Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of amplitude-phase functions of the drill string as a component of automation systemAnalysis of amplitude-phase functions of the drill string as a component of automation system

We determined amplitude-phase frequency functions of the drill string for translational motion while drilling with immersed engines. It was established that amplitude-phase characteristic of the drill string changes with increasing depth of the well. When drilling in hard rocks, it is advisable to use cushion subs in order to reduce the level of reflected wave of mechanical stresses. To eliminate the impact of the reflected wave, it is necessary to apply a bit feed drive with absolutely soft mechanical characteristics. We performed analysis of dynamic modes of the process of drilling wells as a control object based on provisions of the synergetic theory of information. It is proposed to employ energoinformational approach to analyze processes in the system of control over well drilling. This is due to the fact that the drilling process evolves over time and functions under conditions of the a priori and current uncertainty in terms of parameters and structure of the object. Since such a system develops over time, it undergoes changes in the structure of design of the drill string. Therefore, in order to resolve tasks on control over the process of drilling, it is necessary to know how dynamic properties of the column change depending on depth. We identified five modes of operation in the process of drilling as a complex dynamic system: equilibrium, ordered, sorted-chaotic, randomly-ordered, and chaotic. This makes it possible to solve an important applied problem of determining amplitude-phase characteristics of the drill string depending on depth of the well, and to use them for mathematical substantiation of automated control system over drilling.
Investigating the Determinants of Consumers’ Attitude towards Social Media Marketing: Moderating Role of Gender

Social media marketing is a trending topic in marketing research. However the research on its effectiveness is still at embryonic stage. Marketers are faced with challenging issues of identifying consumers’ motivations that affect subsequent trust on social media retailers and attitudes of consumers with respect to social media marketing. The aim of the present research is to address these gaps and identify the impact of consumers’ socialization motivation on consumers’ attitude towards social media marketing and trust on social media retailers. In addition to this, the study identifies the moderating role of gender in affecting the relationship between socialization motivation, trust and attitude towards social media marketing. Data were collected from three cities of Pakistan. Structural equation modelling through AMOS was used to test the hypotheses. The results revealed that socialization motivation has a positive impact on consumer’ trust on social media retailers. Moreover, socialization motivation has a positive impact on consumers’ attitude towards social media marketing. Trust on social media retailers has a significant positive impact on consumers’ attitude towards social media marketing. Gender was found as an important moderating variable in affecting the path estimates among different variables of the research model. The study has important theoretical and managerial implications and concludes with few limitations and future research directions.
The Bucket Approach for Retirement: A Suboptimal Behavioral Trick?

A bucket approach, which broadly consists of parking a few years of annual withdrawals safely in cash and investing the rest of the portfolio more aggressively, is a popular strategy often recommended by financial planners and typically embraced by retirees. Although this strategy is not devoid of merit, the comprehensive evidence discussed here, from 21 countries over a 115-year period, questions its effectiveness. In fact, simple static strategies, which by definition involve periodic rebalancing, clearly outperform bucket strategies, and they do so based not just on one but on four different ways of assessing performance. TOPICS: Long-term/retirement investing, retirement, portfolio management/multi-asset allocation, portfolio construction, performance measurement
Materialism and indebtedness of low income consumers: Evidence from South Africa's largest credit granting catalogue retailer

In South Africa, studies have found changes in consumption and credit usage over time to be significant amongst low-income consumers. Yet, there has been limited empirical research on consumer behaviour in South Africa and even less on low-income consumerism. This study, which explores the relationship between materialism and indebtedness among a sample of low-income, instalment paying consumers of South Africa's largest catalogue retailer, aims to augment our understanding of these phenomena, whilst making some international comparisons. The study assesses whether (i) consumers display strong characteristics of materialism and (ii) whether materialism is a significant variable in predicting the consumers‟ propensity for incurring debt. It is concluded that low-income consumers are indeed highly materialistic. The study further suggests the presence of statistically significant relationships between consumers' levels of indebtedness and the demographic variables age and gender. However, materialism and monthly income are not significant in determining a consumer‟s level of indebtedness. While the decision to conduct the study on client data from one particular retailer, limits the extent to which the findings can be generalised to the larger South African population, the results do provide a number of important insights, which contribute to the scant body of literature on low-income consumer behaviour in the RSA.
Improving performance on NUMA systems

Modern multicore systems are based on a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) design. In a NUMA system, cores are grouped in a set of nodes. Each node has a memory controller and is interconnected with other nodes using high speed interconnect links. Efficiently exploiting such architectures is notoriously complex for programmers. Two key objectives on NUMA multicore machines are to limit as much as possible the number of remote memory accesses (i.e., accesses from a node to another node) and to avoid contention on memory controllers and interconnect links. These objectives can be achieved by implementing application-level optimizations or by implementing application-agnostic heuristics. However, in many cases, existing profilers do not provide enough information to help programmers implement application-level optimizations and existing application-agnostic heuristics fail to address contention issues. The contributions of this thesis are twofold. First we present MemProf, a profiler that allows programmers to choose and implement efficient application-level optimizations for NUMA systems. MemProf builds temporal flows of interactions between threads and objects, which help programmers understand why and which memory objects are accessed remotely. We evaluate MemProf on Linux on three different machines. We show how MemProf helps us choose and implement efficient optimizations, unlike existing profilers. These optimizations provide significant performance gains (up to 2.6x), while requiring very lightweight modifications (10 lines of code or less). Then we present Carrefour, an application-agnostic memory management algorithm. Contrarily to existing heuristics, Carrefour focuses on traffic contention on memory controllers and interconnect links. Carrefour provides significant performance gains (up to 3.3x) and always performs better than existing heuristics.
A Review of Field Experiments in Planning and Urban Research

ABSTRACT Experimental methods remain largely underused by planning researchers and professionals. By adopting experimental research designs, urban scholars and practitioners can develop research programs that test theory, measure impact, build evidence, and learn about key relationships. While not all planning policies are amenable to experimentation, there is untapped potential to apply experimental approaches in many contexts. This paper aims to generate enthusiasm for experimental research methods in planning practice and scholarship by illustrating how experiments have been used to examine relevant urban questions.
Semiparametric estimation of dynamic conditional expected shortfall models

The paper proposes a simple estimator for a class of Conditional Expected Shortfall risk measures. The estimator is semiparametric, in the sense that it does not require a full specification of the conditional distribution of the data, and it is very simple to compute, being a least squares estimator with a closed form expression. We establish its consistency and asymptotic normality under mild regularity conditions. A simulation study provides evidence of the excellent finite-sample properties of the estimator and an application to some exchange rates highlights the semiparametric aspect of the new estimator.
The Importance of Sustainability in the Loyalty to a Tourist Destination through the Management of Expectations and Experiences

Sustainability has become one of the key factors for the development of tourism both nowadays and in the future. The need to integrate environmental, socio-cultural and economic factors is a consequence of the evolution of society itself, the introduction of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and a new way of understanding tourism and the world in general. Tourists increasingly seek a unique quality in their travels and are better informed before deciding on a tourist destination to spend their holidays or leisure time. They want to have unique, memorable experiences, and because of that, they are willing to look for those destinations that can offer them something different. The generation of expectations is no longer the sole responsibility of companies and public and private organizations in destinations, since information may be in the hands of the individuals themselves who can share it in social networks, blogs, or on platforms such as Booking or TripAdvisor, among others. This forces companies and public and private organizations to rethink the way in which and when they relate to tourists in general. With all these considerations, one of the objectives of this study was to analyse the way in which sustainability interrelates with the generation of expectations, experiences and perceptions and the effect on the possibilities of returning to a tourist destination and even recommending it in social networks to friends and acquaintances. For this reason, the destination of Acapulco, Guerrero, Mexico, was chosen, a mature destination of sun and beach that, in recent years, has been immersed in a process of change where one of the axes is sustainability. This study used a convenience survey with 310 valid questionnaires with tourists who stayed more than three days in Acapulco during the months of December 2016 to February 2017. The questionnaires were completed at different points of the destination and by participants over 18 years of age. We used SEM (Structural Equations Modeling) and EQS (Structural Equation Modeling Software) for statistical analysis. The results of the study showed how expectations influenced experiences and the intention to return to the destination and recommend it (WOM), thus, we proposed a series of recommendations for public and private agents that manage this tourist destination.
A Non-Modular Approach to Visual Space Perception

ABSTRACT In the first part of this article, we outline Rene Descartes' (1637/1965) list of cues for perceiving distance. We show that this list has essentially persisted up to the present. What began, however, as a heterogeneous list of ways of perceiving distance was reified by David Marr into a set of modular processes instantiated in the visual system. We suggest that this modular approach does not conform well to what is now known about visual space perception. We show that Marr, although strongly influenced by Gibson, did not adopt the view of visual space perception developed in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Gibson, 1966). In the second part of this article, we show that there is considerable non-modular structure in the optic array that is used to perceive spatial layout. We describe, with examples from the literature, 5 major forms of structure, all of which cut across different forms of information pickup. These are (a) surfaces as references, (b) local and non-local processing, (c) compression and shear, (d) analogous geometrical structures, and (e) boundaries and surfaces.
The effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Couple Therapy on Psychological Well Being, Marital Intimacy, and Life Quality of Chaotic Couples

Purpose: The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of cognitive behavior couple therapy (CBCT) and the approach of Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) on psychological well-being, marriage intimacy and quality of life of chaotic couples. Method: In order to achieve this goal, the quasi-experimental design including pre-test and post-test with control group as the main method was used. Findings: The population of this study included 14 couples who referred to counselling centers in Tehran in 1394 due to chaotic problems in their marriage relationships. The purposive sampling was also used in this study. The instruments of this study included marital adjustment test, psychological well-being questionnaire by Reef, intimacy scale by Walker and Thompson (1983) and quality of life. Conclusion : The results showed that cognitive-behavioral couple therapy has been effective (p<0.000psychological well-being, marital intimacy, and couples quality of life.
The Validity and Reliability of The Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities Questionnaire: An Indonesian Version

Introduction: Diabetes self-care activities is a complex regimen, that required an appropriate tools to asses. The Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities (SDSCA) questionnaire is the most widely used tool for assess diabetes self-care activities. The study aimed to testing validity and reliability of the Bahasa Indonesia version of the SDSCA. Methods: The study applied a forward-backward translation strategy. A pretest and a validation study were conducted. The Bahasa Indonesia version of the SDSCA was reviewed by an expert panel for conceptual and content equivalence to the English version. Furthermore, forty-five and 125 patients with T2DM participated in the pretest and the validation study, respectively. The psychometric properties were evaluated in terms of internal consistency, content validity, concurrent validity, and construct validity. Results: The content validity index (CVI) and the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) were satisfactory, which are 0.98, and 0.72, respectively. The exploratory factor analysis revealed that SDSCA-I are consistent with the original English version. There are significant correlations between three subscales of SDSCA-I and the diabetes knowledge levels namely general diet (r = 0.274, p = 0.002), physical activity (r = 0.269, p = 0.002), and foot care (r = 0.297, p = 0.001). SDSCA-I was significantly correlated with HbA1c values, in term of general diet (r = -0.205, p = 0.022) and self-monitoring of blood glucose (r = -0.265, p = 0.003). Conclusions: The translation and psychometric test of the SDSCA-I were satisfactory. The tool could assess the self-care activities of Indonesians with T2DM in all settings.
Curiosity and surprise enhance memory differently in adolescents than in children

Curiosity - broadly defined as the desire to acquire new information – enhances learning and memory in adults. Surprise about information facilitates later memory as well. To date, it is not known how states of curiosity and surprise about information enhance memory in childhood and adolescence. We used a trivia paradigm in which children and adolescents (N = 60, 10–14 years) encoded trivia questions and answers associated with high or low curiosity. States of high pre-answer curiosity enhanced later memory for trivia answers in both children and adolescents. However, higher positive post-answer surprise enhanced memory for trivia answers beyond the effects of curiosity in adolescents, but not in children. These results suggest that curiosity and surprise have positive effects on learning and memory in childhood and adolescence, but might need to be harnessed in differential ways across child development to optimize learning.
Factors affecting the academic performance of female students at Mekelle University, Ethiopia

The study examined factors affecting the academic performance of female students in Mekelle University, Ethiopia. A total of 392 regular undergraduate students were sampled using (i) stratified random sampling-since students stratified into heterogeneous colleges and departments, (ii) proportional sampling method since the number of students differ in all departments, and (iii) simple random sampling to select respondents. Students were ranked from 1-4, whereas: 4= CGPA>=3.75, 3 = CGPA =3.5, 2=CPA<3.5 and CGPA>=3.25, 1 = CGPA<3.25. An ordered logit model was used to analyze data. Results indicated that academic background of students such as National examination results of grade 10 and grade 12, study strategy, choice of department, and involvement in network studying system were significant determinants of academic performance. Socioeconomic characteristics of parents and tutorial class did not have a significant impact on academic performance. Strategies should be developed to allow weak students to learn and take up study and time management strategies employed by high academic performers.
Digital Educational Games: Methodologies for Development and Software Quality

Development of a game in the form of software for game-based learning poses significant technical challenges for educators, researchers, game designers, and software engineers. The game development consists of a set of complex processes requiring multi-faceted knowledge in multiple disciplines such as digital graphic design, education, gaming, instructional design, modeling and simulation, psychology, software engineering, visual arts, and the learning subject area. Planning and managing such a complex multidisciplinary development project require unifying methodologies for development and software quality evaluation and should not be performed in an ad hoc manner. This dissertation presents such methodologies named: GAMED (diGital educAtional gaMe dEvelopment methoDology) and IDEALLY (dIgital eDucational gamE softwAre quaLity evaLuation methodologY). GAMED consists of a body of methods, rules, and postulates and is embedded within a digital educational game life cycle. The life cycle describes a framework for organization of the phases, processes, work products, quality assurance activities, and project management activities required to develop, use, maintain, and evolve a digital educational game from birth to retirement. GAMED provides a modular structured approach for overcoming the development complexity and guides the developers throughout the entire life cycle. IDEALLY provides a hierarchy of 111 indicators consisting of 21 branch and 90 leaf indicators in the form of an acyclic graph for the measurement and evaluation of digital educational game software quality. We developed the GAMED and IDEALLY methodologies based on the experiences and knowledge we have gained in creating and publishing four digital educational games that run on the iOS (iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch) mobile devices: CandyFactory, CandySpan, CandyDepot, and CandyBot. The two methodologies provide a quality-centered structured approach for development of digital educational games and are essential for accomplishing demanding goals of game-based learning. Moreover, classifications provided in the literature are inadequate for the game designers, engineers and practitioners. To that end, we present a taxonomy of games that focuses on the characterization of games. Digital Educational Games: Methodologies for Development and Software Quality
Investigation of similarity-based test case selection for specification-based regression testing.

uring software maintenance, several modiﬁcations can be performed in a speciﬁcation model in order to satisfy new requirements. Perform regression testing on modiﬁed software is known to be a costly and laborious task. Test case selection, test case prioritization, test suite minimisation,among other methods,aim to reduce these costs by selecting or prioritizing a subset of test cases so that less time, effort and thus money are involved in performing regression testing. In this doctorate research, we explore the general problem of automatically selecting test cases in a model-based testing (MBT) process where speciﬁcation models were modiﬁed. Our technique, named Similarity Approach for Regression Testing (SART), selects subset of test cases traversing modiﬁed regions of a software system’s speciﬁcation model. That strategy relies on similarity-based test case selection where similarities between test cases from different software versions are analysed to identify modiﬁed elements in a model. In addition, we propose an evaluation approach named Search Based Model Generation for Technology Evaluation (SBMTE) that is based on stochastic model generation and search-based techniques to generate large samples of realistic models to allow experiments with model-based techniques. Based on SBMTE,researchers are able to develop model generator tools to create a space of models based on statistics from real industrial models, and eventually generate samples from that space in order to perform experiments. Here we developed a generator to create instances of Annotated Labelled Transitions Systems (ALTS), to be used as input for our MBT process and then perform an experiment with SART.In this experiment, we were able to conclude that SART’s percentage of test suite size reduction is robust and able to select a sub set with an average of 92% less test cases, while ensuring coverage of all model modiﬁcation and revealing defects linked to model modiﬁcations. Both SART and our experiment are executable through the LTS-BT tool, enabling researchers to use our selections trategy andr eproduce our experiment.
Improving Islamic Students’ Ability on Mastering Names and Responsibilities of Angels through Word Guessing Game

From the researcher's experience in the field, many students were reluctant to ask for any clarification, unwilling to express their opinion, less able to give feedback, and did disruptive behaviors during the learning process. Ideally, students are expected to be active and involved in the learning process and to get good learning outcomes. This study is a Class Action Research (CAR), which attempts to improve students' activity and learning outcomes. The research was conducted through four main stages: planning, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reflection. The research findings from teaching the names and responsibilities of angels through the classical method do not obtain maximum result. On the other hand, word guessing learning model shows better results than that of the classical one. In this model, students are motivated to compete with one another in making and answering the questions. The normally passive students are encouraged to participate actively in learning. Thus, it can be concluded that the learning process with of the game will improve students' learning outcomes