Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of Rice Import Trend and it`s Economic Factors: Case of Iran

Rice comes second after wheat in Iran`s food consumption economy. However Iran is one of the greatest rice importer countries all over the world because of it`s rising population and recent growth in GDP. This paper presents an analysis of cointegration test between rice import and it`s economic factors over the period 1990-2011, employing Engle-Granger model. At first, Dickey-Fuller test shows that all variables are non-stationary at data level, so their first difference (that are stationary series) are used. Secondly, Engle-Granger testing presents existence of a long-run relationship between rice import and it`s economic factors including per capita GDP, foreign exchange rate and domestic price. At last, rice import model was estimated using OLS method which proves that all independent variables are significant at high level and the sign of coefficients are consistent with theoretical expectations So that import of rice positively correlates with Per capita GDP, domestic price and negatively correlates with foreigh exchange rate. With respect to increasing demand for rice, government should keep domestic policies for the rise of rice production so that the need for import falls in the long-run.
Transverse C-band Deflecting Structure for Longitudinal Phase Space Diagnostics in the XFEL/SPring-8 ?SACLA?

In SPring-8, the 8 GeV compact XFEL “SACLA” is under commissioning. A single bunch of electrons is compressed down to about 30 fs for brilliant SASE X-ray lasing. It is an important key of stable lasing to investigate the longitudinal phase space and the sliced emittance of a lasing part of the bunch by using a transverse RF deflector. We developed a high gradient C-band deflecting structure operated at 5712 MHz for the bunch diagnosis with a resolution on a femtosecond scale in a limited space in SACLA. The backward travelling-wave of the HEM11-5π/6 mode is excited in the cylindrical structure periodically loaded with racetrack-shaped irises. The featuring irises suppress rotation of the deflection plane and generate strong cell-to-cell coupling for stable resonance. Two 1.8m-long structures were fabricated and installed in SACLA. They successfully generated a deflection voltage of 60 MV and pitched the bunch at the zero-crossing RF phase.
Strategic Growth Options

We provide a strategic rationale for growth options under uncertainty and imperfect competition. In a market with strategic competition, investment confers a greater capability to take advantage of future growth opportunities. This strategic advantage leads to the capture of a greater share of the market, either by dissuading entry or by inducing competitors to "make room" for the stronger competitor. As a result of this strategic effect, payoffs are in a rough sense more convex than in the case of no investment in a growth option. When the strategic advantage is strong, increased uncertainty encourages investment in growth options: higher uncertainty means more opportunity rather than simply larger risk. If the strategic effect is weak, the reverse is true. On the other hand, an increase in systematic risk discourages the acquisition of growth options. Our results contradict the view that volatility is a strong disincentive for investment.
Thermal effects of marine sedimentation in hydrothermally active areas

SUMMARY a hydrothermally active ocean basin, vigorous hydrothermal circulation in highly permeable basement rocks maintains a nearly constant temperature at the base of the overlying accumulating sediment section. To investigate the thermal effects of sedimentation in such geological settings, we have developed a simple onedimensional finite element model and applied it to cases in the northeast Pacific. The model accounts for differential motion of fluids and sediment grains during compaction, and can be used with any porosity-depth function. Results demonstrate clearly that the constant basal temperature of an accumulating sediment section, maintained by convective heat transfer in the basement, causes the section to remain thermally near steady state for even very high rates of accumulation, particularly when compared to conditions 'estimated for a section where heat is transported in the basement by conduction. A 10-kyr period of thermal recovery due to the highly diminished sediment supply during the post-Pleistocene further reduces the thermal effects of sedimentation by a significant amount. Only in rare cases where rates of accumulation exceed 10 mm yr-l and sediment thicknesses exceed 1 km are the sea-floor heat flow and temperatures at depth diminished significantly. An example is found in Middle Valley of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, in a part of which over 2 km of sediment has accumulated in the past 200 kyr. Even in this extreme case, the heat flow is estimated to be lower than that of the steady state by about only 15 per cent. While rates of accumulation are also high in other parts of Middle Valley and in many other hydrothermally active areas, such as Guayamas Basin, Escanaba Trough and the eastern flank of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, these rates and the accumulated sediment thicknesses are found to be insufficient to cause appreciable thermal anomalies.
Teaching Reading Comprehension in English in a Distance Web-Based Course : New Roles for Teach ers

Distance web-based learning is a popular strategy in elt teaching in Colombia. Despite of the growth of experiences, there are very few studies regarding teach ers’ participation in these courses. This paper reports preliminary findings of an on-going study aiming at exploring the roles that a teach er plays in an efl reading comprehension distance web-based course. Data analysis suggests that teach ers play new roles solving technical problems, providing immediate feedback, interacting with students in a non traditional way, providing time management advice, and acting as a constant motivator. The authors conclude that efl teach ers require training for this new teaching roles and the analysis of webbased distance learning environments as an option under permanent construction that requires their active participation.
Firms’ Disclosure Policies and Capital Investment Constraints: Evidence from Reg FD

ii Acknowledgments iiii Vita iv List of Tables viii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Related research 9 Chapter 3: Hypotheses development 13 Chapter 4: Research design 18 4.1 Sample selection 18 4.2 Deriving private earnings guidance 19 4.3 Investment to cash flow sensitivity test 24 4.4 Engdogenous switching model 26 4.5 Financial constraints index 31 4.6 Cash to cash flow sensitivity model 32
Identification of Botryosphaeriaceae from Eucalyptus, Acacia and Pinus in Venezuela

Species of the Botryosphaeriaceae are pathogens of many plantation trees, including species of Acacia, Eucalyptus and Pinus. Some anamorphs associated with the Botryosphaeriaceae have been reported from Venezuela, but their identification is not certain. The aim of this study was to identify Botryosphaeriaceae affecting plantations of Acacia, Eucalyptus and Pinus in Venezuela. Identifications were made using a combination of morphological characteristics and DNA based molecular techniques, namely comparisons of DNA sequence data and restriction digestion (PCR-RFLP) patterns of ITS rDNA amplicons. From a total of 204 isolates from Venezuela, Botryosphaeria dothidea, B. mamane, the Neofusicoccum ribis / N. parvum complex, N. andinum, Lasiodiplodia theobromae, and Pseudofusicoccum stromaticum were identified. To discriminate between isolates residing in the Neofusicoccum ribis-N. parvum complex, PCR-RFLP patterns for an unidentified DNA region, that were characterised previously, were used. This technique showed that both these species are present in Venezuela. This study represents the first report of Botryosphaeria mamane outside Hawaii and the first records of B. dothidea, Neofusicoccum parvum and N. ribis in Venezuela.
Statistical analysis of spatial plant patterns under the effect of forest use

The analysis of the consequences of land use (in particular forest use) may be considered as a partial step towards an integrated modelling of a land system. Let us consider a forest territory, where a gap-cut is made, and after a given time period the eventual change in the spatial distribution of undergrowth plants and tree seedlings is to be detected (see Mihok et al., 2005 and Galhidy et al., 2006). If floristic data are collected along a line transect, we can try to detect the change in the plant distributions along the transect, the so-called change-point, and see whether this occurs at the geometric frontier of the human intervention. The problem, on a theoretical level, can be addressed using the methodology of change- point analysis which is a technically involved branch of mathematical statistics (see e.g. Brodsky and Darkhovsky, 1993; Csorgo and Horvath, 1997), widely used to explore the possible temporal or spatial structure of local homogeneity from collected data. (The main application fields of change-point analysis include meteorology, hydrology, or environmental studies, economy, quality control in industry, biology and medicine.) In this paper we propose a practical, operative approach, using only technique of classical statistics. In our case, given a plant species, along a line transect quadrats have been located and in each quadrat the individuals have been counted. We consider these data as samples of two distributions of the same type but with different parameters, separated by a change-point K. Based on the maximum likelihood approach, an algorithm is given to estimate K. Since the distribution of the change-point estimate is not known, as a substitute of its confidence interval, the so-called change-interval will be calculated, using an adaptation of the bootstrap method. (For this widely applied simulation method see e.g. Efron and Tibshirani, 1993, a justification of the use of bootstrap in this case can be found in Ferger, 1993.) The implementation of the above algorithms was realized with the application of the statistical software "R". As an illustration, for a concrete plant species, the maximum likelihood estimation of the change-point and the calculation of the above mentioned change-interval will be presented.
Implementation of a MIMO system for Wireless Power Transfer Using Acoustic Approach

This paper presents a development of Acoustic energy transfer (AET) system through the air medium by implementing a Multiple Input-Multiple Output (MIMO) arrangement of transducers to transmit energy. AET system allows power to be transmitted without wire connection. The MIMO system is proposed in this paper to increase the efficiency of the transmitting power by multiplying the received power. The simulation and experimental works are carried out using a Class E power converter and the obtained results are analyzed accordingly. Based on the experimental results, the 18.57mW output power is obtained at 40kHz operating frequency when triple transducer is used. It contributes to 30.96% efficiency to the power transfer system.
Sporicidal Efficacy of Thermal Spray Copper Alloy Coating with Varying Degrees of Roughness

This study was focused on the biocidal efficacy on spores of copper alloy sheet and copper alloy coating at two different surface topographies. Endospores can remain viable in a dormant state for centuries. Our work compares the effectiveness of copper alloy coating and copper sheet metal in killing endospores. A twin-wire arc spray system was used for coating of stainless steel coupons. The feedstock was CuNiZn wire, the coating thickness was 400 µm. The copper alloy sheet metal had the same composition and is registered as antimicrobial by Environmental Protection Agency (US). Uncoated stainless steel coupons were used as controls in all experiments. The surface was polished to two roughness levels: Ra=3.5 µm and Ra=0.1 µm. The surface topography was analyzed by a stylus profilometer and 3D image analysis. EDS and FIB were used to characterize the elemental composition and structure of flower-like nanostructures and endospores. The results obtained in this study indicated that changes in Ra values of 0.1 and 3.5 µm had no significant impact on the biocidal activity of sheet metal and the coating on E. coli, S. epidermidis and B. subtilis. The coating was as effective as the EPA-certified sheet metal in the destruction of vegetative cells within 5 minutes. This study indicates that degradation of B. subtilis endospore begins within 2 hours after exposure to the coating. By day seven, only extensively degraded endospores and nanostructures were visible on both surfaces. Our results show that thermal spray copper alloy coatings were as effective as certified antimicrobial sheet metal in the destruction of endospores within hours; however, the coating was more effective in killing the endospores after one week of exposure.
Flexible, textronic temperature sensors, based on carbon nanostructures

The paper presents a comparative analysis of two types of ﬂexible temperature sensors, made of carbon-based nanostructures composites. These sensors were fabricated by a low-cost screen-printing method, which qualiﬁes them to large scale, portable consumer electronic products. Results of examined measurements show the possibility of application for thick ﬁlm devices, especially dedicated to wearable electronics, also known as a textronics. Apart from general characterisation, the inﬂuence of technological processes on speciﬁc sensor parameters were examined, particulary the value of the temperature coeﬃcient of resistance (TCR) and its stability during the device bending.
EDGE-PRESERVING REGULARIZATION SCHEME APPLIED TO THE MODIFIED GRADIENT METHOD FOR THE RECONSTRUCTION OF TWO-DIMENSIONAL TARGETS FROM LABORATORY-CONTROLLED DATA

In this paper, a two-dimensional inverse scattering problem dealing with microwave tomography is considered. To solve this non linear and ill-posed problem, an iterative scheme based on the Modified Gradient Method (MGM) is used. The object to be estimated is represented by a complex function, and some modifications of the MGM formulation have been considered. This algorithm leads to an efficient regularization scheme, based on edge preserving functions which act separately on the real and imaginary parts of the object. In order to show the interest of this regularized MGM, the algorithm is tested against laboratory-controlled microwave data.
Prevalence of Brucella antibodies in horses (Equus Caballus) in Jalingo, Taraba State, Nigeria

A study was conducted to determine the prevalence of Brucella antibodies in Jalingo using the Rose Bengal plate test (RBPT) and the serum agglutination test (SAT). A total of 90 adult horses that were on zero grazing management system were sampled. The sampling sites were selected based on the availability of horses. The objectives of the study were to determine the prevalence of Brucella antibodies in horses as well as the distribution of the infection according to sex. There was no association of horses seen with other animals. The samples collected comprised of 88 males and 02 female horses from four locations in Jalingo: Barade, Sarkin dawaki, Sintali and Turaki. All the sera samples were subjected to initial screening by RBPT and positive cases were then analyzed with SAT. The overall prevalence of Brucella antibodies was 07 (07.8%) with all positive cases recorded from male horses for RBPT, while none was positive for SAT among the male and female horses. There was no significant difference in the prevalence of horse Brucella antibodies between male and female (P>0.05). Horses in Jalingo are in the four wards identified and were all sampled. Turaki ward recorded the highest prevalence of 13.3%, while Barade Ward had the lowest prevalence with 00.0%. However, there is no significant difference in the prevalence between the male and female (P>0.05). Further studies need to be conducted to determine the involvement of other species and humans. Key words: Horse, Brucellosis, Jalingo, Rose Bengal plate test (RBPT), serum agglutination test (SAT).
Interrelationship and Volatility Transmission between Grain and Oil Prices

This study analyzes the interrelationship and volatility between grain and oil prices. Specifically, the objective of this study is to investigate the volatility transmission mechanism of grain prices with oil prices, under the assumption that an increase in crude oil prices not only affects corn and soybean prices but also other grain commodity prices such as wheat and rice. The results presented in this paper suggest several conclusions. First, there is a short-run relationship between the grain market and oil prices, which implies that recent co-movements of oil and grain prices are just a temporary phenomenon. Second, grain prices, except for rice, are affected by oil prices to some degree. Finally, the volatilities of oil prices influence the volatilities of corn and soybean prices, and vice versa.
HIERARCHICAL AUTOASSOCIATIVE POLYNOMIAL NETWORK FOR DEEP LEARNING OF COMPLEX MANIFOLDS

HIERARCHICAL AUTOASSOCIATIVE POLYNOMIAL NETWORK FOR DEEP LEARNING OF COMPLEX MANIFOLDS Name: Aspiras, Theus H. University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Vijayan K. Asari Artificial neural networks are an area of research that has been explored extensively. With the formation of these networks, models of biological neural networks can be created mathematically for several different purposes. The neural network architecture being explored here is the nonlinear line attractor (NLA) network, which uses a polynomial weighting scheme instead of a linear weighting scheme for specific tasks. We have conducted research on this architecture and found that it works well to converge towards a specific trained pattern and diverge with untrained patterns. We have also improved the architecture with a Gaussian weighting scheme, which provides a modularity in the architecture and reduces redundancy in the network. Testing on the new weighting scheme improves network on different datasets gave better convergence characteristics, quicker training times, and improved recognition rates. The NLA architecture, however, is not able to reduce the dimensionality, thus a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique is used. To improve the architecture further, we must be able to decompose the NLA architecture further to alleviate problems in the original structures and allow further improvements. We propose a hierarchical autoassociative polynomial network (HAP Net) which reorders the NLA architecture to include different ways to iii use polynomial weighting. In each layer, we can have orders of each input connected by a weight set, which can be trained by a backpropagation algorithm. By combining different architectures based on the understanding of MLP, attractor, and modular networks, we create a multi-purpose architecture including all aspects of the previous architecture which is far improved for classification and recognition tasks. Experiments conducted on the standard dataset, MNIST, shows very promising results of the HAP Net framework. Research work is progressing in evaluating performance on HAP Net on various datasets and also incorporating advanced learning strategies, convolutional neural networks, and extreme learning machine to investigate the performance.
Comparative phylogeography of four Indo-Pacific moray eel species (Muraenidae) reveals comparable ocean-wide genetic connectivity despite five-fold differences in available adult habitat

Most coral reef fishes have non-migratory adults and depend on a pelagic larval stage for dispersal. Species with long pelagic larval duration (PLD) can have tremendous dispersal potential and thus display little geographic-genetic differentiation among reef habitats. Restricted adult niche breadth due to habitat specialization can have the opposite effect of fragmenting populations and increasing geographic-genetic differentiation. If long PLD suffices to ensure widespread gene flow among reef populations, we predict similar geographic-genetic homogene- ity within species whose adults differ in niche breadth. We tested this hypothesis using a compar- ative phylogeographic study of 4 sympatric moray eel species that differ in the amount of available habitat within their reported ranges. We generated molecular genetic data for Echidna nebulosa (N = 79) and Gymnomuraena zebra (N = 67) to measure geographic-genetic structure within these species, whose adult habitat is very restricted for moray eels, and compared these results to iden- tical measurements previously published for habitat generalists Gymnothorax undulatus and Gymnothorax flavimarginatus. These 4 species share an ocean-wide distribution with adults occu- pying the same reefs; however, adults of E. nebulosa and G. zebra are restricted to shallow waters and occupy only 20% of the area occupied by the Gymnothorax species. Mitochondrial (632 bp of cytochrome b and 596 bp of cytochrome oxidase I) genomic sequences revealed high genetic vari- ation (h = 0.995 to 0.998) and low geographic-genetic differentiation (pairwise ΦST < 0.07 and not significant) for each species across 22 000 km of the Indo-Pacific. Nuclear genomic sequences (420 bp of RAG-1 and 746 bp of RAG-2) demonstrated 16 to 25 haplotypes per marker within each species with minimal geographic-genetic differentiation among populations. This suggests that in cosmopolitan and highly dispersive species such as morays, larval life history can ensure wide- spread gene flow despite a 5-fold difference in the habitat breadth occupied by adult populations.
Asymmetric Price Adjustments in the Fuel Market

The purpose of the article is to verify a hypothesis about the asymmetric pass-through of crude oil prices to the selling prices of refinery products (unleaded 95 petrol and diesel oil). The distribution chain is considered at three levels: the European wholesale market, the domestic wholesale market and the domestic retail market. The error correction model with threshold cointegration proved to be an appropriate tool for making an empirical analysis based on the Polish data. As found, price transmission asymmetry in the fuel market is significant and its scale varies depending on the level of distribution. The only exception is the wholesale price transmission to the domestic refinery price. All conclusions are supported by the cumulative response functions. The analysis sheds new light on the price-setting processes in an imperfectly competitive fuel market of a medium-sized, non-oil producing European country in transition.
Designing A Unified Architecture Graphics Processing Unit

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performs graphics computing and its architecture has developed from the fixed function pipeline to the programmable unified pipeline. Unified architecture promises dynamic load balancing and guarantees the high parallel computing of GPU. This paper presents the design and implementation of a unified architecture GPU. The unified shader is based on the SIMD and SIMT architecture. On the thread level, SIMT guarantees the full-load capability of unified shader by thread managing and scheduling. On the instruction level, SIMD controls the execution of the unified shader hardware unit. We finish the algorithm, architecture design and Verilog RTL implementation. The verification results on FPGA show that the proposed GPU works correctly and its vertex and fragment processing speed reaches one unit per clock cycle.