHICH WERE TESTED UNDER THE EFFECTS OF SEISMIC LOADS. IN THE EXPERIMENTAL PART OF THE STUDY, ONE-THIRD SCALE, ONE-BAY, TWO-STOREY NON-DUCTILE HOLLOW BRICK INFILLED RC FRAMES WERE STRENGTHENED WITH FIVE DIFFERENT TECHNIQUES AND TESTED UNDER REVERSED CYCLIC LATERAL LOADS. ONE BEING A REFERENCE FRAME, FIVE OF THE TEST FRAMES WERE INFILLED WITH HOLLOW BRICKS AND PLASTERED ON BOTH SIDES, ONE FRAME WAS STRENGTHENED WITH PLAIN MORTAR, ONE WAS STRENGTHENED WITH STEEL FIBER REINFORCED MORTAR, TWO WERE STRENGTHENED WITH PRECAST RC PLATES. THE LAST TEST FRAME WAS STRENGTHENED WITH RC INFILL WALL. TEST RESULTS WERE EVALUATED IN TERMS OF STRENGTH, STIFFNESS, INTERSTOREY DRIFT RATIO, ENERGY DISSIPATION CAPACITY, SPECIMEN FAILURE MODE, EASE OF APPLICATION AND COST ECONOMY POINTS OF VIEW. IN THE TESTS, DIFFERENT EFFECTIVENESS ON STRENGTH AND STIFFNESS CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TEST FRAMES WERE OBSERVED FOR EACH STRENGTHENING TECHNIQUE. STRENGTHENING TECHNIQUES INCREASED STRENGTH AND STIFFNESSES OF THE TEST FRAMES IN THE RANGES FROM 57% TO 189% AND FROM 186% TO 486% RESPECTIVELY. IN THE ANALYTICAL PART OF THE STUDY, AN EXISTING RC NON-DUCTILE BUILDING LOCATED IN ISTANBUL, STRENGTHENED WITH THE TECHNIQUES, WERE ANALYZED USING A COMPUTER PROGRAM. ANALYTICAL RESULTS WERE EVALUATED IN TERMS OF INTERSTOREY DRIFT RATIO TOGETHER WITH THE OVERALL SEISMIC PERFORMANCE OF THE BUILDING.
Submesoscale Eddies in the South China Sea

Submesoscale eddies are often seen in high‐resolution satellite‐derived ocean color images. To efficiently identify these eddies from surface chlorophyll data, here, we develop an automatic submesoscale eddy detection method and apply it to the South China Sea. The detected submesoscale eddies are found to have a radius of 13 ± 5 km and an aspect ratio of 0.5 ± 0.2, with a notable predominance of cyclones. Further investigation reveals that the surface structure of these eddies displays a unique “cat's‐eye” pattern, and the eddies become more circular with increasing eddy radius. Submesoscale eddies can strongly regulate surface chlorophyll via horizontal advection while they have less coherent signatures in sea surface temperature. These findings may help to improve submesoscale parameterizations in Earth system models.
Effects of Gender on Students’ Academic Achievement in Public Secondary Schools in Marakwet East Sub County, Kenya

Many researchers have attempted to define and even carried out studies touching on gender as a factor in academics. Flynn (2012), for example defined gender as the range of physical, biological, mental and behavioural characteristics pertaining to and differentiating between masculinity and feminity. Gender is one of the personal variables with relationships to differences in motivational functioning and in self-regulated learning patterns in boys and girls. In the traditional times, there were some work reserved for boys and girls. These beliefs have been extended to educational settings. There are also vocations regarded as men‟s and women‟s. Kashu, (2014) has argued that gender related disparities have also characterized Kenyan education system at the national level, at regional level and at all levels of education from primary to university in favour of males. MOE (2005) reported that secondary school sub sector has been facing challenges, particularly unsatisfactory level of transition from secondary to tertiary particularly university, as well as serious gender and regional disparities with the quality of secondary education remaining low in the last decade. Government of Kenya Education officials and media have over the past couple of years published the top one hundred KCSE candidates at national, regional, county and sub county levels. The top of the lists have often been dominated by male candidates or males‟-only schools apart from just but a few schools and sub counties where the performances have tilted slightly in favour of the female gender (MOE, 2014).
Trust in Public Relations in the Age of Mistrusted Media: A European Perspective

One of the core problems of misinformation and post-trust societies is, indeed, trust in communications. The undermining of the credibility of media as the backbone of democratic societies is becoming a serious problem that affects democracy, business and all kinds of public institutions and organizations in society(ies). This paper explores perceptions of trust in key stakeholders involved in communication on behalf of organizations. Findings are considered at the professional (macro), departmental (meso) and individual (micro) level as well as considering the trusted role of non-specialist communicators for organizations including internal and external spokespeople. Data were collected from an online survey of 2883 respondents from 46 countries across Europe. Key findings were at the macro level that: antagonism between management communication professionals and journalists remains. The lowest trust in the profession is felt to be by the general public. At the meso level, top executives are perceived to trust the department the most followed by journalists in second place. External experts such as professors and consultants are perceived to be the most trusted by the general public. Finally, at the micro level individuals are more trusted than organizations or departments and the communication profession more widely.
Examination of Periodontal Status in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Greek Adults: A Case - Control Study

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is one of the most common respiratory diseases the 4 th leading cause of death in the world, and it is predicted that by 2020 will be the 3 rd leading cause of death and the 5 th leading cause of overall disability worldwide [1]. COPD is a heterogeneous respiratory disease that includes clinical conditions such as emphysema, chronic bronchitis, small airways disease, and non-reversible asthma [2]. Its prevalence in Europe and North America and is 9% to 10% in adults aged 40 years or older, its increased prevalence has been attributed to increased smoking rates, whereas COPD is impaired by exacerbations possibly due to viral or bacterial infections [3].
A systematic review of the relationship between motivational constructs and self-regulated learning

The aim of this review was to identify the motivational constructs which were mostly associated with self-regulated learning and how these motivational constructs were related to self-regulated learning. There were 20 studies (N=8,759) met inclusion criteria for this review. In overall, the evidence of the included studies showed that motivational constructs such as self-efficacy, intrinsic goal orientation, task value, and control of learning beliefs were positively and significantly related to and in predicting self-regulated learning; test anxiety was negatively and insignificantly related to and in predicting self-regulated learning; inconsistent results were observed for extrinsic goal orientation as it could be positively or negatively related to and in predicting self-regulated learning.
A Comparative Evaluation of Deep Learning based Transformers for Entity Resolution Master Thesis

Entity resolution (ER) is the task of identifying pairs of entities in a database or groups of databases that refer to the same real-world entities. ER is a task difficult to solve with a single general solution, since the data in databases can be entered with errors or written in many different ways. Computational challenges also exist, because the number of pairs to compare for identifying all common entities, can be quadratic to the amount of data. In recent years machine learning methods. and specially deep learning, have been used to solve the entity resolution task on relational data. A promising group of approaches work using word embeddings, a technique to represent textual information into a dense vector of numerical values. These vectors are formed in such a way that semantically similar words are mapped to similar vectors, independent of their syntax. These vectors are commonly formed by neural architectures that involve recurrent components or long short term memories, apart from established architectures like FastText, Glove and Word2Vec. In recent years, a novel class of approaches, Transformer architectures, has been proposed to improve on traditional word embeddings. Unlike previous methods, these approaches are tailored to context in semantics. In these cases the vector representation for a word is different depending on the context that surrounds it. For example, the word solution can have different representations if it appears as the solution of a mathematical problem, or a chemical solution substance. These classes of methods have shown superior performance to traditional word embeddings on a large number of natural language processing tasks, like classification, question answering, text summarization and others. Furthermore, a large number of these methods are already available as pre-trained models to the public, in libraries that facilitate their usage. Given that to date there is still no clear study on how these contextual embeddings could contribute to ER, in this work we study their application to this task. We specifically study BERT, DistilBERT, XLNet, and GPT2, on 2 established datasets, without using any special method for pair-formation (other than the ground truth), and using many traditional classifiers for the matching task. We find that BERT outperforms other models for our choice of application, and that logistic regression is able to perform better than other classifiers. We also identify that tuning XGBoost can lead to small improvements. In future work we propose that using the transformer architectures for the downstream classification task would also be of interest, similarly for testing with many other datasets and improving on the blocking methods.
Tracking Proterozoic–Triassic sediment routing to western Laurentia via bivariate non-negative matrix factorization of detrital provenance data

When reconstructing sediment provenance, the challenge posed by multiple univariate (i.e., age-only) detrital geochronology data sets with similar one-dimensional distributions can be mitigated by incorporation of a second variable such as Hf isotopic data. However, there is no commonly applied method of sample intercomparison, much less forward or inverse modeling of these bivariate data sets. In this paper we explore application of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to bivariate data sets. Factorization of univariate mixed (a.k.a., sink or daughter) data sets has been demonstrated to successfully recover both the one-dimensional endmember (a.k.a., source or parent) distributions and their mixture weightings. We show that NMF can successfully recover both the two-dimensional distributions and mixing weights in synthetic data sets. Application of the method to 24 published Neoproterozoic–Triassic samples from western Laurentia yields six two-dimensional endmember distributions that are a close match to empirical sediment sources on the southern, eastern, and northern margin of Laurentia. The results are broadly consistent with previous interpretations and confirm that the method can characterize unknown sediment sources based on data from analyzed sink samples. Correlating between factorized endmembers and empirical sources indicates that the Transcontinental Arch was not a barrier to east–west sediment transport until the late Cambrian. Quantitative comparison also shows that the closest known match for a factorized endmember with highly evolved Permo-Triassic zircons is from northern South America and suggests northward transport of this detritus following assembly of Pangea. Recognizing these empirical sources and their distribution into strata that would later be incorporated into the North American Cordillera sets the stage for interpreting sediment provenance records in the Jurassic–Paleogene Cordilleran retroarc foreland basin. Supplementary material: The open-source software (DZnmf2D) and a user manual is available in public repositories: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4460336. All other supplemental files are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare. c.5280320 Thematic collection: This article is part of the Fold-and-thrust belts and associated basins collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection. org/cc/fold-and-thrust-belts
SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERIZATION OF NEW RUTHENIUM(III) COMPLEXES CONTAINING TETRADENTATE SCHIFF BASES

Several new hexa-coordinated ruthenium(III) complexes of the type [RuX(EPh3)(LL′)] (X=Cl, Br; E=P, As; LL′ = anthacac, anthdibm, 2-amtpacac or 2-amtpdibm) have been synthesised by reacting [RuCl3(PPh3)3], [RuCl3(AsPh3)3], [RuBr3(AsPh3)3] or [RuBr3(PPh3)2(MeOH)] with tetradentate Schiff bases such as bis(anthranilic acid)acetylacetimine (H2-anthacac), bis(anthranilic acid)dibenzoylmethimine (H2-anthdibm), bis(2-aminothiophenol)acetylacetimine (H2-2-amptacac) or bis(2-aminothiophenol)dibenzoylmethimine (H2-2-amtpdibm). All of the complexes have been characterised by elemental analyses, IR, electronic spectra, EPR, magnetic moment and cyclic voltammetric data. An octahedral structure has been tentatively proposed for the complexes. These complexes were also tested for their antibacterial properties.
Positron Annihilation in Hydrides of Transition Metals

An analysis of the degree of positron localization on alloy components is developed in application to palladium, tantalum, and yttrium hydrides. The method is based on the account of positron-ionic core electron interaction. From the results a conclusion is made about a principal positron localization on metallic components. The degree of the localization depends on the nature of the transition metals. The electronic structure of a hydrogen ion can be changed from the partial “proton” state (PdH) up to nearly the complete “proton” state (YH). The anionic hydrogen state is excluded. Die Analysierungsmethode fur den Positronenlokalisierungsgrad an den Legierungskomponente wird fur die Anwendung auf Palladium-, Tantal- und Yttriumhydride weiterentwickelt. Die Methode beruht auf der Positronen-Ionenrumpf-Elektronenwechselwirkung. Aus den Ergebnissen dieser Arbeit werden Schlusse uber die prinzipielle Positronenlokalisierung an den metallischen Komponenten gezogen. Der Grad der Lokalisierung hangt von der Natur des Ubergangsmetalls ab. Die elektronische Struktur eines Wasserstoffions kann von dem partiellen „Protonen”-Zustand (PdH) zu dem nahezu vollstandigen „Protonen”-Zustand (YH) geandert werden. Der anionische Wasserstoffzustand wird ausgeschlossen.
Knowledge and quality of life among Indonesian students during the COVID-19 pandemic

The increasing of online COVID-19 information-sharing in digital media can contribute to the emergence of misinformation in public. Much insufficient knowledge will confuse public understanding and affect their quality of life. Our study purposed to assess the knowledge and its influence on Indonesian students' quality of life during the COVID-19 crisis. A cross-sectional study was performed between October and December 2020 by distributing online questionnaires. The data analysis was run through the Spearman correlation method by using SPSS version 21.0. A total of 200 respondents aged over 17 years were recruited using a snowball sampling technique. Most study participants had insufficient knowledge about COVID-19. 23% of them had moderate knowledge, and only 17.5% had high knowledge. They obtained primary sources of COVID-19 information from social media platforms. The results showed that health science students have a better understanding than social science students (P=0.000). This present study found that the level of knowledge is significant statistically influences psychological domain (P=0.020), environmental domain (P=0.046), and overall quality of life (P=0.047). Thus, the media control center is vital to encounter valid information to provide better knowledge and quality of life during a pandemic.
Microbiome of Grand Canyon Caverns, a dry sulfuric karst cave in Arizona, supports diverse extremo-philic bacterial and archaeal communities

We analyzed the microbial community of multicolored speleosol deposits found in Grand Canyon Caverns, a dry sulfuric karst cave in northwest Arizona, USA. Underground cave and karst systems harbor a great range of microbial diversity; however, the inhabitants of dry sulfuric karst caves, including extremophiles, remain poorly understood. Understanding the microbial communities inhabiting cave and karst systems is essential to provide information on the multidirectional feedback between biology and geology, to elucidate the role of microbial biogeochemical processes on cave formation, and potentially aid in the development of biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Based on the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene, the microbial community was determined to consist of 2207 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) using species-level annotations, representing 55 phyla. The five most abundant Bacteria were Actinobacteria 51.3  35.4 %, Proteobacteria 12.6  9.5 %, Firmicutes 9.8  7.3 %, Bacteroidetes 8.3  5.9 %, and Cyanobacteria 7.1  7.3 %. The relative abundance of Archaea represented 1.1  0.9 % of all samples and 0.2  0.04 % of samples were unassigned. Elemental analysis found that the composition of the rock varied by sample and that calcium (6200  3494 ppm), iron (1141 ± 1066 ppm), magnesium (25  17 ppm), and phosphorous (37  33 ppm) were the most prevalent elements detected across all samples. Furthermore, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen were found to compose 4.7  4.9 %, 0.3  0.4 %, and 0.1  0.1 % of samples, respectively. Finally, Raman spectra compared to the RRUFF Project database using CrystalSleuth found that the mineral composition of the speleosol consisted of calcite, hematite, paraspurrite, quartz, and trattnerite. These data suggest that dry sulfuric karst caves can harbor robust microbial communities under oligotrophic, endolithic, and troglophilic conditions.
Backscattering coefficient measurements of 15 to 60 keV electrons for solids at various angles of incidence

Measurements of the back scatter coefficient as a function of incident electron energy, angle of incidence, and target atomic number are described. The results are compared with existing theories for normal and non-normal electron incidence. Analytical expressions for the back scatter coefficient, which can be used in the fields of X-ray microanalysis and scanning electron microscopy, are given. Messungen des Ruckstreukoeffizienten in Abhangigkeit von Energie und Einfallswinkel der Elektronen und der Ordnungszahl der Targets werden beschrieben. Die Ergebnisse werden mit vorliegenden Theorien fur senkrechten und schragen Elektroneneinfall verglichen. Es werden analytische Ausdrucke fur den Ruckstreukoeffizienten angegeben, die bei der Rontgen-Mikroanalyse und der Rasterelektronenmikroskopie verwendet werden konnen.
Risky sexual behavior among Iranian university students and its relationship with religiosity and familial support

A – study Design, B – Data Collection, C – statistical Analysis, D – Data interpretation, E – manuscript Preparation, F – literature search, G – funds Collection Background. risky sexual behavior (rsb) has emerged as an important public health issue worldwide. Objectives. this study was aimed at evaluating the prevalence of rsb and its risk factors regarding family support and religious beliefs, as well as other risky behaviors among college students in bushehr city. Material and methods. this cross-sectional study was conducted on a total of 977 students of bushehr city, southern iran, in 2016. Participants were selected using multistage sampling. Data collection was performed using a self-administered questionnaire comprised of data on extramarital sexual behavior at three different time points. Data was analyzed using sPss version 16.0 with the chi-squire test, independent samples t -test and logistic regression. Results. the overall prevalence of rsb was 5.6%, and the lifetime, past year and past month prevalence of extramarital sexual activity was 9.9%, 8.1% and 4.7%, respectively. Approx. 1.5% of the students also reported alcohol and other drug use at last sex and 3.7% reported having sexual intercourse without a condom. the results revealed that age (or = 1.10), male gender (or = 2.85), smoking (or = 2.27), hookah use (or = 2.23), alcohol use (or = 6.08) and family support (or = 0.97) were significantly associated with extramarital sex. moreover, male gender (or = 1.94), age (or = 1.10), hookah use (or = 2.94), illicit drug use (or = 3.80) and religiosity (or = 0.98) were associated with rsb. Conclusions. there is a concurrence of high-risk sexual behaviors in iranian students and the experience of high-risk behavior is related to other rsbs. therefore, effective training interventions and programs should be designed and implemented to reduce risky behaviors, especially sexual behaviors.
MACROECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF STOCK MARKET RETURNS IN THE GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL

This study investigates the impact of certain macroeconomic determinants on stock market returns in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Those macroeconomic factors are: interest rates, oil prices, exchange rates, and money supply. Those factors were empirically studied and investigated to have an impact on stock market returns in many countries. This paper also attempts to capture that impact of those macroeconomic factors on the stock market, using a panel set of data by implying several tests on the data, which include unit root tests, cointegration test, and error correction model (ECM). The empirical results support previous studies that suggest the high reliance of governments and stock markets in the GCC on macroeconomic determinants, specifically oil prices, while other determinants were found to have less effect on stock market returns than oil prices. The findings of the study will presumably enable investors and stakeholders in making better investment decisions, in addition to assisting policy-makers in enhancing the efficiency of stock markets and better regulating them.