Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Experience of Female Administrators at a Private, Kenyan University

The ability of women to achieve leadership positions is often constricted in comparison to males, especially within higher education. Although these limitations exist as a global phenomenon, they are a reality specifically within African higher education (Arnfred & Afrikainstituet, 2004). Some women break through barriers such as cultural traditions and enter into leadership, but numbers remain uneven between male and female managers (Burn, 2005). Much can be learned from the experiences of the women who achieve managerial positions within higher education. Currently, literature exists on women serving in the public academic world, but little to no research exists on female administrators in the private, faith-based universities (Cubillo & Brown, 2003; Thaver, 2008). In hopes of addressing this issue by using a phenomenological, qualitative research method, this study reports on the experiences of women serving on the management board of a private, Kenyan institution. The study found that though women have an overall positive experience, the expectations upon them are too high and make it difficult to progress into higher administration. Participants also discussed their personality and strengths playing a huge role in their success. The participants offer advice through their stories as encouragement to others who will follow in their footsteps.
Economic and geographic drivers of wildlife consumption in rural Africa

The harvest of wildlife for human consumption is valued at several billion dollars annually and provides an essential source of meat for hundreds of millions of rural people living in poverty. This harvest is also considered among the greatest threats to biodiversity throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Economic development is often proposed as an essential first step to win–win solutions for poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation by breaking rural reliance on wildlife. However, increases in wealth may accelerate consumption and extend the scale and efficiency of wildlife harvest. Our ability to assess the likelihood of these two contrasting outcomes and to design approaches that simultaneously consider poverty and biodiversity loss is impeded by a weak understanding of the direction and shape of their interaction. Here, we present results of economic and wildlife use surveys conducted in 2,000 households from 96 settlements in Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Madagascar. We examine the individual and interactive roles of wealth, relative food prices, market access, and opportunity costs of time spent hunting on household rates of wildlife consumption. Despite great differences in biogeographic, social, and economic aspects of our study sites, we found a consistent relationship between wealth and wildlife consumption. Wealthier households consume more bushmeat in settlements nearer urban areas, but the opposite pattern is observed in more isolated settlements. Wildlife hunting and consumption increase when alternative livelihoods collapse, but this safety net is an option only for those people living near harvestable wildlife.
Student Perceptions on Service Quality of Higher Education: An Empirical Study

Educational literatures suggest that there is mounting pressure from customers of higher education to close the gap between their expectation of institutional performance and the actual performance (Widrick et al., 2002; Pariseau and Mc Daniel, 1997; Shank et al., 1995). Therefore, it is imperative that higher educations actively monitor the quality of their service. This study deals with measuring the service quality in higher education. The service quality of higher education in this research is defined as the difference between perception of performance and expectation of higher education. The instrument from Shank et al. (1995) was used in this study. The questionnaires were sent to students from some big universities in Jakarta. The t test was used to analysis the data
Non-homogeneous Conditional Random Fields for Contextual Image Segmentation

We propose a non-homogeneous conditional random field (CRF) built over an adjacency graph of superpixels for contextual region grouping. Our model includes spatially dependent potentials that capture contextual interactions of the data as well as the labels. Both superpixels and segments are described with local statistics which take into account their contexts in the image. This results the non-homogeneity of the fields which improves the region grouping process of natural images. In our energy formulation, the similarity is measured by a likelihood ratio learned from a human labeled ground truth. The inference is performed using a cluster sampling method, the Swendsen-Wang cut algorithm. Results are shown on various natural images.
Revenue Maximization and Contract Enforcement through Representative Bidding in Ad Auctions

Online advertising has become a tremendous business, and continues to grow rapidly. There are mainly two ways to distribute ads in online advertising: contracts and auctions. Previous researches usually focus on ad allocation through either contracts or auctions, while the problem of allocating ads simultaneously through both methods has not been carefully addressed. Jointly considering these two methods enables the publisher to globally allocates ads in a more efficient way, conforming to the actual needs of online advertising, but rises several critical challenges that cannot be solved by existing approaches. Our work aims to fill this gap and takes a deep investigation into this problem. In this paper, we consider the revenue maximization problem in online advertising, where the publisher sells ads to advertisers and also needs to satisfy the demands of the contracts. We discuss and tackle the emerged challenges based on a more practical contract model, and propose a bidding strategy for the publisher to satisfy the contract and maximize her total revenue. Our evaluation results demonstrate the good performance of our algorithm in fulfilling the contract and maximizing the revenue.
Compact Substrate Integrated Waveguide Multiband Band Pass Filter using Octagonal Complementary Split Ring Resonators

Transmission line structure based on substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) loaded with new structure of octagonal complementary split ring resonator (CSRR) has been proposed. The SIW loaded CSRR pair is used in dual/quad octagonal structure to design dual band pass filter (single and double pole) with improved performance characteristics. The proposed band pass filter (BPF) yields two passbands (3.824.39) GHz (566 MHz) and (6.18-6.31) GHz (123MHz) with center frequency at 3.97 GHz and 6.2 GHz respectively. The simulated results are in good agreement with measured result. The results obtained by proposed filter are compared with others as reported in literature. It can be seen that the performance parameters such as bandwidth and insertion loss are improved by 14.27%, 0.7dB in first pass band and 2%, 2 dB in a second pass band respectively with transmission zero 5.57 GHz at stopband. The proposed filter structure leads to chronological minimization in size, low cost and quality factor obtained is 153. The proposed filter can be used in Cband of microwave link and easily integrated with other circuits.
Estimation of Solar Radiation from Measured Temperatures at Different Time Scales in Chongqing

Solar radiation (Rs), a critical variable in eco-environmental models, is not measured at many meteorological stations. Prediction of Rs has drawn increasing attention in the recent years. The aim of the present research was to conduct a comparative study of estimating Rs from measured maximum and minimum temperature and dew point temperature at daily, five-day, ten-day, monthly time scales. Coefficient of determination (r2), RMSE (root mean square error), and d-index were used to compare the goodness of fit of all the models at different time scales. The rank of goodness of fit of all models at time scales was: daily < five-day < ten-day < monthly. In terms of RMSE and d-index, the newly developed model which contained all variables performed best at all time scales and could be a general radiation estimation model.
The Worldwide Shift of FDI to Services- How does it Impact Asia? New Evidence from Seventeen Asian Economies

The productivity spillovers of industry-level FDI on both, the sector of manufacturing and the sector of services, in seventeen South and East Asian economies. Using a dynamic panel GMM methodology, we find significant productivity spillovers by several industry-level FDI: mining FDI and some specific services FDI flows, such as financial services, trade, as well as transport and communications FDI. Services FDI has a two-fold effect on the economy. While having a positive impact on services growth, some services FDI inflows have a negative effect on manufacturing growth. At the same time manufacturing FDI has an impact only on its own sector. [FGKS Research Paper].
Nouvelles approches pour la portabilité, la non-intrusivité et l'accessibilité des interfaces de manipulation 3D. (New approaches for the portability, non-intrusiveness and accessibility of 3D manipulation interfaces)

Ce travail porte sur l'interaction avec des objets virtuels 3D, et plus particulierement leur manipulation : selection, translation et rotation. Les plates-formes les plus utilisees aujourd'hui pour ce type de tâche (ordinateur personnel et appareil mobile) ont ete concues avant tout pour l'interaction 2D, et sont donc peu adaptees a la manipulation 3D. Il existe pourtant une alternative plus efficace : les systemes de realite virtuelle. Cependant, les systemes actuellement disponibles restent trop souvent encombrants, onereux et/ou intrusifs pour l'utilisateur, et demeurent sous-utilises pour cette raison. Dans cette these, nous etudions de nouvelles approches pour rendre ce type d'interaction moins contraignant, tout en conservant une bonne efficacite de manipulation. Les principaux axes explores sont la portabilite de l'interface, sa non-intrusivite, et l'utilisation de dispositifs plus largement accessibles au grand public. Nous proposons une premiere approche visant a repondre simultanement aux criteres ci-dessus. Celle-ci consiste a combiner un appareil mobile classique (pour sa portabilite et son accessibilite) avec des objets tangibles passifs (pour une manipulation 3D efficace et non-intrusive). Cette approche presente toutefois encore certaines contraintes : elle est constituee de multiples elements qui doivent etre transportes ensemble, et elle ne se prete pas a l'utilisation de dispositifs a retour de force. Nous introduisons donc dans un deuxieme temps une nouvelle technique, appelee «decouplage». Basee sur le principe du «pseudo-haptique», celle-ci permet a l'utilisateur de percevoir des forces virtuelles a travers la seule modalite visuelle. Il devient alors possible de se passer completement de dispositifs haptiques, et des contraintes qui leur sont associees. Nous nous interessons ensuite a une approche entierement integree, visant a ameliorer la portabilite par-rapport a une interface faite d'elements separes. Cette approche consiste a se servir des deplacements de l'appareil mobile lui-meme dans l'espace reel pour manipuler des objets 3D affiches sur son propre ecran. Cette configuration «localement couplee» presente cependant plusieurs particularites qui rendent la manipulation plus complexe. Nous examinons donc en detail les differentes questions que pose cette configuration specifique. Nous proposons enfin une derniere approche, appelee le «volume tangible», visant a retrouver la simplicite de la manipulation par objets tangibles mais dans un unique dispositif integre. Nous decrivons une premiere implementation de ce dispositif, et discutons de sa faisabilite technique ainsi que de l'accessibilite de cette approche a court et moyen terme.
Effect of dysphasia and spatial distortion on Wechsler-Bellevue results.

Psychological testing of patients with complaints resulting in admission to neurology and neurological surgery services frequently reveals striking deficiencies in fundamental abilities. In a group of 221 patients with verified brain damage, 64 (29%) showed an inability to copy a Greek cross without clear error or distortion. Forty-seven (21%) of the group showed definite evidence of dysphasia. Twenty-one of these patients showed both of these deficits. Since disabilities of these types are usually easily detected and demonstrated without detailed or time-consuming testing, it seemed of value to inquire regarding the possibility of their more general significance with respect to psychological test results. Material and Methods In composing the groups for comparative study the first step was to select all patients who gave evidence of dysphasia or who had any difficulty in copying a Greek cross. The Halstead-Wepman Aphasia Screening Test had been administered to each patient routinely and was used
More on Fiscal Transparency: Measuring Citizens' Capability of Effective Control over Public Budget

This paper proposes an index aimed at measuring citizens’ possibility of effective control over the public budget. An effective public finance monitoring power results, first of all, from the availability of clear information about the public budget content and from institutional arrangements that allow citizens’ involvement in budget oversight. Our index is built using selected data from the Open Budget Initiative dataset and Non Linear Principal Component Analysis. Our analysis shows that countries differ widely in their levels of citizens’ capability of effective control over public budget and that socio-economic and institutional characteristics can explain at least part of this variability. We conclude by suggesting how to redesign the international framework of norms and codes of fiscal transparency in order to include the pivotal issue of effective citizens’ control on fiscal data.
RoboWeedSupport - Presentation of a cloud based system bridging the gap between in-field weed inspections and decision support systems

In order to exploit potentials of 20–40% reduction of herbicide use, as documented by use of Decision Support Systems (DSS), where requirements for manual field inspection constitute a major obstacle, large numbers of digital pictures of weed infestations have been collected and analysed manually by crop advisors. Results were transferred to: 1) DSS, which determined needs for control and connected, optimized options for control returned options for control and 2) convolutional, neural networks, which in this way were trained to enable automatic analysis of future pictures, which support both field- and site-specific integrated weed management.
Implementing orthogonal binary overlay on a pulse train using frequency modulation

As reported recently, overlaying orthogonal phase coding on any coherent train of identical radar pulses, removes most of the autocorrelation near sidelobes and lowers the recurrent lobes. The present work shows that both properties are maintained when a binary orthogonal overlay is replaced by its "derivative phase" (DP) frequency modulation (FM) equivalent. Frequency modulated overlay is more spectrum efficient and would be easier to implement when the original pulses are already frequency modulated.
Treatment with ibritumomab tiuxetan radioimmunotherapy in patients with rituximab-refractory follicular non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

PURPOSE Rituximab is commonly used as a single agent or in combination therapy for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Ibritumomab tiuxetan radioimmunotherapy targets the same antigen as rituximab and has demonstrated efficacy in rituximab-naïve NHL. This study evaluated ibritumomab tiuxetan in the treatment of rituximab-refractory follicular NHL. PATIENTS AND METHODS Eligible patients were refractory to rituximab; this was defined as no objective response to rituximab (375 mg/m(2) weekly for 4 weeks) or time to progression (TTP) of < or = 6 months. The ibritumomab tiuxetan treatment regimen consisted of pretreatment with rituximab (250 mg/m(2) intravenously on days 1 and 8) to deplete peripheral blood B cells, then yttrium-90 ibritumomab tiuxetan (0.4 mCi/kg; maximum, 32 mCi) intravenously on day 8, administered on an outpatient basis. An imaging/dosimetry dose of indium-111 ibritumomab tiuxetan (5 mCi) was injected after rituximab (day 1) in 28 patients. RESULTS Fifty-seven patients were treated. The median age was 54 years, 74% had tumors > or = 5 cm, and all were extensively pretreated (median, four prior therapies; range, one to nine). The estimated radiation-absorbed doses to healthy organs were below the study-defined limit in all patients studied with dosimetry. The overall response rate for the 54 patients with follicular NHL was 74% (15% complete responses and 59% partial responses). The Kaplan-Meier-estimated TTP was 6.8 months (range, 1.1 to > or = 25.9 months) for all patients and 8.7 months for responders. Adverse events were primarily hematologic; the incidence of grade 4 neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, and anemia was 35%, 9%, and 4%, respectively. CONCLUSION Ibritumomab tiuxetan radioimmunotherapy is effective in rituximab-refractory patients. The only significant toxicity is hematologic.
Polymorphic-Torus Network

An interconnection network is presented for a massively parallel fine-grained single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) system, called the polymorphic-torus, whose design goal is to provide high communication bandwidth under a packaging constraint. This goal is achieved by the polymorphic principle, which injects switches with circuit-switching capability into every node of a base network (e.g. a two-dimensional torus). The polymorphic approach maintains wiring complexity of the base network but effectively increases the communication bandwidth due to its flexibility in reconfiguring the switches individually and dynamically to match the algorithm graph. Formal analysis on interpackage wiring (the flux) and the intrapackage wiring (the fluid) is given for the polymorphic-torus and the related torus networks. Three algorithms, namely, the Boolean, the max/min, and the sum operations, are developed to illustrate the use of the polymorphic principle in enhancing the communication bandwidth with no penalty of the interpackage wiring complexity. >
ICT support for gift giving

Gift giving has far deeper societal, sociological, and psychological implications than people are generally aware of. It can work in both positive and negative ways – building and strengthening or weakening and breaking social ties, imposing identity images on both the givers and the recipients. Gifts are also important from a consumer and marketing perspective, and tend to cause their seekers anxiety in many ways. To counter the difficulties in the gift giving process it is important to record information about important dates, recipients, given and received gifts, as well as new plans. Many tools are already being used to help keep track of gift giving, and these range from simple pen-and-paper solutions to productivity applications like note-taking tools and spreadsheets. The purpose of this thesis is to explore gift giving behaviour and make use of the Technology Acceptance Model to triangulate requirements for a gift giving support application, as well as offer a list of possible design contributions to meet each requirement. These results can then be utilised in future research to design and produce an actual gift giving support application, that will meet the needs of both gift givers and recipients.
What Are Agriculture Industry Professionals Trying to Tell Us? Implications for University-Level Agricultural Communications Curricula

Two recent activities have solicited the input of professionals on the future of agricultural communications within the agriculture industry. This paper reexamines these industry-based information and research activities for potential themes that could impact the current and future direction of communications-related activities within the agriculture profession. A reexamination of the outcomes of these two activities may provide insight and guidance for curricular and degree changes being considered by university-level agricultural communications educators. The four themes identified and discussed in this article are as follows: (a) the rapidly changing communication needs, wants, and expectations of the agriculture industry; (b) the new stakeholders of agricultural communications activities and products, and their diverse communication needs, wants, and preferences; (c) the shortened response time for communication-related activities; and (d) the increasing importance of the image of the agriculture industry and agricultural communications professionals. The themes that have emerged from industry through this study underscore the importance of researching the employee needs of the 21st century agriculturalist and agricultural communicator. These results may also positively influence university-level curricula and degree programs both within and outside of agricultural communications. This research is available in Journal of Applied Communications: https://newprairiepress.org/jac/vol90/iss3/5
Impact of Brand Knowledge on Brand Trust in Private Higher Education Institutions: How Do Word of Mouth Sources Intervene?

Private higher education institutions (PHEIs) in Malaysia are facing intensive competition that poses considerable challenges for them, especially the upcoming private universities. Many are struggling to maintain their presence or locate their positions in the market. Past studies suggest that this issue could be dealt with by increasing the enrolment of students. This is highly possible by the dissemination of positive word-of-mouth (WOM) sources that greatly enhance students’ existing knowledge of a particular PHEI and the resulting trust. This study examines the moderation impact of WOM influences on the relationship between brand knowledge and brand trust of PHEIs. Person-administered survey was carried out among 230 randomly selected students of PHEIs in the Klang Valley, Malaysia. Good Cronbach Alpha scores obtained and a stringent validity procedure adopted have demonstrated accuracy of the instrument used in this study. This study discovered that the inclusion of influences from WOM sources has significantly heightened the impact of brand knowledge towards brand trust of PHEIs. PHEIs are recommended to capitalize on the potential of effective branding and the management of WOM sources in order to improve student enrolment.
Risks that are “Worthy” to take: Temporary Workers’ Risk-Benefit Perceptions

In order to deepen and broaden understanding on the occupational safety and health disparities between temporary and non-temporary workers, psychological and perceptual gaps between the two groups need to be carefully investigated, particularly in relation to risk taking behaviors. To this end, the present study showed the precarious nature of temporary employment in terms of perceived job security and perceived job control. Although the present study showed that risk perception is not significantly different across the temporary and non-temporary worker groups, temporary workers tended to perceive higher monetary benefits from potentially hazardous working opportunities and reported greater willingness to undertake the working opportunities than non-temporary workers. Temporary workers may be more likely to view the working opportunities in hazardous occupational settings as risks that are worthy to take. These findings need to be incorporated in the safety management of temporary workers to promote self-regulatory engagement in safer and healthier behaviors.