Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Investigation of Coupling Reduction by EBG Surfaces for Quasi-Static RCS Measurement Systems

It is proposed to reduce the E-plane coupling of two horn antennas, a configuration often used for quasi-static radar cross section (RCS) measurements, by means of a printed metallo-dielectric electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) surface of the mushroom type. It is shown by experiments that the performance of the printed EBG surface is superior to that of standard absorbing materials and a corrugated surface of the soft type. The printed EBG surface and the corrugated surface are designed by finite-element method (FEM)-based eigenmode analysis.
Cooperative terrain model acquisition by a team of two or three point-robots

We address the model acquisition problem for an unknown planar polygonal terrain by a team of two or three point robots. The robots are equipped with visual sensors which acquire all visible parts of the terrain by scan operations executed from their locations. The robots communicate with each other via wireless connection. The performance is measured by the number of the sensor (scan) operations. We employ the restricted visibility graph methods an a hierarchical setup. For terrains with convex obstacles and for teams of n (where n=2, 3) robots, we prove that the sensing time is reduced by a factor of 1/n. For terrains with concave corners, the performance of the algorithm for the n(2, 3) robot team is expressed in terms of the sizes of n-connected components, and the sizes and diameters of (n-1) or less connected components.
Deep Reinforcement Learning of Dialogue Policies with Less Weight Updates

Deep reinforcement learning dialogue systems are attractive because they can jointly learn their feature representations and policies without manual feature engineering. But its application is challenging due to slow learning. We propose a two-stage method for accelerating the induction of single or multi-domain dialogue policies. While the first stage reduces the amount of weight updates over time, the second stage uses very limited minibatches (of as much as two learning experiences) sampled from experience replay memories. The former frequently updates the weights of the neural nets at early stages of training, and decreases the amount of updates as training progresses by performing updates during exploration and by skipping updates during exploitation. The learning process is thus accelerated through less weight updates in both stages. An empirical evaluation in three domains (restaurants, hotels and tv guide) confirms that the proposed method trains policies 5 times faster than a baseline without the proposed method. Our findings are useful for training larger-scale neural-based spoken dialogue systems.
Optimal Consumption and Portfolio with Both Fixed and Proportional Transaction Costs

We consider a market model with one risk-free and one risky asset, in which the dynamics of the risky asset are governed by a geometric Brownian motion. In this market we consider an investor who consumes from the bank account and who has the opportunity at any time to transfer funds between the two assets. We suppose that these transfers involve a fixed transaction cost k>0, independent of the size of the transaction, plus a cost proportional to the size of the transaction. The objective is to maximize the cumulative expected utility of consumption over a planning horizon. We formulate this problem as a combined stochastic control/impulse control problem, which in turn leads to a (nonlinear) quasi-variational Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman inequality (QVHJBI). We prove that the value function is the unique viscosity solution of this QVHJBI. Finally, numerical results are presented.
South Africa poised to become a loyalty marketing gem

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the emergence of South Africa as a potential growth market for loyalty marketing strategies. A developing black middle class represents an under‐served market that presents significant opportunities for marketers and entrepreneurs.Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes South Africa's emerging black middle class as a market poised for loyalty growth, based on up to 15 million currently registered loyalty members across a host of programs. Challenges include some deficiencies in technology. Opportunities include prevalent use of mobile telephony and economic growth.Findings – The study suggests that the historically ignored black middle class can double its consumer spending power in short time and drive South African economic growth. The change in status quo presents significant opportunities for loyalty marketers who are still in the discussion stages of recognizing the new potential.Practical implications – Loyalty marketers who are willing to accept the ch.
Product Aspect Identification and Ranking System

Online retail is growing by leaps and bounds. Many retail websites and forum websites contain thousands of customer reviews about various product expressing their opinion on various aspects of product . These reviews are rich in knowledge but are disorganize creating problem in information navigation and knowledge acquisition . to address this problem this paper proposes a system to automatically identify important aspects of products from online reviews . aspect ranking algorithm is proposed using the concept TFIDF associated with occurrence probability of opinionated words for calculation of weight of aspects. This algorithm is experimented using product review dataset to show the effectiveness of the ranking approach. The scope of the proposed system is to organize the consumer review in appropriate way so that the product promotion can be done effectively based on reviews. Use of internet and e-commerce is growing very rapidly. Many products are available online. Most of the retail Websites encourages consumers to write their feedbacks about products to express their opinions on various aspects of the products. This gives rise to huge collection of reviews on web. These reviews contain rich and valuable knowledge and have become an important resource for both consumers and firms. Consumers commonly look for quality information from online reviews before buying a product and firms can use these reviews as feedback for better product development, consumer relationship management and for the development of new marketing strategies. A product may have hundreds of aspects. Some of the product aspects are more important than the others and have strong influence on the eventual consumer's decision making as well as firm's product development strategies. Identification of important product aspects become necessary as both consumers and firms are benefited by this. Consumers can easily make purchasing decision by paying attention to the important aspects as well as firms can focus on improving the quality of these aspects and thus enhance
Tellers into Sellers

Banks in the UK are facing increased competition. As a consequence there is much more emphasis on realising the potential of their extensive branch networks and large numbers of branch staff. One of the effects of these changes is that bank personnel are being placed in proactive marketing roles with the responsibility of cross‐selling a variety of financial services to clients. It is not, however, clear to what extent and how successfully employees are adapting to this new role. Assessment is sought regarding to what extent clerical employees in a UK clearing bank have taken on board this new marketing focus.
Convex LPV synthesis of estimators and feedforwards using integral quadratic constraints

A method is presented for synthesizing output estimators and disturbance feedforward controllers for continuous-time, uncertain, gridded, linear parameter-varying (LPV) systems. Integral quadratic constraints (IQCs) are used to describe the uncertainty. Since gridded LPV systems do not have a valid frequencydomain interpretation, the time-domain, dissipation inequality approach is followed. There are two main contributions. First, a notion of duality is developed for uncertain, gridded LPV systems. Second, convex synthesis conditions are derived for robust output estimators. Together, these two contributions enable the convex synthesis of robust disturbance feedforward controllers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated using a numerical example. Copyright c © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Automatic parapapillary atrophy shape detection and quantification in colour fundus images

Parapapillary atrophy (PPA) in the retina has been associated with eye diseases (e.g. glaucoma) and certain eye conditions (e.g. myopia). However, no computer-aided measuring tool thus far is available to quantify the extent of the PPA. In this paper, a novel approach to automatically segment and quantify the optic disc (OD) and PPA is proposed. The methodology exploits both the red and blue channels of the colour image to maximise information extraction of features (PPA) whilst keeping interference (blood vessels) to a minimum. A combination of several techniques, including scanning filter, thresholding, region growing as well as modified Chan-Vese (C-V) model with a shape constraint is used to segment and quantify the OD and PPA. Our proposed approach is evaluated against the reference boundary drawn by an ophthalmologist. Experimental results show that our method can repeatedly detect both the sizes of the OD and PPA region automatically, and achieved a mean accuracy level of 91.3% and 92.5% in defining the size of the OD and PPA, respectively. Moreover, the correlation coefficient of the ground truth and the results from proposed method is 0.98 for both the PPA and OD.
Complexity science for sleep stage classification from EEG

Automatic sleep stage classification is an important paradigm in computational intelligence and promises considerable advantages to the health care. Most current automated methods require the multiple electroencephalogram (EEG) channels and typically cannot distinguish the S1 sleep stage from EEG. The aim of this study is to revisit automatic sleep stage classification from EEGs using complexity science methods. The proposed method applies fuzzy entropy and permutation entropy as kernels of multi-scale entropy analysis. To account for sleep transition, the preceding and following 30 seconds of epoch data were used for analysis as well as the current epoch. Combining the entropy and spectral edge frequency features extracted from one EEG channel, a multi-class support vector machine (SVM) was able to classify 93.8% of 5 sleep stages for the SleepEDF database [expanded], with the sensitivity of S1 stage was 49.1%. Also, the Kappa's coefficient yielded 0.90, which indicates almost perfect agreement.
Comparison of winding arrangements of a high-speed interior permanent magnet bearingless machine

Bearingless motor is an advantageous choice when a short rotor structure is needed for high-speed applications. Short rotor structure permits higher operational speed without crossing the critical frequencies of the rotor. Effects of the three different winding arrangements are investigated based on rotordynamics, mechanical and electromagnetic analysis. Comparison is done with interior permanent magnet bearingless motor where 4-pole rotor structure is unchanged.
Prospective, randomized inpatient study of oral metronidazole versus oral metronidazole and rifampin for treatment of primary episode of Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea.

BACKGROUND To date, no randomized trial to address the use of adjunctive rifampin in addition to metronidazole for the treatment of Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea has been reported. Rifampin has excellent in vitro activity against C. difficile and penetrates into cellular materials where the organisms may persist. METHODS This was a prospective, randomized, single-blinded study of 39 patients that compared therapy with metronidazole alone versus therapy with metronidazole and rifampin for 10 days to treat laboratory-confirmed primary episode C. difficile-associated diarrhea. Twenty patients were randomly assigned to the metronidazole group, and 19 were randomly assigned to the metronidazole and rifampin group. Data were analyzed by intention-to-treat analysis using the 2-tailed Kaplan-Meier method and the log-rank test. RESULTS Adjunctive rifampin treatment for 10 days, compared with treatment with metronidazole alone for 10 days, was associated with a similar median time to symptom improvement (9.0 days vs. 6.5 days; P=.74), a similar median time to first relapse (26 days vs. 16 days; P=.23), a similar proportion of patients with relapse by study day 40 (42% vs. 38%; P=1.0), and a similar proportion of patients experiencing nonfatal adverse events (37% vs. 40%; P=.55). There were a significantly higher number of deaths in the metronidazole and rifampin group, compared with the metronidazole group (6 of 19 patients vs. 1 of 20 patients; P=.04), but there were fewer laboratory-confirmed relapses by study day 40 (2 vs. 4; P=.66). CONCLUSIONS We conclude that there is no role for routine rifampin as an adjunct to treatment with metronidazole for hospitalized patients with C. difficile-associated diarrhea. The cure rates for both treatment groups remain unacceptably low, and better treatments are urgently needed.
SMEs capital structure determinants during severe economic crisis: The case of Greece

Abstract The objective of this paper was to explore whether and how the main capital structure determinants of SMEs affected capital structure determination in different ways during the years of economic crisis. We used panel data of 8,052 SMEs operating in Greece during 2009–2012. We found that the effect of capital structure determinants on leverage does not change in an environment of economic crisis; larger SMEs continued to show higher debt ratios, the relationship between profitability and tangibility of assets with leverage continued to be negative, and growth was positively related to leverage.
Supply Chain Integration: Cluster Analysis of the Impact of Span of Integration

Purpose – This paper aims to explore whether firms that integrate only with partners adjacent to them in the supply chain exhibit different patterns of supply chain practice and performance than those that also integrate with partners more distant in the supply chain.Design/methodology/approach – Cluster analysis of survey data is used to partition firms based on the span of the supply chain involved in their integration efforts.Findings – Firms with a broad span of integration have a greater focus on alignment with suppliers and customers, and have more of a supply chain focus than those with a narrow span. They also demonstrate higher levels of performance attributable to supply chain relationships.Practical implications – Results highlight the importance to supply chain professionals of taking a broad view of the supply chain rather than focusing only on first tier suppliers and customers. They also suggest the importance of exploring opportunities to facilitate broader participation in supply chain in.
Networking for Policy Advocacy: Identifying Predictors of Advocacy Success Among Human Service Organizations

In previous studies, nonprofit administrators have reported that networking contributes to achieving their organizations’ policy advocacy goals. However, little is known about the relationship between specific networking activities and policy advocacy success. It is also unclear whether commonly reported problems in interorganizational networking inhibit policy advocacy success. This study examined the association between attributes of networking and policy advocacy outcomes. The findings indicate that networking is more successful when communication indicates higher commitment to a two-way partnership. Also, problems with interorganizational collaborations were not found to negatively affect policy advocacy outcomes. Implications for social workers and research are provided.
An Approach to Map COBIT Processes to ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management Controls

Information is a fundamental asset within any organization and the protection of this asset, through a process of information security is of equal importance. COBIT and ISO27001 are as reference frameworks for information security management to help organizations assess their security risks and implement appropriate security controls. One of the most important sections of IT within the COBIT framework is information security management that cover confidentiality, integrity and availability of resources. Since the issues raised in the information security management of COBIT, are the area covered by the ISO/IEC27001 standard, the best option to meet the information security management in COBIT infrastructure, is using of ISO/IEC27001 standard. For coexistence of and complementary use of COBIT and ISO27001, mapping of COBIT processes to ISO/IEC 27001 controls is beneficial. This paper explores the role of information security within COBIT and describes mapping approach of COBIT processes to ISO/IEC27001 controls for information security management.
In situ identification of keratin-hydrolyzing organisms in swine manure inoculated anaerobic digesters.

Feathers, a poultry byproduct, are composed of > 90% keratin which is resistant to degradation during anaerobic digestion. In this study, four 42-L anaerobic digesters inoculated with adapted swine manure were used to investigate feather digestion. Ground feathers were added into two anaerobic digesters for biogas production, whereas another two without feathers were used as negative control. Feather degradation and enhanced methane production were recorded. Keratin-hydrolyzing organisms (KHOs) were visualized in the feather bag fluids after boron-dipyrromethene (BODIPY) fluorescence casein staining. Their abundances correlated (R(2) = 0.96) to feather digestion rates. A 16S rRNA clone library was constructed for the bacterial populations attached to the feather particles. Ninety-three clones (> 1300 bp) were retrieved and 57 (61%) belonged to class Clostridia in the phylum Firmicutes, while 34 (37%) belonged to class Bacteroidia in the phylum Bacteroidetes. Four oligonucleotide FISH probes were designed for the major Clostridia clusters and used with other FISH probes to identify the KHOs. Probe FIMs1029 hybridized with most (> 80%) of the KHOs. Its targeted sequence perfectly matches that possessed by 10 Clostridia 16S rRNA gene clones belonging to a previously uncharacterized new genus closely related to Alkaliphilus in the subfamily Clostridiaceae 2 of family Clostridiaceae.
Micro enterprise owner perspectives on performance: Insights from selected municipalities in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa

Interest in the performance of small, medium and in particular Micro enterprises (MEs) continues to grow around the globe including South Africa fuelled mainly by the notion, that small business development is a critical ingredient for the creation of new employment and for addressing high un-employment rates. There are a range of factors that have been associated with both successful and poor performance among small enterprises in particular Micro enterprises (MEs). However few studies have actually directly consulted with owner/managers about their views on what leads to successful and/or poor performance. This study is instructive in that it utilizes an inductive approach involving mixed methods to identify the key factors that are perceived to be influencing the performance of Micro enterprises (MEs) in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province. Data were obtained via interviews from a purposive sample of 15 ME owners. The effects of themes such as access to funding, white collar crime, government training and other interventions were investigated. Findings show that owners were experiencing serious problems 1) where access to funding was concerned, 2) in dealing with crime 3) due to lack of appropriate education and training 4) as a result of lack of access to government funds and 5) due to stifling government regulations. Overall, the findings point to a general mismatch between government intentions and practices where ME support is concerned thus negatively affecting ME performance in general. Key words:
No effect on cognitive function from daily mobile phone use

The increasing use of mobiles phones (MP) has raised the problem of the effects of daily electromagnetic fields (EMF) exposure on human health. To date several studies have been published concerning the effects of acute MP exposure on psychomotor performances. This study investigated the effects of daily exposure to GSM 900 type MP on cognitive function. Fifty‐five subjects (27 male and 28 female) were divided into two groups: a group with MP switched on and a group with MP switched off. The two groups were matched according to age, gender, and IQ. This double blind study lasted for 45 days and was divided in three periods: baseline (BLP, 2 days), exposure (EP, 27 days), and recovery (RP, 13 days). Subjects were exposed during EP and sham exposed during RP for 2 h/day, 5 days/week. The neuropsychological test battery composed of 22 tasks screened four neuropsychological categories: information processing, attention capacity, memory function, and executive function. This neuropsychological battery was performed four times on day 2 (BLP), day 15 (EP), day 29 (EP), and day 43 (RP). Our results indicate that daily MP use has no effect on cognitive function after a 13‐h rest period. Bioelectromagnetics 26:102–108, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Insects: a protein-rich feed ingredient in pig and poultry diets

The use of insects as a sustainable protein-rich feed ingredient in pig and poultry diets is technically feasible. Insects can turn lowgrade biowaste into proteins. • The amino acid profile of yellow mealworm, common housefly, and black soldier fly is close to the profile of soybean meal with methionine or methionine + cystine, which are generally the most limiting essential amino acids for growing pigs and broilers. Arginine can also become a limiting essential amino acid for broilers fed housefly pupae and mealworm. • Additional research is recommended on digestibility of (processed) insects, inclusion levels in poultry and pig diets, functional properties, safety when using biowaste as a rearing substrate, extraction of nutrients, shelf life, and use of left-over substrates and residue products of insects. • To compete with conventional protein sources and become an interesting link in the animal feed chain to fulfil the globally increasing demand for protein, cost price of insect production and processing should be further reduced.
Access to Physician Services in Public Insurance Programs for LowIncome Populations A Framework for Assessment and Action

Eligibility expansion for low-income children and families under Medicaid and the State Childrenâ€™s Health Insurance Program has improved access to physician care for many, but problems continue to persist. This report provides a framework for states to use in assessing factors that promote or impede physician access, and to identify actions to improve access. It also includes a literature review and examples of applications.