Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Study on the Relationship among Freetime Management , Leisure Constraints and Leisure Benefits of Employees in Resort

The purpose of this study was to explode the relationship among free time management, leisure constraints and leisure benefits of employees in resort hotels. The fit of structural model would be tested with AMOS statistical software. This study employed scales and drew 233 subjects who service in three resort hotels in the southern area of Taiwan. The data collected were then analyzed by structural equation model. The main results indicate: 1. Free time management of employees in resort hotels have negative influence on leisure constrains. 2. Free time management of employees in resort hotels have positive influence on leisure benefits. 3. Leisure constrains of employees in resort hotels have negative influence on leisure benefits. 4. The fit indices of the structural model for the full sample were within an acceptable range.
A post-market quality assessment of first-line, fixed-dose combination antiretrovirals in South Africa

South Africa has the world’s largest antiretroviral (ARV) program and despite having stringent upstream medicine’s regulatory oversight, the post-market reassessment of ARV quality is prohibitively resource intensive. The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the post-market quality of four fixed-dose combination (FDC) generics containing efavirenz (EFV) 600 mg, emtricitabine 200 mg, and tenofovir 300 mg against the innovator, Atripla® and according to the International Pharmacopoeia (IP). Generic tablet samples, sourced from a South African provincial depot, were subjected to the identification, content assay, dissolution, uniformity of weight and disintegration tests. An in-house reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) method was developed and validated in lieu of the RP-HPLC IP method which proved to be unsuitable. All samples passed the identification, assay, uniformity of weight and disintegration tests and one generic FDC failed the dissolution test (at both stage 1 and 2), releasing 62.23% (standard deviation 20.43) of EFV in 30 minutes. One generic first-line ARV combination that is currently supplied to the South African public health sector was found to be substandard and this reinforces the need for routine ARV post-market surveillance, as well as reliable compendial methods to facilitate this undertaking.
ANALYSING DESIGN MODIFICATIONS EFFECTS ON THE COMPLIANCE OF DEFORMABLE HYBRID SERIAL-PARALLEL MANIPULATORS

This paper presents a quantitative study on the effects of angle variation-disposition of actuators on the compliance of a class of Deformable Hybrid Serial-Parallel Manipulators (DHSPM). Although compliance is desired to achieve a secure and stable maneuverability, high stiffness is good to provide precision and reject perturbations. Thus, the compromises between compliance and stiffness can have different profiles along the degrees of freedom of deformable robots. The study is based on the simulation of the model of the robot derived from computational mechanics (Finite Element Method) and is conducted on a DHSPM with antagonistic actuation. We show that antagonistic actuation predominantly increases stiffness in torsion when activated and that by changing the orientation of the actuator it is possible to increase compliance in one direction while decreasing it in another. Finally, we provide guidelines for the design of soft robots having a parallel structure such as deformable hybrid serial-parallel manipulators.
Interface Locking of Subduction Zone near Costa Rica using Seismic and Geodetic Methods

Most of the world’s largest earthquakes occur along subduction megathrusts. Study of the evolution mechanism of seismogenic locking and strain accumulation along the subducting interface is crucial for estimating recurrence of these destructive events. The Costa Rica region is ideal for investigating megathrust earthquakes because of the region’s proximity to the subducting interface and abundance of existing and new seismic and geodetic data. For this project, I have manually located more than 5000 local earthquakes that occurred in 2009 in the Costa Rica region by using the Antelope seismic analysis software. I have applied the local magnitudes of these events to demonstrate the spatial variability of frequency-magnitude (FM) along the subduction interface of the Nicoya Peninsula. Preliminary results show the current spatial FM distribution has changed compared with Nicoya seismicity FM (between late-1999 and mid-2001) maps produced by previous studies. This change is most likely due to either slow slip events or tremor, or a variation in an interface property. Future work includes generating a best-fit 3-D interface model for the Costa Rican subduction zone by using the seismicity distribution along the approximate interface. I will then use the geometry of this newly generated subduction interface model, combining with GPS surface deformation data (from 1996 to 2010) of the Nicoya Peninsula, to generate the inversion results of the slip distribution along the interface. This analysis can be used as a good proxy for locating accumulated stress along the megathrust interface. If the simulated interface model works well, I will also apply it to specifically examine the stress accumulation pattern changes before and after the 2007 slow slip event by calculating the inversion results of GPS movement data. I will then evaluate the impact of slow slip events on potential regions of future megathrust earthquakes with highly accumulated stress.
econstor Make Your Publications Visible . A Service of zbw

We compare the alternative approaches for regulating genetic information in the health insurance market when prevention measures are available. In the model, firms offer insurance contracts to consumers who are initially uninformed of their risk type but can obtain such information by performing a costless genetic test. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is that information has decision-making value since it allows for optimal choice of a self-insurance action (secondary prevention). We focus on the welfare properties of market equilibria obtained under the different regulatory schemes and, by using an intuitive graphical analysis, we rank them
Cherenkov Detector with a Focusing Aerogel Radiator

Cherenkov Detector with a Focusing Aerogel Radiator A.Yu. Barnyakov, M.Yu. Barnyakov, V.S. Bobrovnikov, A.R. Buzykaev, S.A. Kononov, E.A. Kravchenko∗, A.P. Onuchin, V.V. Porosev Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, Russia A.F. Danilyuk, V.L. Kirillov Boreskov Institute of Catalysis, Novosibirsk, Russia T. Fukushima, A. Kuratani Dept. of Physics, Chiba Univ., Chiba, Japan I. Adachi, S. Nishida, Y. Unno IPNS, KEK, Tsukuba, Japan K. Fujita, D. Hayashi, T. Iijima, Y. Kozakai, Y. Mazuka Dept. of Physics, Nagoya Univ., Nagoya, Japan M. Iwabuchi Dept. of Physics, Toho Univ., Funabashi, Japan T. Nakagawa, T. Seki, T. Sumiyoshi Dept. of Physics, Tokyo Metropolitan Univ., Tokyo, Japan A. Gorišek, S. Korpar, R. Pestotnik J.Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia P. Križan Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Univ. of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
LONG-PERIOD GROUND MOTION SIMULATION OF OSAKA SEDIMENTARY BASIN FOR A HYPOTHETICAL NANKAI SUBDUCTION EARTHQUAKE

Long-period ground motion simulations for the hypothetical Nankai subduction earthquake are studied. We confirmed the Osaka basin and crustal velocity structure model that covers the source area of the Nankai earthquake and the Osaka basin by modeling of long-period ground motion of the largest aftershock of the 2004 off Kii peninsula earthquake. The simulated ground motions by our velocity model reproduce the observed ground motions well. Then we simulate long-period ground motions for the hypothetical Nankai earthquake using that velocity model and discuss the ground motion characteristics in the Osaka sedimentary basin.
UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SANTA MARIA CENTRO DE CIÊNCIAS DA SAÚDE PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM CIÊNCIASODONTOLÓGICAS

DARK SHADOWS FROM DENTIN (ICDAS 4 CARIES LESIONS) IN PERMANENT POSTERIOR TEETH AUTHOR: Patricia Kolling Marquezan ADVISOR: Júlio Eduardo do Amaral Zenkner The present dissertation is composed of two manuscripts whose objectives were to analyze the prevalence, extension, and risk indicators associated with dark shadows from dentin (ICDAS 4) in 12years-old schoolchildren from Porto Alegre, RS (Article I) and to evaluate the radiograph pattern of dark shadow from dentin (ICDAS 4) in the occlusal surfaces of permanent posterior teeth compared to dark non-cavitated lesions (ICDAS2) (Article II). Article I is linked to an epidemiological survey conducted to assess the oral health conditions of a representative sample of 12 year-old schoolchildren from Porto Alegre, RS (n=1,528). Data collection included the application of a questionnaire and clinical examination. The primary outcome of the study was the prevalence of dark shadow from dentin in permanent teeth. Poisson regression models were used to assess the association between predictor variables and the prevalence of dark shadows from dentin. The second study was conducted on a convenience sample selected in Santa Maria, RS. In addition to a questionnaire and clinical examination, data collection included bilateral bitewing radiographs. The radiographic expression of dark non-cavitaded lesions (ICDAS 2, n=140) and dark shadows from dentin (ICDAS 4, n= 142) was compared using the chi-square test. The risk of presenting radiolucent image in dentin was estimated through logistic regression models with generalized estimating equations to adjust for clusters. In article I, the prevalence of dark shadows from dentin lesions was 7.4% (95%CI [confidence interval]=2.8-12), corresponding to 117 students. The adjusted model showed that type of school (public, PR [prevalence ratio]=2.05, 95%CI=1.16-3.65, p=0.01) and caries experience (DMFT 1-2, PR=2.22;95%CI=1.08-4.57, p=0.03; DMFT≥3,PR=3.26;95%CI=1.41-7.53, p=0.01) were significantly associated with the prevalence of dark shadows from dentin. In article II, it was observed that the majority of lesions presented no radiographic image (87.2%) or, when present, the image was restricted to the enamel-dentin junction (12.1%). The proportion of cases with radiographic image at the enamel-dentin junction was significantly higher in dark shadow from dentin than in dark non-cavitated lesions (p<0.001). However, only one case in each group presented an obvious image in dentin. In the risk analysis, dark shadows from dentin had a 6-foldincreased risk for presenting any radiolucent image in dentin compared to dark non-cavitated lesions (odds ratio=5.78, 95%CI=2.73-12.22, p<0.001).
A Review of Landsat TM/ETM based Vegetation Indices as Applied to Wetland Ecosystems

A review of vegetation indices as applied to Landsat-TM and ETM+ multispectral data is presented. The review focuses on indices that have been developed to produce biophysical information about vegetation biomass/greenness, moisture and pigments.In addition, a set of biomass/greenness and moisture content indices are tested in a Mediterranean semiarid wetland environment to determine their appropriateness and potential for carrying redundant information.The results indicate that most vegetation indices used for biomass/greenness mapping produce similar information and are statistically well correlated.
Using Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling to Examine Contextual Differential Item Functioning: A Validity Study of Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale

The purpose of the study was to further investigate the validity of the instrument used for collecting preservice teachers’ perceptions of self-efficacy adapting the three-level hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) model. To serve the purpose, the study used data collected by the research team which elicited preservices teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs using Teachers’ Sense of Efficacy Scale (TSES). Hierarchical generalized linear modeling (HGLM) were used to analyze the data. Results of the HGLM analyses (at level-two) showed that one item in the scale displayed gender DIF. Another item became DIF item when the context variable was added to the level-two model. However, the effect of the context on the DIF item was not big.
Comparative study of carboxylate and amide forms of HLDF-6 peptide: Neuroprotective and nootropic effects in animal models of ischemic stroke

Cerebrovascular diseases are among the most urgent medical and social problems of the modern world. The prevalence of nervous system diseases associated with circulatory insuf iciency is up to 20% of the population and is trending upwards. Many nervous system diseases are characterized by a lingering severe course and persistent functional defects resulting in limited or total disability [1]. One of the most severe cerebrovascular diseases is ischaemic stroke (IS). Mechanisms of brain tissue damage development under conditions of cerebral ischaemia necessitate the introduction of a special type of therapy known as neuroprotection. Neuroprotection is aimed at interrupting the delayed mechanisms of cell death—oxidative stress, cytokine imbalance, local in lammation, trophic dysfunction, and apoptosis. A tight interconnection between all mechanisms of nervous tissue death motivates exploitation of the modulating effect that could be achieved through stimulation of the regulatory systems. Peptides are among the key players in regulatory processes [2]. An optimal scenario of therapy for IS and other cerebral disorders should comprise the application of agents simultaneously affecting several key components in the pathogenesis of the disease. Another important requirement for these compounds is the absence of toxic effects when used for prolonged preventive treatment. Due to Abstract
High Performance Techniques for Face Recognition

The identification of individuals using face recognition techniques is a challenging task. This is due to the variations resulting from facial expressions, makeup, rotations, illuminations, gestures, etc. Also, facial images contain a great deal of redundant information, which negatively affects the performance of the recognition system. The dimensionality and the redundancy of the facial features have a direct effect on the face recognition accuracy. Not all the features in the feature vector space are useful. For example, non-discriminating features in the feature vector space not only degrade the recognition accuracy but also increase the computational complexity. In the field of computer vision, pattern recognition, and image processing, face recognition has become a popular research topic. This is due to its wide spread applications in security and control, which allow the identified individual to access secure areas, personal information, etc. The performance of any recognition system depends on three factors: 1) the storage requirements, 2) the computational complexity, and 3) the recognition rates. Two different recognition system families are presented and developed in this dissertation. Each family consists of several face recognition systems. Each system contains three main steps, namely, preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. Several preprocessing steps, such as cropping, facial detection, dividing the facial image into sub-images, etc. are applied to the facial images. This reduces the effect of the irrelevant information (background) and improves the system performance. In this dissertation, either a Neural Network (NN) based classifier or Euclidean distance is used for classification purposes. Five widely used databases, namely, ORL, YALE, FERET, FEI, and LFW, each containing different facial variations, such as light condition, rotations, facial expressions, facial details, etc., are used to evaluate the proposed systems. The experimental results of the proposed systems are analyzed using K-folds Cross Validation (CV).
Reduction for STBC Transmit Diversity with Transmit FDE using Blind Selected Mapping

Recently, we have proposed a peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) reduction technique called blind selected mapping (blind SLM) for single-antenna transmission and for space-time block coded transmit diversity (STBC-TD). Blind SLM does not require side-information transmission. We exploited the fact that PAPR of the signal after STBC encoding and that of before STBC encoding are the same. However, if STBC-TD is combined with transmit frequency-domain equalization (TxFDE), this does not hold anymore. In this paper, we study an application of blind SLM on STBC-TD with Tx-FDE. Both orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and discrete Fourier transform (DFT)-precoded OFDM transmissions are considered. Phase rotation sequence selection in SLM is carried out to minimize the maximum instantaneous PAPR among all transmit antennas. Computer simulation results confirm that blind SLM can reduce the PAPR of STBC-TD with Tx-FDE without causing significant bit-error rate (BER) degradation when the total received bit energy-per-noise power spectrum density (Eb/N0) is higher than about 5 dB.
The JHU ASR System for VOiCES from a Distance Challenge 2019

This paper describes the system developed by the JHU team for automatic speech recognition (ASR) of the VOiCES from a Distance Challenge 2019, focusing on single channel distant/farfield audio under noisy conditions. We participated in the Fixed Condition track, where the systems are only trained on an 80hour subset of the Librispeech corpus provided by the organizer. The training data was first augmented with both background noises and simulated reverberation. We then trained factorized TDNN acoustic models that differed only in their use of i-vectors for adaptation. Both systems utilized RNN language models trained on original and reversed text for rescoring. We submitted three systems: the system using i-vectors with WER 19.4% on the development set, the system without i-vectors that achieved WER 19.0%, and the their lattice-level fusion with WER 17.8%. On the evaluation set, our best system achieves 23.9% WER.
Contourlet Transform based Method for Medical Image Denoising

Noise is an important factor of the medical image quality, because the high noise of medical imaging will not give us the useful information of the medical diagnosis. Basically, medical diagnosis is based on normal or abnormal information provided diagnose conclusion. In this paper, we proposed a denoising algorithm based on Contourlet transform for medical images. Contourlet transform is an extension of the wavelet transform in two dimensions using the multiscale and directional filter banks. The Contourlet transform has the advantages of multiscale and time-frequency-localization properties of wavelets, but also provides a high degree of directionality. For verifying the denoising performance of the Contourlet transform, two kinds of noise are added into our samples; Gaussian noise and Speckle noise. Soft thresholding value for the Contourlet coefficients of noisy image is computed. Finally, the experimental results of proposed algorithm are compared with the results of wavelet transform. We found that the proposed algorithm has achieved acceptable results compared with those achieved by wavelet transform.
Looking from the Mirror: Evaluating IoT Device Security through Mobile Companion Apps

Smart home IoT devices have increasingly become a favorite target for the cybercriminals due to their weak security designs. To identify these vulnerable devices, existing approaches rely on the analysis of either real devices or their firmware images. These approaches, unfortunately, are difficult to scale in the highly fragmented IoT market due to the unavailability of firmware images and the high cost involved in acquiring real-world devices for security analysis. In this paper, we present a platform that accelerates vulnerable device discovery and analysis, without requiring the presence of actual devices or firmware. Our approach is based on two key observations: First, IoT devices tend to reuse and customize others’ components (e.g., software, hardware, protocol, and services), so vulnerabilities found in one device are often present in others. Second, reused components can be indirectly inferred from the mobile companion apps of the devices; so a cross analysis of mobile companion apps may allow us to approximate the similarity between devices. Using a suite of program analysis techniques, our platform analyzes mobile companion apps of smart home IoT devices on market and automatically discovers potentially vulnerable ones, allowing us to perform a large-scale analysis involving over 4,700 devices. Our study brings to light the sharing of vulnerable components across the smart home IoT devices (e.g., shared vulnerable protocol, backend services, device rebranding), and leads to the discovery of 324 devices from 73 different vendors that are likely to be vulnerable to a set of security issues.
Investigations on thermo-mechanical modeling of abradable coating in the context of rotor/stator interactions

In modern turbomachine designs, the nominal clearances between rotating bladed-disks and the surrounding casings are reduced to improve aerodynamical performances. But the reduction of nominal clearances signiﬁcantly increases the risk of occurrence of contacts between static and rotating components and may lead to hazardous interaction phenomena. A common technical solution to mitigate this issue consists in the addition of an abradable coating on the casing inner surface. Even so, contact interactions between the blade tips and this abradable coating may yield unexpected abradable wear removal phenomena. For that reason, recent researches have focused on the numerical simulation of rotor/stator interactions with wear removal mechanism of operating clearances while neglecting thermal eﬀects. However, high temperature areas due to contact occurrence have been observed experimentally. These high temperatures are suspected to generate a self-excitation of the system due the abradable dilatation. Accordingly, the aim of this work is to investigate the numerical modeling of thermal eﬀects in the abradable coating due to contact interactions.
A multi-step process mining approach based on the markov transition matrix

According to the situation that many workflow instances may deviate from the predefined model, this paper proposed a new process mining approach based on analyzing the workflow log to realize the workflow process reconstruction. First, build the markov transition matrix based on the workflow log, then design a multi-step process mining algorithm to mine the structural relationships between the activities, finally, this paper verifies the feasibility and applicability of the approach through a simulation example.
ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND ECONOMIC GROWTH : A TIME SERIES EVIDENCE FROM THE ITALIAN ECONOMY 1

As follows from Friedman’s view, it is often maintained that economic freedom fosters economic growth by affecting incentives, productive effort and the effectiveness of resource use. Since the time of Adam Smith, economists have argued that the freedom to choose and supply resources, competition in business, trade with others and secure property rights are central ingredients for economic progress (de Haan and Sturm, 2000).