Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Symbol Synchronization Techniques in Digital Communications

Timing synchronization plays an important role in recovering the original transmitted signal in telecommunication systems. In order to have a communication system that operates at the correct time and in the correct order, it is necessary to synchronize to the transmitter’s symbol timing. Synchronization can be accomplished when the receiver clock tracks the periodic timing information in a transmitted signal to reproduce the original signal. In this thesis work, we report the design, implementation and evaluation of a timing synchronization algorithm based on the technique first proposed by Gardner [1], applied to wireless communication using the Alamouti space­time code [2] under QPSK modulation with half­sine pulses. To achieve this, a mathematical model is introduced which includes software design of communication algorithms. In this modeling, we simulate the Gardner algorithm in MATLAB. Then, five techniques are introduced to improve the performance of the loop filter in the digital receiver, and they are successfully implemented and evaluated in Matlab. These five techniques prove that there is an improvement in digital receiver performance in terms of the convergence speed and the communication system complexity. On the other hand, the optimum decoding of the Alamouti space­time code, as initially proposed, makes the non­trivial assumption that the communication system is perfectly synchronized. Realistic wireless environments contain additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), multipath fading, and it is not perfectly synchronized. In this thesis, the Alamouti space­time code technique is written for QPSK modulation scheme to work in realistic environment that involves a timing synchronization technique. We compare the bit error rate (BER) of the Alamouti decoder when synchronized using the proposed algorithms with the ideal results found in the literature, and
Is there a limit to car traffic growth ? Potential demand and convergence paths towards saturation

Car traffic growth has temporarily stopped during the 2000's, before coming back to growth after 2010, in relation with economic recovery and decreasing fuel prices. However, there are strong reasons to believe that car traffic growth is potentially limited, among which close completion of the diffusion process for car ownership, limited travel time budgets in relation with stable or declining travel speeds, decreasing marginal returns of additional car travel and infrastructure capacity restrictions. Representing car ownership as the result of an equilibrium between potential demand and economic constraints, and assuming additional car travel to be of decreasing marginal utility, one can implement a model to estimate saturation thresholds and describe the convergence path towards saturation. The model is disaggregated by household type and vehicle rank to account for heterogeneous choice sets and structural change in demographics and activity rates. It highlights the existence of an incomplete diffusion process for some groups and allows to break down potential demand between negotiable and non-negotiable needs. Projection results for France prove the existence of residual potential growth for car equipment among non-working adults which is nonetheless limited, while population ageing and changing cohabitation patterns will have a downwards effect on demand. By combining these results with car mileage projections, we find average car traffic per adult to increase gently until 2040, and remain almost stable afterwards. From this date, traffic trends would be essentially determined by demographic factors.
ASSESSMENT OF PRE-SEASON ANTHROPOMETRIC TESTS OF RUGBY PLAYERS IN A CHAMPIONSHIP CLUB, KENYAN RUGBY UNION

Objective: The objectives of the present study were to evaluate the anthropometric factors of rugby players on preseason before the onset of the training in a championship club (Kisumu Rugby Rfc Setting: The study was carried out in a Kenya at a Kenya rugby union (Kisumu Rfc) championship club. Sample: Sampling frame consisting of 52 players who were registered in the club at the time of the study. ( n =52) Analysis: Data were analyzed through descriptive and inferential statistics, linear and multiple regression analyses. Main measures: Maximal Aerobic power, demographics and strength tests of back squat and Bench press. Results: The estimation of this hypothesized factors that affect maximal aerobic power were age, Primary position, weight, injury F (7,44) =. 622, P<. 735, R 2 =. There was correlation between several factors that affect maximal aerobic factors with the linear regression formula generated being Maximal Aerobic Power (VO 2 Max) = 12.12 + (0.49xAge) - (017xWeight) – (0.657xPosition) + (257X FMS TM (z-score) – (0.52x100m) + (.170xPlanks) + (0.37xPush-ups) Conclusion: aerobic power (VO 2 Max) is influenced by several factors including age of the rugby players, weight of the players and the playing positions of the players. Recommendation: Future research should further clarify how preseason testing and anthropometric tests of rugby players would influence the outcome on fitness before the start of the season which the ultimate goal of most rugby players and coaches. Article visualizations:
The application of categorization and stereotype content theories to country of origin image: Vietnamese perceptions towards Korean wave brands

ABSTRACT This study validates the relationship between the perceived brands of Korean wave and country-of-origin image (COI) of Korea on the basis of categorization and stereotype content theories. Data collected from local consumers in Vietnam are analyzed using structural equation modeling. Our findings show that perceived brand globalness significantly affects the competence and warmth of COI. The perceived brand localness only has a positive effect on warmth. COI positively influences foreign consumers’ attitudes and purchasing intentions. Emotional and cognitive aspects are considered to explain the complex relationships between foreign consumers’ perceived brands and COI and their effects on purchasing behavior. Our study shows the positive roles of Korean wave brands as a cue to stimulate competent and warm stereotypes of COI.
The Impact of Socio-Economic and Gender Factors on Common Mental Disorders Among Married Women

This study aims to determine the impact of socio-economic and gender factors on common mental disorders in married women in Indonesia. Using the National Women’s Life Experience Survey in 2016 and binary logistic regression, the common mental disorders were measured based on detailed questions consisting of 20 Self Reporting Questionnaire (SRQ-20) questions with 5/6 cut off. The results of the inferential analysis show that socio-economic factors and gender factors significantly influence emotional, mental disorders. The socio-economic factors that significantly influence common mental disorders are the level of education and wealth index. Gender factors that significantly influence the common mental disorders of married women are the duration of the marriage, husbands' activities and domestic violence by husbands.
Market Competition, Business Model Innovation and Enterprise Innovation Performance

The research results of business model and enterprise performance are relatively rich, but the research literature on how market competition and business model innovation affect enterprise innovation performance is relatively rare. This study uses 289 companies as research samples to construct a dynamic interaction model between market competition, business model innovation and corporate innovation performance, empirically testing the effects of market competition, business model innovation and corporate innovation performance. Research shows that market competition is an important external influence factor of enterprise innovation performance.Market competition has a significant positive effect on corporate innovation performance.Different market competition levels have different effects on the innovation performance of enterprises;business model innovation is enterprise innovation. The important internal influencing factors of performance, business model innovation has incentive effect on enterprise innovation performance, business model innovation has greater incentive effect on private enterprise innovation performance than in state-owned enterprise innovation performance, and business model innovation improves high-tech enterprise innovation performance The effect is greater than the improvement effect on the innovation performance of traditional enterprises;there is an interaction between market competition, business model innovation and enterprise innovation performance.
Australian women’s use of health and fitness apps and wearable devices: a feminist new materialism analysis

ABSTRACT An extensive range of apps and wearable devices is available to women to monitor or improve their health and fitness. In this article, I adopt a feminist new materialism theoretical perspective to analyse interviews and focus group discussions with women who took part in The Australian Women and Digital Health Project about their use (or non-use) of these technologies. The findings identified not only the agential capacities opened up by women’s enactments with the affordances of health and fitness apps and wearable devices, but also the limitations of these technologies and the possibilities the women identified for future apps and devices. These findings highlight the tensions that can exist between the different demands that women face when attempting to conform to idealised and normative femininities and healthy citizenship. The women’s successful enactments of health apps and wearables that worked toward achieving the healthy, active, controlled body imagined by these technologies were disrupted or challenged by the demands of pregnancy, breastfeeding, chronic pain or disability or achieving the ideal of the caring mother. It is not surprising, therefore, that women imagined novel health technologies that would better cater for the diversity of their embodiment and demands of their everyday lives.
A visual system for distributed mosaics using an auvs fleet

The use of teams of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for visual inspection tasks is a promising robotic field. The images captured by different robots can be also to aid in the localization/navigation of the fleet. In a previous work, a distributed localization system was presented based on the use of Augmented States Kalman Filter through the visual maps obtained by the fleet. In this context, this paper details a system for on-line construction of visual maps and its use to aid the localization and navigation of the robots. Different aspects related to the capture, treatment and construction of mosaics by fleets of robots are presented. The developed system can be executed on-line on different robotic platforms. The paper is concluded with a series of tests and analyses aiming at to system validation.
Parenting and practical wisdom: moral decision-making in disciplinary practice

Aristotle (2004) stated every art, activity, and science aims at some good outcome. In parenting, this manifests as a desire for one’s children to be good people and to grow into mature, responsible adults. Discipline has the potential to be either harmful or helpful, often requiring thoughtful consideration of multiple factors before determining an appropriate response. According to virtue theory, practical wisdom (phronesis) is a chain of reasoning by which people determine how best to act (Fowers, 2005). The present study examined parental responses to child misbehaviour. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four parents recruited from the community, wherein they described how they handled specific instances of child misbehaviour. Thematic analysis – as recommended by Braun and Clarke (2006) – was used to analyze the collected data. Five themes consistent with existing literature on eudaimonic psychological theory and phronetic reasoning were identified (Moral Perception, Deliberation, Reasoned Choice, Learning from Upbringing, and Parental Duty). The immediate concern of future research is to conduct further interviews to reach theoretical saturation. However, these findings give cause for optimism regarding future research on practical wisdom in parental practice and could potentially generate multiple avenues for future investigation. At present, the themes identified in the present study are glimpses of the relevancy practical wisdom and eudaimonic theory may have in understanding the flourishing family unit.
The effects of minimum wage increases on labor demand growth

This work discusses the effects of the minimum wage on Colombian Manufacturing labor using the estimation of conditional and unconditional labor demand models, as well as the panel structure of the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey (AMS). Findings show significant long-run minimum wage elasticities in labor demand: 0.638, -0.774, and -0.6 for skilled, unskilled, and total workers, respectively; meaning that minimum wage pressures the substitution of unskilled for skilled workers. The substitution effect, however, is not enough to prevent a negative reaction on aggregate labor demand due to the predominantly unskilled composition of the manufacturing workforce. The minimum wage negative effect on labor demand is especially sizable for unskilled temporary workers. The largest employment generating sectors are more sensitive to minimum wage and own price variations revealing the presence of heterogeneity within the manufacturing. Additionally, a positive TFP elasticity of labor demand is found in the unconditional labor demand model but it is not statistically significant implying the link between TFP and labor demand could potentially be affected by the increased prevalence of temporary contracts among workers.
International Commodity Prices and Domestic Bank Lending in Developing Countries

We study the role of the bank-lending channel in propagating fluctuations in commodity prices to credit aggregates and economic activity in developing countries. We use data on more than 1,600 banks from 78 developing countries to analyze the transmission of changes in international commodity prices to domestic bank lending. Identification relies on a bank specific time-varying measure of bank sensitivity to changes in commodity prices, based on daily data on bank stock prices. We find that a fall in commodity prices reduces bank lending, although this effect is confined to low-income countries and driven by commodity price busts. Banks with relatively lower deposits and poor asset quality transmit commodity price changes to lending more aggressively, supporting the hypothesis that the overall credit response to commodity prices works also through the credit supply channel. Our results also show that there is no significant difference in the behavior of foreign and domestic banks in the transmission process, reflecting the regional footprint of foreign banks in developing countries.
The Effect of Employee Engagement on Quality Work Task Performance with the Moderating role of Employee Relationship

This study tried to inquire the impact of employee engagement on task performance. In this study, moderation role of employee relationship between employee engagement and task performance is also being inquired. This survey is based on questionnaire and data is collected from 125 employee of textile sector organizations located in Faisalabad. The results of this study reveal that employee engagement and task performance are significantly correlated. Results reveal that significant. Thus, all the hypotheses showed significant results. This study will provide a guideline to organization management in considering the fusion/ Engagement of employees for attaining organizational goals. This study will guide the organization’s management to figure out the role of Employee employees for the forthcoming cut-throat challenges in international business competition. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences Vol. 8 , No. 8, August 2018, E-ISSN: 2222-6990 © 2018 HRMARS 254
LEVELS OF PROCESSING

The levels of processing model (Craik and Lockhart, 1972) focuses on the depth of processing involved in memory, and predicts the deeper information is processed, the longer a memory trace will last. Craik defined depth as: "the meaningfulness extracted from the stimulus rather than in terms of the number of analyses performed upon it. ” (1973, p. 48) Unlike the multi-store model it is a non-structured approach. The basic idea is that memory is really just what happens as a result of processing information. Memory is just a byproduct of the depth of processing of information, and there is no clear distinction between short term and long term memory. Therefore, instead of concentrating on the stores/structures involved (i.e. short term memory & long term memory), this theory concentrates on the processes involved in memory.
Exascale MPI-based program deadlock detection

Deadlock detection is one of the main issues of software testing in High Performance Computing (HPC) and also in exascale computing areas in the near future. Developing and testing programs for machines which have millions of cores is not an easy task. HPC program consists of thousands (or millions) of parallel processes which need to communicate with each other in the runtime. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard library which provides this communication capability and it is frequently used in the HPC. Exascale programs are expected to be developed using MPI standard library. For parallel programs, deadlock is one of the expected problems. In this paper, we discussed the deadlock detection for exascale MPI-based programs where the scalability and efficiency are critical issues. The proposed method is implemented to detect and flag the processes and communication commands which are potential to cause deadlocks in a scalable and efficient manner. MPI benchmark programs were used to test the propose method.
Towards Cooperative SLAM for Low-Cost Biomimetic Robots

Author(s): Buchan, Austin Dane | Advisor(s): Fearing, Ronald S | Abstract: Bio-inspired millirobots exhibit unique locomotion modalities that allow them to traverse complex, unstructured terrain that traditional robots cannot.This makes them potentially useful in urban search and rescue, structure inspection, environmental monitoring, and surveillance, all of which require some level of situational awareness.The low-cost, lightweight design and difficult-to-model dynamics of these robots also create unique challenges when applying state-of-the-art Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) approaches usually used to gain this awareness.In this thesis, we develop a collection of estimation and control techniques that addresses these challenges, allowing teams of millirobots to localize within and map complex, unstructured environments.The analysis covers several facets of the problem, including low-cost millirobot team design, motion modeling, cooperative state estimation, and mapping.We first show the utility of disposable low-cost robots in hazardous environments by using teams of “picket” and “observer” robots for exploration.Next, we explore a data-driven motion modeling approach to approximate the non-linear stochastic dynamics of legged millirobots.Then we develop an inter-robot pose estimation technique using monocular vision and active markers that can operate in visually feature-poor environments, and can scale to teams of computationally constrained robots.We demonstrate this technique first on autonomous underwater vehicles, and then extend it to a team of ground robots cooperatively navigating three-dimensional terrain.Finally, we explore a simple scanning laser technique that can leverage cooperating robots with cameras to map an environment.
Comparative Study of Web Page Classification Approaches

Classification of Web pages is one of the challenging and important task as there is an increase in web pages in day to day life provided by internet. There are many ways of classifying web pages based on different approach and features. This paper explains some of the approaches and algorithms used for the classification of webpages. Web pages are allocated to pre-determined categories which is done mainly according to their content in Web page classification. The important technique for web mining is web page classification because classifying the web pages of interesting class is the initial step of data mining. The agenda of this paper is first to introduce the concepts related to web mining and then to provide a comprehensive review of different classification techniques.
Computational Thinking in Secondary Education: Where does it fit? A systematic literary review

Computational Thinking has been described as an essential skill which everybody should learn. Since Wing popularised the term in 2006 increased focus and attention have been placed on Computational Thinking.The first aim of this systematic literary review is to give second-level educators, who are considering incorporating Computational Thinking into their classrooms, ideas and options about how to achieve this. The hope is also to present reasons as to why it is beneficial to teach Computational Thinking, along with potential issues.Secondly, we aim to present education researchers with an overview of what work has been carried out in the domain, as well as potential gaps that still exist.Thirdly, this is the first stage in a longer-term project to develop a Computational Thinking based curriculum which is taught using Computer Science. It is hoped that the problems and ideas that are presented here will underpin this curriculum.
Investigation of diamond deposition on the diamond, silicon and quartz substrates by microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition and Monte Carlo simulations

In this paper, a growth mechanism of diamond utilizing Microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition (MPCVD) on various substrates alongside Monte-Carlo simulations is presented for the first time. The values of roughness exponent (α) have been estimated on diamond, silicon and quartz substrates while as the growth exponent (β) is found out through the grown diamond film on a diamond substrate. The roughness exponent has been investigated by evaluating the height-height correlation function for the diamond interface. For diamond, silicon, and quartz the roughness exponent α is found to be 0.42, 0.21 and 0.25 respectively. The value of α < 0.5 suggests that diamond deposited on silicon and quartz surface has more gagged surface than the diamond deposited on diamond substrates. It has been investigated that the growth exponent β = 0.45 ± 0.18 is dominated by random deposition with diffusion during the growth process. Monte-Carlo simulation with varying sticking probability p has been carried out in order to reconstruct the interface obtained in experiments. It is found that β decreases with sticking probability p. The interface reconstructed through simulations for this sticking probability shows voids and vacancies during the deposition. Raman spectra and x-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) study confirm the diamond phase of carbon (sp3) is present in the grown films. The diamond grown in the setup used for this study exhibits crystalline nature and long-range order as suggested Raman spectroscopy.