Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Intelligibility-based Approach to English Pronunciation Teaching: Evidence from [r] Production

This work was to support the intelligibility-based approach to teaching English pronunciation through the experimental tests. In this study, both production and perception experiments were conducted for thirty three-levelled Korean learners of English and five native English speakers. The results showed that native English raters marked ‘good’ /r/ sound of Korean speech of English which showed a comparatively wide range of F3 between 2,150 and 2,550 Hz. Considering that native English speakers produced a comparatively narrow F3 range with low mean value between 1,700 and 1,800 Hz, we came to understand that they were tolerant of foreigners’ wide range of F3 for [r] signals with comparatively high mean value. Overall, this experiment clearly showed that we should rely more on the intelligibility principle, not on the native-like accurate pronunciation features, for the teaching of English pronunciation. It implies that pronunciation teaching should adopt the intelligibility-based approach.
Formation of core/shell structured cobalt/carbon nanoparticles by pulsed laser ablation in toluene

Magnetic cobalt nanoparticles encapsulated in shells of layered structure have been produced by the technique of pulsed laser ablation in toluene. The morphology, microstructure, and magnetic properties of the prepared nanoparticles were characterized by electron microscopy, micro-Raman spectroscopy, and superconducting quantum interference device magnetometry, respectively. The results indicated that the cobalt nanoparticles fabricated are noncrystalline but coated with the graphitic carbon layers. It is believed that the formation of these carbon layers well-protect the cobalt nanoparticles to be oxidized thus maintaining the superparamagnetic property. This is an important feature that makes the cobalt nanoparticles a useful material for medical and many other magnetic based applications.
Development of a Low Carbon Economy in Wuxi City

The development of a Low Carbon Economy is a vital instrument to encounter climate change and take into account the growing challenges of an increasing urbanization in China. Wuxi City in East China’s Jiangsu Province is starting to implement a Low Carbon City Plan for safeguarding a sustainable development of the city until 2020 and beyond. This paper aims at estimating the impact of the Low Carbon City plan for Wuxi’s energy demand and CO2-emissions until 2050. Using an econometric energy supply and demand model to estimate and forecast the Wuxi energy and CO2-balance aggregates until 2050, it compares a scenario without specific Low Carbon City measures to reduce sectoral CO2-intensities to a Low Carbon scenario implementing these measures according to the Low Carbon City Plan until 2020 and beyond. The decomposition of the Kaya-identity reveals that the increase of per capita income has the largest impact on the growth of CO2-emissions and the decrease of energy intensity of Gross Value Added the largest impact on the reduction of CO2-emissions in Wuxi. A decrease of population and CO2-intensity of Primary energy supply only have average contributions. The decrease of energy intensity of Gross Value Added is due to energy efficiency gains in the single economic sectors, but to a large extent due to structural changes of the economy away from energy intensive sectors such as iron and steel, chemical industry or cement industry towards the energy extensive service sectors. A growing residential sector also reduces the industrial share of energy demand. Only following the assumed national trend with a shift from CO2-intensive industries to a CO2-extensive service economy, the Low Carbon goal of a 50% reduction of CO2-intensity of Gross Value Added compared to 2005 cannot be reached in Wuxi. Specific sectoral CO2 -intensity goals have to be successfully observed by the economic sectors in Wuxi, especially by the industry. The promotion of combined heat and power generation also has to contribute to the specific activities in Wuxi.
Measuring technical efficiency of microfinance institutions in India.

The last three decades have witnessed an expansion in the domain and scope of microfinance activities shaping policy discussions as well as social delivery systems within and across many national contexts. The modern microfinance movement dates back to the 1970s when the experimental programmes in India, Bangladesh, Brazil, and a few other countries began to extend tiny loans to groups of poor women to invest in microenterprises. It has been argued for long that commercial banks have not met the credit needs of financially challenged people who are not able to offer collaterals but who have feasible and promising investment ideas that can turn into profitable initiatives (Hollis and Sweetman, 1998). The incidence of such exclusion had also been highlighted by Littlefield et al. (2003) stating that the commercial banking sector does not consider the poor bankable owing to their inability to meet the eligibility criteria, including collateral. This had limited the accessibility and provision of timely and adequate credit from formal financial institutions for the resource starved section of the society. Further, Fisher and Sriram (2002) argued that the mismatch between the hierarchy of credit needs and availability from formal financial institutions results in ‘adverse usage’. To cover the unmet credit requirement of the poor, a set of new financial institutions have come up that are in touch with the local community, that can obtain information about the loan taker at a low cost, and that often are not only interested in profit but also on the creation of income generating activity and empowerment. These new financial intermediaries, the Microfinance Institutions (MFIs), provide small loans to poor people, who can offer little or no collateral. The role of MFIs in India in bridging the gap between the demand and supply of financial services among credit thirsty people had been noted by Sinha (2003) that over the past two decades, while organisations such as SEWA Bank, Ahmedabad and Working Women’s Forum, Chennai have taken a pioneering effort to meet the vacuum in financial services, the more vigorous attempt has started during the 1990s, with the initiation of the microfinance programme by several NGOs.
PROGRESS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN ELECTRO-MIGRATION MODELLING METHODOLOGY

In this work, previous simulation works on electro-migration have been reviewed, and a multi-physics EM simulation method that combines electric, thermal, atomic diffusion and stress analysis has been proposed. The method is able to solve vacancy concentration distribution with coupling electric current, temperature gradient, hydro-static stress gradient simultaneously and to mimic void formation in realistic structure of microelectronics devices.
Image Regularity and Fidelity Measure with a Two-Modality Potential Function

We define a strictly convex smooth potential function and use it to measure the data fidelity as well as the regularity for image denoising and cartoon-texture decomposition. The new model has several advantages over the well-known ROF or TV- and the TV- model. First, due to the two-modality property of the new potential function, the new regularity has strong regularizing properties in all directions and thus encourages removing noise in smooth areas, while, near edges, it smoothes the edge mainly along the tangent direction and thus can well preserve the edges. Second, the new potential function is very close to the norm; thus using it to measure the data fidelity makes the new model perform very well in removing impulse noise and preserving the contrast. Lastly, the proposed fidelity and regularization term is strictly convex and smooth and thus allows a unique global minimizer and it can be solved by using the steepest descent method. Numerical experiments show that the proposed model outperforms TV- and TV- in removing impulse noise and mixed noise. It also outperforms some state-of-the-art methods specially designed for impulse noise. Tests on cartoon-texture decomposition show that our method is effective and performs better than TV- .
SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING: LESSONS FROM INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE HOLDERS FOR SCHOOL SCIENCE EDUCATION

In this paper we argue that the holders of indigenous knowledge were and are selfdirected learners. The authors will discuss the construct of the Ethnobotanical Knowledge Index (EKI) and how this statistical construct suggests that indigenous knowledge holders’ self-directedness could be traced back to survival needs (and solving problems in authentic contexts). One of the theoretical contributions of this paper is our unconventional use of third-generation cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), namely using a process (self-directed learning) and a system (indigenous knowledge systems) as the ‘subject’ in two activity systems (in contrast to the conventional way, namely human subjects), that are juxtaposed by the authors to determine whether self-directed learning and indigenous knowledge systems share common ground. We then use CHAT also in the conventional way, focusing on the school learner as the subject, to determine which lessons indigenous knowledge systems hold for the science classroom, which is often characterised by teacher-centred transmission mode teaching and learning, and in general very little self-directed learning. In an era where school science education is often not promoting self-directed learning due to the decontextualized nature of it, this research provides insights that could assist in preparing learners better for the 21 Century.
Input-to-state stability of Lur'e hyperbolic distributed complex-valued Parameter control systems: LOI approach

In this work, input-to-state stability of Lur’e hyperbolic distributed complex-valued parameter control systems has been addressed. Using comparison principle, delay-dependent sufficient conditions for the input-to-state stability in complex Hilbert spaces are established in terms of linear operator inequalities. Finally, numerical computation illustrates our result.
EXFOLIATIVE CYTOLOGY: AN ADJUVANT IN DIAGNOSING EARLY LESIONS

The cause-effect relationship of tobacco chewing to oral malignancy is well known. Although the clinical signs and symptoms may be absent or unapparent, early changes in the oral mucosal cells can be detected using the simple technique of exfoliative cytology. The review aims at studying the changes observed in the mucosal cells of tobacco chewers. The dysplastic changes of the cells are observed with various parameters. Also the recent advances of exfoliative cytology in the detection of various disease conditions have been emphasized.
Characterization of bending stiffness and spontaneous buckling of alpha-helices and coiled coils

Characterization of Bending Stiffness and Spontaneous Buckling of Alpha-Helices and Coiled Coils. (August 2008) Sirish Kaushik Lakkaraju, B.En. , University of Madras, India Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr.Wonmuk Hwang Elasticity of α-helices and coiled coils have often been described by a linear response to local bending with bending stiffness (Kb) and persistence length (Lp) describing their flexibility. However, we observed that the non-bonded forces along the length of these structures are not screened at physiological conditions and introduce a buckling instability. For α-helical systems of same composition, but different lengths, this is identified by a drop in Kb for longer helices and the length where this drop is triggered is referred to as the critical buckling length. When shorter than their critical buckling length they behave linearly, and Kb calculated using normal mode analysis in this regime is about (3.0− 3.4)× 10−28 Nm for α-helices with varying compositions, and about (1.9 − 2.1) × 10−27 Nm for coiled coils with leucine zipper periodicity. Beyond the critical buckling length, normal mode solutions turn imaginary, leading to an eventual disappearance of bending modes. Investigations with one dimensional (1-D) linear chains of beads (a simplistic representation of bio-filaments) show that non-bonded forces have a reciprocal relation with the critical buckling length (no buckling instability existed in the absence of non-bonded forces). Critical buckling length is 115.3 ± 2.9 Å for α-helices and 695.1 ± 44.8 Å for coiled coils with leucine zipper periodicity, which is much smaller than their Lp (∼ 800 Å for α-helices and ∼ 3000 Å for coiled coils).
The Role of Remote Sensing and Economic Development: Glaciological Applications with Landsat 4-5 Imagery

Comprehensive use of remote sensing imagery has provided and enabled researches and policy makers alike the ability to study the dynamics of arctic sea-ice relative to global climatic change. Based on Landsat 4-5 imagery, this paper provides a study and analysis of sea-ice variations as located within the polar Northwest Passage as an indicator of global climatic changes. Particularly important is its impact on issues relative to national sovereignty, security and, economic development of countries bordering the arctic region and the world at large.
A Minimally Supervised Word Sense Disambiguation Algorithm Using Syntactic Dependencies and Semantic Generalizations

Natural language is inherently ambiguous. For example, the word "bank" can mean a financial institution or a river shore. Finding the correct meaning of a word in a particular context is a task known as word sense disambiguation (WSD), which is essential for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and others. While most current WSD methods try to disambiguate a small number of words for which enough annotated examples are available, the method proposed in this thesis attempts to address all words in unrestricted text. The method is based on constraints imposed by syntactic dependencies and concept generalizations drawn from an external dictionary. The method was tested on standard benchmarks as used during the SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-3 WSD international evaluation exercises, and was found to be competitive.
Comparative dosimetry in intracavitary balloon catheter brachytherapy with I-125 and in Cf-252 brachytherapy combined with BNCT for brain tumors *

Objective: Comparative analysis of dosimetry in intracavitary balloon catheter brachytherapy with I-125 and in Cf-252 brachytherapy combined with BNCT for treatment of brain tumors. Materials and Methods: Simulations of intracavitary balloon catheter brachytherapy with I-125 and in Cf-252 brachytherapy combined with BNCT were performed with the MCNP5 code, modeling the treatment of a brain tumor on a voxel computational phantom representing a human head. Absorbed dose rates were converted into biologically weighted dose rates. Results: Intracavitary balloon catheter brachytherapy with I-125 produced biologically weighted mean dose rates of 3.2E-11, 1.3E-10, 1.9E-11 and 6.9E-13 RBE.Gy. h –1 . p –1 . s, respectively, on the healthy tissue, on the balloon periphery and on the I 1 and I 2 tumor infiltration zones. On the other hand, Cf-252 brachytherapy combined with BNCT produced a biologically weighted mean dose rate of 5.2E-09, 2.3E-07, 8.7E-09 and 2.4E-09 RBE.Gy. h –1 . p –1 . s, respectively on the healthy tissue, on the target tumor and on the I 1 and I 2 infiltration zones. Conclusion: Cf-252 brachytherapy combined with BNCT delivered a selective irradiation to the target tumor and to infiltration zones, while intracavitary balloon catheter brachytherapy with I-125 delivered negligible doses on the tumor infiltration zones. Braquiterapia; Glioblastoma multiforme; Dosimetria; BNCT; MCNP.
Evidence calls for practice change in intramuscular injection techniques

Background and objective: Intramuscular (IM) injections are administered to patients in all health care settings. Even though this procedure is invasive and the evidence supporting the process of administration is extensive, techniques and procedures vary throughout the literature and in practice. The purpose of this descriptive correlational study was to 1) investigate the literature on current evidence-based IM injection procedures pertaining to gender, patient weight, injection site, needle length, and technique, 2) compare surveyed healthcare personnel self-reported IM injection practices, and 3) query respondents on informational resources they access, continuing education they receive, and their years of healthcare experience and higher education. Methods: The Intramuscular Injection Questionnaire (IIQ) was sent via email to various professional healthcare facilities and their respective social media sites. Two hundred and six (206) healthcare personnel of various healthcare backgrounds and educational levels accessed the IIQ via a link to Qualtrics software. SPSS Version 24 was used for data analysis. Results: Most respondents were registered nurses with 4-15+ years of experience. Seventy-eight percent of respondents considered their IM injection knowledge at above average or expert levels. Gender was not considered an important factor when selecting an injection needle among 75% of participants. Of all respondents, 61% use z-track technique, 59% use the ventrogluteal site and 34% always bunch or stretch the skin during injection. IM injection education was not provided in 75% of healthcare facilities. Conclusions: IM injection practices vary among respondents and in the literature; some reported practices are contrary to current evidence-based practice. While the evidence provides some sound recommendations, some procedures are not well-documented or supported including in nursing texts. Nurses and other healthcare personnel must critically analyze the site, depth, needle, volume, medication, vaccine, and whether to bunch or stretch, according to evidence-based practice. Healthcare facilities should provide IM injection education routinely to ensure safe practices. Future studies (Level 1 and 2) are needed to further demonstrate the best evidence leading to safe and effective IM injections.
Expression analysis of photosynthesis genes in Dunaliella salina grown at different NaCl concentrations

The expression of five genes involved in photosynthesis was investigated under different salinity conditions in Dunaliella salina. These genes encodes ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RuBisCo) large and small subunits, major light-harvesting chlorophyll (chl) a/b protein of photosystem II, carbonic anhydrase and adenosine tri phosphate synthase alpha subunit. As D. salina grows in hypersaline conditions, it is important to study expression of these genes in relation to different salinity levels. Changes in the mRNA level under different NaCl conditions were determined using the comparative CT method. Cell number and chl a content were estimated to determine optimal growth at different NaCl concentrations. Real-time PCR results showed enhanced expression of photosynthesis genes upon exposure of D. salina cells from Sambhar Lake to 1.7 M NaCl containing medium. This salinity corresponds to only one-third of the salinity of the Sambhar Lake habitat. In another salt condition, the expression level of all genes was found to be down -regulated at 1.0 M (sub-optimal concentration for growth of D. salina), 2.5 M and 3.0 M NaCl (supra-optimal concentration for growth) when compared with 1.7 M NaCl containing medium as a control. The present study will help in understanding the salinity tolerance in D. salina as a model microalga.
The circumstances of older people in England with self-reported visual impairment: A secondary analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA)

One key challenge to those charged with tackling the social exclusion of visually impaired people is having information about the extent to which visual impairment is related to the ability to enjoy and participate in various aspects of life. Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), this article considers how self-reported visual impairment is related to older people’s physical health and cognitive abilities, their economic and housing conditions, their social engagement, as well as their emotional well-being and life-satisfaction. We find self-reported poor vision to be associated with multiple disadvantages in those outcome measures. Further research is needed to establish causal links between visual impairment and the various health, economic, social and emotional well-being experiences documented in this article. Nevertheless, secondary data analysis of ELSA offers a useful and cost-effective research approach.
Modeling recreation demand for British forests: An application of an endogenously stratified and truncated log-normal distribution

Evaluating the value of British forests is important for forest policies’ making. Since the number of visitors to British forests is quite large and each visitor’s visiting frequency is high, the conventional count data models which focus on small integers may not cope adequately with this big number of visitation. This study utilizes newly developed endogenously stratified and truncated distributions to model the recreation demand for British Forests. Keyword: British forest recreation; count data models; endogenously stratified and truncated continuous distributions
Model simulations of rainfall over southern Africa and its eastern escarpment

Rainfall simulations over southern and tropical Africa in the form of low-resolution Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) simulations and higher resolution National Centre for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis downscalings are presented and evaluated in this paper. The model used is the conformal-cubic atmospheric model (CCAM), a variable-resolution global atmospheric model. The simulations are evaluated with regards to rainfall totals, spatial distribution, seasonality and inter-annual variability. Since both Global Circulation Models (GCMs) and Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are known to have relatively large biases and shortcomings in simulating rainfall over the steep eastern escarpment of southern Africa and in particular Lesotho, the paper has a focus on evaluating model performance over these regions. It is shown that in the reanalysis simulations the model realistically represents the seasonal cycle in rainfall. However, the AMIP simulations are prone to the model overestimating rainfall totals in spring. The spatial distribution of rainfall is simulated realistically; however rainfall totals are significantly overestimated over the escarpment areas of both southern Africa and East Africa. When nudged within the observed circulation patterns of the reanalysis data, the model is capable of realistically simulating inter-annual rainfall variability over the eastern parts of southern Africa.