Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessing the GOCE models accuracy in the Mediterranean area

The GOCE satellite mission has significantly improved the results obtained with the previous satellite missions CHAMP and GRACE. Using GOCE data satellite Global Geopotential Models were developed using three different approaches, namely the direct, the time-wise and the space-wise approaches. The last releases of these models are complete to degree and order 300 (direct approach) and 280 (time-wise and space-wise approaches). In this paper, the different releases of the three estimation methodologies are compared with observed gravity and GPS/levelling data in the Mediterranean area and in particular, the Italian and Greek databases are considered. Comparisons are also carried out with respect to EGM2008 in order to check for possible improvements in the medium frequencies. For the validation of GOCE and GOCE/GRACE models, the spectral enhancement approach has been used, during which the models are augmented with EGM2008, up to its full degree of expansion, and terrain effects. These enhanced GOCE/GRACE geoid heights and gravity anomalies are then compared with the local data and statistics of the residuals have been computed. These comparisons show that significant improvements are obtained when Greek data are considered while the same doesn’t occur with the Italian data.
Design of Mid-IR $\hbox{Er}^{3+}$-Doped Microsphere Laser

A mid-IR lasing system based on a tapered fiber coupled to an Er3+-doped microsphere has been modeled and numerically investigated. In order to design and optimize the device performance, a dedicated 3-D numerical code exploiting the coupled mode theory and the rate equations model has been developed. The main energy level transitions among the Er3+ ions, the most relevant secondary ion-ion interactions, the amplified spontaneous emission, and the fiber-microsphere coupling phenomena have been taken into account. In order to optimize the lasing performance, several parametric simulations have been carried out. The obtained numerical results show that a laser threshold of about 55 mW and an output power of about -17.8 dBm can be obtained by using small microspheres.
The effect of Corporate Governance Information (CGI) on banks’ reporting performance

Recent literature on Corporate Annual Reports (CAR) underlines that, in order to meet the changing needs of CAR users, more narrative (forward looking) information should be provided, with a focus on those factors that are liable for longer term value of banks financial performance. This papes investigates the Management Commentary portion (MC) and specifically the effect of Corporate Governance Information (CGI) on banks’ reporting performance mechanisms such as board structure, audit function, bank size and common equity. Return on Assets (ROA) ratio is used as a proxy to measure financial performance. The data sample comprises of 86 worldwide banks during the period of deep economic crisis (2008–2011). Novelty of the study is the search for the effect of core characteristics of corporate governance on banks’ performance during the financial crisis period. The research uses a Panel Estimated Generalized Least Squares (EGLS) regression model in order to examine the aforementioned effect. The results of this research suggest that boards’ independence strongly supports banks’ efficiency and operations, as well as external audit contributes positively to banks’ efficiency during the crisis period.
Why FDI? An Empirical Assessment Based on Contractual Incompleteness and Dissipation of Intangible Assets

This paper makes an empirical assessment of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), by analysing the boundaries of a large sample of Italian Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). Firm level data from the eighth and the ninth Capitalia Surveys on Manufacturing Firms, AIDA and Centrale dei Bilanci is gathered in a comprehensive dataset that accounts for more than 8000 observations. In line with the Dissipation of Intangible Assets explanation of Foreign Direct Investment, our estimates show that MNEs endowed with superior technology and better human capital tend to operate abroad via FDI, to avoid knowledge spillover. By contrast, we do not find strong support to the Contractual Incompleteness hypothesis: indeed there quite a weak correlation between the degree of contractual incompleteness, at the industry level, and the likelihood of Foreign Direct Investment by Italian enterprises.
Automatization of Optimal Routing for Multimodal Passenger Transportations in Irkutsk Region

The article presents an algorithm of forming dynamic table of routs for multimodal passenger transportations. The algorithm selects the optimum route using one of criteria: fare, travelling time, comfort level. It is shown that the proposed method can find routs with minimum number of transfers. The algorithm is realized in the graphical language of programming LabVIEW. It has been tested for Irkutsk region touristic routs.
Does More Schooling Make You Run for the Border? Evidence from Post-Independence Kosovo

Abstract Does an extra year of schooling augment one's propensity to migrate? In a naive regression, which does not account for the potential reverse causality and omitted variables, the coefficient of education is likely to be biased. To deal with the problems of endogeneity, we use parental education as an instrument for own education. The data come from a survey on preparedness to emigrate from Kosovo, carried out in the summer of 2008. Two-stage residual inclusion multinomial probit results suggest that an extra year of education increases the probability of taking concrete steps to realise migration intentions by up to 9 percentage points.
Assessment of the near infrared identification of carbon stars - II. The local group galaxies IC 1613 and NGC 3109

Context. Thousands of C stars have been identified in Local Group galaxies using narrow band photometry. To survey C stars at larger distances and alternative to the narrow-band approach is needed. Aims. We obtain, from ESO Archive data, NIR magnitudes and colours of previously known C stars in two dwarf irregular Local Group galaxies, namely IC 1613 and NGC 3109. Methods. We compare the NIR magnitudes and colours of the C star populations, previously identified from narrow band techniques to estimate the star formation history of their intermediate-age populations. Results. We demonstrate that the photometric properties of C stars show a wider range in the NIR than in the optical. As confirmed by models we see, among the four galaxies investigated with a 0.7 dex metallicity range, little if any metallicity effect in the C star colour distribution.
Control of the Electric Load Simulator Using Fuzzy Multiresolution Wavelet Neural Network with Dynamic Compensation

A fuzzy multiresolution wavelet neural network (FMWNN) controller with dynamic compensation (DC) is proposed to address the complexities of the electric load simulator (ELS). The FMWNN acts as a main torque tracking controller, which takes full advantage of the merits of an ideal sliding mode, fuzzy rules, and multiresolution WNN. The fuzzy algorithm is used to dynamically adjust the weights of the WNN and effectively accelerate the convergence rate. In addition, the DC controller is designed to greatly decrease the effect of the approximation error and guarantee the system stability in the sense of the Lyapunov theory. Finally, the proposed algorithms are carried out on the semiphysical simulation platform, the precision and superiority of which are comparatively verified based on the simulation results.
Financial sector development and economic growth in Pacific island countries

This paper explores the relationship between financial sector development and economic growth in the Pacific island countries. The analysis suggests that the poor state of financial sectors has constrained the mobilisation of savings for growth and therefore restricted economic development in the region. Moreover, past policies to ‘assist’ financial sector development have been counterproductive. Alternative policy options to achieve the desired results are explored. Satish Chand is a Fellow with the Asia Pacific School of Economics and Management and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University.
Determination of Potting Media for Effective Acclimatization in Micropropagated Plants of Tea Clone Iran 100

Establishment of in vitro plantlets in the greenhouse on various additives of soil mixtures is considered as one of the trickiest phases of micropropagation. In the present research, we report the results of experiments aimed at optimizing acclimatization of tea clone Iran 100 plantlets ( Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze) by using different types and ratios of potting media. Potting media like peat moss, vermiculite and perlite having various ratios are mixed together. This experiment was done in four repetitions by keeping the base of randomized complete block design. The properties such as survival rate, number of leaves, plant height and root length were measured and recorded in the period of the experiment. The collected data was analyzed by SAS statistical software and the mean of data was evaluated by the Tuckey Test using the probability of 1 percent. Nevertheless, the mixture containing peatmoss+ vermiculite+ perlite (2:1:1; v/v/v) resulted in increased percentage of plant survival, root length plant height and number of leaves of tea clone Iran 100 and it is therefore, a recommended medium for growth of the cultivar during acclimatization.
Cetacean Interactions with Trawls: A Preliminary Review

Cetaceans interact with trawls to an undetermined extent. A preliminary review of global data indicates that individuals of 25 cetacean species (two mysticete, 23 odontocete) have been documented to have died in working trawls or discarded trawling gear. Cetacean interactions with trawls are complex, in part because both fishermen and cetaceans are drawn to areas of high prey density. Furthermore, within such areas, cetaceans are probably often attracted to trawling activities because they make it easier for the animals to exploit a concentrated food source. Individuals of 15 (possibly 16) cetacean species (13 odontocete, and one or even two mysticete) have been reported to feed in association with trawls. Animals follow working nets (feeding on stirred-up organisms or fish gilled in mesh) and also feed on discarded by-catch. Damage to gear as a result of feeding interactions or entanglement has been reported. Such damage results in (1) harm to the animals, (2) creation of negative opinions of cetaceans by fishermen (regardless of whether a cetacean or a shark is, in fact, responsible for the damage in question), and (3) loss of time and money for repair and replacement of gear. The relationships of cetaceans with trawls need to be further studied to determine what effects the trawl fisheries have on the ecology and population status of the whales and dolphins involved.
INTEGRATION OF IMAGE-DERIVED AND POS-DERIVED FEATURES FOR IMAGE BLUR DETECTION

Abstract. The image quality plays an important role for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)’s applications. The small fixed wings UAV is suffering from the image blur due to the crosswind and the turbulence. Position and Orientation System (POS), which provides the position and orientation information, is installed onto an UAV to enable acquisition of UAV trajectory. It can be used to calculate the positional and angular velocities when the camera shutter is open. This study proposes a POS-assisted method to detect the blur image. The major steps include feature extraction, blur image detection and verification. In feature extraction, this study extracts different features from images and POS. The image-derived features include mean and standard deviation of image gradient. For POS-derived features, we modify the traditional degree-of-linear-blur (blinear) method to degree-of-motion-blur (bmotion) based on the collinear condition equations and POS parameters. Besides, POS parameters such as positional and angular velocities are also adopted as POS-derived features. In blur detection, this study uses Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier and extracted features (i.e. image information, POS data, blinear and bmotion) to separate blur and sharp UAV images. The experiment utilizes SenseFly eBee UAV system. The number of image is 129. In blur image detection, we use the proposed degree-of-motion-blur and other image features to classify the blur image and sharp images. The classification result shows that the overall accuracy using image features is only 56%. The integration of image-derived and POS-derived features have improved the overall accuracy from 56% to 76% in blur detection. Besides, this study indicates that the performance of the proposed degree-of-motion-blur is better than the traditional degree-of-linear-blur.
LOCATION-TARGETED MEASUREMENT OF PERCEIVED STRESS BY CLAY E. GREGORY THESIS

Modern medicine has made significant advancements in the treatment of acute diseases, disorders, and injury. However, the acute care system rising from the twentieth century medical industry is far less adept in tracking and managing the needs of chronic conditions, especially that of chronic stress. Here we propose utilizing daily behavioral patterns to develop a model of daily stress, predictive of contexts leading to elevated perceived stress within an individual. We identify the smartphone as an effective data logger of daily life, and demonstrate a battery-efficient method of all-day behavior tracking, particularly location and activity, of individuals within an open environment. This behavioral logging is then combined with on-device experience sampling to create and evaluate a model of perceived stress built from extracted features of daily activity, including exercise, social, and sleep.
Visualization of surfactant‐enhanced nonaqueous phase liquid mobilization and solubilization in a two‐dimensional micromodel

Surfactant‐enhanced aquifer remediation is an emerging technology for aquifers contaminated with nonaqueous phase liquids (NAPLs). A two‐dimensional micromodel and image capture system were applied to observe microscale NAPL mobilization and solubilization phenomena. In each experiment a common residual NAPL field was established, followed by a series of mobilization and solubilization experiments. Mobilization floods included pure water floods with variable flow rates and surfactant floods with variations in surfactant formulations. At relatively low capillary numbers (Nca < 10−3) the surfactant mobilization floods resulted in higher NAPL saturations than for similar Nca pure water floods. These differences in macroscopic saturations are explained by differences in microscale mobilization processes. Sqlubilization of the residual NAPL remaining after the mobilization stage was dominated by the formation of microscale dissolution fingers, which produced nonequilibrium macroscale NAPL solubilization. A macroemulsion phase also was observed to form spontaneously and persist during the solubilization stage of the experiments.
Identifying Culturally Sensitive Factors of Science Learning Environments in Western Australia.

The present study examines and investigates students’ perception of their learning environment and its associations with their cultural background and attitude to class. A total of 560 students from years 7 and 8 from a multicultural Western Australian public school responded to the Cultural Learning Environment Questionnaire (CLEQ) and an Attitude Scale. Students’ cultural background was established by ascertaining the language spoken at home and their parents’ country of birth. This study provides further validation data for the already existing CLEQ and indicates changing trends in Western Australian schools with regard to cultural sensitivity. Gender differences in students’ perception of cultural background were also established. Associations were drawn between students’ perceptions of their cultural learning environment and attitude to science. These associations examine whether the students’ cultural background affects their attitude.
PERSONALITY TRAITS AND RELIGIOSITY AS PREDICTORS OF GENERAL HEALTH AMONG BLOOD DONORS IN IBADAN.

This study investigated personality traits and religiosity as predictors of general health among blood donors in Ibadan. It adopted expost facto design. The independent variables are Personality traits and religiosity while dependent variable is general health. The study was conducted in Ibadan city. Purposive sampling technique was used to sample 260 participants consisting of 112 males, 138 females and 10 participants who indicated not their sex responded to questionnaire of Big Five Personality Inventory of Gerlitz and Schupp (2005), The Daily Spiritual Experience and Religiosity Scale (DSER) developed by Underwood and Teresi (2002), and Goldberg and Hillier (1979)’s General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28). Mean scores, frequencies, percentages, Pearson's correlation and regression were used for analysis. The results disclosed that personality as a whole does influence general health among individual blood donors(R = .454; R 2 =.206; F (5,252) = 1924.161; P<. 01). Also, religiosity predicts the level of general health among individual blood donors in Ibadan city t(256) = 5.057; P<. 01). The implication of these findings is to inform Federal government of Nigeria and the global society about how to educate individuals on how to manage general health considering psychosocial factors and the family setting.
ELECTRICITY INVESTMENT AND ECONOMIC GROW TH IN CHINA: A DEMONSTRATION AND A FORECAST BASED ON THE VAR MODEL

In the 21st century, in response to energy security, climate change, the financial crisis and many other issues, European and American countries respect developing a smart grid as an important measure to deal with these crises, and it is considered within the national economic development and energy policy frameworks and is gradually put up to the national strategic level. In China, the construction of the UHV (ultra-high voltage) power grid started in 2006. The Outline of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Chinese National and Development Strategies (http://www.gov. cn/2011lh/content_1825838.htm) clearly put forward to develop a UHV power grid and to advance a smart grid construction, marking the construction of a smart grid into the national development strategies. Investing in a smart grid not only involves the transmission, transformation, distribution and use of the power industry but also forms a huge stimulus on upstream electrical equipment, electronic information, new materials, electric vehicles and other industries. According to the smart grid development plan, China’s electricity industry investments are about 6.1 trillion yuan during the Twelfth Five-Year Period and about 7.1 ELECTRICITY INVESTMENT AND ECONOMIC GROW TH IN CHINA: A DEMONSTRATION AND A FORECAST BASED ON THE VAR MODEL
The Search for Personality–Intelligence Relations: Methodological and Conceptual Issues

Prior to empirical investigation of trait level measures, it had been suggested that, on balance, well-adjusted individuals tended to have a higher level of intelligence than poorly adjusted individuals. The underlying inference was that there should be positive correlations found between personality traits associated with “adjustment” and intelligence, at least at the level of general mental abilities. Over the last several decades, empirical research has suggested that, while there are sources of common variance among personality and intellectual ability measures, the relations are more scattered and provide few general findings (other than broad assessments of neuroticism and so-called engagement traits and intellectual abilities). The status of the empirical research foundation is briefly reviewed. Conceptual and methodological issues, such as non-linear relations, typical and maximal behaviors, contextualized assessment, and missing linkages are discussed in an effort to explore personality and intelligence traits in a manner that might better reveal underlying relations between these domains.
Nonparametric Inference for Max-Stable Dependence

The choice for parametric techniques in the discussion article is motivated by the claim that for multivariate extreme-value distributions, “owing to the curse of dimensionality, nonparametric estimation has essentially been confined to the bivariate case” (Section 2.3). Thanks to recent developments, this is no longer true if data take the form of multivariate maxima, as is the case in the article. A wide range of nonparametric, rank-based estimators and tests are nowadays available for extreme-value copulas. Since max-stable processes have extreme-value copulas, these methods are applicable for inference on max-stable processes too. The aim of this note is to make the link between extreme-value copulas and max-stable processes explicit and to review the existing nonparametric inference methods.
Equity Extraction and Mortgage Default

Using a property-level data set of houses in Los Angeles County, I estimate that 30% of the recent surge in mortgage defaults is attributable to early home-buyers who would not have defaulted had they not borrowed against the rising value of their homes during the boom. I develop and estimate a structural model capable of explaining the patterns of both equity extraction and default observed among this group of homeowners. In the model, most of these defaults are attributable to the high loan-to-value ratios generated by this additional borrowing combined with the expectation that house prices would continue to decline. Only 30% are the result of income shocks and liquidity constraints. I use this model to analyze a policy that limits the maximum size of cash-out refinances to 80% of the current house value. I find that this restriction would reduce house prices by 14% and defaults by 28%. Despite the reduced borrowing opportunities, the welfare gain from this policy for new homeowners is equivalent to 3.2% of consumption because of their ability to purchase houses at lower prices.
Estimation of Harvest Rate and Vulnerability from Age and Sex Data

A nonlinear least-squares procedure is developed to estimate harvest rate and differential vulnerability in wildlife populations that are harvested with 1 segment of the population more vulnerable than another. The method requires age data by category from a series of harvests, plus information on accumulated harvest effort, and assumes that the nonharvest mortality rate is the same for the 2 categories. The data need not be from consecutive harvests, as long as the effort is known for missing samples. Monte Carlo simulations were done to verify the estimation procedure. An example shows the application of the method to moose (Alces alces) harvest data from Ontario. J. WILDL. MANAGE. 45(4):948-958 Age-structure data obtained from biggame harvests are frequently employed to measure mortality. However, Gill (1953), Caughley (1974), and others have cautioned that these data should not be relied upon, because many assumptions basic to the usual analyses (Eberhardt 1969, Caughley 1977) are violated and spurious results may be derived. This paper presents a statistic that avoids most biases while providing a direct estimate of the proportion of a population removed by hunters. Harvest depends on the abundance of the exploited population, the ease of capture of the individuals, and the effort exerted in harvesting. Vulnerability frequently varies among individuals, often because of systematic differences based on size, age, or sex. Given appropriate data, such differences may be used to estimate the population size and rate of har-