Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Issues Facing Small Egyptian Construction Firms: The Financing Barrier

Abstract This paper aims at investigating the magnitude of the financing barrier faced by small Egyptian construction firms (SCFs). A survey questionnaire was compiled and sent to Egyptian contractors. For a further investigation of the SCF financing issue, the financial data for a typical small construction firm was examined.Findings revealed that the lack of access to suitable sources of finance was indeed a barrier to growth for SCFs.Approximately 70% of SCFs stated that they could not access formal sources of finance, and 85% confirmed that the lack of suitable financial resources hindered their ability to compete for larger projects. Finally, the paper highlights the prospective benefits that could be achieved if finance were made available to SCFs, for the firms and the economy as well.
Removal of TiO2 Nanoparticles During Primary Water Treatment: Role of Coagulant Type, Dose, and Nanoparticle Concentration.

Nanomaterials from consumer products (i.e., paints, sunscreens, toothpastes, and food grade titanium dioxide [TiO2]) have the capacity to end up in groundwater and surface water, which is of concern because the effectiveness of removing them via traditional treatment is uncertain. Although aggregation and transport of nanomaterials have been investigated, studies on their removal from suspension are limited. Hence, this study involves the development of scaled-down jar tests to determine the mechanisms involved in the removal of a model metal oxide nanoparticle (NP), TiO2, in artificial groundwater (AGW), and artificial surface water (ASW) at the primary stages of treatment: coagulation, flocculation, and sedimentation. Total removal was quantified at the end of each treatment stage by spectroscopy. Three different coagulants-iron chloride (FeCl3), iron sulfate (FeSO4), and alum [Al2(SO4)3]-destabilized the TiO2 NPs in both source waters. Overall, greater than one-log removal was seen in groundwater for all coagulants at a constant dose of 50 mg/L and across the range of particle concentrations (10, 25, 50, and 100 mg/L). In surface water, greater than 90% removal was seen with FeSO4 and Al2(SO4)3, but less than 60% when using FeCl3. Additionally, removal was most effective at higher NP concentrations (50 and 100 mg/L) in AGW when compared with ASW. Zeta potential was measured and compared between AGW and ASW with the presence of all three coagulants at the same treatment stage times as in the removal studies. These electrokinetic trends confirm that the greatest total removal of NPs occurred when the magnitude of charge was smallest (<10 mV) and conversely, higher zeta potential values (>35 mV) measured were under conditions with poor removal (<90%). These results are anticipated to be of considerable interest to practitioners for the assessment of traditional treatment processes' capacity to remove nanomaterials prior to subsequent filtration and distribution to domestic water supplies.
The Trickle-Down Effect: Policy Decisions, Risky Work

The Challenger disaster cannot be accounted for by reductionist explanations that direct attention only toward individual actors, nor by theories that focus solely on communication failure or the social psychological dynamics of the infamous eve-of-launch teleconference. The cause of the tragedy was rooted in historic organizational and environmental contingencies that preceded the launch decision. By tracing the connection between top policy decisions and decisions by engineers and managers assigned to do risky work, this analysis contradicts conventional understandings about what happened at NASA. As a consequence, this case contains new lessons for both managers and students of organizations.
Tropospheric-propagation induced distortion of wideband signals

Summary form only given: Wideband signals are already playing an important role in telecommunications and radar remote sensing. In telecommunication and remote sensing applications, large-bandwidth signals are required for generating high channel capacity and data-transfer rates. In radar-imaging applications, large bandwidths are required for obtaining higher spatial resolution, for instance. The wellknown benefits of wideband signals, however, are available only under the premise that the free-space propagation effects do not distort or impair the amplitude and phase composition of the different frequency components contained in such signals. Indeed, the so-called free-space is, however, often filled with precipitation media, such as rain. Contrary to popular belief, such media are capable of generating dispersion by causing unequal attenuation and phase-shift of the different frequency components present in the wideband signal. In this contribution, we shall report investigations in this regard. More precisely, using an appropriate scattering model of rain media, we shall, in the first step, quantify the frequency dependent amplitude extinction and phase-shift in rain media for different frequencies in the range of 1-60 GHz. In the second step, we shall use this information to quantify the distortion of wideband signals with different centre carrier frequencies and different modulation depths. Also, the results will be used to construct the `channel impulse response' appropriate for different rain media that are likely to occur in reality. In this contribution, for brevity and accuracy of scattering calculations, the polarization dependence of rain media will not be considered. The results should enable the radar engineer and the telecommunication engineer to estimate the degree of tropospheric-propagation induced distortion of wideband signals both in the frequency domain and the time domain.This electronic document is a “live” template. The various components of your paper [title, text, heads, etc.] are already defined on the style sheet, as illustrated by the portions given in this document.
Marine angling tourism in Norway and Iceland: Finding balance in management policy for sustainability

This paper presents empirical data from a comparison of the management strategies governing marine angling tourism (MAT) in Norway and Iceland. Marine angling tourism has been steadily growing in popularity in the coastal fjord communities of Norway and Iceland over the last several years, and as regulations stand now, MAT is consumptive wildlife tourism, dependent on the extraction of living marine resources. Iceland's management system is based on the individual transferable quota (ITQ) and total allowable catch (TAC) management policies, designed for the commercial fishing fleet. These policies can be considered too restrictive with regard to laws and regulations for the appropriate management of MAT; however, Iceland found a way to compensate for this through active stakeholder participation which includes mutual and open communication, and actively engaging feedback loops which empirically demonstrates how interactive governance could work in practice. Norway's system gives more freedom to tourists, and the consequences of this impact both the vulnerable fjord stocks and the local communities. Findings suggest that the environmental and socio‐cultural sustainability of MAT requires a complex socio‐ecological systems perspective, with interactive governance strategies leading management policies. Sustainability requires that a management strategy not only focus on the economic aspects; priority must also be given to minimizing multi‐stakeholder conflicts and providing sufficient resource data to protect vulnerable fish stocks.
Bacterium-Induced Internal Egg Hatching Frequency Is Predictive of Life Span in Caenorhabditis elegans Populations

ABSTRACT Internal egg hatching in Caenorhabditis elegans, “worm bagging,” is induced by exposure to bacteria. This study demonstrates that the determination of worm bagging frequency allows for advanced insight into the degree of bacterial pathogenicity and is highly predictive of the survival of worm populations. Therefore, worm bagging frequency can be regarded as a reliable population-wide stress reporter.
Capital Flows, Country Risk, and Contagion

It has been widely recognized that both country-specific and global factors matter in explaining capital flows. The author presents an empirical framework that disentangles the relative weight of country-specific and global factors in determining capital flows. In essence, his approach first separates the common component of emerging country spreads from their country-specific component. The pure country risk and global risk components are then used as explanatory variables to account for the observed pattern of capital flows using multivariate cointegration analyses. The author is able to identify the relative weight of global and country-specific factors in explaining capital flows to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela in the 1990s. When further decomposing country risk into its determinants, the author finds that within a small system it is possible to jointly identify the determinants of capital flows and sovereign bond spreads. We find that capital flows are driven by country risk and global factors ("contagion"and U.S. long-term interest rates), while country risk is determined by the primary balance-to-GDP ratio (-) and the ratio of public debt to GDP (+).
Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation using self-organizing map

Recommender systems can help people to find interesting things and they are widely used in Electronic Commerce. Collaborative filtering technique has been proved to be one of the most successful techniques in recommender systems. The main problems of collaborative filtering are about prediction accuracy, response time, data sparsity and scalability. To solve some of these problems, this paper presented an item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm using self-organizing map. Firstly, it employs clustering function of self-organizing map to form nearest neighbors of the target item. Then, it produces prediction of the target user to the target item using item-based collaborative filtering. The item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm using self-organizing map can efficiently improve the scalability and promise to make recommendations more accurately than conventional collaborative filtering.
Repellent properties of celery, Apium graveolens L., compared with commercial repellents, against mosquitoes under laboratory and field conditions

In our search for new bioactive products against mosquito vectors, we reported the slightly larvicidal and adulticidal potency, but remarkable repellency of Apium graveolens both in laboratory and field conditions. Repellency of the ethanolic preparation of hexane‐extracted A. graveolens was, therefore, investigated and compared with those of 15 commercial mosquito repellents including the most widely used, DEET. Hexane‐extracted A. graveolens showed a significant degree of repellency in a dose‐dependent manner with vanillin added. Ethanolic A. graveolens formulations (10–25% with and without vanillin) provided 2–5 h protection against female Aedes aegypti. Repellency that derived from the most effective repellent, 25% of hexane‐extracted A. graveolens with the addition of 5% vanillin, was comparable to the value obtained from 25% of DEET with 5% vanillin added. Moreover, commercial repellents, except formulations of DEET, showed lower repellency than that of A. graveolens extract. When applied on human skin under field conditions, the hexane‐extracted A. graveolens plus 5% vanillin showed a strong repellent action against a wide range of mosquito species belonging to various genera. It had a protective effect against Aedes gardnerii, Aedes lineatopennis, Anopheles barbirostris, Armigeres subalbatus, Culex tritaeniorhynchus, Culex gelidus, Culex vishnui group and Mansonia uniformis. The hexane‐extracted A. graveolens did not cause a burning sensation or dermal irritation when applied to human skin. No adverse effects were observed on the skin or other parts of the human volunteers’ body during 6 months of the study period or in the following 3 months, after which time observations ceased. Therefore, A. graveolens can be a potential candidate for use in the development of commercial repellents that may be an alternative to conventional synthetic chemicals, particularly in community vector control applications.
The Effect of Gender and Nationality on Service Quality in Malaysian Higher Education

Competition is becoming increasingly intense among service organizations, and one of the most profitable service sectors of Malaysia is the higher education sector. This stiff competition requires tertiary institutions to satisfy their clients. Hence, measuring students’ satisfaction becomes essential. Accordingly, this study measures the effect of gender and nationality on service quality in Malaysian private universities using the SERVQUAL instrument. The level of students’ satisfaction is evaluated based on the gap found between their perceptions and expectations towards five dimensions of service quality, namely tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy, based on their gender and nationality. Thus, a 22-item Likert-type questionnaire was administered among 250 students from both genders and different nationalities. Based on the results obtained, there is no sufficient evidence concerning the effect of gender on service quality in higher education institutions. However, nationality has a slight effect on the responsiveness dimension of service quality. Then, the research addresses policy implications on the importance of the education system in a country, and some implications for universities to improve their offered services. Finally, in the two last sections, the researchers address limitations of the study and future research directions.
Iterative decoding of convolutionally encoded signals over multipath Rayleigh fading channels

We analyze and compare several strategies for iteratively decoding trellis-encoded signals over channels with memory. Soft-in/soft-out extensions of reduced-complexity trellis search algorithms such as delayed decision-feedback sequence estimating (DDFSE) or parallel decision-feedback decoding (PDFD) algorithms are used instead of conventional BCJR and min-log-BCJR algorithms. It has been shown that for long channel impulse responses and/or high modulation orders where the BCJR algorithm becomes prohibitively complex, the proposed algorithms offer very good performance with low complexity. The problem of channel estimation in practical implementation of turbo detection schemes is studied in the second part. Two methods of channel reestimation are proposed: one based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm and the second on a simple Bootstrap technique. Both algorithms are shown to dramatically improve the performance of the classical pseudo inverse channel estimation performed initially on a training sequence.
Joint source-channel decoding for variable-length encoded data by exact and approximate MAP sequence estimation

Joint source-channel decoding based on residual source redundancy is an effective paradigm for error-resilient data compression. While previous work only considered fixed rate systems, the extension of these techniques for variable-length encoded data was previously independently proposed by the authors, Park and Miller (see Proc. of Conf. on Info. Sciences and Systems, Princeton, N.J., 1998) and by Demir and Sayood (see Proc. of the Data Compression Conf., Snowbird, U.T., p.139-48, 1998). In this paper, we describe and compare the performance of a computationally complex exact maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder, its efficient approximation, an alternative approximate MAP decoder, and an improved version of this decoder suggested here. Moreover, we evaluate several source and channel coding configurations. Our results show that the approximate MAP technique from Park et al. outperforms other approximate methods and provides substantial error protection to variable-length encoded data.
Commercially Sexually Exploited Girls and Participant Perceptions of Blameworthiness

Prostitution among female youth has been largely misunderstood, trivialized, or ignored. Increased attention has been directed toward juvenile female delinquency, particularly related to the overlap in their status as victims and offenders. Areas in this research continue to be underinvestigated, however, especially with regard to public perceptions of commercially sexually exploited girls. The current study used survey questionnaires to examine participant perceptions of the blameworthiness of a prostituted minor while considering her victimization history disclosure and race. Results indicate that victimization history disclosure significantly reduced perceptions of blameworthiness and reduced blameworthiness operated similarly for Caucasian and African American females forced into prostitution. Further research directions are discussed.
Hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance in China

Purpose - – Maize production in China is exposed to pronounced yield risks, in particular weather risk, which is one of the most important and least controllable sources of risk in agriculture. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which weather index-based insurance can contribute to reducing the revenue risk in maize production caused by yield variations. An average farm producing maize is analyzed for each of eight Chinese provinces, six of which are part of the Northern Plains of China. Design/methodology/approach - – Data are based on the Statistical Yearbook of China and the Chinese Meteorological Administration. The used method of insurance pricing is burn analysis. Hedging effectiveness of precipitation index-based insurance is measured by the relative reduction of the standard deviation (SD) and the Value at Risk of maize revenues. Findings - – Results reveal that precipitation index-based insurance can cause a reduction of up to 15.2 percent of the SD and 38.7 percent of the Value at Risk with a 90 percent confidence level of maize revenues in the study area. However, there are big differences in the hedging efficiencies of precipitation index-based insurance measured at different weather stations in the various provinces. Therefore, it is recommended for insurance providers to analyze the hedging effectiveness of weather index-based insurance with regard to the geographical location of their reference weather station if they would like to offer weather index-based insurance products. Research limitations/implications - – The absence of individual, long-term yield data in the study area prevents the evaluation of risk on individual farms. Thus, the hedging effectiveness can only be analyzed on an aggregated level of yield data and can rather be modeled for an average farm of a particular province. Originality/value - – To the author's knowledge, this paper is the first that investigates the hedging effectiveness of precipitation index-based insurance designed for reducing revenue risk of maize production in eight Chinese provinces.
Visual Stimulus Detection Correlates with the Consistency of Temporal Sequences within Stereotyped Events of V1 Neuronal Population Activity

Sensory information about the world is translated into rate codes, such that modulations in mean spiking activity of neurons relate to differences in stimulus features. More recently, it has been proposed that also temporal properties of activity, such as assembly formation and sequential population activation, are important for understanding the relation between neuronal activity and behavioral output. These phenomena appear to be robust properties of neural circuits, but their relevance for perceptual judgments, such as the behavioral detection of stimuli, remains to be tested. Studying neuronal activity with two-photon calcium imaging in primary visual cortex of mice performing a go/no-go visual detection task, we found that assemblies (i.e., configurations of neuronal group activity) reliably recur, as defined using Ward-method clustering. However, population activation events with a recurring configuration of core neurons did not appear to serve a particular function in the coding of orientation or the detection of stimuli. Instead, we found that, regardless of whether the population event showed a recurring or nonrecurring configuration of neurons, the sequence of cluster activation was correlated with the detection of stimuli. Moreover, each neuron showed a preferred temporal position of activation within population events, which was robust despite varying neuronal participation. Furthermore, the timing of neuronal activity within such a sequence was more consistent when a stimulus was detected (hits) than when it remained unreported (misses). Our data indicate that neural processing of information related to visual detection behavior depends on the temporal positioning of individual and group-wise cell activity. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Temporally coactive neurons have been hypothesized to form functional assemblies that might subserve different functions in the brain, but many of these proposed functions have not yet been experimentally tested. We used two-photon calcium imaging in V1 of mice performing a stimulus detection task to study the relation of assembly activity to the behavioral detection of visual stimuli. We found that the presence of recurring assemblies per se was not correlated with behavior, and these assemblies did not appear to serve a function in the coding of stimulus orientation. Instead, we found that activity in V1 is characterized by population events of varying membership, within which the consistency of the temporal sequence of neuronal activation is correlated with stimulus detection.
EXPLORATORY STUDY ON EMPLOYEES ’ MOTIVATION IN THE OMANI PRIVATE BANKING SECTOR

There are clear evidences that organizations are focusing on retaining motivated employees. Although motivation is a well-discussed topic in academic literature, motivation of employees in the Omani private banking sector is not fully discussed. The purpose of this exploratory study is to find some insights on the predictors of employees’ motivation in the Omani private banking sector. A cross-sectional method was used to collect data from 105 employees from the Omani private banking sector. Furthermore, to collect the primary data, a questionnaire with 23 items was designed and distributed for that purpose. In order to analyze the gathered data, correlational methods were used. This exploratory study shed some light on the importance of the relationship that the employees have with their colleagues on their motivation and on the employees’ salaries to their motivation. The study found these two variables as significant and positive predictors of employees’ motivation.