Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the Effect of Asset Market Fluctuations on the Financial Crisis of the Economy: An Application of Markov Switching

Purpose: The main purpose of this article is the effect of exchange rate fluctuations, oil prices, and stock market index on the financial instability index using the Markov switching rotation mode in 2009-2018 in the form of monthly data. Design/Methodology/Approach: In this research, the Toolbox-Violet wavelet transform model has been used to extract the exchange rate fluctuations, oil prices, and stock market indices. Findings: The results indicated that the effect of exchange rate fluctuations in various regimes and periods is different. Exchange rate fluctuations in the high regime of the financial instability index and the short term have a different effect compared to other periods. Oil price fluctuations have a positive and significant effect in the medium and long term, regardless of the financial instability regime, which will be more substantial in the long run. Moreover, stock market fluctuations have a negative and significant effect only in the short term when the financial instability index in the regime is low. Practical implications: According to results of this article, fluctuations have different effects depending on the period and the level of financial instability. Therefore, the management of foreign exchange and stock markets in the country should be performed based on the level of financial instability and the period of fluctuations. Originality/value: This research provides a new perspective on understanding the impact and transmission or fluctuations between markets and their impact on each other in recent decades.
Neural responses during down-regulation of negative emotion in patients with recently diagnosed bipolar disorder and their unaffected relatives

Abstract Background Aberrant emotion regulation has been posited as a putative endophenotype of bipolar disorder (BD). We therefore aimed to compare the neural responses during voluntary down-regulation of negative emotions in a large functional magnetic resonance imaging study of BD, patients' unaffected first-degree relatives (URs), and healthy controls (HCs). Methods We compared neural activity and fronto-limbic functional connectivity during emotion regulation in response to aversive v. neutral pictures in patients recently diagnosed with BD (n = 78) in full/partial remission, their URs (n = 35), and HCs (n = 56). Results Patients showed hypo-activity in the left dorsomedial, dorsolateral, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (DMPFC and DLPFC) during emotion regulation while viewing aversive pictures compared to HCs, with URs displaying intermediate neural activity in these regions. There were no significant differences between patients with BD and HCs in functional connectivity from the amygdala during emotion regulation. However, exploratory analysis indicated that URs displayed more negative amygdala–DMPFC coupling compared with HCs and more negative amygdala-cingulate DLPFC coupling compared to patients with BD. At a behavioral level, patients and their URs were less able to dampen negative emotions in response aversive pictures. Conclusions The findings point to deficient recruitment of prefrontal resources and more negative fronto-amygdala coupling as neural markers of impaired emotion regulation in recently diagnosed remitted patients with BD and their URs, respectively.
Effectiveness of the Alternative Learning System Informal Education Project and the Transfer of Life Skills among ALS Teachers: A Case Study

Alternative Learning System (ALS) has been adopted in Philippine basic education, yet there is no academic institution in the region prepares ALS teachers in teaching life skills. ALS teachers graduated from different programs of teacher education for formal education. In response, an extension project was conceptualized and implemented to enhance the teaching capacity and effectiveness of ALS teachers. Case study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the project. It explored the transfer of life skills among ALS teachers. Data were collected from multiple sources. Interview and written responses, and feedbacks were analyzed using thematic narrative analysis. Other data were analyzed using document and descriptive analyses. The project had achieved its objectives and rated best by participants. These indicate that the project was implemented effectively and successfully. ALS teachers have acquired life skills and transferred them to others. Thus, the project has made a difference in the lives of these teachers.
Measurement of the Importance of 11 Sustainable Development Criteria: How Do the Important Criteria Differ among Four Asian Countries and Shift as the Economy Develops?

Understanding the criteria underlying development in a country is crucial to formulating developmental plans. However, it is not always clear which criteria are more important than others in different countries and at different times. The relationship between developmental criteria and the stage of economic development is also unclear in many countries. Therefore, we devised an indirect stated preference approach for the measurement of the importance of developmental criteria and employed it in four Asian countries—Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam—to measure the importance of sustainable development (SD) criteria perceived by the general public. Specifically, we evaluated the importance of 58 national goals linked to 1 of 11 SD criteria. Security, efficiency, accessibility, capability, and environmental capacity were perceived as relatively important by respondents in all four countries. The respondents perceived that the currently important criteria would be important in the future as well. The order of the importance in each country differed. For example, environmental capacity was ranked lower, and inclusiveness was ranked higher as the gross domestic product of a country increased. Thai and Vietnamese respondents had similar perceptions and, overall, tended to have higher levels of importance than South Korean and Japanese respondents, who also had similar perceptions of importance.
What Makes Families Healthy? Examining Correlates of Family Health in a Nationally Representative Sample of Adults in the United States

Conceptually, family health is crucial for individual health across the lifespan, yet previous research has lacked a validated family health measure. The current study examines the relationships between individual physical (physical activity) and mental health (depressive symptoms and executive functioning) and social determinants of health (socioeconomic status) with four domains of family health using a recently validated family health measure. The sample included 1050 US adults (40.30 years; 53.78% female) that completed a survey. The results of the structural equation model revealed that depression was associated with reduced family health across all domains. Executive functioning was associated with better family social and emotional processes and family healthy lifestyle. Physical activity was associated with improved family healthy lifestyle only. Income was positively associated with each domain, but subjective SES was not associated with any domain. The findings indicate the interconnectedness of family health and individual factors, particularly with depression and wealth.
Observations of Shoaling Internal Wave Transformation Over a Gentle Slope in the South China Sea

Abstract. Four oceanographic moorings were deployed across the South China Sea continental slope near 21.85° N, 117.71° E, from May 30 to July 18, 2014 for the purpose of observing high-frequency nonlinear internal waves (NLIWs) as they shoaled across a rough, gently sloping bottom. Individual waves required just two hours to traverse the array and could thus easily be tracked from mooring-to-mooring. In general, the amplitude of the incoming NLIWs was a good match with the fortnightly tidal envelope in the Luzon Strait, lagged by 48.5 hours, and were smaller than the waves observed 50 km to the southwest near the Dongsha Plateau. The now-familiar type a-waves and b-waves were observed, with the b-waves always leading the a-waves by 6–8 hours. Most of the waves were remotely generated, but a few of the b-waves formed locally via convergence and breaking at the leading edge of the upslope internal tide. Waves incident upon the array with amplitude less than 50 m and energy less than 100 MJ m−1 propagated adiabatically upslope with little change of form. Larger waves formed packets via wave dispersion. For the larger waves, the kinetic energy flux decreased sharply upslope between 342 m to 266 m while the potential energy flux increased slightly, causing an increasing ratio of potential-to-kinetic energy as the waves shoaled. The results are in rough agreement with recent theory and numerical simulations of shoaling waves.
Segmental Alignment of English Syllables with Singleton and Cluster Onsets

Recent research has shown fresh evidence that consonant and vowel are synchronised at the syllable onset, as predicted by a number of theoretical models. The finding was made by using a minimal contrast paradigm to determine segment onset in Mandarin CV syllables, which differed from the conventional method of detecting gesture onset with a velocity threshold [1]. It has remained unclear, however, if CV co-onset also occurs between the nucleus vowel and a consonant cluster, as predicted by the articulatory syllable model [2]. This study applied the minimal contrast paradigm to British English in both CV and clusterV (CLV) syllables, and analysed the spectral patterns with signal chopping in conjunction with recurrent neural networks (RNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) [3]. Results show that vowel onset is synchronised with the onset of the first consonant in a cluster, thus supporting the articulatory syllable model.
Porphyrins and Polyoxometalate Scaffolds.

Polyoxometalates (POMs) can act as unique reservoirs for multiple electron transfers. As POMs display only weak absorption in the visible spectrum, they can be associated with chromophores such as porphyrins and porphyrin antennae. In this review, the research dedicated to the combination of porphyrins and polyoxometalates is put in context and the state of the art identifying the challenges addressed in the optimization of hybrid materials for applications is detailed. @font-face {font-family:"MS Mincho"; panose-1:2 2 6 9 4 2 5 8 3 4; mso-font-alt:"ＭＳ "; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;}@font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;}@font-face {font-family:"\@MS Mincho"; panose-1:2 2 6 9 4 2 5 8 3 4; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:fixed; mso-font-signature:1 134676480 16 0 131072 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:. 0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman",serif; mso-fareast-font-family:"MS Mincho"; mso-ansi-language:DE; mso-fareast-language:JA;}. MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}. MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:8.0pt; line-height:107%;}div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;}.
Failed gender agreement in L1 English L2 Spanish: Syntactic or lexical problem?

According to representational accounts (Hawkins & Franceschina, 2004), the inability to acquire abstract syntactic features after a critical period explains L2 difficulties with gender, while according to lexical accounts (Grüter et al. 2012; Hopp 2012), gender assignment issues – the inability to assigned to a target-like class accounts for these difficulties. We explore three potential agreement cues: 1) semantic gender relating to sex (e.g. ‘girl’ vs. ‘boy’) 2) morphophonological transparency cues, and 3) syntactic agreement cues. Semantic and morphophonological cues may facilitate gender agreement only for a subset of nouns, whereas agreement cues can do so for all nouns, including opaque gender nouns that do not have semantic gender. Seventeen low proficiency and sixteen high proficiency L1 English L2 Spanish speakers and seventeen native Spanish controls judged the grammaticality of 60 experimental sentences. We compared participants’ gender agreement accuracy and reaction times (RTs) on experimental items with and without semantic gender, and with and without transparent gender morphemes. Semantic gender did not serve as a cue for gender assignment/agreement; instead, it slowed down RTs in high proficiency and control participants. Morphophonological cues significantly increased accuracy and decreased RTs in all groups. Finally, agreement cues did not seem to help low proficiency learners, since their accuracy on opaque nouns was barely above chance. This suggests that they did not effectively use agreement cues to assign gender. By contrast, high proficiency learners exhibited native-like accuracy on opaque nouns. These findings support the lexical accounts of gender agreement difficulties, against the representational accounts.
Various Methods for Measurement of Resistive Leakage Current of Metal Oxide Surge Arrester

Metal Oxide Surge Arrester (MOSA) does not require any ordinary maintenance. But MOSA is get affected from ageing due to the effect of discharging impulse currents, uneven heating and internal partial discharges. A leading cause of deterioration is ingress of moisture. The degradation of MOSA also correlated with the ageing level of the arrester. This is called degradation under surge. The ageing level with the degradation of MO surge arrester or the leakage current of the surge arrester is related to each other. The leakage current is directly proportional to the ageing level. If the ageing level is raise, the leakage current also will increase. So, various methods for determination of the condition of ZnO surge arrester by means of measurement of the arrester leakage current are discussed. A MSCM method, which is based on leakage current of the surge arrester presented. The measuring instrument Leakage Current Monitor is also discussed.
Real-time Speaker counting in a cocktail party scenario using Attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network

Most current speech technology systems are designed to operate well even in the presence of multiple active speakers. However, most solutions assume that the number of co-current speakers is known. Unfortunately, this information might not always be available in real-world applications. In this study, we propose a real-time, single-channel attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to estimate the number of active speakers in overlapping speech. The proposed system extracts higher-level information from the speech spectral content using a CNN model. Next, the attention mechanism summarizes the extracted information into a compact feature vector without losing critical information. Finally, the active speakers are classified using a fully connected network. Experiments on simulated overlapping speech using WSJ corpus show that the attention solution is shown to improve the performance by almost 3% absolute over conventional temporal average pooling. The proposed Attention-guided CNN achieves 76.15% for both Weighted Accuracy and average Recall, and 75.80% Precision on speech segments as short as 20 frames (i.e., 200 ms). All the classification metrics exceed 92% for the attention-guided model in offline scenarios where the input signal is more than 100 frames long (i.e., 1s).
Investigation of Spatial-Acoustic Features for Overlapping Speech Detection in Multiparty Meetings

In this paper, we propose an overlapping speech detection (OSD) system for real multiparty meetings. Different from previous works on single-channel recordings or simulated data, we conduct research on real multi-channel data recorded by an 8-microphone array. We investigate how spatial information provided by multi-channel beamforming can beneﬁt OSD. Speciﬁ-cally, we propose a two-stream DFSMN to jointly model acoustic and spatial features. Instead of performing frame-level OSD, we try to perform segment-level OSD. We come up with an attention pooling layer to model speech segments with variable length. Experimental results show that two-stream DFSMN with attention pooling can effectively model acoustic-spatial feature and signiﬁcantly boost the performance of OSD, result in 3.5% (from 85.57% to 89.12%) absolute detection accuracy improvement compared to the baseline system.
The Role of Self-compassion and Hope in the Relationship Between Psychological Wellbeing, Maladaptive Schemas, Resilience, and Social Support in Women With Multiple Sclerosis

Background: Psychological disorders often threaten the mental health of individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Higher levels of psychological wellbeing and life satisfaction provide these patients with better social relationships and greater biopsychological health. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between psychological wellbeing, early maladaptive schemas, resilience and perceived social support mediated by self-compassion and hope in women with MS. Methods: This descriptive-correlational study was conducted from August to October 2019. The study population consisted of all female patients with MS who were admitted to Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex, Milad Hospital, and Charity Foundation for Special Diseases in Tehran City, Iran. Using the stratification convenience sampling method, 300 patients were recruited as the study sample. The research instruments included the Self-Compassion Scale, Early Maladaptive Schema Questionnaire-Short Form, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Multidimensional Perceived Social Support Scale, Ryff’s Scale of Psychological Wellbeing, and the Adult Hope Scale. The collected data were analyzed by structural equation modeling. SPSS and AMOS were used for analyzing the collected data. Results: There was a positive and significant relationship between self-compassion, hope, resilience, perceived social support, and psychological wellbeing (P<0.01). There was also a negative relationship between early maladaptive schemas and psychological wellbeing in the study participants (P<0.01). The indirect path analysis data indicated that self-compassion and hope played a mediating role in the relationship between perceived social support, resilience, early maladaptive schemas, and psychological wellbeing (P<0.01). Conclusion: The designed model fitted the empirical data very well. Therefore, the research components can help researchers, therapists, and psychiatric nurses to design better procedures to care for patients with MS.
Lay Beliefs About Who Can Bridge the Black–White Racial Gap During Interracial Exchanges

For group discussions about fraught racial topics between Black and White Americans to be beneficial, conversation participants must view the person who facilitates as effective at communicating both the perspectives of Black and White Americans. We identify a biracial advantage in this domain. In three studies (total N = 710), we tested how a facilitator’s race affects their perceived effectiveness in communicating with both Black and White Americans. Both Black and White participants expected Black and White monoracial facilitators to more effectively engage with racial in-group than racial out-group members. However, they expected biracial facilitators to be equally effective in communicating with both Black and White groups. Both Black and White participants also expected biracial facilitators to use productive learning strategies (perspective taking, showing empathy) more than White facilitators, and either more than or equally to Black facilitators, suggesting one reason why people expect biracial facilitators to perform well in these moments.
X-net: A Joint Scale Down and Scale Up Method for Voice Call

This paper proposes X-net, a jointly learned scale-down and scale-up architecture for data pre-and post-processing in voice calls, as a means to bandwidth extension over band-limited channels. Scale-down and scale-up are deployed separately on transmitter and receiver to perform down-and upsampling. Separate supervisions are used on the submodules so that X-net can work properly even if one submodule is missing. A two-stage training method is used to learn X-net for improved perceptual quality. Results show that jointly learned X-net achieves promising improvement over blind audio super-resolution by both objective and subjective metrics, even in a lightweight implementation with only 1k parameters.
Influence of Environmental Factors on Forest Understorey Species in Northern Mexico

Background: Understorey plants are key to maintaining forest structure and functioning. They protect the soil, improve its structure and fertility, reduce water run-off and sustain the below-ground biota, amongst other ecological services. However, little is known about the environmental conditions that regulate the occurrence of these plants. This study focuses on determining how canopy cover influences the occurrence of understorey species and identifying the most important soil properties that affect these species. The study area was a pine-oak forest in the Sierra Madre Occidental, an important source of ecological services for northwestern Mexico. Methods: To assess the conditions influencing the presence of herbaceous and shrub species, 25 soil variables were examined in relation to the species occurring in forest gaps and under the canopy. Sampling was conducted in five plots, each of 100 × 100 m. In each plot, 4 subplots, each of 20 × 20 m, were each subdivided in a grid of 2 × 2 m units, in which the presence-absence of herbaceous and shrub species was recorded (2000 units in total). Soil samples were extracted for analysis from the central point in each subplot. Data were analyzed using a Binomial Logistic Model (BLM) and Random Forest (RF) classification. Results: Understorey species were more strongly affected by soil variables than by their location in gaps or below canopy. The concentrations of Ca, P, K, Fe, Na, C, Zn, Mn, nitrates, organic matter, sand, silt, and percentage water saturation were statistically significantly associated with the presence of some plant species, whilst no significant differences were found in regard to preference for gaps or canopy, although several species were more frequent in open areas. Conclusions: Given the importance of the understorey cover in forest system functioning, we propose that understorey should be considered in integrated management and conservation practices for the temperate forests of northern Mexico.