Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Flipping the flipped. The concept of flipped learning in an online teaching environment

ABSTRACT This article investigates the concept of flipped learning in an online learning environment. It evaluates the case study of the award-winning flipped learning project carried out in the context of a beginners’ level German module at The Open University, UK, during the academic year 2017/18. In particular, the article focuses on the similarities between distance teaching and the flipped classroom methodology, and possible complements. Based on the evaluation of the OU Flipping German project, the study also makes suggestions on how to implement elements of flipped learning in the provision of online teaching.
POPULATIONS: EVIDENCE FROM THE BLACK DEATH

The Black Death killed 40% of Europe’s population between 1347-1352, making it one of the largest shocks in history. Despite its importance, little is known about its spatial effects and the effects of pandemics more generally. Using a novel dataset that provides information on spatial variation in Plague mortality at the city level, as well as various identification strategies, we explore the short-run and long-run impacts of the Black Death on city growth. On average, cities recovered their pre-Plague populations within two centuries. In addition, aggregate convergence masked heterogeneity in urban recovery. We show that both of these facts are consistent with a Malthusian model in which population returns to high-mortality locations endowed with more rural and urban fixed factors of production. Land suitability and natural and historical trade networks played a vital role in urban recovery. Our study highlights the role played by pandemics in determining both the sizes and placements of populations. JEL Classification: R11, R12, O11, O47, J11, N00, N13
Isolation and functional analyses of PvFAD2 and PvFAD3 involved in the biosynthesis of polyunsaturated fatty acids from Sacha Inchi (Plukenetia volubilis)

The development of ω-3 fatty acid-rich vegetable oils is essential to enrich the production of functional foods. Sacha Inchi (Plukenetia volubilis L.) is a unique oilseed crop with much potential. Its seeds contain rich polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), especially linoleic acid (LA, C18:2) and α-linolenic acid (ALA, C18:3). Endoplasmic reticulum -located ω-6 and ω-3 fatty acid desaturases (FAD) are responsible for the biosynthesis of LA and ALA, respectively, in plant seeds. Here, we isolated two full-length FAD genes from Sacha Inchi, named PvFAD2 and PvFAD3, which encoded predicted amino acid residues of 384 and 379 in protein, respectively. Protein sequence and subcellular localization analysis revealed that they were located in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER). Heterologous expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae confirmed that PvFAD2 and PvFAD3 could catalyze LA and ALA synthesis, respectively. The stability and catalytic efficiency of the PvFAD3 protein may be closely related to temperature. In transgenic tobacco, using seed-specific expression promoters, PvFAD2 and PvFAD3 significantly promotes the production of LA (from 68% to 70.5%) and ALA (from 0.7% to 3.1%) in seed oil. These results show that PvFAD2 and PvFAD3 do, indeed, function as crucial enzymes for PUFAs biosynthesis, and provide a key gene source for the sustainable production of lipids with tailored fatty acid compositions via genetic engineering in other oil crops.
Practicing Scrum in Institute Course

Scrum is one of the most popular agile methods following Manifesto for Agile Software Development, and is a value-driven software development approach which focuses on maximizing the values of the customers. Many top software companies like Amazon.com, Apple, and Microsoft directly apply Scrum and other Agile methods for developing great software products. To raise the talents required by industry, teaching agile methods in university is necessary. However, with the limits of time, space, and experts in agile development, it can be difficult for students to learn the practices of agile methods in college. In this paper, we describe an experimental course in Feng Chia University that practices Scrum for term projects among five teams composed of 34 students. To the best of our knowledge the practices is the few attempts to practically apply all the factors described in Scrum framework such as sprint planning, daily scrum, review, retrospective meetings, product owner, and scrum master in institutional agile education. In this paper, the design and the process of the term projects based on Scrum are described, and the lessons learned from practicing Scrum in college are presented
A fast converging adaptive control scheme for suppression of broadband disturbances on a multi-variable vibration isolation setup

For research and development, a single reference input multiple actuator input multiple error sensor output vibration isolation setup is realized. The objective of the setup is to investigate if the flexible receiver structure can be isolated from the rigid source structure by six piezo-electric actuators (serving as a hybrid vibration isolation mounts), such that disturbances stemming from the source structure are reduced at the receiver structure. Vibration isolation is established by minimizing signals from six acceleration sensor outputs and by steering the piezo-electric actuator inputs. The first contribution of this paper is that by making use of an adaptive multi-variable feedforward controller which is updated on the basis of a computationally efficient filtered error least mean square algorithm, broadband vibration isolation control is achieved with an average reduction of up to 9.4 dB in the error sensor outputs (between 0-1 kHz). The second contribution is that the slow convergence problem of the adaptive controller is solved by incorporating the multi-variable state space based inverse outer factor model in the control scheme. The latter is obtained from an inner/outer factorization of the state space model of the transfer path between the actuator inputs and error sensor outputs.
Early Stage Cancer Detector : Identifying Future Lymphoma Using Epigenomics Data

DNA Methylation is an epigenetic process affecting gene expression which has been linked to cancer [4]. A combination of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques have been implemented on epigenomics datasets to build a classification model that can predict whether a person will develop lymphoma (a group of cancers beginning in white blood cells of immune system) in the future. An F1 score of 72% and accuracy of 69% have been obtained on test dataset using a combination of PCA (with the projections of dataset on the first 59 principal components) and logistic regression.
MARKER BASED INTERACTIVE WRITING BOARD FOR PRIMARY LEVEL EDUCATION

White board with marker and black board with chalk are teaching aids without which no one can think of a class room but these traditional teaching aids are currently being replaced by computer based tools. Computer based tools are changing the face of education, the classroom and the teaching methodology. This paper presents a computervision based interactive writing board, which is low cost, easy to use and easy to implement. This writing board enables teachers to attract students to classroom and teach them in an interactive method. Both teachers and students can actively interact with the system during the class. Subjective evaluation revealed that the board was very useful and was easily implementable in educational institutions.
A Subjective Equilibrium Approach to the Value of Children in the Agricultural Household

A Philippine sample of agricultural households is studied by a subjective equilibrium model which also accounts for the household's demographic structure. The model becomes a potent tool for integrating the economic and demographic behaviour of the household, since issues such as the value of children can be approached in a utility maximization framework and furthermore, such values can be causally related to the variance in measured fertility among different households (or socioeconomic groups). For example, the low marginal productivity contribution of children in tenant (and small farm-size) households, along with the low fertility control that prevails there, has been combined in confimling the inverse-fertility-endowments hypothesis, which in this instance is based on labour-market failure in periods of peak agricultural labour demand. On the.consumption side, on the other hand, the demand for leisure and for other commodities is consistent with the higher valuation of children, and thus higher fertility, in tenant (and small farm-size) households, as compared to owner (and large farm-size) households. The policy inlplications of such fmdings from a household equilibrium model are rich.
Hyperthermia Efficiency of Magnetic Nanoparticles in Dense Aggregates of Cerium Oxide/Iron Oxide Nanoparticles

Iron oxide nanoparticles are intended to be used in bio-applications for drug delivery associated with hyperthermia. However, their interactions with complex media often induces aggregation, and thus a detrimental decrease of their heating efficiency. We have investigated the role of iron oxide nanoparticles dispersion into dense aggregates composed with magnetic/non-magnetic nanoparticles and showed that, when iron oxide nanoparticles were well-distributed into the aggregates, the specific absorption rate reached 79% of the value measured for the well-dispersed case. This study should have a strong impact on the applications of magnetic nanoparticles into nanostructured materials for therapy or catalysis applications.
Water—A Key Substance to Comprehension of Stimuli-Responsive Hydrated Reticular Systems

Thermo-responsive hydrated macro-, micro- and submicro-reticular systems (TRHRS), particularly polymers forming hydrogels or similar networks, have attracted extensive interest because comprise biomaterials, smart or intelligent materials. Phase transition temperature (LCST or UCST, i.e. low or upper critical solution temperature, respectively) at about the TRHRS exhibiting a unique hydration-dehydration change is a typical characteristic. The characterization and division of the TRHRS are described followed by explanation of their behaviour. The presented original explanation is based on merely combination of basic thermodynamical state of individual useful macromolecule chains (long-chain or coil) with inter- and intra-mutual action of attractive and repulsive intramolecular hydration forces among them being strongly dependent upon temperature. Acquainted with this piece of knowledge, a theoretical concept of really biological systems movement, e.g. muscle tissues or artificial muscle etc., can be formulated.
The “Paris-End” of Town? Deriving Urban Typologies Using Three Imagery Types

Urban typologies allow areas to be categorised according to form and the social, demographic, and political uses of the areas. The use of these typologies and finding similarities and dissimilarities between cities enables better targeted interventions for improved health, transport, and environmental outcomes in urban areas. A better understanding of local contexts can also assist in applying lessons learned from other cities. Constructing urban typologies at a global scale through traditional methods, such as functional or network analysis, requires the collection of data across multiple political districts, which can be inconsistent and then require a level of subjective classification. To overcome these limitations, we use neural networks to analyse millions of images of urban form (consisting of street view, satellite imagery, and street maps) to find shared characteristics between the largest 1692 cities in the world. The comparison city of Paris is used as an exemplar and we perform a case study using two Australian cities, Melbourne and Sydney, to determine if a “Paris-end” of town exists or can be found in these cities using these three big data imagery sets. The results show specific advantages and disadvantages of each type of imagery in constructing urban typologies. Neural networks trained with map imagery will be highly influenced by the structural mix of roads, public transport, and green and blue space. Satellite imagery captures a combination of both urban form and decorative and natural details. The use of street view imagery emphasises the features of a human-scaled visual geography of streetscapes. However, for both satellite and street view imagery to be highly effective, a reduction in scale and more aggressive pre-processing might be required in order to reduce detail and create greater abstraction in the imagery.
Comparing Eight Computing Algorithms and Four Consensus Methods to Analyze Relationship between Land Use Pattern and Driving Forces

Although many computing algorithms have been developed to analyze the relationship between land use pattern and driving forces (RLPDF), little has been done to assess and reduce the uncertainty of predictions. In this study, we investigated RLPDF based on 1990, 2005 and 2012 datasets at two spatial scales using eight state-of-the-art single computing algorithms and four consensus methods in Jinjing rive catchment in Hunan Province, China. At the entire catchment scale, the mean AUC values were between 0.715 (ANN) and 0.948 (RF) for the single-algorithms, and from 0.764 to 0.962 for the consensus methods. At the subcatchment scale, the mean AUC values between 0.624 (CTA) and 0.972 (RF) for the single-algorithms, and from 0.758 to 0.979 for the consensus methods. At the subcatchment scale, the mean AUC values were between 0.624 (CTA) and 0.972 (RF) for the single-algorithms, and from 0.758 to 0.979 for the consensus methods. The result suggested that among the eight single computing algorithms, RF performed the best overall for woodland and paddy field; consensus method showed higher predictive performance for woodland and paddy field models than the single computing algorithms. We compared the simulation results of the best - and worst-performing algorithms for the entire catchment in 2012, and found that approximately 72.5% of woodland and 72.4% of paddy field had probabilities of occurrence of less than 0.1, and 3.6% of woodland and 14.5% of paddy field had probabilities of occurrence of more than 0.5. In other words, the simulation errors associated with using different computing algorithms can be up to 14.5% if a probability level of 0.5 is set as the threshold. The results of this study showed that the choice of modeling approaches can greatly affect the accuracy of RLPDF prediction. The computing algorithms for specific RLPDF tasks in specific regions have to be localized and optimized.
Sensitivity of Niobium Superconducting Cavities to Trapped Magnetic Flux Dissipation

Future particle accelerators such as the the SLAC ``Linac Coherent Light Source-II'' (LCLS-II) and the proposed Cornell Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) require hundreds of superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities operating in continuous wave (CW) mode. In order to achieve economic feasibility of projects such as these, the cavities must achieve a very high intrinsic quality factor ($Q_0$) to keep cryogenic losses within feasible limits. To reach these high $Q_0$'s in the case of LCLS-II, nitrogen-doping has been proposed as a cavity preparation technique. When dealing with $Q_0$'s greater than 1\e{10}, the effects of ambient magnetic field on $Q_0$ become significant. Here we show that the sensitivity to RF losses from trapped magnetic field in a cavity's walls is strongly dependent on the cavity preparation. Specifically, standard electropolished and 120$^\circ$C baked cavities show a residual resistance sensitivity to trapped magnetic flux of $\sim0.6$ and $\sim0.8$ n$\Omega$/mG trapped, respectively, while nitrogen-doped cavities show a sensitivity of $\sim$ 1 to 5 n$\Omega$/mG trapped. We show that this difference in sensitivities is directly related to the mean free path of the RF surface layer of the niobium: shorter mean free paths lead to less residual resistance sensitivity to trapped magnetic flux in the dirty limit ($\ell >\xi_0$). These experimental results are also shown to have good agreement with recent theoretical predictions for pinned vortex lines oscillating in RF fields.
UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Loss of the BMP Antagonist , SMOC-1 , Causes Ophthalmo-Acromelic ( Waardenburg Anophthalmia ) Syndrome in Humans and Mice

Ophthalmo-acromelic syndrome (OAS), also known as Waardenburg Anophthalmia syndrome, is defined by the combination of eye malformations, most commonly bilateral anophthalmia, with post-axial oligosyndactyly. Homozygosity mapping and subsequent targeted mutation analysis of a locus on 14q24.2 identified homozygous mutations in SMOC1 (SPARC-related modular calcium binding 1) in eight unrelated families. Four of these mutations are nonsense, two frame-shift, and two missense. The missense mutations are both in the second Thyroglobulin Type-1 (Tg1) domain of the protein. The orthologous gene in the mouse, Smoc1, shows siteand stage-specific expression during eye, limb, craniofacial, and somite development. We also report a targeted pre-conditional gene-trap mutation of Smoc1 (Smoc1) that reduces mRNA to ,10% of wild-type levels. This gene-trap results in highly penetrant hindlimb post-axial oligosyndactyly in homozygous mutant animals (Smoc1). Eye malformations, most commonly coloboma, and cleft palate occur in a significant proportion of Smoc1 embryos and pups. Thus partial loss of Smoc-1 results in a convincing phenocopy of the human disease. SMOC-1 is one of the two mammalian paralogs of Drosophila Pentagone, an inhibitor of decapentaplegic. The orthologous gene in Xenopus laevis, Smoc-1, also functions as a Bone Morphogenic Protein (BMP) antagonist in early embryogenesis. Loss of BMP antagonism during mammalian development provides a plausible explanation for both the limb and eye phenotype in humans and mice. Citation: Rainger J, van Beusekom E, Ramsay JK, McKie L, Al-Gazali L, et al. (2011) Loss of the BMP Antagonist, SMOC-1, Causes Ophthalmo-Acromelic (Waardenburg Anophthalmia) Syndrome in Humans and Mice. PLoS Genet 7(7): e1002114. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen. 1002114 Editor: Andrew O. M. Wilkie, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Received December 29, 2010; Accepted April 15, 2011; Published July 7, 2011 Copyright: 2011 Rainger et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Funding for this project was provided as an intramural program grant from the Medical Research Council (UK). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: david.fitzpatrick@hgu.mrc. ac.uk (DRF); H.vanBokhoven@antrg.umcn. nl (HvB)
Exploring CSR in the Supplier Management of SMEs in Germany : A Study about Supplier-Related CSR Activities and Barriers in CSR Adoption

Background CSR is a concept of growing attention as stakeholders’ pressure on companies to ensure social and environmental standards has increased. However, as companies have progressively shifted to supplier-based manufacturing their dependency on suppliers requires them to assure that CSR standards are also employed at their suppliers. Thereby, the size of a company plays an important role. While SMEs are generally CSR-oriented internally and on a societal level, they are rather disadvantaged when aim-ing to impose CSR requirements on their suppliers due to their specific characteristics. Nonetheless, making a supply chain truly sustainable de-pends on the SMEs imposing CSR practices on their suppliers.Purpose Exploring CSR in the context of SMEs’ supplier management.Method The study employs a qualitative research method to fulfil the exploratory nature of the thesis. As research strategy, case studies of ten SMEs in Germany were conducted. Therefore, empirical data was collected through retrospective, semi-structured interviews as well as data from corporate webpages, internal documents and newspaper articles. The empirical data were categorised and prepared for content analysis, which comprised of interpretations according to defined categories.Conclusion This thesis shows that general awareness of CSR among SMEs has in-creased. Though, occurrence of CSR in supplier management context is often not considered and recognised yet. Thus, it can be said that CSR has reached the SMEs’ awareness but not sufficiently in all business opera-tions. Nonetheless, the thesis determined many CSR activities in supplier management which can be assigned to supplier selection, relationships and development. However, many activities depend on the available resources a firm can offer. Thereby, this thesis confirms that lack of resources is a general drawback of SMEs. Thereof arising, SMEs face several other bar-riers when adopting CSR in their supplier management. These need to be overcome as increasing importance of supplier-related CSR is expected.
Impact of individual and institutional factors on wage rate for nurses in Canada: is there a monopsony market?

ABSTRACT Previous studies on Canadian nurse wages were limited to individual factors and did not take into account contextual factors such as hospital market share, labour market size or unionization. Based on market share, some refer to the nursing labour market as a monopsony, which depresses wages and might explain the shortage. However, this has not yet been tested empirically in the Canadian Registered Nurse (RN) labour market. This article aims to fill this gap by using the microdata files of the Labour Force Survey for the years 2010–2012 and the multilevel analysis to shed light on this issue. The contribution of this work is that it takes into account both individual and contextual variables to try to explain nurses’ hourly wage. In accordance with the monopsony model, we hypothesize a negative correlation between hourly wage and level of market share; i.e. monopsony employers would pay a lower wage rate. The results do not support the monopsony model to explain nursing labour shortage: there is no statistically significant relation between RN wages and market share; no relation was found for market size either. This suggests that an explanation for RN labour shortage must be investigated elsewhere.