Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors responsible for crystal-chemical variations in the solid solutions from illite to aluminoceladonite and from glauconite to celadonite

Abstract Several finely dispersed low-temperature dioctahedral micas and micaceous minerals that form solid solutions from (Mg,Fe)-free illite to aluminoceladonite via Mg-rich illite, and from Fe3+-rich glauconite to celadonite have been studied by X-ray diffraction and chemical analysis. The samples have 1M and 1Md structures. The transitions from illite to aluminoceladonite and from glauconite to celadonite are accompanied by a consistent decrease in the mica structural-unit thickness (2:1 layer + interlayer) or csinβ. In the first sample series csinβ decreases from 10.024 to 9.898 Å, and in the second from 10.002 to 9.961 Å. To reveal the basic factors responsible for these regularities, structural modeling was carried out to deduce atomic coordinates for 1M dioctahedral mica based on the unit-cell parameters and cation composition. For each sample series, the relationships among csinβ, maximum and mean thicknesses of octahedral and tetrahedral sheets and of the 2:1 layer, interlayer distance, and variations of the tetrahedral rotation angle, α, and the degree of basal surface corrugation, ΔZ, have been analyzed in detail. The transitions from illite to aluminoceladonite and from glauconite to celadonite are accompanied by a slight increase in the mean thickness of the 2:1 layers and a steady decrease in the α angles, whereas the interlayer distance becomes smaller. These results are consistent with the generally accepted model where tetrahedral rotation is the main factor for the interlayer contraction in muscovitephengite structures: the smaller the rotation angle (α) the larger the ditrigonal ring of the tetrahedral sheet and the interlayer pseudo-hexagonal cavity, allowing the interlayer cation to sink and thus shorten the c parameter. A new insight into the interpretation of the contraction of the mica layer thickness in dioctahedral micas has been achieved with the discovery that micas with the same or close mean interlayer distance, on one hand, have the same or nearly the same substitution of Al for Si; and on the other hand, they may have significantly different parameters of the interlayer structure, such as tetrahedral rotation, basal surface corrugation, ΔZ, and minimum and maximum interlayer distance. These results show that in dioctahedral 1M micas, the mean interlayer distance is determined by the amount of tetrahedral Al because the higher the Al for Si substitution, the stronger the repulsion between the basal O atoms and the larger the interlayer distance and csinβ parameter.
An Investor’s Perspective on Volatility as an Asset Class: Evidence from the European Stock Market

Volatility movements are known to be negatively correlated with stock index returns. Hence, investing in volatility appears to be attractive for investors seeking risk diversification. The most common instruments for investing in pure volatility are variance swaps, which now enjoy an active over-the-counter market. This paper investigates the risk-return tradeoff of variance swaps on the “Deutscher Aktienindex” (DAX) and EuroStoxx50 index (ESX) over the time period of 1995 to 2004. We synthetically derive variance swap prices from the smile in option prices, which we estimate using transaction data. Our objective is to analyze the relationship between index and variance swap returns and to draw conclusions for investors. Empirically, the profile of log swap returns against log index returns on average resembles the payoff of a long put position. This highlights that variance swaps provide crash protection to investors. However, the market price of crash protection is suprisingly high. In line with previous U.S. evidence, we find a strongly negative volatility risk premium at the German as well as the European stock market. Its magnitude is not compatible with standard equilibrium pricing models. Thus, selling realized volatility seems to be a profitable strategy. Our backtests result in significant portfolio weights of the short volatility position during the sample period. Thus, our findings contradict recommendations of major investment banks and investment consultants to integrate long volatility positions into equity portfolios. JEL classification: G10; G12; G13
Parametric structural modelling of fish bone active camber morphing aerofoils

Camber morphing aerofoils have the potential to significantly improve the efficiency of fixed and rotary wing aircraft by providing significant lift control authority to a wing, at a lower drag penalty than traditional plain flaps. A rapid, mesh-independent and two-dimensional analytical model of the fish bone active camber concept is presented. Existing structural models of this concept are one-dimensional and isotropic and therefore unable to capture either material anisotropy or spanwise variations in loading/deformation. The proposed model addresses these shortcomings by being able to analyse composite laminates and solve for static two-dimensional displacement fields. Kirchhoff–Love plate theory, along with the Rayleigh–Ritz method, are used to capture the complex and variable stiffness nature of the fish bone active camber concept in a single system of linear equations. Results show errors between 0.5% and 8% for static deflections under representative uniform pressure loadings and applied actuation moments (except when transverse shear exists), compared to finite element method. The robustness, mesh-independence and analytical nature of this model, combined with a modular, parameter-driven geometry definition, facilitate a fast and automated analysis of a wide range of fish bone active camber concept configurations. This analytical model is therefore a powerful tool for use in trade studies, fluid–structure interaction and design optimisation.
1 Privatization and Stock Market Liquidity *

Share issue privatization – i.e. privatization on public equity markets – is often claimed to foster stock market development. In this paper, we assess empirically this claim, testing the role of privatization on two market liquidity measures in a panel with monthly data of 19 developed economies. Privatization is shown to be key in improving domestic stock market liquidity, controlling for other economic, financial and institutional determinants. Results do not appear to be driven by reverse causality or non-stationarity of the data.
Extensions of Rubin's Causal Model for a Latent-Class Treatment Variable: An analysis of the effects of employers' work-life balance policies on women's income attainment in Japan

Combining inverse-probability weighting based on propensity scores and a semiparametric outcome model with a latent-class variable as an intervening variable, this paper introduces extensions of Rubin's causal model for the case where the treatment variable is a latent-class variable with indicators. Although the paper first introduces a method for the analysis of cross-sectional survey data, some extensions of the method for panel survey data analysis are also described. The method is especially useful when we have a set of mutually related categorical variables to characterize a specific latent characteristic of social contexts such as firms, schools, or neighborhoods, and when the latent characteristic is hypothesized to affect an individual-level outcome and we need to control for selection bias of people in different social contexts. An application, which is based on data for employees and employers collected in 2009 by the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan, focuses on the effect of employers' work-life balance policies on female regular white-collar employees' income. Six dichotomous indicators of policies are employed. Variables tested for possible confounding factors include individual human-capital and labor-hour variables and some firm-level exogenous variables. The analytical results show that although a certain portion of the effects of employer's work-life balance policies on income are explained as a result of such a selection bias that firms of larger size have a higher prevalence rate of those policies and at the same time higher average income for employees, the positive effects of those policies on income among female employees still remain significant after the elimination of the selection bias.
CNN BASED TARGET CLASSIFICATION FRAMEWORK BASED ON COMPLEX SPARSE SAR IMAGE: INITIAL RESULT

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active surveillance system which is able to work under all-day and all-weather conditions. Due to the rapid development of SAR, automatic target recognition (ATR) as one of SAR image applications has become an important research direction in recent years, and its key process is target classification. In this paper, a novel target classification model based on amplitude and phase information of sparse SAR image is proposed. Firstly, we use a novel iterative soft thresholding (BiIST) algorithm to acquire sparse SAR image with better quality than traditional matched filtering (MF)-based SAR image. Moreover, the amplitude and phase information are utilized to classify the targets based on the proposed amplitude-phase convolutional neural network (AP-CNN). Experimental results based on real MSTAR dataset show that AP-CNN performs better than amplitude-based CNN under standard operating conditions (SOC). In the case of limited samples, the performance gap between the proposed network and amplitude-based CNN is more obvious.
Time-Series Reconstruction of 30M Fractional Vegetation Cover Based on Multi-Source Satellite Data

Fractional vegetation cover (FVC) is an important indicator reflecting changes in the Earth's ecosystem, as it is essential for simulating growth processes and modeling land surfaces. At present, there have been several FVC products available on the global scale using a variety of satellite data with different retrieval methods. Compared with other FVC products, the Landsat-based FVC is able to describe global vegetation cover at a resolution of 30 m with long time series, which can better represent vegetation cover information with more spatial details. However, the revisit cycle of Landsat satellite is 16 days, resulting in poor performance of Landsat in temporal continuity. In this study, the Landsat-based FVC was enhanced by combining normalized the Sentinel-2 data and filling in some of the missing dates. By applying different temporal reconstruction methods, the temporal continuity of 30 m FVC was significantly improved, and the strengths and weaknesses of each method were also discussed.
Modified Polymer Materials for Use in Selected Personal Protective Equipment Products

Abstract The paper discusses the methods of modification of melt-blown polymer materials by the addition of a bactericidal agent or superabsorbent directly to the fibre-forming area during the melt-blown production process. It also presents tests of textile composites designed for use in selected types of personal protective equipment worn in the workplace. One example of the application of textile composites is the protective footwear insole. The insole composites contain specially developed variants of melt-blown nonwovens made from PP, PC, and PA fibres. Microbiological, hygienic, and mechanical tests have shown that the optimum insoles for all-rubber protective footwear are those made of bioactive composites containing a PC melt-blown nonwoven. Another example of composite application is the air-purifying half mask. Filter composites contain polymer nonwovens with the addition of different quantities of a superabsorbent. They have been tested for particle penetration, airflow resistance, and moisture sorption.
A Sub-Terahertz Wideband Stacked-Patch Antenna on a Flexible Printed Circuit for 6G Applications

In this paper, a wideband aperture-coupled stacked-patch antenna (ACSP) on a flexible material for wireless applications at WR-08 band is presented. It is shown that conventional designs of ACSP fail to achieve a large bandwidth at this frequency range and a novel design methodology is proposed. We first propose a broadband impedance matching between the input port and the slot aperture based on two-section broadband distributed network (TWBDN). We also propose a TWBDN matched stack patch network (TMSP) based on constant VSWR circles to attain broadband matching between the slot aperture and patches in an ACSP. To facilitate the measurements, a novel low-loss transition from a ground-signal-ground (GSG) port to feedline is proposed. The proposed structure suppresses surface waves induced in the WR-08 band by placing via arrays around the feedline which largely reduces unwanted resonance modes, thereby leading to uniformly high radiation efficiency across the band. The measured results of the fabricated antenna closely follow the simulations and a measured peak gain of 7.95 dBi and S11≤ -10 dB across a wide frequency range from 90- to 128.5-GHz is achieved.
Malaysian Culture and the Leadership of Organisations: A GLOBE Study

Leadership behavior significantly influences the performance of companies and the motivation of people. However, much of our knowledge regarding the characteristics of effective leaders is based on research carried out in Western countries. To redress this imbalance, the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Program was set up in the early 1990s to investigate leadership behaviors in over 60 countries around the world, including Malaysia. Much cross-cultural research focuses on identifying differences between cultures. In contrast, the results of the GLOBE research indicate that a number of attributes associated with charismatic/transformational leadership are universally endorsed by all cultures as contributing to outstanding leadership. This paper will describe aspects of Malaysian leadership behaviors, identifying their traditional roots while placing them in the context of GLOBE findings. As Malaysia moves from a commodity-based economy to one based on sophisticated industrial and technological export industries, Malaysian leaders are seeking to develop a more international leadership style, but one rooted in fundamental tenets of Malaysian society. 1 The Malaysian GLOBE data were collected by Zakaria bin Ismail (UKM), Norma Mansor (UM), and Nik Rahimah Nik Yacob (UKM)
Image Magnification based on the Human Visual Processing

Image magnification is among the basic image processing operations and has many applications in a various area. In recent, multimedia techniques have advanced to provide various multimedia data that were digital images and VOD. It has been rapidly growing into a digital multimedia contents market. In education, many researches have used e-learning techniques. Various equipments - image equipments, CCD camera, digital camera and cellular phone – are used in making multimedia contents. They are now widespread and as a result, computer users can buy them and acquire many digital images as desired. This is why the need to display and print them also increases (Battiato & Mancuso, 2001; Battiato et al., 2002). However, such various images with optical industry lenses are used to get high-resolution. These lenses are not only expensive but also too big for us to carry. So, they are using the digital zooming method with the lenses to solve the problem. The digital zooming method generally uses the nearest neighbor interpolation method, which is simpler and faster than other methods. But it has drawbacks such as blocking phenomenon when an image is enlarged. Also, to improve the drawbacks, there exist bilinear interpolation method and the cubic convolution interpolation commercially used in the software market. The bilinear method uses the average of 4 neighborhood pixels. It can solve the blocking phenomenon but brings loss of the image like blurring phenomenon when the image is enlarged. Cubic convolution interpolation improved the loss of image like the nearest neighbor interpolation and bilinear interpolation. But it is slow as it uses the offset of 16 neighborhood pixels (Aoyama & Ishii, 1993; Candocia & Principe, 1999; Biancardi et al., 2002). A number of methods for magnifying images have been proposed to solve such problems. However, proposed methods on magnifying images have the disadvantage that either the sharpness of the edges cannot be preserved or that some highly visible artifacts are produced in the magnified image. Although previous methods show a high performance in special environment, there are still the basic problems left behind. Recently, researches on Human vision processing have been in the rapid progress. In addition, a large number of models for modeling human vision system have been proposed to solve the drawbacks of
Do peacocks devote maintenance time to their ornamental plumage? Time budgets of male blue peafowl Pavo cristatus

Elaborate secondary sexual traits, such as the ornamental plumage of birds, appear to be favoured by female choice because they serve as honest advertisements of male quality. Elaborate plumage is thought to be an honest signal because it is energetically expensive to produce and to carry, and it may also increase the vulnerability of males to predators. According to several recent studies, the elaborate ornamental train of male blue peafowls (Pavo cristatus) appears to be such an honest signal. In this paper, I explore another potential cost of such plumage, which is the daily time and energy investment required to maintain the plumage in good condition. Since time devoted to maintenance cannot be devoted to feeding, vigilance, or other activities, the maintenance cost of ornamental plumage should reinforce the honesty of such plumage as an advertisement of male quality. I observed free-ranging peacocks for 30 hours at the Denver Zoo in June 2002 and April 2003. Preening, scratching and dusting took up more than 99% of maintenance time. Long bouts of maintenance behaviour were performed while peacocks were resting or standing, while short bouts occurred while peacocks were walking or feeding. No maintenance behaviours were observed while peacocks displayed their trains. Peacocks spent 14.9% of their total time budget on maintenance behaviours and 7.2% on displaying their trains, and 25.2% of their total grooming time on preening their trains. Consequently, peacocks not only incur the costs of producing and carrying their trains, but they also pay an additional maintenance cost. Hypotheses concerning the indicator mechanism of ornamental plumage need to consider these additional costs, as any additional cost should make the signal even more “honest”. Keywords: Pavo cristatus, time budget, maintenance behaviour, grooming, sexual selection, indicator traits.
The Effect of Target Repetition on Semantic Priming in a Three-Target RSVP Task

This study used a rapid serial visual presentation task to examine the impact of target relatedness on report accuracy. In this task participants were shown a series of briefly presented words and were required to identify the three colored target words from the stream of distractor words. In two experiments participants either recalled the three targets words from memory at the end of each trial or recognized the targets from a list of all possible targets. The first target shown on each trial was unrelated to the second or third target. The second and third targets within each stream were semantically related (e.g., dog and cat) on half the trials and unrelated on the other half the trials (e.g., table and cat). The effect of the second and third targets sharing a relationship was examined for Target 3 accuracy. Target 3 accuracy was greater if it was preceded by a related Target 2, compared to when Targets 2 and 3 were unrelated. This shows a semantic priming effect (facilitation effect) for Target 3 accuracy, when the both Target 2 and 3 were identified. In contrast, when Target 2 was missed or incorrectly reported there was no difference in accuracy for related or unrelated target contexts (no priming or facilitation effect for Target 3). These semantic priming effects were evident in the recall and recognition tasks in Experiment 1 and 2. This study shows that a target presented during a rapid serial visual presentation task must be consciously processed to facilitate the report of a subsequently presented target word.
Detection of Human Papillomavirus Infection in Esophageal Carcinomas by the Histopathological Method and Polymerase Chain Reaction Technique

A series of 30 surgical resection materials of patients with squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) and 10 with adenocarcinoma (AC) were analyzed histologically and by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to demonstrate whether human papillomavirus (HPV) has a role in the etiology of esophageal cancers. Epithelial changes suggesting HPV infection were histopathologically detected in 19 of 30 (63.3%) SCC and in 4 of 10 (40%) AC cases. By PCR, HPV type 16 and/or type 18 DNA were detected in 10 of 30 (33.3%) SCC and HPV type 18 DNA alone was detected in 1 of 10 (10%) AC cases. Histopathologic findings related to HPV infection were detected in all the cases with positive HPV DNA. A significant correlation was present between histopathologic positivity and PCR positivity. The positivity rate of HPV infection was higher in well-differentiated SCC cases when compared to poorly-differentiated ones. These results suggest that HPV might have a role in the etiology of esophageal cancers and histopathologic findings of HPV infection were reliable markers for the presence of HPV DNA in tissue.
An Analysis of Principals’ Ethical Decision Making Using Rest's Four Component Model of Moral Behavior

Secondary school principals confront ethical dilemmas daily. This study examined how MetLife/NASSP Secondary Principals of the Year made ethical decisions conforming to three dispositions from Standard 5 of the ISLLC Standards and if they could identify processes used to reach those decisions through Rest's Four Component Model of Moral Behavior. Using a descriptive design with a mixed methodological approach of survey research and interviews of selected respondents, state principals of the year (N = 64) were surveyed regarding selected dispositions. Quantitative results indicated that the majority of respondents made ethical decisions regarding the three dispositions tested, but analysis as to the justifications used for those decisions was inconclusive. Qualitative analysis of selected respondents indicated that Rest's four components are essential justifications for making ethical decisions. Four themes emerged from the qualitative study: courage, a philosophy of the common good, gut feelings, and difficulty in defining ethics.
Title Protective Capacity of the Human Anamnestic Antibody Response during Acute Dengue Virus Infection

Half of the world’s population is exposed to the risk of dengue virus infection. Although a vaccine for dengue virus is now available in a few countries, its reported overall efficacy of about 60% is not ideal. Protective immune correlates following natural dengue virus infection remain undefined, which makes it difficult to predict the efficacy of new vaccines. In this study, we address the protective capacity of dengue virus-specific antibodies that are produced by plasmablasts a few days after natural secondary infection. Among a panel of 18 dengue virus-reactive human monoclonal antibodies, four groups of antibodies were identified based on their binding properties. While antibodies targeting the fusion loop of the glycoprotein of dengue virus dominated the antibody response, two smaller groups of antibodies bound to previously undescribed epitopes in domain II of the E protein. The latter, largely serotype-cross-reactive antibodies, demonstrated increased stability of binding at pH 5. These antibodies possessed weak to moderate neutralization capacity in vitro but were the most efficacious in promoting the survival of infected mice. Our data suggest that the cross-reactive anamnestic antibody response has a protective capacity despite moderate neutralization in vitro and a moderate decrease of viremia in vivo.