Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Retrospective Analysis of the Capacity Built through a Community-Based Participatory Research Project Addressing Diabetes and Obesity in South and East Los Angeles

Chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity, are more prevalent in low-income and minority communities. One promising method to understand and address these chronic conditions is through Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR). CBPR engages and empowers community members to identify risk factors and work toward solutions as equal partners with researchers. One positive and lasting outcome may be an increase in the community capacity which includes individual and community leadership development, policy making, creating connections and utilizing existing community resources. Evaluating community capacity created as a result of a CBPR project is one way to measure its effectiveness. This paper is a retrospective analysis of the capacity built during a CBPR study of diabetes and obesity in East and South Los Angeles which are two low-income and minority neighborhoods. Four people, who were heavily involved in the project, completed a retrospective analysis of the capacity built utilizing a validated instrument. There was consensus about the capacity built, which included: excellent participation by community members, inclusion of members’ ideas to leverage additional funding, and pride of community members in their participation in the project. One area that could have been strengthened was increased access for leadership and research experience among community members, especially since the project ended prematurely. There were differences among the two community groups with East Los Angeles members focusing more on tangible interventions and grant writing, while South Los Angeles members had a greater policy focus. Communities and researchers who are embarking on a CBPR project can learn from those who have implemented the strategy. Measuring capacity built during and after the project, can be one way to understanding the contributions of a project in a community. CBPR is an empowering research methodology which, done correctly, can build community capacity and have long-term impacts on individuals and communities.
Gray-Edge-HOG feature based cascaded learning for facial landmark detection

Compared with the traditional statistical models, such as the active shape model and the active appearance model, the facial feature point localization method based on deep learning has improved in accuracy and speed, but there still exist some problems. First, when the traditional deep neural network model targets a data set containing different face poses, it only performs the preprocessing through the initialized face alignment, and does not consider the regularity of the distribution of the feature points corresponding to the face pose during feature extraction. Secondly, the traditional deep neural network model does not take into account the feature space differences caused by the different position distribution of the external contour points and internal organ points (such as eyes, nose and mouth), resulting in inconsistent detection accuracy and difficulty of different feature points. In order to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) based on grayedge-HOG (GEH) fusion feature.
Running head: EFFECTS OF MACROECONOMIC FACTORS ON STOCK PRICES Ashesi University College The Effects of Macroeconomic Factors On Stock Price Movement in Ghana Thesis

The purpose of this study is to identify the effects that macroeconomic factors have on stock price movement in Ghana, using the Arbitrage Pricing Theory(APT) as a framework. Ordinary Least Square Regression (OLS) was employed for the study since it provides an ideal structure for the APT. The macroeconomic variables considered were inflation rate, treasury bill rate, cocoa price, crude oil prices, gold prices, Balance of Payment account (BOP), Gross Domestic Product(GDP) and exchange rate between the periods of 2006 and 2014.The data was obtained from the Bank of Ghana, the Ghana Stock Exchange and the Ghana Statistical Service. The Ghana Stock Exchange All Share Index(GSE-ASI) was used as a proxy for stock price movement in Ghana. After discovering a multicolinearity problem through the Global Validation for Linear Model Assumptions test, a backward stepwise regression was run to eliminate some of the variables (BOP, treasury bill rate, oil and gold prices) as a way of solving the multicolinearity problem. Results from the OLS regression analysis revealed that inflation rate, exchange rate and GDP possess statistically significant explanatory power over the GSE-ASI. Although cocoa prices had a positive relationship with the GSE-ASI, it was statistically insignificant in explaining stock price movement. With regards to the findings, the government should take drastic steps to reduce the depreciation of the cedi, as exchange rate significantly determines stock price movement in Ghana. Investors should buy more local stocks at the back of an improvement in inflation rate, exchange rate and GDP in Ghana.
SUPERVISE DIFFERENCE LINEAR CLASSIFICATION TECHNIQUE FOR TWO GROUPS PROBLEM

Classification techniques can be categorized as parametric and nonparametric. The former strictly depends on assumptions, and is a supervised linear classification procedure whereas the later does not rely on any assumptions and is an unsupervised linear classification technique. This paper considers supervised linear classification techniques in which the course of dimensionality is negated. In this regard, the sample size is greater than the sample dimension. We investigated the performance of the Fisher, and the difference linear classification techniques based on the classification performance and the acceptance or rejection of the null or alternative hypothesis in which the mean of the optimal probability of correct classification is used as the hypothesized mean, and the computed mean probability is derived from the mean probability of correct classification based on 1000 replications. The robustness of these techniques is determined by the sensitivity of these methods to contaminated data set. Relying on the performance analysis, we further investigated the acceptance or rejection of the null or alternate hypothesis based on the proportion of contamination using the Hoteling test statistics. The comparative analysis indicates that the difference linear classification rule outperformed the conventional Fisher’s technique. The analysis revealed that using 95% level of significant, the null hypothesis is rejected.
Attributing the Carbon Cycle Impacts of CMIP5 Historical and Future Land Use and Land Cover Change in the Community Earth System Model (CESM1)

Historical global land use and land cover change (LULCC) emissions of 160 PgC represent a third of all human CO2 emissions from 1850 to 2010. Future land management decisions will have large impacts on the global carbon cycle, with scenarios ranging from continued deforestation and wood harvest to mitigation scenarios that reduce total emissions through afforestation and conversion to bioenergy. Here we present a systematic assessment of Community Earth System Model (CESM1) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) historic and projection simulations, with and without LULCC. For the historical period, CESM produced a Net LULCC flux of 123 PgC to the atmosphere, removing −130 PgC from ecosystems while increasing wood product pools by 7 PgC. Historical LULCC fluxes were equally divided between conversion and wood harvest fluxes. For the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 afforestation scenario CESM produced a Net LULCC flux of 53 PgC to the atmosphere, removing −58 PgC out of the ecosystem and increasing wood product pools of 5 PgC. The afforestation offsets the Direct LULCC flux of 153 PgC with a negative Indirect LULCC flux of −94 PgC. For the RCP 8.5 high LULCC scenario, CESM produced a Net LULCC flux of 211 PgC, removing −227 PgC from ecosystems and increasing wood product pools of 15 PgC. The LULCC of the future RCP scenarios was dominated by wood harvest fluxes, which is a process that was not included in many of the CMIP5 models. The analysis framework also allowed the attribution of Indirect and Prior LULCC fluxes that offset the Direct LULCC fluxes in many cases.
Robust Design of Linear Control Laws for Constrained Nonlinear Dynamic Systems

Abstract In this paper we present techniques to solve robust optimal control problems for nonlinear dynamic systems in a conservative approximation. Here, we assume that the nonlinear dynamic system is affected by a time-varying uncertainty whose L-infinity norm is known to be bounded. By employing specialized explicit upper estimates for the nonlinear terms in the dynamics we propose a strategy to design a linear control law which guarantees that given constraints on the states and controls are robustly satisfied when running the system in closed-loop mode. Finally, the mathematical techniques are illustrated by applying them to a tutorial example.
Changes in small-mammal diversity and ecology in relation to landscape and climate change over the Neogene

The middle Miocene from 17 to 14 Ma was a time of elevated mammalian diversity in western North America that coincided with the regional development of topographic complexity and the last global warming interval of the Neogene. Understanding the evolutionary and ecological processes that govern past diversity trends and contribute to modern diversity gradients in relation to landscape and climate requires the integration of faunal and paleoenvironmental datasets across spatio-temporal scales. Using a variety of approaches, I analyzed small-mammal and environmental data to investigate diversity and dietary-ecology responses to changes in climate across space today and through time during the middle Miocene. I additionally utilized fossil-record simulations to assess the influence of variable preservation history on estimates of diversification rates in relation to landscape change. This thesis sheds light on how interactions between tectonic activity and climate warming influenced species richness and ecology from local to regional scales.
Architectural Support for Task Migration Concerning MPSoC

Embedded computing systems are currently present in a wide range of consumer goods and their main characteristic is the implicit specialized be- havior but keeping a certain level of flexibility once it avoids redesigning due to small requirement changes. Thus, microprocessors usually are a good al- ternative to achieve such flexibility. Consequently, embedded systems designs make use of homogeneous or heterogeneous processors families for its complete implementation, which is known as Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC), which can have a performance speed up through using dynamic load balancing strategies, such as task migration, to fairly distribute the existing tasks among all embedded processors. The objectives of this work are to discuss architec- tural aspects for embedded systems, which allow a dynamic task migration and its implications, as well as to present different techniques for the dynamic task migration showing their possible use in MPSoCs.
Measurement of the velocity-profile in and above a forest of Laminaria hyperborea

Abstract The aim of this study is to resolve the mechanism of damping of surface waves above bottom vegetation. A field experiment has been carried out, where the horizontal velocities were measured in and above a kelp forest of Laminaria hyperborea (Gunnerus)Foslie, using ultrasonic current-meters. The results from the experiment are presented as periodograms of kinetic energy-density at several levels, and as the correlation of energy at two levels. The main conclusion is that the attenuation extends throughout the whole water column. The long waves exhibit only a slight (5–8%) reduction of velocity-amplitude within the kelp forest.
Response of the near wall turbulence to localized unsteady blowing periodical and dissymetric in time

The active control of the near wall turbulence by suboptimal or optimal strategies is plausible, but it requires unfeasibly dense distribution of the sensors and actuators at the wall. One possible way to remedy to this situation is to go through dual control methods. The latter consist of exciting the near wall turbulence locally to render it more predictable and controllable. Such a strategy has been used by Tardu (1998, 2001) who investigated the reaction of the near wall turbulence to a space localized oscillating blowing sinusoidal in time with small severity. He showed that the flow is partly relaminarized during the oscillation cycle until roughly 50 wall units downstream of the slot. This is due to the creation of a positive spanwise vorticity layer that dilutes the negative vorticity existing near the wall. The relaminarized phase is unstable. The diffusion of the induced vorticity layer is constrained into the low buffer layer with limited effect of turbulent mixing, when the frequency of the oscillating blowing is large. Consequently the vorticity concentrates, becomes compact and rolls-up into a coherent spanwise vortex at approximately the beginning of the low buffer layer. It increases the wall shear stress as it is convected downstream, resulting in an important drag penalty compared with steady blowing with the same mean severity.
Two Algorithms for Finding k Shortest Paths of a Weighted Pushdown Automaton

Weighted pushdown automata (WPDAs) have recently been adopted in some applications such as machine translation [Iglesias et al., 2011] as a more compact alternative to weighted finite-state automata (WFSAs) for representing a weighted set of strings. Allauzen and Riley [2012] introduce a set of basic algorithms for construction and inference of WPDAs, and the corresponding implementation as an extension of the open source finite-state transducer toolkit OpenFst.1 Although a shortest-path algorithm for WPDAs with bounded stack is described in Allauzen and Riley [2012], it does not give a k-shortest-path algorithm, which finds the k shortest accepting paths of the given automaton. Other than just the single shortest path, k shortest paths are useful for many purposes such as reranking the output in parsing [Collins and Koo, 2005] or tuning feature weights in machine translation [Chiang et al., 2009]. One existing work-around is to first expand the WPDA into an equivalent WFSA and then find the k shortest paths of the WFSA using the k-shortest-path algorithm for WFSAs (the expansion approach). Since the WPDA expansion has an exponential time and space complexity with respect to the size of the automaton, one usually has to prune the WPDA before expansion (the pruned expansion approach), i.e. remove those transitions and states that are not on any accepting path with a weight at most a given threshold greater than the shortest distance. However, setting an adequate threshold that neither prunes nor keeps too many states or transitions a priori is almost impossible in practice. In this paper, we introduce two efficient algorithms for finding the k shortest paths of a WPDA, both derived from the same weighted deductive logic description of the execution of a WPDA using different search strategies.
Effects of stocking rate on quantity and quality of available forage in a southern mixed grass prairie.

The objective of this study was to quantify the long-term (25 years) effects of heavy (HC) and moderate (MC) rates of stocking on quantity and quality of forage available. Study design required frequent harvest of standing crop on 5 range sites in twice replicated, 244 ha treatment pastures. Results from the 20-month study showed aboveground standing crop dynamics were similar in both treatments, quantity of available forage was greater in the MC than HC treatment, quality of available forage was greater generally in the HC than MC treatment, and that heavy stocking favored a dominance of warm-season shortgrasses as opposed to a dominance of warm-season midgrasses. Averaged across dates and adjusted for differences among pastures in range site composition, aboveground herbaceous standing crop averaged 1,341 kg/ha in the HC pastures as compared to 1,816 kg/ha in the MC treatment pastures. Crude protein and organic matter digestibility averaged 8.6% and 49.3%, respectively, in the HC pastures and 7.7% and 46.7%, respectively, in the MC pastures. It is concluded that the greater variation among years in cow/calf production in the HC than in the MC treatment is primarily because forage availability in the HC treatment is less than in the MC treatment.
THE IMPACT OF FISCAL POLICY IMPACT ON INCOME INEQUALITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: A CASE STUDY OF DISTRICT/CITY IN JAVA

Indonesian government has planned a policy in both accelerating the economic growth and reducing the income inequality. The improvement of income equality in Indonesia is conducted specifically through tax and transfer system. The progressive tax system is conducted to redistribute income and to reduce income inequality (measured by Gini index). The efficiency of a low tax system gave rise to suspicion that the system is not effective for reducing income inequality. This study examines the effect of fiscal policy on income ineaquality and economy growth in Java. To achieve the objective of study, the changes of macroeconomic indicators, tax system efficiency, and the changes of the income distribution is analysed using a panel data regression model. The results showed that the redistribution value of district/city is negative, indicating that the redistribution through taxes is not effective. In practice, the applicable tax system tends to widen the income inequality. The relation between equity income and economic growth show greater influence in the region with high income, whereas in regions with low income, incidence of such influence is very small indeed.
Implementation of image steganography using 2-level DWT technique

Image steganography is an engineering term defining a different and significant discipline for information hiding. This process can be described as ‘hiding of secret information behind an image’. Discrete wavelet Transform (DWT) is one of the known methods under steganography. The focus of the proposed work in this paper is on decreasing the complexity in image hiding through DWT technique while providing better undetectability and lesser distortion in the stego image. This paper proposes the algorithm for embedding and extracting the secret image embedded behind the cover gray scale image. Also, the analysis of performance measurement methods such as Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and Mean square error (MSE), gives us the experimental summary for four different cases where each cases spans different sizes of cover and secret image, comparing the cover image & stego image at the sender’s side and embedded secret & extracted secret at the receiver’s side. The stego attacks are then applied on the stego image and after each of the attack, the secret image is extracted from the distorted image. For better analysis, this extracted secret is compared with the expected result on the basis of PSNR and MSE. Also, the proposed algorithm is compared with one of the existing method using DWT technique, proposed by K.B. Shiva Kumar et. al. and hence the conclusion is drawn.
Local Anesthesia by Topical Application of Lidocaine After Stratum Corneum Ablation with an Er:YAG Laser

Background and Objectives: The stratum corneum, the outermost layer of skin, is the principle barrier to permeation of any drug through the skin, including local anesthetics. Removal of the stratum corneum using a pulse of infrared radiant energy could conceivably allow for rapid penetration of topically applied local anesthetic solutions. The purpose of this study was to provide preliminary information on the effectiveness of local anesthesia produced by topically applied lidocaine after ablation of the stratum corneum by an Er:YAG laser. Methods: 50 adult volunteers were enrolled into the study. Participants were divided into two groups (4% lidocaine or 10% lidocaine) and had a site irradiated on the forearm of each arm with a 2.94 micrometer Er:YAG laser. The appropriate concentration of lidocaine was applied for 5 minutes on one arm and 10 minutes on the other. Pinpricks using a 25 gauge 1/2 mm lancet were performed and participants rated the pain using a 0 10 scale. Results: The results of our study suggest that the transdermal administration of topically applied lidocaine is enhanced and topical anesthesia is produced at the site of stratum corneum ablation within 5 minutes. No anesthesia was found in areas tested outside of the ablation site. The ablation of the stratum corneum with the 2.94 micron wavelength radiant energy produced by an Er:YAG laser produced minimal discomfort and resulted in no immediate adverse effects. Conclusions: Results suggest application of topical lidocaine after removal of the stratum corneum using the radiant energy produced by an Er:YAG laser produces rapid local anesthesia at the ablation site.
THE EFFECTS OF CHANGES IN ACCOUNTING STANDARDS ON LOAN LOSS PROVISIONS (LLP) AS EARNINGS MANAGEMENT DEVICE: EVIDENCE FROM MALAYSIA AND NIGERIA BANKS (PART I)

n view of dearth of studies on changes in accounting standards and banks’ earnings management particularly in the context of emerging economies, and the recent Malaysia and Nigeria change from their respective local GAAP to IFRS, this study deemed it overwhelming to investigate the effects of the switch on banks’ earnings management focusing on LLP as the manipulative device. Particularly, this study investigates both discretionary LLP and LLP earnings management pattern for Malaysia and Nigeria banks. This study also investigates credit quality in the context of different accounting standards. Accordingly, this study employed judgmental sampling to select twenty eight banks- eight Malaysia and twenty Nigeria banks as sample covering period 2008-2013. Findings suggest that DLLP significantly reduce post IFRS adoption for Malaysia and Nigeria banks. Also, earnings management pattern of income minimization significantly declined and credit quality remarkably increased post IFRS adoption. Malaysia and Nigeria banks use LLP to manage reported earnings more prior to IFRS implementation. With results demonstrating that IFRS adoption is associated with lower earnings management via LLP, this study recommends the global adoption of IFRS as reporting framework. Originality: This study is one of very few studies which have investigated Malaysia and Nigeria banks earnings management via LLP in the context of changes in accounting standards