Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Relationships among the Oil Consumptions in China , Japan and India

Previous studies have focused on the analysis of energy consumption within a given country or a region. The paper aims to examine the short-run and/or long-run cross-regional relationships among the oil consumptions in China, Japan and India. These three countries are geographically close. I introduce the yearly time series of oil consumption for the 1965 to 2010 period. I tested for unit root, break date and Granger causality. I did not find any break dates in the data. I found that the oil use variables for these three countries had various unit root properties, which imply that they were impossibly co integrated. The pronounced differences of economy, politics, and population and energy sources across the countries may lead to no co integration. However, using the TodaYamamoto technique, I found that the oil consumption in either China or India Granger caused that of Japan. Oil consumption in India Granger caused that of China. Therefore, foreign oil consumption could be a predictive factor when one analyse China’s short-run oil consumption changes. Index Terms oil, consumption, regional relationship
Succession Decision in Vietnamese Family Companies

This study examines the relationship between the choices of family or outside CEO with company performance. The sample of this study covered 65 Vietnamese family companies in 17 industries. The findings indicate, as anticipated, that family CEO enhanced company performance greater than outside CEO. Within the family company, CEO-successor enhanced the firm value lower than the CEO-founder. Contacts with the business environment, education, experience and sufficient business capital may provide young CEOs with values added to better manage family companies than founders.
Modelling Environmental Attitudes of the Users of Kilombero Valley Wetlands, Tanzania

Development policies have for a long time made it more profitable for people to degrade than to conserve environment. The adoption of these economic wide policies by Africa especially during colonial time and after independence has resulted into erosion of its communities’ conservation behaviour and attitude. Although many studies assess environmental attitudes, those focussing on African regions or countries using New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale are very limited. Such studies in the African context using NEP scale are very important, simply because many people depend on the environment for their livelihood, and in the process they destroy the world’s valued ecosystems including wetlands. This study is meant to fill in the gap using Kilombero valley wetlands in Tanzania as a case. The study used Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to predict the behaviour of the users based on attitudes, environmental knowledge and awareness. The findings indicate that users of the Kilombero wetlands have a generally positive attitude towards the environment, despite a great degree of variability among the study participants. The study shows also that a certain level of environmental awareness is needed in order to increase people’s knowledge about environmental issues and change their environmental attitudes. The NEP scale does not fully fit into the Tanzanian context, thus suggesting that further research into the adaptation of the scale is needed.
Linguistics in Amsterdam

It has been known for a long time that metonymy is not just a figure of speech, but rather a cognitive process which affects linguistic expressions and their interpretations. Because meaning and form are two sides of the same coin, metonymical effects are also visible within grammar. Linguists have therefore started to make use of the notion ‘grammatical metonymy’. It is not always clear, however, what exactly is intended by this notion. In this paper I will clarify the relation between metonymy and grammar. I will show that grammar can be used to provide insights into the exact nature of metonymy. Based on several grammatical observations and linguistic tests, I will analyse metonymies as causing linguistic transfers and I will provide a classification of different types of such metonymical transfers. 1 Metonymy, linguistics and grammar From the ancient Greeks onwards metonymy has been viewed as one of the principal figures of speech (cf. Arata 2005). However, most examples of metonymy are not typical for literary or rhetorical language use. Consider in this respect sentences (1)-(3). (1) The power of the crown was weakened (2) I am reading Goethe. (3) The ham sandwich is waiting for his check. From a linguistic point of view, therefore, metonymy should not be seen as a figure of speech, but rather as a cognitive mechanism underlying normal language use (cf. Kövecses & Radden 1998). Metonymy is based on contiguity, that is conceptual closeness in reality. In line with this, linguists have analysed metonymy as a kind of ‘gestalt switch’ (cf. Koch 1999: 151; Koch 2001: 203; Warren 1999: 127) or more precisely as a 1 I would like to thank my supervisors Fons Moerdijk and Wim Honselaar and also my colleagues of the ACLC (especially Mara van Schaik-Rădulescu and Bart de Boer) for their help, support, fruitful feedback and discussions. I would like to thank Roland Pfau for discussing some German examples with me. I also owe many thanks to Mario Brdar and Hedde Zeijlstra who suggest some improvements for previous versions of this paper. All mistakes are of course mine.
The Design of the Communication and Telemetry System used by the Ionospheric Observation Nanosatellite Formation Mission

This document describes the approach taken by the Ionospheric Observation Nanosatellite Formation (ION-F) communication team in designing and developing a ground communication system, space communication system, and amateur communication system for three satellites in the ION-F constellation. It outlines the mission objectives, the system requirements, the theory of operation, hardware, software, communication protocols; including equipment specifications and other major aspects of the system. An important feature of the communication system is the extensive use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) components, which has lowered cost and shortened development time. This system will be adopted by all three universities. Figure 1: ION-F Formation
THE EFFECT OF pH AND MOLECULAR WEIGHT OF CHITOSAN ON SILVER NANOPARTICLES SYNTHESIZED BY y-IRRADIATION

During the last decades, developments of surface microscopy, materials science, biochemistry, physical chemistry and computational engineering have converged to provide remarkable capabilities for understanding, fabricating and manipulating structures at the atomic level. The rapid evolution of this new science and the opportunities for application promise that nanotechnology will become one of the dominant technologies of the 2 r ' century []]. The study on synthesis of metal nanoparticles is of interest in both research and technology. Among metal nanoparticles, silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) have attracted considerable interest because of their novel properties and their potential application [2, 3].
The role of individual intertemporal transfers in dynamic TU-Games

Dynamic TU-games are considered which consist of a finite player set, a finite sequence of TU-games and a profile of intertemporal utility functions. At every stage a (restrictively) additive solution is applied to the TU-game, which results in a stream of payoff distributions, evaluated by the intertemporal utility functions of the players. Players are able to transfer payoffs between stages. The strategic possibilities from individual transfers between periods are modeled by a noncooperative game. Conditions under which a Nash equilibrium in this noncooperative game exists, are established. It is shown when a Nash equilibrium in dominant strategies is Pareto optimal.
Systemic risk in a mean-field model of interbank lending with self-exciting shocks

ABSTRACT In this article we consider a mean-field model of interacting diffusions for the monetary reserves in which the reserves are subjected to a self- and cross-exciting shock. This is motivated by the financial acceleration and fire sales observed in the market. We derive a mean-field limit using a weak convergence analysis and find an explicit measure-valued process associated with a large interbanking system. We define systemic risk indicators and derive, using the limiting process, several law of large numbers results and verify these numerically. We conclude that self-exciting shocks increase the systemic risk in the network and their presence in interbank networks should not be ignored.
The Behavior of Number Concentration Tendencies for the Continuous Collection Growth Equation Using One- and Two-Moment Bulk Parameterization Schemes

Abstract This paper presents a mathematical explanation for the nonconservation of total number concentration Nt of hydrometeors for the continuous collection growth process, for which Nt physically should be conserved for selected one- and two-moment bulk parameterization schemes. Where possible, physical explanations are proposed. The assumption of a constant no in scheme A is physically inconsistent with the continuous collection growth process, as is the assumption of a constant Dn for scheme B. Scheme E also is nonconservative, but it seems this result is not because of a physically inconsistent specification; rather the solution scheme’s equations simply do not satisfy Nt conservation and Nt does not come into the derivation. Even scheme F, which perfectly conserves Nt, does not preserve the distribution shape in comparison with a bin model.
Application of active biomonitoring within an integrated water resources management framework in South Africa

Because waste water and runoff from surrounding catchments are a main source of direct and continuous input of pollutants in aquatic ecosystems, the study of the effects of in-stream exposure on organisms has a high ecological relevance. However, correlating observed effects with specific pollutants or even classes of pollutants remains difficult, due to the usually unknown, complex and often highly variable composition of these source waters. By integrating multiple endpoints at different ecologically relevant levels of organization within one test organism, it is possible to gain an understanding of how different levels of organization within this organism respond to toxic exposure, and how responses at these different levels are interrelated. The use of biological markers in transplanted organisms, referred to as active biomonitoring (ABM), is demonstrated in this paper. The correct choice of bioindicator organism and suite of biomarkers makes it possible to assess the effects of wastewater and runoff water in terms of known environmental effects (such as effluents containing endocrine-disrupting chemicals or pulp mill effluent) as well as runoff water with an uncharacterized composition of contaminants (for instance storm-water runoff from industrial complexes). The applicability of ABM as a cause–effect assessment protocol is demonstrated through a case study in South Africa that relates to stressor identification within a system exposed to urban and industrial waste water. This paper proposes a multi-tiered framework that allows for the incorporation of ABM within the existing South African integrated water resources management framework.
Party politics and education spending: challenging some common wisdom

ABSTRACT Much literature has analysed parties’ influence on public education spending. We challenge this literature on theoretical, methodological and empirical grounds. It is standard to regress expenditure on cabinet seat-share weighted party family dummies in time-series cross-section regressions using ‘country-year’ data. But using ‘country-year’ data artificially inflates the number of cases and leads to biased estimates, as governments usually do not change annually. Second, using party families as proxies for party preferences assumes that parties within families hold similar positions while they differ across families. But this is empirically often not the case. Finally, a historical institutionalist perspective suggests that we should not expect party effects anymore in the first place. Empirically, we propose a new design, using direct measures of party preferences in analyses on government-term level. We find that the partisan composition of government did not have any significant effects on education spending from 1995 to 2010 in 21 democracies.
On the structure of the matrix corresponding to a finite topology

In connection with enumeration of finite topologies on an w-set, we introduced a number a{K) which is defined on the matrix K corresponding to a finitetopology on an n-set and investigated its properties [2]. In this paper, we shall carry on our studies on the structure of the matrix corresponding to a finite topology and show the following inequality for an arbitrary nXn matrix K which corresponds to a To topology:
Exploring the Effects of Group Interaction in Large Display Systems

Large display systems have been successfully applied in the virtual reality domain because they can provide a full immersion sense through large visual space and high display resolution. However, most of the previous studies on the interaction method of those systems focused on single or double users. In this paper, we study the effects of integrating group interaction in such systems and we propose a framework called “Groupnect”, which enables the unique experience of group interaction in a large display system. By using optical tracking and 3D gesture recognition technologies, our approach can automatically recognize gesture-based control signals for 20 users simultaneously and trigger corresponding real-time actions in a back-end system. Through a comparison experiment between standard interaction mode and group interaction mode, the results demonstrate that physical and mental participation of users could be promoted in group interaction mode. It has immense potential to design group interaction applications on entertainment, education and training areas.
Anisotropic polydopamine capsules with an ellipsoidal shape that can tolerate harsh conditions: efficient adsorbents for organic dyes and precursors for ellipsoidal hollow carbon particles

Polymeric capsules often buckle, collapse or even break when being processed in the dried state into other materials under high temperature and pressure due to moderate mechanical rigidity. In the case of non-spherical capsules, to keep their precious anisotropic morphology intact under harsh conditions is even more challenging since the whole surface of such kinds of capsules does not experience the same stress or strain due to the different surface curvatures. In the current work, we reported a strategy to prepare polydopamine (PDA) capsules with an ellipsoidal shape and enhanced mechanical rigidity using polystyrene ellipsoids as the sacrificial anisotropic templates. Bio-inspired oxidation induced self-polymerization of dopamine can form conformal PDA coatings on polystyrene ellipsoids of various aspect ratios and sizes. Several strategies have been exploited to increase the thickness of the PDA shell, among which, iterating PDA coating produces ellipsoidal PDA capsules with a thick and robust shell. These ellipsoidal PDA capsules can survive carbonization at temperatures as high as 800 °C and were directly turned into N-doped carbon capsules with a well-defined ellipsoidal shape, excluding the necessity of removing the sacrificial templates after carbonation. Furthermore, the rigid PDA ellipsoidal capsules are efficient adsorbents for organic dyes in contaminated water and have impressive adsorption efficiencies as high as 200 mg g−1.
A Two Level Multi-Parametric Classification Approach for Prediction of Coronary Heart Disease

3 Abstract: Prediction system is one of the major research area under data mining. It is useful to perform the necessary action on time so that the future loss can be minimized. In this paper, we have defined a prediction system to identify the chances of occurrence of coronary heart disease based on person's basic information, symptoms as well as medical tests. The medical disease prediction system is an application of expert system, that we here define by using an intelligent soft- computing approach called neuro-fuzzy. In this paper, we have defined a two layered approach for identifying the disease possibility. The critical factors that are mandatory for occurrence of coronary heart disease are taken at first level and the rest one are taken at second level. This two level approach increases the performance of our work as it helps in predicting disease chances accurately. The heart disease dataset is taken from UCI machine learning repository to train the neural network and then fuzzy rules are applied to predict the chances of coronary heart disease as low, medium or critical.
Evaluating Implicit Sentiments for Sinners and Sins: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

A pencil-and-paper version of the Implicit Association Test was used to evaluate the fluency with which participants could categorize sinful person and sinful behavior concepts with negative and positive words. The research was conducted in Kenya and the United States. Results indicated that participants from both countries were faster when they combined sinful person and sinful behavior concepts with negative words than when they combined sinful person and sinful behavior concepts with positive words. Thus participants from both countries manifested negative implicit sentiment for sinful person and sinful behavior concepts. However, the implicit negativity manifested by Kenyan participants exceeded that of U.S. participants. The research has implications for cultural differences between Kenya and the United States. It also has implications for cognitive theories that describe how implicit sentiments for sinful persons might be represented within an underlying network of cognitive associations.
Development and Implementation of aWell-conditioning Approach Toward Generalized/Extended Finite Element Method into an Object-oriented Platform

Abstract. This paper shows and discusses a generic implementation of the well-conditioning approach toward generalized/extended finite element method. This implementation, performed into an academic computational platform, follows the object-oriented approach presented before for the standard version of GFEM in which the shape functions of finite elements are hierarchically enriched by analytical functions, according to the problem behavior. The stable version of GFEM is employed here to avoid the bad effects of blending elements on the approximate solution convergence rate. Beside this, a sparse matrix data structure is used to accelerate the solution procedure. This approach uses the advantage of sparse matrix to solve the matrix system of equations. The implementations are explained in detail and different aspects of this approach are discussed through numerical examples. Keywords: Generalized/eXtended FEM, Object-oriented programming, Two-scale Analysis, Stable GFEM, Matrix sparsity
Cryptanalysis on an Elgamal-like cryptosystem for encrypting large messages

This paper considers both the security issues and fundamental properties of a recently proposed ElGamal-like cryptosystem for encrypting large messages. This ElGamal-like cryptosystem may be useful for communicating large messages since it reduces both computation and bandwidth requirement. However, the result of this paper shows that security level of this modified ElGamal-like cryptosystem is different from that of the original ElGamal cryptosystem. Furthermore, fundamental weakness exists in this modified system, say successful decryption can not be guaranteed. Finally, we propose an enhancement on the security of the ElGamal-like cryptosystem.
Comparing Methods for Generating Large Scale Political Event Data Sets

This paper addresses three general issues surrounding the use of political event data generated by fully automated methods in forecasting political conflict. I first look at the differences between the data generation process for machine and human coded data, where I believe the major difference in contemporary efforts is found not in the precision of the coding, but rather the effects of using multiple sources. While the use of multiple sources has virtually no downside in human coding, it has great potential to introduce noise in automated coding. I then propose a metric for comparing event data sources based on the correlations between weekly event counts in the CAMEO “pentaclasses” weighted by the frequency of dyadic events, and illustrate this with two examples: • A comparison of the new ICEWS public data set with an unpublished data set based only on the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts. • A comparison of the Tabari shallow parser and Petrarch full parser for the 35-year KEDS Reuters and Agence France Presse Levant series. In the case of the ICEWS/BBC comparison, the metric appears useful not only in showing the overall convergence—typical weighted correlations are in the range of 0.45, surprisingly high given the differences between the two data sets—and showing variations across time and regions. In the case of Tabari/KEDS, the metric shows high convergence for the series with a large number of reports, and also shows that the Petrarch coding reduces the number of material conflict events—presumably mostly by eliminating false positives—by around a factor of 2 in most dyads. In both tests, the metric is good at identifying anomalous dyads, Asia in the case of ICEWS and Palestine in the case of the Tabari-coded Levant series. Finally, the paper looks at the degree to which the complex coding of Petrarch can be duplicated using much simpler “bag of words” methods, specifically a simple pattern-based method for identifying actors and support vector machines for identifying events. While, as expected, these methods do not fully reproduce the more complex codings, they perform far better than chance on doing the aggregated classifications typically found in research projects, and arguably could be used as a first approximation for new behaviors where automated coding dictionaries are not available. The pattern-based actor and SVM models also strongly suggests that there may be a very substantial number of sentences which are currently not coded which actually contain events.
Linking exploration to academic performance: The role of information seeking and academic self-efficacy

Purpose Substantial empirical research has addressed the antecedents of students’ academic performance. Building on these insights, the purpose of this paper is to extend the related literature by investigating the impact of students’ exploration on their academic performance. Furthermore, to provide a better understanding of this relationship the authors incorporate two sequential mediators, namely, information seeking and academic self-efficacy. Design/methodology/approach Quantitative approach using self-report questionnaires. This study was conducted in the Hellenic Open University through a specially designed questionnaire. The authors collected data from 248 students attending a postgraduate course in Healthcare Management. Findings The results showed that information seeking and in turn academic self-efficacy mediate the positive association between exploration and academic performance. Both theoretical and practical implications are also discussed. Originality/value Students’ exploration plays an important role in enhancing both their information seeking and self-efficacy which in turn affects their academic performance.