Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CPO: A Crow Particle Optimization Algorithm

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is the most well known of the swarm-based intelligence algorithms and is inspired by the social behavior of bird flocking. However, the PSO algorithm converges prematurely, which rapidly decreases the population diversity, especially when approaching local optima. Recently, a new metaheuristic algorithm called the crow search algorithm (CSA)was proposed. The CSA is similar to the PSO algorithm but is based on the intelligent behavior of crows. Themain concept behind the CSA is that crows store excess food in hiding places and retrieve it when needed. The primary advantage of the CSA is that it is rather simple, having just two parameters: flight length and awareness probability. Thus, the CSA can be applied to optimization problems very easily. This paper proposes a hybridization algorithm based on the PSO algorithm and CSA, known as the crow particle optimization (CPO) algorithm. The two main operators are the exchange and local search operators. It also implements a local search operator to enhance the quality of the best solutions from the two systems. Simulation results demonstrated that the CPO algorithm exhibits a significantly higher performance in terms of both fitness value and computation time compared to other algorithms. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Dyslexia and the Need for Teacher Training: A Collaborative Three-Pronged Approach between a University and a Community Partner.

An absent element in many education preparation programs is sufficient training on dyslexia and how to effectively remediate the disorder. Defining characteristics and remedial strategies for dyslexia have been established for decades but have not sufficiently become a part of teacher preparation programs, thus creating a gap in professional knowledge and skill. This article explores how one university and a community partner agency collaboratively developed a three-pronged approach to address the gap by developing a graduate-level certification program, a professional development series for in-service training, and a potential regional tutoring center to support students with dyslexia.
Health-Related Quality of Life and Self-Care Management Among People With Diabetic Foot Ulcers in Northern Thailand

Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) are a common complication of diabetes that impacts on the health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Foot care is an important factor in the self-care management of patients with DFUs. The objective of this study was to investigate the HRQOL and foot care management of people with DFUs. A cross-sectional study involving 41 people with DFUs was conducted at a large tertiary hospital in Northern Thailand. The Diabetic Foot Ulcer Scale-Short Form and the VA-Diabetes Foot Care Survey were used to assess the HRQOL and foot care management among people with DFUs. The majority of the participants were female (n = 24, 58.5%), and the mean age was 62.13 years. The scores for HRQOL in the six domains were as follows: leisure (66.95 ± 28.03), physical health (68.93 ± 28.51), dependence or daily life (80.08 ± 25.23), negative emotions (71.23 ± 29.48), worried about ulcers (62.20 ± 31.97), and bothered by ulcer care (69.36 ± 25.20). High scores indicate a high (good) HRQOL. Less than a third of the participants reported that they had received education about foot care management. Almost all participants reported that they washed their feet daily; however, a large proportion did not test the water temperature or use lubricants on their feet. Most of the participants did not have a mirror for checking under their feet (48.8%), and there was a lack of knowledge about how to use a mirror for foot inspections (51.2%). This study provides guidance for clinicians on the content and delivery of diabetes education programs for people with diabetes (and DFUs) in Northern Thailand. The findings provide guidance on existing knowledge and the need for programs to address barriers to foot self-care management both in terms of skills and attitudes.
The Effects of Land Markets on Resource Allocation and Agricultural Productivity

We assess the effects of land markets on misallocation and productivity by exploiting policy-driven variation in land rentals across time and space arising from a large-scale land certification reform in Ethiopia, where land remains owned by the state. Our main finding from detailed micro panel data is that land rentals substantially reduce misallocation and increase agricultural productivity. Our evidence builds from an empirical difference-in-difference strategy, an instrumental variable approach, and a calibrated quantitative macroeconomic framework with heterogeneous household-farms that replicates, without targeting, the empirical effects. These effects are nonlinear, impacting more farms farther away from efficient operational scale, consistent with our theory. Using our model, we find that more active land markets reduce inequality, an important concern for the design of land policy. We also find that the positive effects of land markets are mainly driven by formal market rentals as opposed to informal rentals. Finally, our analysis also provides evidence that land markets increase the adoption of more advanced technologies such as the use of fertilizers.
Tail associations in ecological variables and their impact on extinction risk

Extreme climatic events (ECEs) are becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change. Furthermore, there is reason to believe ECEs may modify "tail associations" between distinct population vital rates, or between values of an environmental variable measured in different locations. "Tail associations" between two variables are associations that occur between values in the left or right tails of the distributions of the variables. Two positively associated variables can be principally "left-tail associated" (i.e., more correlated when they take low values than when they take high values) or "right-tail associated" (more correlated when they take high than low values), even with the same overall correlation coef ﬁ cient in both cases. We tested, in the context of non-spatial stage-structured matrix models, whether tail associations between stage-speci ﬁ c vital rates may in ﬂ uence extinction risk. We also tested whether the nature of spatial tail associations of environmental variables can in ﬂ uence metapopulation extinction risk. For instance, if low values of an environmental variable reduce the growth rates of local populations, one may expect that left-tail associations increase metapopulation extinction risks because then environmental "catastrophes" are spatially synchronized, presumably reducing the potential for rescue effects. For the non-spatial, stage-structured models we considered, left-tail associations between vital rates did accentuate extinction risk compared to right-tail associations, but the effect was small. In contrast, we showed that density dependence interacts with tail associations to in ﬂ uence metapopulation extinction risk substantially: For population models showing undercompensatory density dependence, left-tail associations in environmental variables often strongly accentuated and right-tail associations mitigated extinction risk, whereas the reverse was usually true for models showing overcompensatory density dependence. Tail associations and their asymmetries are taken into account in assessing risks in ﬁ nance and other ﬁ elds, but to our knowledge, our study is one of the ﬁ rst to consider how tail associations in ﬂ uence population extinction risk. Our modeling results provide an initial demonstration of a new mechanism in ﬂ uencing extinction risks and, in our view, should help motivate more comprehensive study of the mechanism and its importance for real populations in future work.
Two-machine flowshops with material handling

This paper concerns the minimization of the makespan when producing different parts in a 2-machine cell with a robot as the material handling. In the literature, two problems have been studied independently: the flowshop problem with a robot which is NP-hard and the robotic flowshop problem which is polynomially solvable. In this paper, we clarify the difference between both configurations. Then, we describe general results on equivalent configurations and we prove that the no-wait flowshop problem with a robot (where the parts are available at the first machine and leave the cell when the processing is finished on the second machine) is polynomially solvable.
Arsenic, boron and salt resistant Bacillus safensis MS11 isolated from Mongolia desert soil

Arsenic (As) is a toxic metalloid, having both properties of a metal and a non-metal. Boron (B) is a nonmetal, essential micronutrient for plants growth and development but its excess can be toxic to plants with various levels. In this study arsenic, boron and salt resistant bacteria were isolated from desert soil, Mongolia. The bacterial screening was carried out by serial dilution method. One hundred colonies were screened initially using of (2 mM) arsenic and (2 mM) boron containing LB agar medium. From this population, 10 bacterial isolates were selected based on arsenic and boron resistance, boron accumulation, salt tolerance and arsenic oxidizing capability. One of the potent strain, MS 11 from Mongolia desert soil, was tentatively identified as Bacillus sp. The phylogenetic and comparative analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequence with closely related validly published species available in the database showed that the isolate MS11 was closely related to Bacillus safensis FO-036b(T) with the highest sequence similarity (99.439%). The 16S rRNA gene sequence of the strain MS11 was submitted in the NCBI database with the accession number JF836885. B. safensis MS11 exhibited high level of resistance to arsenite (40 mM), arsenate (400 mM), boron (200 mM) and 15% salt tolerance in LB agar medium. B. safensis MS11 was also associated with resistance to multiple heavy metals such as Cd, Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb and Zn. Hence, this bacterium could be useful in the remediation of salt affected soils and biogeochemical cycles of arsenic pollution.
Using Twitter in higher education : what are students’ initial perceptions and experiences?

Of the range of recent technological developments, social media have become the most widely adopted by the current generation of students (Evans 2014). Next to this, the digiMeter (iMinds 2015), which reports on a yearly base the ownership and effective use of (social) media among the Flemish population, revealed that the number of people with an account on a social media site is still increasing. However, despite the widespread use and the potential of social media to enhance teaching and learning in higher education, research on students’ perceptions, actual use, and the effectiveness of Twitter as a learning and teaching tool is still lacking. The purpose of the current study was to determine higher education students’ expectations and experiences about the use of the microblogging and social networking platform Twitter for educational purposes. For this reason, an intervention in the course Instructional Strategies taught at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at Ghent University was set up. Students initial status of Twitter use and expectations and their changed experiences throughout the course were measured by means of three measurements, the pre-, mid-semester-, and post-test survey. Next to quantitative data obtained through the three surveys, qualitative data has been collected by organizing four focus groups to get a deeper insight into students’ motivations, their experiences and their suggestions for future practice. Our results indicate that before the intervention, students had rather high expectations about Twitter in higher education. They believed, for example, that Twitter is a tool to get insight into teachers’ and peers’ opinions, to close the gap between formal and informal learning, and to keep informed about education-related topics. When asking to students’ experiences after the intervention, we however found a moderate preference for the use of Twitter in higher education. We can conclude that as in previous research (e.g. Kvavik 2005; Raes & Schellens 2011), this study supports the idea of throwing doubt upon the myth of “digital natives”.
Emotion Research in Economics

Emotions were central to the development of economics, especially in utility theory in classical economics. While neoclassical utility theory basically abolished emotions, behavioural economics more recently reintroduced emotions in utility theory. Beyond utility theory, economic theorists use emotions to explain behaviour which otherwise could not be understood or they study emotions out of interest for the emotion itself. While some analyses display a strong overlap between psychological thinking and economic modelling, in most cases there is still a large gap between economic and psychological approaches to emotion research. Ways how to reduce this gap are discussed.
Influence functions continued. A framework for estimating standard errors in reweighting, matching, and regression adjustment

In Jann (2019) I provided some reflections on influence functions for linear regression (with an application to regression adjustment). Based on an analogy to variance estimation in the generalized method of moments (GMM), I extend the discussion in this paper to maximum-likelihood models such as logistic regression and then provide influence functions for a variety of treatment effect estimators such as inverse-probability weighting (IPW), regression adjustment (RA), inverse-probability weighted regression adjustment (IPWRA), exact matching (EM), Mahalanobis distance matching (MD), and entropy balancing (EB). The goal of this exercise is to provide a framework for standard error estimation in all these estimators.
Ductility of 3D printed concrete reinforced with short straight steel fibers

ABSTRACT With the number of 3D printed concrete structures rapidly increasing, the demand for concepts that allow for robust and ductile printed objects becomes increasingly pressing. An obvious solution strategy is the inclusion of fibers in the printed material. In this study, the effect of adding short straight steel fibers on the failure behaviour of Weber 3D 115-1 print mortar has been studied through several CMOD tests on cast and printed concrete, on different scales. The experiments have also been simulated numerically. The research has shown that the fibers cause an important increase in flexural strength, and eliminate the strength difference between cast and printed concrete that exists without fibers. The post-peak behaviour, nevertheless, has to be characterised as strongly strain-softening. In the printed specimens, a strong fiber orientation in the direction of the filament occurs. However, this has no notable effect on the performance in the tested direction: cast and printed concrete with fibers behave similarly in the CMOD test. For the key parameters, no scale effect was found for the specimens with fibers, contrary to the ones without. Numerical modelling of the test by using the Concrete Damage Plasticity material model of Abaqus, with a Thorenfeldt-based constitutive law in compression and a customised constitutive law in tension, results in a reasonable fit with the experimental results.
Genetics and population analysis GWAsimulator : a rapid whole-genome simulation program

Summary: GWAsimulator implements a rapid moving-window algorithm to simulate genotype data for case-control or population samples from genomic SNP chips. For case-control data, the program generates cases and controls according to a user-specified multi-locus disease model, and can simulate specific regions if desired. The program uses phased genotype data as input and has the flexibility of simulating genotypes for different populations and different genomic SNP chips. When the HapMap phased data are used, the simulated data have similar local LD patterns as the HapMap data. As genome-wide association (GWA) studies become increasingly popular and new GWA data analysis methods are being developed, we anticipate that GWAsimulator will be an important tool for evaluating performance of new GWA analysis methods. Availability: The Cþþ source code, executables for Linux, Windows and MacOS, manual, example data sets and analysis program are available at http://biostat.mc. vanderbilt.edu/GWAsimulator Contact: chun.li@vanderbilt.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Do Workers Work More When Wages are High?

The canonical model of life-cycle labor supply predicts a positive response of labor supplied to transitory wage changes. We tested this prediction by conducting a randomized field experiment with bicycle messengers. In contrast to previous studies we can observe in which way working hours as well as effort respond to a wage increase and we have full control regarding the workers' anticipation of the wage increase. The evidence indicates that workers increase monthly working time and decrease their daily effort but since the working time effect dominates the effort effect overall labor supply increases. The decrease in daily effort contradicts the canonical model of intertemporal labor supply with time separable preferences, since the wage in our experiment directly rewarded effort. We show that a simple model of loss averse, reference dependent, preferences can account for both the increase in working time and the decrease in daily effort. Moreover, we elicit independent individual measures of loss aversion and show that workers who are more prone to loss aversion are more likely to reduce effort in response to higher wages. Our model and our results also reconcile the seemingly contradictory evidence reported in previous studies (Camerer et al. 1997, Oettinger 1999) of high frequency labor supply.
COMPLEMENT, IMMUNE COMPLEXES AND SYSTEMIC LUPUS ERYTHEMATOSUS*

COMPLEMENT has two main roles as part of the human innate immune system. Historically, the first of these to be defined was that of defence against infection with pyogenic bacteria. However, it is now evident that complement proteins, particularly those of the classical pathway, play a role in the processing of immune complexes (ICs) and in protecting the body against the development of diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which are thought to be mediated by ICs. The study of individuals with inherited deficiencies of individual complement proteins has provided many insights into the functions of these proteins in vivo. The most convincing evidence that complement is important in protection against IC disease follows from the observation that the prevalence of certain diseases in which ICs are a characteristic feature, particularly SLE, is greatly increased in individuals who are genetically deficient in classical pathway complement proteins [1]. In this essay, I plan to discuss the results of the work I have performed during the last 5 yr in the Rheumatology Unit at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (RPMS). During this time we have explored specifically the interactions between ICs and the proteins of the complement system and their cellular receptors in the pathogenesis of SLE. After a brief discussion of the background to the work, I describe some of the key in vivo and in vitro experiments and clinical studies we have performed, which have advanced our understanding in this area, and at the end of the dissertation I attempt to address some of the implications of our observations for the management of patients with SLE.
Seigniorage of fiat money and the Maqasid al-Shari’ah: The compatibility of the gold dinar with the Maqasid

Purpose – Having argued in the part I paper that the interest-based fiat monetary system is not compatible with the objectives of the Islamic law or the Shariah, this paper seeks to argue why commodity moneys, like the gold dinar and silver dirham, are compatible with the maqasid. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theoretical paper that integrates information from the Qur’an, the traditions of the Prophet, the writings of early Islamic scholars and historical observations vis-a-vis the objectives or the maqasid al-Shariah and makes logical deductions therefrom. Findings – The theoretical conclusion is that while fiat money is counterproductive to the maqasid al-Shariah, commodity moneys like the gold dinar and silver dirham, are indeed compatible with the maqasid. The Islamic economic system is, therefore, fundamentally a “barter” system, i.e. an exchange economy where goods and services are exchanged value for value, but avoids the problems associated with barter by taking some of the commodities exchanged in the economy, that have the characteristics of money, as money. Gold is argued to be the best Shari’ah money. Research limitations/implications – Empirical investigations may shed further light. Practical implications – If the theoretical deductions and contentions of the paper are correct, then their practical implications cannot simply be understated. For the Islamic economic system to emerge in reality, or for that matter any process of Islamization of knowledge/disciplines to succeed, it is foremost crucial that commodity moneys gradually replace fiat money. Originality/value – The paper establishes that commodity moneys like gold and silver are Shariah-compatible moneys, whereas the current fiat money is not.
Nesting Behaviour of a Neotropical Social Wasp Mischocyttarus saussurei Zikán, 1949 (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)

Mischocyttarus saussurei nests show a curious architectural pattern which could be related to colony camouflage. Since information on that species is scarce in literature, this study aimed to record ecological data on M. saussurei, as well as morphometric data on its nests. Data was collected at the Parque Estadual do Ibitipoca state park and at the municipalities of Barroso and Inconfidentes, Minas Gerais state, Southeastern Brazil. Seven colonies were located, exclusively in conserved environments. Five nests were dissected for morphometric analysis and for the assessment of the vegetal matter incorporated to comb walls. Nests showed comb cells opening towards the substrate and covered by vegetal layers, in which three families of mosses and three of liverworts could be identified. We deduct that the nests’ morphometry and the incorporation of vegetal layers to the combs are related to the camouflaging of colonies amidst their substrate.
A Centralized Smart Decision-Making Hierarchical Interactive Architecture for Multiple Home Microgrids in Retail Electricity Market

The principal aim of this study is to devise a combined market operator and a distribution network operator structure for multiple home-microgrids (MH-MGs) connected to an upstream grid. Here, there are three distinct types of players with opposite intentions that can participate as a consumer and/or prosumer (as a buyer or seller) in the market. All players that are price makers can compete with each other to obtain much more possible profitability while consumers aim to minimize the market-clearing price. For modeling the interactions among partakers and implementing this comprehensive structure, a multi-objective function problem is solved by using a static, non-cooperative game theory. The propounded structure is a hierarchical bi-level controller, and its accomplishment in the optimal control of MH-MGs with distributed energy resources has been evaluated. The outcome of this algorithm provides the best and most suitable power allocation among different players in the market while satisfying each player’s goals. Furthermore, the amount of profit gained by each player is ascertained. Simulation results demonstrate 169% increase in the total payoff compared to the imperialist competition algorithm. This percentage proves the effectiveness, extensibility and flexibility of the presented approach in encouraging participants to join the market and boost their profits.