Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Development, implementation and evaluation of youth development programmes to address health risk behaviour among grade 8 to grade 10 learners in selected schools in the Paarl area.

Assessment: Abstracts of all suitable titles identified during the title search were read independently by a pair of reviewers and then evaluated relative to the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the review as well as the PIO. The same method of review was followed with regards to resolving disagreements. Abstracts that satisfied the inclusion criteria were identified for the full text review. Information for all the selected titles was recorded in the abstract summary table (Appendix I). Full Text Assessment: Papers selected for retrieval were assessed by two independent reviewers for methodological rigour using a critical appraisal tool. Assessment of the articles was done independently and then discussed by the two reviewers. Final scores for each item and by extension the article had to be agreed upon by the reviewers. As before, one of the supervisors acted as a control to verify decisions made at all stages of the review process.
Matched Block Detection and Motion Vector Salvage Methods for Fast H.264/AVC Inter Mode Decision

In H.264 advanced video coding (AVC), variable block size motion estimation plays an important role in the compression of inter frames to increase video quality and coding efficiency. However, the computation for inter prediction is also substantially increased as well. This paper proposes a fast inter mode decision algorithm based on matched block detection and motion vector salvage scheme to help to early terminate the decision process to reduce needless computation. Experimental results shows that the proposed algorithm can save from 10% to 60% computation for inter mode decision with fast motion search without introducing any noticeable performance degradation
A HOLISTIC FRAMEWORK FOR USER RECOMMENDATION IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

As social networks grow larger and larger, finding users of interest becomes an increasingly difficult task, making these networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, great scenarios for the application of recommender systems. In this work, we perform an extensive evaluation of content-based, collaborative-based, diffusion-based algorithms for user recommendation. We perform experiments on two real datasets from Twitter. In this work, a new user representation for tf-idf content-based algorithms is proposed. This representation captures the users’ interests more fully, by also taking into account the content posted by the people they follow. Our experiments show that this new representation outperforms the traditional one. We apply state-of-the-art collaborative filtering item recommendation algorithms in our user recommendation scenario. We also introduce and evaluate ProfileRank, a new diffusion-based model for measuring user influence and content relevance. ProfileRank is also applied to the task of user recommendation. Previous research has shown that there is value in combining different recommendation algorithms, as each algorithm has strengths and weaknesses. However, previous works have focused on specific classes of recommendation algorithms, or on naïvely combining different algorithms. In contrast, in this work we present a holistic hybrid framework that simultaneously takes into account content-based, collaborative-based, diffusion-based and user-based information. Our framework learns how to combine different sources of evidence (including the output from other algorithms) from the data itself, by using a Logistic Regression model. Therefore, instead of manually determining the importance of each source, or worse weighting all the sources equally, the appropriate emphasis given to each of the sources in our model comes from the data. Our experiments show that our algorithm outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms for user recommendation.
Assessing the Provision of Nutritional Information on Quick Service Restaurant Menu Item Choices for College Students

This study examines the effect of providing nutritional information on quick service restaurant menus and whether or not this information leads consumers to select healthier food items. A computer-based experiment was conducted in which 273 participants were presented with 3 different versions of a standard quick-service restaurant menu. Providing nutritional information led consumers to choose healthier foods. Nutritional information disclosure on menus had the most significant effect on choices in the burger sandwich category. In addition, individual differences in consumers’ nutritional knowledge, health consciousness, body mass index and gender affected the use of nutritional information in food choices.
The mediating role of communication satisfaction in relational demography – a study in Macao, SAR context

Although demographic diversity has been found to increase interpersonal attraction and trust, some research has suggested that the effect is only temporary. This study investigates the mechanism of relational demography on supervisor satisfaction by examining the mediating role of an underlying attribute – communication satisfaction. The results demonstrate that communication satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between hometown diversity and satisfaction with a supervisor. Hometown diversity acts as a stepping stone to increase satisfaction at the beginning of the relationship. However, in the long run, communication satisfaction, which serves as a deep-level factor, increases satisfaction with supervisor. Implications are discussed.
The Role of Dealers in Providing Interday Liquidity in the Canadian-Dollar Market

Access to information about the future direction of the exchange rate can be extremely valuable in the foreign exchange market. Evidence presented in this article suggests that Canadian dealers are more likely to provide interday liquidity to foreign, rather than Canadian, financial customers, since foreign financial flows can be more informative about future movements in the exchange rate. The author reveals a statistical relationship between the supply of liquidity provided by non-financial firms and that provided by dealing institutions across time, and across markets, and suggests that the relationship between the positions of commercial clients and market-makers, and the role played by dealers in interday liquidity provision, has been understated in the market microstructure literature.
Spatial Patterns and Persistence of Woody Plant Species in Ecological Communities

The role of stochastic effects and seed dispersal limitations in maintaining the diversity of a tree community is investigated by means of a forest growth simulator called TROLL. This simulator makes it possible to investigate impacts on the spatial distribution and the extinction probability of plant species. I present the results of a two‐species competition scenario. Coexistence is found to be possible for competitively dissimilar species, and the criterion for this coexistence is given analytically in the reaction‐diffusion approximation. A higher frequency of tree falls implies a smaller extinction probability of least adapted species. The multispecies model is also investigated. A mathematical quantity—the persistence function—permits measurement of the ability of a species to out compete other species locally. This quantity is compared with the average time to extinction, and it is computed for the TROLL simulator. I interpret the shape of this function in light of available information on the persistence function in simple interacting particle systems. These results indicate an analogy between the dynamics of forest communities and a simple discrete and spatially explicit model, the voter model. The ecological implications of this analogy are discussed and are extended to species‐rich communities.
New Evidence on the Returns to Job Skills

The typical Mincerian wage equation examines wages in relation to the education, potential experience, and other personal characteristics of job incumbents. These characteristics serve as proxies for the job holder’s skill level, but do not indicate what specific skills are being rewarded. A number of recent papers make use of data on occupational skill requirements, which have proven useful for understanding shifts in labor demand (see, for example, David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane 2003; Maarten Goos and Alan Manning 2007) as well as for understanding the relationship between wages and specific job skills (see, for example, Beth Ingram and George Neumann 2006; Autor and Michael Handel 2008). To the extent that the labor market does a good job of matching individuals to jobs for which they are well suited, such analyses can shed new light on how workers’ job skills are valued in the labor market. Studies that focus on job skills generally begin with data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) or another household survey that contains information on the detailed occupation in which people work. Information on required job skills is attached to the survey records according to reported occupation. There is considerable evidence, however, of significant errors in the coding of occupation in household survey data. Wesley Mellow and Hal Sider (1983) find disagreements between the occupation recorded in CPS data compared to that based on information supplied by individuals’ employers for 19 percent of jobs at the major occupation level and 42 percent at the detailed occupation level. Nancy Mathiowetz (1992) reports similar findings for the employees of a large manufacturing firm. Comparisons of aggregate data on the number of jobs in each of 19 broad occupations from the New Evidence on the Returns to Job Skills
Logics of Conversation

Preface Acknowledgements 1. Motivations 2. Semantic models of discourse interpretation 3. Pragmatic models of discourse interpretation 4. The logical form of discourse 5. Building logical forms for discourse 6. The lexicon and discourse structure 7. Discourse relations for dialogue 8. Disputes in dialogue 9. Cognitive modelling 10. Some concluding remarks: A. Objections and replies B. Notation index C. The semantics of DRT D. Glossary of discourse relations E. Summary of discourse update F. Some proofs in the glue logic References Indexes.
Laparoscopic partial nephrectomy techniques: developments and translation.

PURPOSE Laparoscopic partial nephrectomy has recently emerged as a potential surgical option for select renal masses. Several new techniques and devices that may aid in laparoscopic partial nephrectomy are reviewed. MATERIALS AND METHODS I review several techniques studied and/or developed in our laboratory. Each technique was evaluated for effectiveness in the porcine model and is in translation to clinical practice. RESULTS Three techniques are reviewed. A hand assisted approach incorporating renal hilar clamping with hypothermia has proven successful for complex and multifocal lesions. Recent clinical studies, and our laboratory and clinical experience have shown a saline cooled monopolar dissector to be a valuable adjunct. A new and simple technique of achieving rapid hypothermia using a pure laparoscopic approach is described. CONCLUSIONS Laparoscopic partial nephrectomy continues to develop as a standard of care for select renal masses. New devices and techniques will continue to make the procedure safer and reproducible.
Money Talks: A Predictive Model on Crowdfunding Success Using Project Description

Existing research of crowdfunding mainly focuses on the basic properties of the project such as category and goal, the information content of the project, however, is barely studied. By introducing Elaboration Likelihood Model into crowdfunding context and using a large dataset obtained from Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding platform, we study the influence of project descriptions in terms of argument quality and source credibility, and investigate their impacts on funding success. We find information disclosed in project descriptions is associated with funding success. We also examine the practical impacts of project description by using a predictive model. Results show that our model can predict with an accuracy rate of 73% (71% in F-measure), which represents an improvement of 15 percentage points over the baseline model and 4 percentage points over the mainstream model. Overall, our results provide insights to researchers, project owners and backers to better study and use crowdfunding platforms.
Voltage and calcium transients in basal dendrites of the rat prefrontal cortex

Higher cortical functions (perception, cognition, learning and memory) are in large part based on the integration of electrical and calcium signals that takes place in thin dendritic branches of neocortical pyramidal cells (synaptic integration). The mechanisms underlying the synaptic integration in thin basal dendrites are largely unexplored. We use a recently developed technique, multisite voltage–calcium imaging, to compare voltage and calcium transients from multiple locations along individual dendritic branches. Our results reveal characteristic electrical transients (plateau potentials) that trigger and shape dendritic calcium dynamics and calcium distribution during suprathreshold glutamatergic synaptic input. We regularly observed three classes of voltage–calcium interactions occurring simultaneously in three different zones of the same dendritic branch: (1) proximal to the input site, (2) at the input site, and (3) distal to the input site. One hundred micrometers away from the synaptic input site, both proximally and distally, dendritic calcium transients are in tight temporal correlation with the dendritic plateau potential. However, on the same dendrite, at the location of excitatory input, calcium transients outlast local dendritic plateau potentials by severalfold. These Ca2+ plateaus (duration 0.5–2 s) are spatially restricted to the synaptic input site, where they cause a brief down‐regulation of dendritic excitability. Ca2+ plateaus are not mediated by Ca2+ release from intracellular stores, but rather by an NMDA‐dependent small‐amplitude depolarization, which persists after the collapse of the dendritic plateau potential. These unique features of dendritic voltage and calcium distributions may provide distinct zones for simultaneous long‐term (bidirectional) modulation of synaptic contacts along the same basal branch.
Contribution of prosody to the perception of Spanish/Italian accents

Advantage is taken of new technologies, and in particular speech synthesis, to clear up the relative importance of prosody (melody and rhythm) in the identification of a foreign language or accent. The methodology we propose, based on the prosody transplantation paradigm, can be applied to different languages or language varieties. Here, it is applied to Spanish and Italian. We built up a dozen sentences which are spoken in almost the same way in both languages. And we wanted to study what is perceived when the segmental and suprasegmental characteristics of these two languages are crossed. Results obtained with French, Italian and Spanish listeners converge and suggest that prosody plays a greater role than the articulation of phonemes to identify the Spanish/Italian language and accent.
WHEN A PARTNER DIES: LESBIAN WIDOWS

Death of a life partner and the subsequent bereavement are profound experiences for an individual. By far, the majority of bereavement research reported is focused on heterosexual couples, primarily married and often in the later years of life. The purpose of this study was to describe the bereavement experiences of lesbians whose life partners have died. The study used a descriptive, qualitative design informed by feminist scholarship and phenomenology to access the depth of personal experiences, as well as internally interpreted meanings of those experiences, among lesbian widows.
Analysis of Acoustic-to-Articulatory Speech Inversion Across Different Accents and Languages

The focus of this paper is estimating articulatory movements of the tongue and lips from acoustic speech data. While there are several potential applications of such a method in speech therapy and pronunciation training, performance of such acoustic-to-articulatory inversion systems is not very high due to limited availability of simultaneous acoustic and articulatory data, substantial speaker variability, and variable methods of data collection. This paper therefore evaluates the impact of speaker, language and accent variability on the performance of an acoustic-to-articulatory speech inversion system. The articulatory dataset used in this study consists of 21 Dutch English speakers reading Dutch and English words and sentences, and 22 UK English speakers reading English words and sentences. We trained several acoustic-to-articulatory speech inversion systems both based on deep and shallow neural network architectures in order to estimate electromagnetic articulography (EMA) sensor positions, as well as vocal tract variables (TVs). Our results show that with appropriate feature and target normalization, a speaker-independent speech inversion system trained on data from one language is able to estimate sensor positions (or TVs) for the same language correlating at about r = 0 . 53 with the actual sensor positions (or TVs). Cross-language results show a reduced performance of r = 0 . 47 .
A Novel High-Speed and Energy Efficient 10-Transistor Full Adder Design

In this paper, we propose a novel full adder design using as few as ten transistors per bit. Compared with other low-gate-count full adder designs using pass transistor logic, the proposed design features lower operating voltage, higher computing speed and lower energy (power delay product) operation. The design adopts inverter buffered xor/xnor designs to alleviate the threshold voltage loss problem commonly encountered in pass transistor logic design. This problem usually prevents the full adder design from operating in low supply voltage or cascading directly without extra buffering. The proposed design successfully embeds the buffering circuit in the full adder design and the transistor count is minimized. The improved buffering helps the design operate under lower supply voltage compared with existing works. It also enhances the speed performance of the cascaded operation significantly while maintaining the performance edge in energy consumption. For performance comparison, both dc andperformances of the proposed design against various full adder designs are evaluated via extensive HSPICE simulations. The simulation results, based on TSMC 2P4M 0.35-mum process models, indicate that the proposed design has the lowest working Vdd and highest working frequency among all designs using ten transistors. It also features the lowest energy consumption per addition among these designs. In addition, the performance edge of the proposed design in both speed and energy consumption becomes even more significant as the word length of the adder increases
A case study on monitoring polynomial profiles in the automotive industry

In some statistical process control applications, the quality of a process or product can be characterized by a relationship between a response variable and one explanatory variable, which is referred to as profile. We give an example here of a profile that can be described using a polynomial model. This example comes from the automotive industry, where one of the most important quality characteristics of an automobile engine is the relationship between the torque produced by an engine and the engine speed in revolutions per minute. We find for this data set that a second‐order polynomial works well. In addition, we show that there is autocorrelation within each profile, thus an ordinary least‐square method that ignores the autocorrelation is inappropriate. We propose a linear mixed model method as an alternative approach. After the reduction of the data to a series of parameter estimates, we then conduct a step‐by‐step Phase I analysis of the polynomial profiles monitoring using a T2‐based procedure to check the stability of the process and whether or not there are outlying profiles. The remaining profiles are used to form the estimated mean vector and variance–covariance matrix to be used in Phase II studies. Finally, a brief discussion is presented to show how one can use these parameters in Phase II. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Using Private-Public Linkages to Regulate Environmental Conflicts: The Case of International Construction Contracts

The article takes a pluralistic view of the 'trade-environment' conflict by exploring one of the settings of this conflict: the lex constructionis - international construction law. It seeks to unravel the way in which the unique structural-cultural attributes of this legal domain have affected its environmental (in)sensitivity. The article's main argument in that context is that the contractual tradition of the lex constructionis (as manifested in the standard contracts that dominate this field) and its unique institutional structure, have created a culture of ecological indifference. This culture has important practical consequences because of the deep ecological problematic of international construction projects. The article develops an alternative contractual model, which depicts the construction contract as a semi-political mechanism, rather than a private tool. This conceptual change seeks to break the public/private separation that characterizes the contractual discourse in the international construction market. The article explores, further, whether this alternative contractual vision could be realized in practice, and proposes several implementing modules which could further this goal. While the article explores a particular international regime, its methodology and conclusions - in particular, the political-constitutional interpretation of the contract and the critique of the public/private dichotomy (see sections III.3 and III.4) - should be relevant to the regulation of many other (national or international) environmental dilemmas.
Effect of Technology Awareness and Access on the Conservation of Clean Planting Materials of Vegetatively Produced Crops: The Case of Sweetpotato

Efforts to combat vitamin A deficiency in children and pregnant mothers have focused on promotion of nutritionally enhanced food security crops. Such efforts have recently targeted the production and consumption of these crops. The orange-fleshed sweetpotato (OFSP) is one of the most known nutritionally enhanced crops. However, access to quality planting materials of OFSP and most vegetatively propagated crops by farmers remains a major constraint. This study used discrete and count data regression models and data collected from 732 farm households in Tanzania to test the effect of participation on a project designed to break this quality “seed” bottleneck (via technology awareness and targeted access to clean planting materials) on a) the decision to conserve planting materials during dry periods for future planting and b) the number of conservation strategies used by farmers. The study found that participation in such a project increases both the likelihood of conserving quality planting materials and also the number of conservation strategies employed by the farmers. It also found that varietal attributes and the agroecology of the area affect conservation of OFSP planting materials. It concludes that awareness and access to clean sweetpotato planting materials of nutritionally enhanced crops promote farmers’ conservation of own planting materials. The study discusses the policy implications of the findings.