Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploring and Conceptualizing Workplace Spirituality in Islamic Banks

This study investigates workplace spirituality in Islamic banks in Pakistan. Through qualitative approach, this study seeks to understand the meaning employees give to workplace spirituality in Islamic banks and explores the way workplace spirituality is constituted and enacted at workplace. It takes an epistemological stance of social constructionism and argues that the way people define workplace spirituality is subjective in nature. Data has been collected from 22 respondents working in Islamic banks and has been analyzed through thematic analysis. Findings reveal that all respondents defined workplace spirituality in terms of religion. They found inner peace and happiness by serving humanity and religion and had deeper concerns for earning â€˜halalâ€™ or â€˜haramâ€™. Also, the confusion created due to conflicting fatwas on Islamic banks influenced job satisfaction which is seen as a component of workplace spirituality in literature. This study theoretically contributes that workplace spirituality is highly contextual in nature and religiosity and spirituality cannot be treated as separate in organizations that are based upon religious foundations.
DESIGN FOR LUXURY AUTOMOTIVE HMI SYSTEMS AND DRIVER EXPERIENCES

Luxury is predominantly discussed within marketing, economics and psychology literature, with little research made into the practicalities of designing for luxury products and experiences. This thesis addresses the lack of an evidence base from which to design and virtually prototype luxury automotive HMI (human-machine interaction) systems. The work involved five interconnected studies and two industrial partners: Bentley Motors – manufacturers of luxury automobiles; and the VEC (Virtual Engineering Centre) – a consultancy and RD (ii) the design of luxury automotive HMI systems benefits from a new set of a guidance developed from research data without reliance on corporate know-how; and (iii) careful selection of virtual and augmented reality technologies can provide plausible virtual prototyping routes for HMI design concepts.
Méthodes stochastiques pour la modélisation et l’identification des bioprocédés de digestion anaérobie

This thesis concerns the stochastic methods for the modeling and the identi cation of anaerobic digestion bio-processes. In the rst part of the thesis, we present the deterministic models of anaerobic bioreactors generally used. We also present the di erent types of stochastic models associated with each deterministic model. One of these stochastic models is compared in simulation with its deterministic version to validate the modeling approach. In a second part, we present the di erent methods generally used to estimate the state variables of the stochastic models. Then, these methods are adapted to the proposed stochastic models by taking into account the particular nature of the latter. The results obtained were compared and evaluated based on di erent performance criteria to determine the most appropriate method for the system in study. Finally, we present an algorithm which can combine di erent estimation methods and choose the best method amongst them. This algorithm also allows to estimate the system parameters which admit a nite number of possible values and is used in our case to estimate the growth rate functions in the model.
Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) in Childhood - Results of the Multicenter-Trial CML-paed.

CML is a rare disease in childhood and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (SCT) remains the only proven option for cure of young patients (pts). We here report the results of the GPOH-trial “CML-paed”. From December 1995 to June 2004 pts younger than 19 years (median age: 11.4 yrs) with Philadelphia-chromosome positive CML (n=193; 99 boys, 94 girls) were treated by hydroxyurea ± interferon and scheduled for SCT from an HLA-matched family donor within 6 months after diagnosis (Dx) and from an unrelated donor within 12 months. 85% of the pts were diagnosed in chronic phase (CP). Six pts (3%) died from disease without SCT with a median interval from Dx to death of 6.5 months (range 0.5–12 months) and 25 pts are still searching for a donor. 168 pts underwent SCT (n=50 HLA-matched related; n=69 HLA-matched unrelated (MUD); n=18 HLA-mismatched related; n=31 HLA mismached unrelated) in CP (n=139), in accelerated phase (AP, n=9), in blast crisis (BC, n=9), or in 2. CP (n=10). Probability of overall survival (OS) was 75 % if SCT was performed <7 months after Dx (n=53 pts) and 60 % (n=100 pts) if pts were transplanted later, however, this difference was statistically not significant. Conditioning regimens included either total body irradiation (n=82) or busulfan (n=80) resulting in no statistically different impact on OS. 5-year OS was 82 % for SCT from HLA-matched related and 55% for HLA-MUD-SCT reflecting a higher transplant-related mortality for the latter (p=.0017). After SCT from HLA-mismached unrelated and HLA-mismatched related donors, OS was 56% and 50%, respectively. 12 out of 168 pts (12%) relapsed following SCT after a mean interval of 11 months (range: 1–137 mos) and 9 of them so far have died of CML. Outcome was inferior if SCT was performed in advanced stages of CML (OS of all pts in CP: 67%; in AP: 55%, in BC: 21%, respectively). During the last decade the 3-year OS after SCT from HLA-matched unrelated donors improved gradually from 45 % before the year 1994, to 53 % in the period 1995 to 1999 and to 62 % after 2000, respectively. This large series of pts from a controlled trial shows an excellent OS of 82% for pediatric pts with CML undergoing SCT from matched sibling donors and constantly improving results during the last decade in the setting of MUD-SCT.
Feasibility Study of Magister Management Program in Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha

— This research aimed to gather empirical data that can be used as a feasibility study of the Magister Management Program at Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha (Undiksha). This research used qualitative research approach. Data were collected by interview and survey technique. Data were analyzed with qualitative research technique. The results of this study can be use as an empirical data for decision making process on magister management program at Undiksha. This research is a feasibility study which is focusing on developing curriculum, analysis of human resources and developing basic competencies for Magister Management Program at Undiksha. This research found that Undiksha has capacity to open magister management program in 2020.Undiksha has human resources and complete facilities to support the magister management program. This research found that the society have strong motivation to pursue postgraduate program in Undiksha. Majority of respondent want to enhance their career prospect through education. Most of the respondent are permanent employee therefore they looking for night class or weekend program. Finally, it can be concluded that Undiksha has market opportunity and capacity to open magister management program.
Differentially Private Searchable Symmetric Encryption Scheme with Configurable Pattern Leakage

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) allows a data owner to outsource its data to a cloud server while maintaining the ability to search over it. Most existing SSE schemes leak access-pattern leakage, and thus are vulnerable to attacks like the IKK attack. Oblivious RAM and PIR can be used to construct SSE schemes that fully hide access patterns. However, such schemes suffer from heavy communication overhead or computation overhead making them impractical. Chen et al. proposed an obfuscation mechanism to protect existing SSE schemes against access-pattern leakage. This mechanism can produce differentially private access patterns per keyword. However, it cannot hide whether or not the same keyword is being searched multiple times or, in other words, the search patterns, making this mechanism vulnerable to search-pattern attacks. In this thesis, we propose a stronger security definition for differentially private searchable symmetric encryption schemes and present a real construction, DP-SSE, fulfilling it. On the one hand, DP-SSE is adaptively semantically secure and provides differential privacy for both keywords and documents implying search-pattern hiding and access-pattern hiding, respectively. On the other hand, DP-SSE has communication overhead as small as O(log log n) and computation complexity of O(n · log log n) when querying relatively frequent keyword w. When assuming queries follow Zipfian distribution, the amortized communication overhead would be O(log n · log log n). By replicating the IKK attack, we show that DP-SSE can actually hide access patterns and make it difficult to extract useful information from differentially private access-pattern leakage. Finally, we perform KMeans clustering, we were able to show that inferring search patterns from differentially private access-pattern leakage is difficult, namely search patterns are hidden.
Cockayne syndrome proteins CSA and CSB maintain mitochondrial homeostasis through NAD+ signaling

Background Cockayne syndrome (CS) is a rare premature aging disease, most commonly caused by mutations of the genes encoding the CSA or CSB proteins. CS patients display cachectic dwarfism and severe neurological manifestations and have an average life expectancy of 12 years. The CS proteins are involved in transcription and DNA repair, with the latter including transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair (TC-NER). However, there is also evidence for mitochondrial dysfunction in CS, which likely contributes to the severe premature aging phenotype of this disease. While damaged mitochondria and impaired mitophagy were characterized in mice with CSB deficiency, such changes in the CS nematodes and CS patients are not fully known. Results Our cross-species transcriptomic analysis in CS postmortem brain tissue, CS mouse and nematode models show that mitochondrial dysfunction is indeed a common feature in CS. Restoration of mitochondrial dysfunction through NAD+ supplementation significantly improved lifespan and healthspan in the CS nematodes, highlighting mitochondrial dysfunction as a major driver of the aging features of CS. In cerebellar samples from CS patients, we found molecular signatures of dysfunctional mitochondrial dynamics and impaired mitophagy/autophagy. In primary cells depleted for CSA or CSB, this dysfunction can be corrected with NAD+ supplementation. Conclusions Our study provides support for the interconnection between major causative aging theories, DNA damage accumulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and compromised mitophagy/autophagy. Together these three agents contribute to an accelerated aging program that can be averted by NAD+ supplementation.
The Investment Behavior of Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors in China

Abstract Using data from Chinese listed firms, this paper examines the investment behavior of Qualified Foreign Institutional Investors (QFIIs). QFIIs have a preference for large well-known firms with some element of state ownership, lower liability levels and greater turnover capacity. Furthermore, the presence of QFIIs in Chinese firms is associated with better levels of corporate operating performance. We show that this positive relationship is more pronounced, the greater the international investors level of commitment, in terms of investment size and horizon. Our results highlight the heterogeneity of foreign institutional investors and support the view that foreign institutional investors in emerging markets provide an important source of managerial oversight. Our results are particularly noteworthy given all QFIIs in China represent small overall holdings, with shareholdings below blockholder thresholds.
Benchmark solutions of the stabilized computations of flows of fluids governed by the Rolie-Poly constitutive model

Recent studies demonstrate that flow induced non-uniformities of concentration can trigger shear banding in the flow of certain viscoelastic fluids. These studies show that the driving mechanisms for such shear banding are related to the coupling of the polymer stresses to an inhomogeneous concentration profile. The Rolie-Poly (RP) viscoelastic constitutive model has been used in such studies since it has been comprehensively subjected to extensive experimental validation with regards to shear banding and has the demonstrated ability to accurately express the rheology of polymer solutions for a wide range of strain rates. The primary aim of this work is to develop an efficient computational methodology that could be used to accurately simulate the flow of complex fluids governed by the Rolie-Poly constitutive equation. The development of such a computational platform is crucially important for the purposes of our follow up studies on the computational analysis of shear banding phenomena by coupling polymer stress with inhomogeneous concentration profile. Our numerical algorithms will be based on the finite volume method (FVM) and will be implemented on the open source software package OpenFOAM®. In this paper, we will present both validation results as well as new benchmark results from our FVM based OpenFOAM® numerical solver for flow of fluids governed by the Rolie-Poly constitutive model. We use two well-known benchmark problems, the lid-driven cavity flow and the 4:1 planar contraction flow problems. In order to stabilize the numerical algorithm at high Weissenberg numbers, we employ either of two stabilization techniques; the Discrete Elastic Viscous Stress Splitting (DEVSS) technique as well as the Log-Conformation Reformulation (LCR) methodology. Validation of our results is done by comparing our (stabilized) numerical results, against data from existing literature. The numerical results obtained for the contraction flow using the LCR stabilization approach are in good agreement with the existing literature for a wider range of Weissenberg numbers. The DEVSS method shows a good agreement only for lower Weissenberg numbers. For the lid-driven cavity flow, good agreement with the existing literature is observed for low Weissenberg numbers using either of the two stabilization techniques.
Is the Fed's News Perception Different from the Private Sector's?

The recent literature on monetary policy has dedicated considerable attention to modelling agents’ processing of information about the future in real time. This paper contributes to this growing strand by investigating the implied differences in the so-called news shocks estimated from the standard New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model using the real-time data sets from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the Federal Reserve’s Greenbook (GB) forecasts. Alternative specifications with either the SPF or GB forecasts aim to delineate the differences in the private sector’s and the Fed’s expectations of future macroeconomic outcomes and identify the differences in their perception of news shocks. Our results indicate that while the demand news shocks have very similar distributions in the two datasets, the monetary and cost-push news shocks from the models estimated on the GB data tend to be larger than those from the SPF. These findings suggest that the Federal Reserve’s forecasting methods allow for more variation in future outcomes than the SPF’s. These findings mesh well with the extant literature on the superiority of the Fed’s forecasts relative to the private sector’s and provide a structural explanation for the source of this superiority.
Synthesis of Plasmonic Photocatalysts for Water Splitting

Production of H2, O2, and some useful chemicals by solar water splitting is widely expected to be one of the ultimate technologies in solving energy and environmental problems worldwide. Plasmonic enhancement of photocatalytic water splitting is attracting much attention. However, the enhancement factors reported so far are not as high as expected. Hence, further investigation of the plasmonic photocatalysts for water splitting is now needed. In this paper, recent work demonstrating plasmonic photocatalytic water splitting is reviewed. Particular emphasis is given to the fabrication process and the morphological features of the plasmonic photocatalysts.
Comparison of Radiation Dose and Image Quality with Various Computed-Tomography Scout Views: The Angular Modulation Technique Based on Information Calculated from Scout Views

Background: While using the automatic exposure control technique in computed tomography (CT), the scout view determines the radiation dose for the CT scan by taking anatomical morphology into consideration. Objectives: The goal of this study was to estimate radiation doses during scout scanning and to evaluate the hypothesis that the radiation dose during CT depends on the location and order of the X-ray tubes. Materials and Methods: A CT scanner (GE VCT 64-channel) with the X-ray tubes placed in the anteroposterior (AP), lateral, and posteroanterior (PA) positions was used to acquire the scout views. The effective doses were assessed using an anthropomorphic chest phantom (RSD Inc., Long Beach, CA), an AAPM CT performance phantom (CIRS model 610), and CT dose indices (CTDI) head phantom. Both single and two scout views were tested with the three views combined according to the order of scanning. The CTDIs obtained from the CT unit dose report were used to compare the chest CT radiation doses, while the image quality was evaluated based on the root-mean-square error values calculated using the Image program. Results: The results of this study indicate that single AP (0°) scout views obtained with the z-axis modulation technique (AutomA) during chest CT scanning resulted in CTDIs that were lower than those generated by using lateral (90°) or PA (180°) scout views. The analysis of two-scout views using AutomA alone revealed the lowest CTDI in the 90° - 0° scout views. However, based on the CT image noise analysis, a scout angle order of 0°-90° resulted in the optimal scout view combination with the minimal dose. Conclusion: Scout views may be useful in determining dose and image quality in CT scanning; however, it is necessary to first determine the most appropriate scout view for CT scans.
CLIMATE LITERACY AWARENESS AMONG PRESERVICE TEACHERS IN MALAYSIA

Climate change and global warming are the primary issues often debated when environmental issues are discussed nowadays. Among the efforts made to raise awareness concerning mitigation and adaptation to climate change is climate literacy acquired from the educational medium. Therefore, this article seeks to identify the level of awareness on climate literacy among preservice teachers in Malaysia. This study involved 500 final-year students from nine faculties at Sultan Idris Education University using the stratified sampling method. A questionnaire instrument was used to get feedback, containing four study variables, namely the knowledge, attitudes, skills, and practices of climate change mitigation and adaptation. The findings showed that the knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change mitigation and adaptation variables were at high levels, while the skills and practices of climate change mitigation and adaptation variables were at moderate levels. Thus, this indicates that students’ knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change mitigation and adaptation were good and satisfactory, but not the skills and practices of climate change mitigation and adaptation, which were still moderate and could be improved over time. The findings and issues that have been studied can be used as a reference and guide for universities, educators and ministries in improving students’ climate literacy, aiming for a more sustainable life.
Chemical Modification of Urena lobata (Caeser Weed) Fibers for Reinforcement Applications

The reinforcements of composites with natural fibers have attracted more concerns than their synthetic counterparts due to the biodegradability, less-expensiveness, CO2 neutrality, ready availability, non-abrasiveness, low weight, renewability and high specific mechanical properties of these fibers. However, the hydrophilicity, reduced interfacial bond, and reduced thermal strength of fibers of natural origin deter their attraction for use in composites reinforced with natural fibers. The treatment of naturally-occurring fibers chemically helps to clean up the fiber surface making them rougher; reduces moisture absorption; and increases fiber-matrix adhesion. In this study, Urena lobata fibers produced by natural water retting for use as composite reinforcements were subjected to alkaline-treatment with sodium hydroxide solutions at varying concentrations. The transformations that occurred in the structures and morphologies of the fibers were checked using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Tests were done on several bundles of the Urena lobata fibers so as to understand how the chemical treatments had effects on the tensile behaviours of the fibers. The results obtained reveal enhanced mechanical behaviours of the treated Urena lobata fibers in comparison to the untreated ones. Interestingly, the chemical treatment with 6 wt% NaOH solution yielded the best mechanical behaviours (2.91 ± 0.01%, 53.26 ± 0.01 GPa and 2611.34 ± 0.045 MPa for ductility, elastic modulus and tensile strength, respectively) amongst other alkaline-treated fibers.
Prenatal Stress Up-Regulated Hippocampal Glucocorticoid Receptor Expression in Female Adult Rat Offspring

Accumulating evidence from preclinical and clinical studies indicates prenatal exposure to stress or excess glucocorticoids can affect offspring brain. Glucocorticoid receptor (GR) is an important target of glucocorticoid. Therefore th aim of the present study was to investigate the expression of GR in prenatally stressed adult offspring and the relationship between GR ex pr ssion and behavior in offspring. Pregnant rats received restraint stress during the last week of pregnancy. Hippocampal glucocorticoi d recep or expression levels in the offspring were detected on postnatal 60 (P60). Cognition function was also detected. It shows significa ntly lower hippocampal GR expression was observed in female prenatally stressed offspring compared with their controls at P60. Correspondi ng to the expression of GR, female prenatally stressed offspring exhibited poorer spatial learning and memory abilities in the Barnes maze than control, This suggests that cognitive impairment in prenatally stressed rat offspring attribute lower hippocampal GR expre ssion.
Do Classroom Simulations Really Help Students Learn and Engage?

Political science professors have been using simulations to try to enhance student learning for years. Simulations are interesting, a nice change of pace from the traditional lecture, and allow for more student participation in class. But do they really make a difference when it comes to actual learning, and to longer term engagement with the material and with politics? This study attempts to examine the actual impact that simulations are having, by examining attitudes and understanding before and after taking part in a simulation. We study whether participation in classroom and Model United Nations simulations leads to increases in civic attitudes, behaviors, and political literacy. Using data from two semesters, five courses, and two clubs, we examine the statistical evidence to see if it supports the beneficial claims in the scholarly literature.