Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spreadsheet Proficiency: Which Spreadsheet Skills Are Important?

Many academic studies and industry reports have stressed the need for workers to be proficient in spreadsheets. As spreadsheets have hundreds of functions and features, it is useful to know which particular spreadsheet skills are important. Unfortunately, there are few studies that determine the relative importance of specific spreadsheet skills. This research examines, in general as well as in specifics, the importance of spreadsheet skills for accountants. It also determines the knowledge new accountants have regarding detailed spreadsheet skills. The results of this study found that: (1) Recruitment advertisements mentioned the need for Excel proficiency almost 50 percent of the time; (2) The top three spreadsheet skills perceived as important among practicing accountants are ‘Lookup and Pivot Table’, ‘Data entry, format and calculations’, and ‘Logic’; and (3) The top three spreadsheet skills that newly hired accountants are knowledgeable are ‘Data entry, format and calculations’, ‘Charting’, and ‘Logic’. The results obtained in this study suggest that aspiring accountants should include ‘Lookup and Pivot Table’ as part of their portfolio of spreadsheet skills. These results also provide useful knowledge for accountants, employers, and educators in aiding their communications regarding spreadsheets proficiency.
Unambiguous and precise correlation receiver for binary offset carrier modulated signal

The binary offset carrier (BOC) modulated signal can improve the positioning accuracy and increase the multipath resistance in global navigation satellite system (GNSS), and it may cause potential ambiguity in the process of signal acquisition and code tracking. In this paper, a simple but efficient unambiguous receiver is firstly proposed for multiple side‐peaks mitigation by implementing correlation of the received BOC signal with local sine wave instead of square wave used at the transmitter. Moreover, the potential degradation of sharpness of the nonlinear correlation induced by the sine wave is well compensated by optimizing the early‐to‐late spacing. The other reason leading to ambiguity is the multipath propagation, so we further propose a maximum likelihood (ML) estimator with Newton iteration method, where the received GNSS signal is modeled via the line‐of‐sight (LOS) component and the first‐arrived non‐line‐of‐sight (NLOS) component. Finally, the analytical expression of multipath propagation Cramer‐Rao bound is derived for the designed ML estimator. Simulation results indicate that compared with the conventional BOC modulation, the proposed sine wave receiver can achieve unambiguous and more precise code tracking performance and thus turns out to be more robust to multipath propagation.
Optimizing of Pretreatment Process of Electroless Ni-P Plating on Aluminum Substrate

In order to improve and simplify the process of electroless Ni-P plating on aluminum substrate, a activated solution and process were optimized by orthogonal test, the plating morphology were analysed using Quanta 200 type scanning electron microscope. The bond between the plating and aluminum substrate were evaluated using method of water quenching and alternating bending test. The results show that good coating can be obtained on aluminum substrate under the normal condition of the acid electroless Ni-P plating solution with sulfuric acid of 120g/L and nitric acid of 10-15g/L as activated solution and activated time of 20 min. And the good bond between the plating and aluminum substrate was obtained.
Secure Routing Protocol with Unobservable Identity for MANET

— Two issues plays the critical role for the Mobile ad hoc network i.e Privacy and Routing. Stronger privacy is needed for mobile ad hoc networks. An unobservable secure on demand routing protocol used to provide complete unlinkability and unobservablitiy for all packets. It uses the combination of ID based encryption and Group signature for route discovery. USOR protocol help attacker to break cipher using repetitions. The objective of work is to develop a secure routing protocol scheme with hashing in session authentication. By implementing a USOR protocol using advanced hashing technique in NS2. USOR provides security against both inside and outside attackers.
Clinical assessment of factors associated with subacromial shoulder impingement: a systematic review

Background: Physiotherapists commonly use orthopaedic special tests to reproduce subacromial shoulder impingement (SIS) pain by increasing compression or tension within the subacromial space. However, these tests do not differentiate between purported extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms associated with SIS. Objective: To identify, and determine the reliability and validity of clinical tests used to assess extrinsic factors associated with SIS. Method: A scoping review identified tests for extrinsic SIS. A systematic approach was then used to search six electronic databases in July 2016 to identify clinical tests used to measure (1) posterior shoulder range, (2) cervical and/or thoracic posture, (3) 2D scapula movement, (4) rotator cuff strength. The 14 articles included in the review were assessed using a modified Downs and Black quality assessment tool. Results: Moderate quality studies investigated 2D scapula measurements (N = 2), resting pectoralis minor length (N = 2) and rotator cuff strength (N = 5). High quality studies measured forward head position and/or thoracic posture (N = 2) and rotator cuff strength (N = 1). Conclusion: A good level of assessment reliability and significantly less range and strength was identified in those with SIS for: posterior shoulder range (passive shoulder adduction and internal rotation and passive internal rotation in supine); isokinetic peak torque values for internal and external shoulder rotation (isokinetic testing); forward head position (lateral photograph) and thoracic range of motion (tape measure or ultrasound tomography). Good to excellent reliability was reported for lateral scapular slide test positions and resting pectoralis minor muscle length. These clinical tests should be considered for use in SIS assessment.
THE EFFECT OF SUBMESO MOTIONS ON SECOND-ORDER MOMENT BUDGETS IN THE STABLE ATMOSPHERIC BOUNDARY LAYER

The effect of submeso motions on small-scale turbulence is studied considering the budget of the vertical flux of stream-wise momentum, 〈uw〉, in the atmospheric stable boundary layer (SBL). A parameter expressing the strength of the submeso effect is defined, and the budget is evaluated from observations both for small and large submeso effect. It results that submeso motions affect the efficiency of the vertical transport by small-scale turbulence, having implications on the terms composing the momentum flux budget and on its corresponding
On the Irrationality of Being in Two Minds

This article presents a general framework that allows irrational decision making to be theoretically investigated and simulated. Rationality in human decision making under uncertainty is normatively prescribed by the axioms of probability theory in order to maximize utility. However, substantial literature from psychology and cognitive science shows that human decisions regularly deviate from these axioms. Bistable probabilities are proposed as a principled and straight forward means for modeling (ir)rational decision making, which occurs when a decision maker is in “two minds”. We show that bistable probabilities can be formalized by positive-operator-valued projections in quantum mechanics. We found that (1) irrational decision making necessarily involves a wider spectrum of causal relationships than rational decision making, (2) the accessible information turns out to be greater in irrational decision making when compared to rational decision making, and (3) irrational decision making is quantum-like because it violates the Bell–Wigner polytope.
Clinical presentation of tubal ectopic pregnancy

It is the most important cause of maternal mortality and morbidity in first trimester. Diagnosis requires a high index of suspicion as the classic triad of amenorrhea, abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding is not seen in majority of cases. Women may present with nonspecific symptoms, unaware of ongoing pregnancy or may even present with hemodynamic shock. The contribution of ectopic pregnancy to maternal mortality in developing countries including India is not presently known, with data from few studies indicating 3.5-7.1% maternal deaths due to ectopic pregnancy.
Will You Ever Trust the Review Website Again? The Importance of Source Credibility

ABSTRACT Online product reviews provide vital information to help customers with their purchase decisions. It is therefore critical for administrators of online review websites to ensure the credibility of their sites. Most studies have focused on customers’ perceptions of the source credibility of online review websites before the customers make a purchase. However, the studies have ignored the fact that purchase decision outcomes (i.e., product performance) may also influence the perceived credibility of the source. We address this research gap by considering the perception of source credibility in both the prepurchase and postpurchase phases. We draw upon source credibility theory to define the concept of incongruous source credibility (ISC) in the context of online review websites. This concept is based on a customer’s mental comparison of prepurchase versus postpurchase perceptions of source credibility. Three experimental studies were conducted to investigate the impact of ISC on customers’ revisiting intention and positive word of mouth. The studies explored the moderating effects of message valence and review sidedness as well as the mediating effects of disappointment and satisfaction. The results show that the consistency or inconsistency between the online review and product performance can lead customers to reconsider their judgments of the credibility of online review websites. The results also show that ISC affects both revisiting intention and positive word of mouth for such sites. The findings contribute to research on source credibility and online review websites, suggesting that practitioners managing these sites should consider customers’ ISC.
How Effective Public Managers Tranform Separation of Powers into “Inseparable Powers“ in Foster Care Administration Networks

Results from a four state foster care administration field research study with over 55 key player interviews produced data on what particular networking practices public managers perform that contributes to foster care administration effectiveness. One of these practices was the concept of inseparable powers, whereby the traditional checks and balances roles of the judicial, executive, and legislative branches are slightly altered in eras of state-level foster care administration effectiveness. During a period of inseparable powers, effective public managers work across the state branch boundaries with partners from other branches to produce better foster care outcomes.
Computer Vision and Image Understanding

The paper studies the image fusion from multiple images taken by hand-held cameras with different exposures. Existing methods often generate unsatisfactory results, such as blurring/ghosting artifacts due to the problematic handling of camera motions, dynamic contents, and inappropriately fusion of local regions (e.g., over or under exposed). In addition, they often require a high-quality image registration, which is hard to achieve in scenarios with large depth variations and dynamic textures, and is also time-consuming. In this paper, we propose to enable a rough registration by a single homography and combine the inputs seamlessly to hide any possible misalignment. Specifically, the method first uses a Markov Random Field (MRF) energy for the labeling of all pixels, which assigns different labels to different aligned input images. During the labeling, it chooses well-exposed regions and skips moving objects at the same time. Then, the proposed method combines a Laplacian image according to the labels and constructs the fusion result by solving the Poisson equation. Furthermore, it adds some internal constraints when solving the Poisson equation for balancing and improving fusion results. We present various challenging examples, including static/dynamic, indoor/outdoor and daytime/nighttime scenes, to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.
Semi-Supervised Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory and Conditional Random Fields Model for Named-Entity Recognition Using Embeddings from Language Models Representations

Increasingly, popular online museums have significantly changed the way people acquire cultural knowledge. These online museums have been generating abundant amounts of cultural relics data. In recent years, researchers have used deep learning models that can automatically extract complex features and have rich representation capabilities to implement named-entity recognition (NER). However, the lack of labeled data in the field of cultural relics makes it difficult for deep learning models that rely on labeled data to achieve excellent performance. To address this problem, this paper proposes a semi-supervised deep learning model named SCRNER (Semi-supervised model for Cultural Relics’ Named Entity Recognition) that utilizes the bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and conditional random fields (CRF) model trained by seldom labeled data and abundant unlabeled data to attain an effective performance. To satisfy the semi-supervised sample selection, we propose a repeat-labeled (relabeled) strategy to select samples of high confidence to enlarge the training set iteratively. In addition, we use embeddings from language model (ELMo) representations to dynamically acquire word representations as the input of the model to solve the problem of the blurred boundaries of cultural objects and Chinese characteristics of texts in the field of cultural relics. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model, trained on limited labeled data, achieves an effective performance in the task of named entity recognition of cultural relics.
Optimizing Variational Graph Autoencoder for Community Detection with Dual Optimization

Variational Graph Autoencoder (VGAE) has recently gained traction for learning representations on graphs. Its inception has allowed models to achieve state-of-the-art performance for challenging tasks such as link prediction, rating prediction, and node clustering. However, a fundamental flaw exists in Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based approaches. Specifically, merely minimizing the loss of VAE increases the deviation from its primary objective. Focusing on Variational Graph Autoencoder for Community Detection (VGAECD) we found that optimizing the loss using the stochastic gradient descent often leads to sub-optimal community structure especially when initialized poorly. We address this shortcoming by introducing a dual optimization procedure. This procedure aims to guide the optimization process and encourage learning of the primary objective. Additionally, we linearize the encoder to reduce the number of learning parameters. The outcome is a robust algorithm that outperforms its predecessor.
A Retailer’s Decision to Join a Promotional Event of an E-commerce Platform

ABSTRACT Promotional events on e-commerce platforms (e.g., November 11 in China and Cyber Monday in the United States) have become very popular. Retailers joining these promotions sell their products on the e-commerce platform at a discount. We analyze a retailer’s decision to join the e-promotion of the platform versus offering a discount on its own. Given the platform’s discount factor and fees, we determine the retailer’s optimal prices and the quantity to commit to the e-promotion. Our findings indicate that if the platform can help the retailer make more consumers aware of the discount, then the retailer should join the e-promotion and set the prices such that no sales to strategic consumers take place for some time interval before the e-promotion. Under incomplete information where the retailer can create a rationing risk, it may be optimal to join the e-promotion even if the platform makes fewer consumers aware of the promotion and the platform charges considerable fees. Furthermore, advance selling is found not to increase profit under complete information but to increase profit under incomplete information. Surprisingly, incomplete information on the part of consumers benefits them by lowering the average price of the product and increasing the quantity sold.
Entropy-Based Measures of Hypnopompic Heart Rate Variability Contribute to the Automatic Prediction of Cardiovascular Events

Surges in sympathetic activity should be a major contributor to the frequent occurrence of cardiovascular events towards the end of nocturnal sleep. We aimed to investigate whether the analysis of hypnopompic heart rate variability (HRV) could assist in the prediction of cardiovascular disease (CVD). 2217 baseline CVD-free subjects were identified and divided into CVD group and non-CVD group, according to the presence of CVD during a follow-up visit. HRV measures derived from time domain analysis, frequency domain analysis and nonlinear analysis were employed to characterize cardiac functioning. Machine learning models for both long-term and short-term CVD prediction were then constructed, based on hypnopompic HRV metrics and other typical CVD risk factors. CVD was associated with significant alterations in hypnopompic HRV. An accuracy of 81.4% was achieved in short-term prediction of CVD, demonstrating a 10.7% increase compared with long-term prediction. There was a decline of more than 6% in the predictive performance of short-term CVD outcomes without HRV metrics. The complexity of hypnopompic HRV, measured by entropy-based indices, contributed considerably to the prediction and achieved greater importance in the proposed models than conventional HRV measures. Our findings suggest that Hypnopompic HRV assists the prediction of CVD outcomes, especially the occurrence of CVD event within two years.
Evaluating secrecy performance of cooperative NOMA networks under existence of relay link and direct link

The secrecy performance of a nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system is examined in this study by employment of a dual‐hop decode‐and‐forward (DF) relay under existence of eavesdropper. Due to the fact that the relay is trusted or untrusted device and thus eavesdropper may wiretap information from the base station or the relay. In this regard, three scenarios related to trusted and untrusted relays are proposed, with different assumptions on the information overhearing ability of the eavesdropper; ie, the first scenario is that an eavesdropper overhears signal from the relay while the BS is overheard by eavesdropper in the second scenarios. More specifically, we derive closed‐form expressions for the secure probability metrics when the direct and relay links experience independent Rayleigh fading. There metrics include strictly positive secrecy capacity (SPSC) and the secure outage probability (SOP). Furthermore, secure performance of traditional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) is also provided as further comparison with NOMA counterpart. We analyze the influence of main coefficients such as the target rates and the transmit SNR factors on the secrecy performance. Our results specify that for reasonable selection of such parameters, secrecy performance can be enhanced remarkably. Numerical results are delivered to corroborate the derived results.
Relation between biofilm formation ability and antibiotics resistant in Staphylococcus aureus from suppurative post-operation infections

Background: Antibiotics resistance and biofilm formation among Staphylococcus aureus strains represents a dangerous problem of the successful treatment during infections caused by opportunists S. aureus. The objectives of this study were to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility patterns and biofilm production among strains of S. aureus isolates from hospitalized patients after surgery. Methods: The present study included 130 Surgical Site Infections specimens represented swabs from suppurative infected sites. Using Disc diffusion method for antimicrobial susceptibility for isolates detected and tissue culture plate method was used for detection of biofilm formation ability. Results: The results confirmed that MRSA isolates had high degree of biofilm formation ability and increased the role in developing antibiotics resistance in a significant manner (approximately P<0.0001). In addition, Staphylococcus aureus was found as the predominant bacterial isolate (42.30%) after culturing all swab specimens tested. Conclusion: Increased antimicrobial resistance and biofilm formation affected synergistically in failure of surgical wound healing and invasion of infection promoting morbidity and mortality rates of hospitalized patients.
Structural Features of Old Growth Forest from South Eastern Carpathians, Romania

Background and Purpose: Romania’s forests are of globally significant value due to their natural characteristics, as similar forests in some other parts of the world have been lost forever. These types of forests, so-called "virgin" and "quasi-virgin (old growth)" forests, are also identified in the Buzau Mountains, which are part of the Eastern Carpathians in Romania (Curvature Region). Materials and Methods: To study and understand the structure and dynamics of primeval forest, four permanent one-hectare research plots were installed in the Penteleu Mountains, part of the Buzau Mountains. All trees with a diameter at breast height (DBH) greater than 80 mm were measured and their main dendrometric characteristics (DBH, height and social position) registered. The forest structure was analysed by fitting different theoretical distribution functions (beta, gamma, gamma 3P, gamma 3P mixt, loglogistic 3p, lognormal 3P and Weibull 3p). The structural homogeneity of the permanent research plots was tested using the Camino index (H) and Gini index (G). Results: For the smaller DBH categories, Norway spruce was relatively shorter in height, but with increasing DBH, the heights of Norway spruce exceeded those of European beech. Stand volume varied between 615 and 1133 m3 per hectare. The area of maximum stability where we encountered the lowest tree height variability was recorded between the 60 cm and 100 cm diameter categories. The Lorenz curve and the Gini index indicated that the studied stands have high structural biodiversity. Conclusions: The results showed that the studied forests have an optimal structural diversity, assuring them a higher stability and multifunctionality. Thus, these forests are models for managed forests.
A new impetus for endogenous growth: R&D offshoring via virtual labor mobility

We develop a simple North-South model of quality ladders to show that the virtual mobility of labor across time zones, facilitated by the advance in communication technology, can raise the endogenous growth rate of the world economy. The unique balanced growth rate is increasing in the endowments of skilled labor in both countries and decreasing in the rate of impatience. Moreover, we find that partial R&D offshoring to the South has initially a negative effect on the level of skilled wages in the North, but this is compensated for by its positive effect on the growth rate in both North and South.