Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Regulations on Public Supply Chain Performance: Case of Tanzania

The supply chain in public sector in Tanzania has been characterized as being ineffective leading to the loss of taxpayers’ money. Laws and regulations are key factors identified to pull back public supply chain performance’s initiatives in public sectors. Reasons include i). Regulations are not realistic to the environment in which supply chain operates; ii). Laws and regulations are not flexible thus created a roadblock for practitioners to improve the efficiency or responsiveness in public supply chain. This paper conducted a survey interviewing 120 respondents with varying demographical characteristics and background in the field of supply chain management from both public and private sectors. The paper conducted data analyses using SPSS to study the impact of laws and regulations on public supply chain performance. The study showed that there is negative impact of laws and regulations (PPA2011) on effectiveness (cost) of a public supply chain. The study also found that PPA2011 has no significant impact on innovation and effectiveness of a public supply chain in Tanzania. This study suggests the Tanzania government amend sections of PPA2011 and regulations 2016 that seems to limit the performance of the supply chain in public sector. By doing so, a real benefit and essence of laws and regulations in the public supply chain will be harnessed. Keywords— Operation Management, Supply Chain, Public Supply Chain, Regulations, Tanzania
Dependence of partial discharge UHF characteristics on metal particel position at insulating spacer in GIS

In this paper, the influence of metal particle position at insulating spacer on partial discharge (PD) characteristics is studied by using the ultra high frequency (UHF) detection method in a 252kV GIS PD experimental platform. The PD inception voltage (PDIV), phase resolved partial discharge (PRPD), phase resolved pulse sequence (PRPS) and UHF signal waveform and its frequency spectrum are investigated with different defect position and under stepped applied voltage amplitude. By combining the electric field analysis of insulating spacer surface and PD investigation results, the influence of metal particle position on PD characteristics is clarified. It is shown that, the PDIV of metal particle defect increases with electric field strength on spacer surface due to the distortion of electric field on surface. The PRPD and PRPS images behave as the floating discharge pattern. The high order modes of EM waves are easier excited when the metal particle placed near the flange of space. The detection sensitivity of extractor-type sensor is much higher than that of external sensor, however it is a little lower than that of interior sensor.
Mobile App Marketing Communication for B2B and B2C: Ingoes as a Case Study

In today's marketing world, there are highly competitive business environments in every industry. The companies try to survive, and their strategical conceptual thinking and entrepreneurship levels help them to be unique in their industry. The innovative ideas and alterations on consumer behavior create success stories in the future survival of the companies. Ingoes is a real estate platform that brings real estate buyers and sellers together and must be research case since it is the first mobile application for property market in Northern Cyprus. Thus, this chapter is helpful as a literature source for mobile application sector usage of marketing communication strategies when they are newly entering in their markets. Diffusion of innovation theory is considered while analyzing Ingoes brand. The aim of this study is to focus on the diffusion of innovation for mobile application marketing perspectives. This chapter covers both quantitative and qualitative research method content analyses by focusing on Ingoes new media usage while they are reaching their current and potential consumers.
Examining the Impacts of Tourism on Gumushane Residents According to the Doxey Index

Tourism is a versatile activity that can have both positive and negative impacts on touristic destinations and local people. Reducing the negative impacts of tourism on touristic destinations depends on the development of a planned tourism. Accordingly, it is primarily required to determine the level of present tourism activities in destinations in order to achieve the planned tourism development. In this context, the ‘Doxey Irritation Index’, presented by Doxey (1975) based on the stages of euphoria, apathy, irritation and antagonism, is an important guide in determining the level of tourism development in destinations. In this direction, the purpose of this study is to determine the stage of Gumushane in terms of tourism development level according to the “Doxey Irritation Index” by revealing the opinions of Gumushane residents about Gumushane tourism. Accordingly, the opinions of Gumushane residents about tourism were consulted via face-to-face interviews. As a consequence, it was determined that tourism in Gumushane was at the stage of euphoria (beginning) according to the “Doxey Irritation Index”. Besides, the vast majority of Gumushane residents stated that tourism would not have negative social, cultural, economic and environmental impacts on Gumushane.
A Hybrid Power Control Concept for PV Inverters With Reduced Thermal Loading

This letter proposes a hybrid power control concept for grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) inverters. The control strategy is based on either a maximum power point tracking control or a constant power generation (CPG) control depending on the instantaneous available power from the PV panels. The essence of the proposed concept lies in the selection of an appropriate power limit for the CPG control to achieve an improved thermal performance and an increased utilization factor of PV inverters, and thus, to cater for a higher penetration level of PV systems with intermittent nature. A case study on a single-phase PV inverter under yearly operation is presented with analyses of the thermal loading, lifetime, and annual energy yield. It has revealed the trade-off factors to select the power limit and also verified the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed control concept.
Accounting at an Irish maltster – the accounting practices of Bennetts of Ballinacurra in the 1920s and 1930s

ABSTRACT This study details the accounting practices of Bennetts of Ballinacurra, a maltster, from about 1920 to the mid 1930s. Little literature exists on the accounting practices of the time in an Irish context, and even less on maltster accounting in Ireland or a wider context. Our findings reveal relatively stable and institutionalised accounting practices with a primary focus on financial accounting and transaction recording. While we find some management accounting-type practices that appear to have been relatively stable and institutionalised, no detailed or regular costs of the malting process are apparent. We suggest that the maltster type, strong links to Arthur Guinness, Son & Co, Ltd, cost structure and the influence of an external accounting firm were contributing factors to whether or not accounting practices were institutionalised.
A probability tracking approach to segmentation of ultrasound prostate images using weak shape priors

Prostate specific antigen density is an established parameter for indicating the likelihood of prostate cancer. To this end, the size and volume of the gland have become pivotal quantities used by clinicians during the standard cancer screening process. As an alternative to manual palpation, an increasing number of volume estimation methods are based on the imagery data of the prostate. The necessity to process large volumes of such data requires automatic segmentation algorithms, which can accurately and reliably identify the true prostate region. In particular, transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging has become a standard means of assessing the prostate due to its safe nature and high benefit-to-cost ratio. Unfortunately, modern TRUS images are still plagued by many ultrasound imaging artifacts such as speckle noise and shadowing, which results in relatively low contrast and reduced SNR of the acquired images. Consequently, many modern segmentation methods incorporate prior knowledge about the prostate geometry to enhance traditional segmentation techniques. In this paper, a novel approach to the problem of TRUS segmentation, particularly the definition of the prostate shape prior, is presented. The proposed approach is based on the concept of distribution tracking, which provides a unified framework for tracking both photometric and morphological features of the prostate. In particular, the tracking of morphological features defines a novel type of "weak" shape priors. The latter acts as a regularization force, which minimally bias the segmentation procedure, while rendering the final estimate stable and robust. The value of the proposed methodology is demonstrated in a series of experiments.
Saline‐Filled Cuffs Help Prevent Laser‐Induced Polyvinylchloride Endotracheal Tube Fires

&NA; To determine whether the filling of tracheal tube cuffs with saline would decrease their combustibility during laser surgery, 20 polyvinylchloride tracheal tubes were studied. The cuffed end of each tracheal tube was inserted into the neck of an empty flask, and the tube and flask were flushed with oxygen for 5 min before cuff inflation. Ten tracheal tubes had their cuffs inflated with air, and 10 were inflated with saline. A Lasersonics LS880 CO2 laser, set to 5 W for five of each of the two types of filled cuffs and to 40 W for the other pair of five tubes, was fired continuously at the cuffs for up to 1 min. No combustion occurred at the 5‐W setting. The times to cuff perforation when the laser was set at 5 W were (mean ± SD) 1.00 ± 0.83 and 4.21 ± 3.91 s for the air‐ and saline‐filled cuffs, respectively, a difference that was not statistically significant The time to deflation of the saline‐filled cuff (104.6 ± 67.5 s) was, however, significantly longer than that of the air‐filled cuff (2.59 ± 1.97 s). When the tracheal tube cuffs were exposed to 40‐W laser radiation, the cuff and adjacent tube shaft ignited in all cases when the cuffs were inflated with air, but only in one of five cases when the cuffs were filled with saline (P < 0.05). The filling of tracheal tube cuffs with saline provides simple, moderately effective partial protection of the cuff of endotracheal tubes during CO2 laser airway surgery.
Extraction du bruit de combustion d'un moteur Diesel. Développement et application d'un spectrofiltre.

Cette these porte sur la validation et l'application d'un spectrofiltre pour separer le bruit de combustion et le bruit mecanique d'un moteur Diesel. Le spectrofiltre est un estimateur de fonction de transfert. Dans le contexte de notre etude, il estime les transferts vibroacoustiques des forces de combustion entre les cylindres du moteur et le point d'ecoute. Le spectrofiltre s'obtient a partir des pressions-cylindre et du bruit rayonne par le moteur. La methode que nous examinons est une application de la theorie de la cyclostationnarite. Elle consiste a calculer le spectrofiltre a partir de la partie aleatoire des signaux. L'interet de cette methode est de fortement reduire une erreur provenant de la coherence entre la combustion et les sources de bruit mecanique. Cette methode est d'abord justifiee sur la base d'arguments theoriques, et formalisee de facon a mettre en evidence ses avantages et ses inconvenients. Elle est ensuite validee par deux experiences numeriques et une experience en conditions reelles. Elle est finalement appliquee a l'etude des transferts vibroacoustiques des forces de combustion, et de la composition du bruit du moteur, relativement au point de fonctionnement (regime, charge, et teneur en GTL du carburant).
Analysis of the Automatic Test Generation Tool: CREST

The CREST is an open source automatic test generation tool for C which based on Common Intermediate Language and Yices. One of its major advantages is that several heuristic search strategies are proposed to test larger programs. The success of CREST should be attributed to static instrumentation, concolic execution, and heuristic search. Thus, it's meaningful for software testing and vulnerability exploitation to analyze this software testing platform. The concolic execution is introduced briefly in the first. Then, the work flow of CREST, instrumentation and the solver is explained. In addition, the key structures used to store symbolic expression and heuristic search strategies are given. By giving examples of executing the single-file and multiple-files program, the execution performance of three common utilities from Busybox is analyzed at last. Through this project, we have learned limitations of CREST. Conclusion and future work provide a sense of direction of concolic execution in software testing.
Soft-Sensor-Based Flow Rate and Specific Energy Estimation of Industrial Variable-Speed-Driven Twin Rotary Screw Compressor

Energy costs are typically the largest cost element in the life-cycle of a compressed-air system (CAS). Real-time usage information as well as historical data can help identify whether the CAS is functioning properly. To this end, modern variable-speed drives are able to provide this information as well as produce soft-sensor estimates of volume flow rate production and specific energy consumption of a CAS. In this paper, an identification (ID) run sequence for a twin rotary screw compressor-operated system is proposed to identify the total system volume, to improve the estimation accuracy of a volume flow rate soft sensor, and to create a specific energy consumption map for the CAS performance monitoring. Laboratory measurements are carried out to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed ID run and related estimations. Moreover, possible usage applications of the proposed methods are discussed.
Modified Ninhydrin Reagent for the Detection of Amino Acids on TLC Paper

Ninhydrin is the most well known spray reagent for identification of amino acids. Spring with Ninhydrin as a non-specific reagent is well-known and widely used for its remarkable high sensitivity. Using Ninhydrin reagent alone to detect amino acid on thin layer chromatography (TLC) paper is not advisable due to its lower sensitivity. A new spray reagent, Stannus chloride solution (SnCl 2 ) has been used to detect amino acids on filter paper (whitman paper 14) and TLC paper, silica Gel, 60 F254 TLC Aluminum Sheet 20 x 20 cm Merck- Germany. Al so, modified TLC pre-staining method was used, which only consisted of 3 steps: spotting, separating and color. The improved method was rapid and inexpensive and the results obtained were clear and reliable. In addition it is suitable for screening different amino acid.
Outcomes and Costs of Post-Acute Care Pathways in Hip Fracture Patients: Implications of Trade-Offs in Resource Allocation

There is a gap in evidence with respect to the delivery of quality post-acute care for hip fracture patients. The primary objective of this thesis is to describe the post-acute care pathways of hip fracture patients and their associated outcomes (i.e., mortality and rehospitalizations) and health system costs. The secondary objective is to explore the use of system dynamics modelling to determine the impact of trade-offs in resource allocation on patient outcomes and health system costs. Population-level administrative databases were used to capture older adults admitted to acute care for hip fracture between 2008 and 2012 in Ontario, Canada. Study one describes the variation in post-acute care pathways for hip fracture patients and concluded that four health regions discharge a relatively higher proportion of patients to inpatient rehabilitation (IPR) compared to the remaining 10 health regions. In study two, patients discharged directly from acute care to the community (i.e., community patients) were matched to patients discharged directly from acute care to IPR (i.e., IPR patients). A substantially higher proportion of community patients died or reiii hospitalized and had substantially lower health system costs compared to their matched IPR counterparts. Results of study three suggest that only 60% of community patients receive post-acute rehabilitation, and of the community patients who do receive it, they have substantially lower rehabilitation intensity and specialists’ visits compared to their matched IPR counterparts, regardless of health region. Study four’s system dynamics model predicts the increased health system costs required to increase the number of hours of home-based rehabilitation to attenuate these differences in re-hospitalizations. Taken together, results suggest that the variations in hip fracture post-acute delivery are pervasive in Ontario and that the impact of this variation on patient outcome may be attenuated through increased allocation of resources to home-based rehabilitation. Results can be used by policymakers, clinicians, and researchers to further improve and understand the post-acute quality of care delivered to hip fracture patients.
Evolution of replication machines

Abstract The machines that decode and regulate genetic information require the translation, transcription and replication pathways essential to all living cells. Thus, it might be expected that all cells share the same basic machinery for these pathways that were inherited from the primordial ancestor cell from which they evolved. A clear example of this is found in the translation machinery that converts RNA sequence to protein. The translation process requires numerous structural and catalytic RNAs and proteins, the central factors of which are homologous in all three domains of life, bacteria, archaea and eukarya. Likewise, the central actor in transcription, RNA polymerase, shows homology among the catalytic subunits in bacteria, archaea and eukarya. In contrast, while some “gears” of the genome replication machinery are homologous in all domains of life, most components of the replication machine appear to be unrelated between bacteria and those of archaea and eukarya. This review will compare and contrast the central proteins of the “replisome” machines that duplicate DNA in bacteria, archaea and eukarya, with an eye to understanding the issues surrounding the evolution of the DNA replication apparatus.
A standard for calibration and shading correction of a fluorescence microscope.

BACKGROUND Numerous applications of fluorescence microscopy require quantitation of signal intensity in reproducible units. Two problems must be overcome to achieve this goal. First, due to various instrumental factors, the same sample imaged on two microscopes or even on the same microscope at different times may produce highly divergent readings. Second, because of shading, some areas within the same field may appear brighter than others despite the same amount of fluorophore. The first type of variability requires calibration using a sample of reproducible fluorescence yield; to correct for shading, a uniform fluorescent field is needed. METHODS Standard slides were prepared by placing several microliters of 10%-50% w/v fluorescein or rhodamine between a coverglass and a slide. They were used to perform shading correction and normalization under a variety of imaging conditions. RESULTS Concentrated fluorophores produced a uniform fluorescent field of moderate and reproducible brightness. By expressing the staining of a biological object in the units of standard slides, identical results were obtained irrespective of the imaging conditions or the microscope used. We compared shading correction based on concentrated fluorescein with two other standards. Concentrated fluorescein resulted in the best equalization of the field. CONCLUSIONS Standardization of fluorescent images can be achieved by normalizing them to the image of a concentrated solution of a fluorophore. Due to its simplicity and efficiency, this method can be used in clinical analysis as well as in routine laboratory practice.
Senior Capstone Design Project 14 : 332 : 418 Open Ears Application Project Members

The Open Ears app is an initiative undertaken with the hopes of providing an easy and affordable way for pedestrians to stay safe as they listen to their music or other types of audio. For a few dollars, any Android user could download the application and instantly experience a higher level of safety with minimal effort. The app doesn’t require any fancy hardware, simply plug in your microphone equipped headphones and go. The app will run in the background and listen to the microphone for you using powerful linear algebra techniques and alert you to any oncoming traffic by muting your music and vibrating your phone. The app has proven very successful in detecting cars with a false positive rate that is higher than desired. In terms of future work, a more rigorous training program for the machine learning portion of the app will make it much more accurate in detecting the difference between a noisy traffic filled environment and direct danger to the pedestrian.
Credit card fraud detection based on transaction behavior

The proliferation of the EMV (Europay-MasterCard-VISA) chip card design in the credit card business mostly resolved the problem posed by the old Magnetic stripe card technology. However, several papers are starting to question the design and implementation of the EMV. This paper is suggesting that a detection model must be available to capture the possible anomalous transactions — a fallback in case the technology will fail. Several classifiers were evaluated during the model creation however only the Random Tree and J48 yielded the highest accuracy value of 94.32% and 93.50% respectively. By thorough analysis of these two (2) classifiers, it shows that the J48 is more fit in understanding the transaction logs data.
Managing the survivor syndrome as scenario planning methodology … and it matters!

PurposeThe importance of foresight is discussed in relation to why traditional scenario planning methodology is problematic at achieving it. The “survivor syndrome” is borrowed from the human resources literature and presented as a metaphor for foresight to illustrate how better “scenarios” can be achieved by understanding the syndrome better. A practice perspective is given on the use of a seven-theme framework as a method of interviewing survivors. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws from an empirical research that took place during the 2008 global financial crisis to illustrate the richness of the insights that would otherwise not be obtainable through scenario planning methods that do not involve “survivors. ” In that research, semi-structured interviews were employed with key personnel at multiple levels of one private and one public organization that had undergone a redundancy process at the time of the crisis to explore its effect on the remaining workforce.FindingsThe “survivor syndrome” itself would be minimized if managers consider the feelings of survivors with more open communication. Survivors in private firms were found generally to experience anxiety, but are more likely to remain more motivated, than their counterparts in the public sector. These detailed insights create more accurate “scenarios” in scenario planning exercises.Originality/valueOrganizational performance can be better enhanced if the survivor syndrome can be better managed. In turn, scenario planning, as a form of organizational foresight, is better practiced through managing the survivor syndrome. Scenario planning methodology has proliferated well in the human resource management literature.