Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sustainable Practices in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Ecuador

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as larger enterprises, generate economic, social, and environmental impacts on their environment. However, in the case of these types of enterprises, the accumulation of these impacts is very significant in the immediate surroundings where they offer their products and services. This discussion is particularly relevant in Ecuador, where 99% of all enterprises are SMEs. The objective of this research is to find out if small and medium-sized enterprises in this country are involved in the adoption of sustainable practices as well as see if there are significant differences in adoption based on size, sector, and age. The methodology used is the performance of a descriptive analysis and regression of the data obtained through a structured questionnaire (indicators of the Ethos Institute of Brazil). Previously, the reliability of the questionnaire was validated through an exploratory factor analysis. The target population consists of 9843 enterprises, obtaining a sample size of 188 valid surveys, which implies a response rate of 2%, representing a sampling error of ±7.08%. The results obtained enabled us to perform a sustainability diagnosis of SMEs in Ecuador, identifying the strengths and weaknesses. The managers have a positive and favourable attitude towards sustainability. The practices considered show a medium-high implementation level of 79.71% in economic sustainability, 82.28% in social sustainability, and 78.14% in environmental sustainability in the enterprises considered in the sample. Although these percentages are significant, there is plenty of scope for improvement.
Magneto-optics of massless Kane fermions: Role of the flat band and unusual Berry phase

HgCdTe at a critical cadmium doping has a bulk dispersion which includes two linear cones meeting at a single point at zero energy, intersecting a nearly flat band, similar to the pseudospin-1 Dirac-Weyl system. In the presence of a finite magnetic field, these bands condense into highly degenerate Landau levels. We have numerically calculated the frequency-dependent magneto-optical and zero-field conductivity of this material using the Kane model. The calculations show good agreement with recent experimental measurements. We discuss the signature of the flat band and the split peaks of the magneto-optics in terms of general pseudospin-s models and propose that the system exhibits a non-{\pi}-quantized Berry phase, found in recent theoretical work.
Inhibitory effect of β-pinene , α-pinene and eugenol on the growth of potential infectious endocarditis causing Gram-positive bacteria

This study was led with the purpose of evaluating the effectiveness of eugenol, β-pinene and α-pinene in inhibiting the growth of potential infectious endocarditis causing gram-positive bacteria. The phytochemicals Minimum Inhibitory Concentration-MIC was determined by solid medium diffusion procedure, while the interference of the MIC values on the bacterial cell viability was performed by viable cells count. Staphylococcus aureus, S. epidermidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and S. pyogenes strains were used as test microorganisms. The assayed phytochemicals showed effectiveness in inhibiting all assayed bacteria strains presenting MIC values between 2.5 and 40 μL/mL. Eugenol showed the lowest MIC values which were between 2.5 and 5 μL/mL for the most bacteria strains. MIC values found to the phytochemicals were able to inhibit the cell viability of S. aureus providing a total elimination of the bacteria inoculum in a maximum time of 24 hours of exposure. These data showed the interesting antibacterial property of the assayed phytochemicals and support their possible and rational use in the antimicrobial therapy. Uniterms
Generalization across Contexts in Unsupervised Computational Creativity

Autonomous computational creativity systems must not only have the ability to generate artifacts, but also to select the best ones on the basis of some assessment of quality (and novelty). Such quality functions are typically directly encoded using domain knowledge or learned through supervised learning algorithms using labeled training data. Here we introduce the notion of unsupervised computational creativity; we speciﬁcally consider the possibility of unsupervised assessment for a given context by generalizing artifact relationships learned across all contexts. A particular approach that uses a knowledge graph for generalizing rules from an inspiration set of artifacts is demonstrated through a detailed example of computational creativity for causal associations in civic life, drawing on an event dataset from political science. Such a system may be used by analysts to help imagine future worlds.
Impact of executive function on efficacy obtaining resources following intimate partner violence

University ofDenver Correspondence DepartmentofPsychology,University ofDenver, 2155SouthRaceStreet,Denver,CO80208 Email:michelle.lee@du.edu Wethank the studypartners, including the DenverDistrictAttorney’sOffice,City Attorney’sOffice,DenverPoliceDepartment VictimAssistanceUnite,DenverDomesticViolenceCoordinatingCouncil, SafeHouseDenver, Project Safeguard,AMEND, and theTriageSteeringCommittee. Thankyou to theTraumatic Stress StudiesGroup. Finally, thankyou to thewomen who trusteduswith their stories. This projectwas fundedbyAwardNo. 2007-WGBX-0002awardedby theNational Instituteof JusticeOfficeof JusticePrograms,U.S.Departmentof Justice. Theopinions, findings, and conclusionsor recommendations expressed in this report are thoseof theauthors anddonotnecessarily reflect thoseof theDepartmentof Justice or theNational Instituteof Justice. Abstract Following intimate partner violence (IPV), women risk losing resources needed to meet their basic needs, such as food and housing. To identify potential points of community intervention, the current study examined the role of executive function (EF) in women’s efficacy to obtain resources following a police-reported physical IPV incident. Participants were 199 women from diverse, urban, and largely lower-income backgrounds. As predicted, greater physical abuse was associated with worse EF performance and worse EF was associated with less efficacy in obtaining resources 1 year later. Greater physical abuse was indirectly related to less efficacy in obtaining resources via EF, evenwhencontrolling for income.Results provide information regarding EF as a potential link in the relationship between IPV and obtaining resources among women of lowerincome backgrounds. In the context of limited resources, preparing community service professionals to useEF-focused interventions (e.g., to structure tasks, repeat instructions) may support women’s efforts to access resources.
Artificial bee colony ( ABC ) algorithm and fuzzy based discriminative binary descriptor for partial duplicate medical image search in health care applications

Objective: To determine the duplicate search of medical images in health care industry to improve treatment and diagnosis of Brain Tumor (BR). Methods: Medical image duplication search was treated in the present work. Fuzzy Sigmoid Kernel (FSK)-Subspace Clustering (SC)-Edge Scale-Invariant Feature Transform algorithm (FSK-SC-ESIFT) algorithm is presented for partial duplicate search of medical images. It contains five major steps such as deblurring, discovery of steady corner points, map extraction, detection of most discriminative bin and subspace clustering. In this research method, the image deblurring is accomplished by utilizing Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. The constant corner point discovery is carried out by Harris Corner (HC) and map extraction is accomplished by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Then FSK Function is used to discover the most discriminative bin selection. SC is presented for quick image
Making the home safer and more secure through visual surveillance

Video surveillance has a direct application in intelligent home automation or domotics (from the Latin word domus, that means “home”, and informatics). In particular, in-house video surveillance can provide good support for people with some difficulties (e.g. elderly or disabled people) living alone and with limited autonomy. A key aspect in video surveillance systems for domotics is that of analyzing behaviours of the monitored people. To accomplish this task, people must be detected and tracked, and their posture must be analyzed in order to model behaviours recognizing abrupt changes in it. Problems related to reliable software solutions are not completely solved, in particular luminance changes, shadows and frequent posture changes must be taken into account. Long-lasting occlusions are common due to the proximity of the cameras and the presence of furniture and doors that can often hide parts of a person’s body. For these reasons, a probabilistic and appearance-based tracking, particularly conceivable for people tracking and posture classification, has been developed. However, despite its effectiveness for long-lasting and large occlusions, this approach tends to fail whenever the person is monitored with multiple cameras and he appears in one of them already occluded. Different views provided by multiple cameras can be exploited to solve occlusions by warping known object appearance into the occluded view. To this aim, this paper describes an approach to posture classification based on projection histograms, reinforced by HMM for assuring temporal coherence of the posture.
Evaluating non-tidal atmospheric products by measuring GRACE K-band range rate residuals

In order to reduce high frequency non-tidal mass changes, while inverting for the Earth’s time-variable gravity fields from the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) measurements, it is usual to apply the Atmospheric and Oceanic De-aliasing (AOD1B) products. However, limitations in these products count as a potential threat to the accuracy of time-variable gravity fields derived from GRACE, as well as its follow-on mission(s). Therefore, in this study, we show to what extent the GRACE-type gravity recovery procedure is sensitive to different non-tidal atmospheric background models. For this, we evaluate the atmospheric parts of the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ)’s AOD1B RL05 and RL06, as well as those computed as a part of the European Space Agency Earth System Model ESA-ESM, and the ITG3D model. These data products employ different atmosphere fields (operational and reanalysis data or their combination) from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) as inputs, and they are also computed by implementing different 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional (2-D or 3-D) integration methods. The accuracy of these products is assessed by comparing the resulting GRACE K-Band Range-Rate (KBRR) residuals computed for time-variable gravity field inversions using each of them separately as a background model. Our investigations during 2006 indicate that: (i) applying ESA-ESM and ITG3D decreases averaged KBRR residuals by 2.8 nm/s and 3.4 nm/s compared to those reduced by the official RL05 products. (ii) Projecting these residuals onto the spatial domain indicates that the improvement covers 78.4% and 78.9% of the globe, respectively. (iii) We find that, compared to ESA-ESM, ITG3D can further reduce the KBRR residuals by 1.8 nm/s at regions of high latitudes, which likely improve the uncertainty of ice mass estimations. Our investigation of the AOD1B RL06 products covers 2006-2010, which indicates the advantage of using the higher temporal sampling, i.e. 3-hourly reanalysis data. Applying the RL06 reduces the averaged KBRR residuals by 44.2 nm/s with respect to the use of the RL05 for gravity field inversion. We, therefore, conclude that the integration method of ITG3D and utilizing reanalysis data with higher (than 6-hourly) temporal sampling rate are beneficial for GRACE-like gravity inversion such as the GRACE Follow-On mission with laser interferometric ranging system.
Adjusting Forest Density Estimates for Surveyor Bias in Historical Tree Surveys

Abstract The U.S. General Land Office surveys, conducted between the late 1700s to early 1900s, provide records of trees prior to widespread European and American colonial settlement. However, potential and documented surveyor bias raises questions about the reliability of historical tree density estimates and other metrics based on density estimated from these records. In this study, we present two complementary approaches to adjust density estimates for possible surveyor bias. We addressed the problem of surveyor bias of density estimates by simulating the effects of (1) rank of selected trees (compared to assuming the nearest trees were selected) and (2) specific surveyor bias in selection of (a) quadrant location, (b) quadrant configuration, (c) azimuth, and (d) combined species and diameter. We then developed regression equations to calculate adjustment quotients for these biases, making the adjustment quotients transferable to any similar datasets. For the rank-based approach, an unvarying rank of 2 (selection of the second nearest tree instead of always the nearest tree) decreased density estimates to about 25 to 45% of the actual density, depending on number of trees per survey point, resulting in corrected density estimates that are 2.2 to 4 times greater than uncorrected density estimates. However, constant selection of the second nearest tree did not occur; varying ranks decreased density estimates to around 55 to 65% of the density, resulting in corrected density estimates about 1.5 to 1.8 times greater than uncorrected values. For the bias-based approach, depending on the specific General Land Office dataset, bias for tree species and diameter alone may decrease density estimates by about 35%. Quadrant configuration and azimuth preference may decrease density estimates by about 15% each. The quadrant location bias has negligible effects on the density estimates. The overall density estimates may be about 35 to 55% of the actual density and correction of the density estimate will approximately double the value. These methods can provide a range of estimates, from low values of uncorrected density to high values of corrected density, about the amount that varying surveyor bias may have decreased density estimates for any areas where bias is detected (i.e., non-random frequencies) in point-centered quarter surveys. Adjustments will increase reliability of historical forest density estimates and their applications for restoration.
Characterization of damaged composite laminates by an optical measurement of the displacement field

The degradation of the elastic properties of composite laminates with intralaminar cracks is caused by reduced stress in the damaged layer which is mainly due to two parameters: the crack opening displacement (COD) and the crack sliding displacement (CSD). In this paper these parameters are measured experimentally providing laminate stiffness reduction models with valuable information for validation of used assumptions and for defining limits of their application. In particular, the displacement field on the edges of a [0/ +704/ −704]s glass fiber/epoxy laminate specimens with multiple intralaminar cracks is studied and the COD and CSD dependence on the applied mechanical load is measured. The specimen full-field displacement measurement is carried out using ESPI (Electronic Speckle Pattern Interferometry). By studying the displacement discontinuities, the crack face displacements were measured. A comparison between the COD and the CSD (for the same crack) is performed.
The Role of Vegetation Structure in Controlling Distributions of Vertebrate Herbivores in Arctic Alaska

ABSTRACT Climate-driven shrub expansion is altering the distribution of animal communities in the Arctic. A better understanding of habitat requirements is needed to accurately predict the response of herbivore communities to shrub expansion. We examined patterns of browsing by moose (Alces alces), snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus), and ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus, L. muta) across the tundra of northern Alaska to determine whether forage requirements explain the distribution of herbivores in this ecosystem. In addition, we examined the potential for competition among these three shrub-dependent species. We recorded shrub characteristics and browsing levels at 59 sites along a 568 km riparian transect spanning from the Brooks Range to the Arctic Coast. Mean shrub height was positively correlated with browsing intensity for all three species (r = 0.40–0.71). The minimum shrub height threshold for hare occurrence (≥87 cm, 95% CI: 67–94) was similar to that for moose (≥81 cm, 95% CI: 65–96), whereas ptarmigan were nearly ubiquitous (≥3 cm, lower 95% CI = 0). Diet overlap among herbivores was nearly complete, with all three species heavily browsing feltleaf willow (Salix alaxensis). Our findings indicate that unlike moose and ptarmigan, forage availability does not appear to control the distribution of snowshoe hares in the Arctic. Resource competition may further affect distribution patterns within this guild as shrub cover continues to expand.
A Simple Solver for the Fractional Laplacian in Multiple Dimensions

We present a simple solver of the fractional Laplacian based on the hypersingular integral representation. Through singularity subtraction, we obtain a regularized integrand that is amenable to the trapezoidal rule with equispaced nodes. The resulting quadrature scheme gives a discrete operator on a regular grid that is translation-invariant and thus can be applied quickly with the fast Fourier transform. For discretizations of problems related to space-fractional diffusion on bounded domains, we observe that the underlying linear system can be efficiently solved via preconditioned Krylov methods with a preconditioner based on the finite-difference (non-fractional) Laplacian. We show numerical results illustrating the error of our simple scheme as well the efficiency of our preconditioning approach, both for the elliptic (steady-state) fractional diffusion problem and the time-dependent problem.
Regulatory Cooperation and Foreign Portfolio Investment

Abstract We investigate the effect of cross-border regulatory cooperation in the enforcement of securities laws on global-mutual-fund portfolio allocations. Our research design exploits a shock to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of foreign firms cross-listed on a US stock exchange around the signing of the Multilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MMoU), a non-binding, information-sharing arrangement between global securities regulators. In signatory countries, foreign investment in US-cross-listed firms increases by $110 billion relative to non-cross-listed firms. The strongest effects are for investors facing greater information asymmetries, those from countries closely linked to the US, and non-US foreign investors, suggesting significant spillover effects from international regulatory cooperation.
ANTIOXIDANT AND MEDICINAL PROPERTIES OF MULBERRY (MORUS SP.): A REVIEW

Mulberry is exclusively used for rearing silkworm due to the presence of unique chemo-factors like morin, β-sitosterol in leaves. Plant is a potential source for curing debilitating diseases. Flavonoids, anthocyanin and alkaloids present in the leaves, bark, root and fruits of mulberry play a pivotal role in containing free radicals and prooxidants generated in the body due to metabolism and phagocytosis. Though oxygen is much imperative for life processes, metabolism imbalance and generation of free radicals are prime reason for causing different ailments. The review reveals the wide range of important Pharmacological uses of mulberry including phytochemical composition, antioxidant, and medicinal properties. Present paper provides concrete evidence on the role of mulberry for antioxidation therapy and management of human diseases.
Artificial saliva in diabetes Type II: A Registry cross over study

Background: Xerostomia is a quite common symptom diabetes Type II. Objective: To evaluate the activity of an artificial saliva spray (AS) in patients with diabetes Type II presenting xerostomia Methods: Registry crossover study in 16 cases comparing AS with Tonimer throat (TT). Patients were following a three-day treatment with each product (3 times/ day). A period of three days washes out was followed between the two arms of the crossover. The symptoms under investigation were xerostomia (main variable measured with a ordinal scale from 0 to 6), stimulated salivary flow, and soluble antioxidant test (SAT) in saliva. At the end of the experience the patients were asked which treatment was considered the best. Results: The AS was reducing xerostomia from 4.2 ± 0.83 to 1.7 ± 0.6 (ANOVA p< 0.001) and SAT from 3290 ± 505.3 to 2496 ± 285.2 μmol/L whereas using TT the respective values were almost identical to the baseline values. The patrients expressed a clear preference with 97% in favor of AS. Conclusion: In patients with diabetes type II AS is reducing the xerostomia and the inflammation of the oral tissue. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT03452085 ID IAPSSAPP Correspondence to: Umberto Cornelli, MD, PhD, Piazza Novelli 520129 MilanItaly, Tel: 3902714904; Email: ucornelli@gmail.com
Harnessing NLG to Create Finnish Poetry Automatically

This paper presents a new, NLG based approach to poetry generation in Finnish for use as a part of a bigger Poem Machine system the objective of which is to provide a platform for human computer co-creativity. The approach divides generation into a linguistically solid system for producing grammatical Finnish and higher level systems for producing a poem structure and choosing the lexical items used in the poems. An automatically extracted open-access semantic repository tailored for poem generation is developed for the system. Finally, the resulting poems are evaluated and compared with the state of the art in Finnish poem generation.
Secondary Offerings of State Owned Incorporations

This study focuses on the effect of the secondary public offerings of shares by state owned corporations. Extending the views of Megginson and Netter (2001), we investigate whether there is a change in the behavior of excess returns representing the news effect between the state and private firms’ offerings of stocks. We use a modified event study framework to calculate the cumulative average abnormal returns pre and after periods of the date of issues. Data consists of related issues in the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) between June 1997 and March 2006. We conclude that, the significant differentiation in the pattern of the cumulative average returns before and after the issue indicates asymmetry regarding the information perception by the investor side. Furthermore, contrary to the expected uniformity for all issues under ideal market conditions, the existence of such asymmetry would enlighten a differentiation with respect to the goal of the issue.