Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Does Biological Endowment Matter for Demand for Financial Services? Evidence from Russian Household Survey

There are many studies revealing factors which influence the demand for financial services. However genetic features, determining the individual’s overall postnatal behaviour, have not been studied within this context. This paper extends the previous literature by studying to what extent individual biological endowment, proxied by prenatal testosterone (PT) (measured by the 2D:4D ratio), can determine personal demand for bank services and insurance. We use data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of 2011–2012. Our findings confirm the existence of the link between inherent biological variation and financial inclusion: PT affects the use of bank cards, intention to take out a loan, having a bank deposit and the consumption of insurance products.
Computational design for the next manufacturing revolution

Over the next few decades, we are going to transition to a new economy where highly complex, customizable products are manufactured on demand by flexible robotic systems. In many fields, this shift has already begun. 3D printers are revolutionizing production of metal parts in the aerospace, automotive, and medical industries. Whole-garment knitting machines allow automated production of complex apparel and shoes. Manufacturing electronics on flexible substrates makes it possible to build a whole new range of products for consumer electronics and medical diagnostics. Collaborative robots, such as Baxter from Rethink Robotics, allow flexible and automated assembly of complex objects. Overall, these new machines enable batch-one manufacturing of products that have unprecedented complexity. In this thesis, I argue that the field of computational design is essential for the next revolution in manufacturing. To build increasingly functional, complex and integrated products, we need to create design tools that allow their users to efficiently explore high-dimensional design spaces by optimizing over a set of performance objectives that can be measured only by expensive computations. In this work discuss how to overcome these challenges by 1) developing data-driven methods for efficient exploration of these large spaces and 2) performance-driven algorithms for automated design optimization based on high-level functional specifications. I showcase how these two concepts are applied by developing new systems for designing robots, drones, and furniture. Thesis Supervisor: Wojciech Matusik Title: Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
TokenVote: Secured Electronic Voting System in the Cloud

With the spread of democracy around the world, voting is considered a way to collectively make decisions. Recently, many government offices and private organizations use voting to make decisions when the opinions of multiple decision makers must be accounted for. Another advancement: cloud computing attracts many individual and organizations due to low cost, scal-ability, and the ability to leverage big data. These considerations motivate our proposal of the TokenVote scheme. TokenVote is an electronic voting system in the cloud that uses revocable fingerprint biotokens with a secret sharing scheme to provide privacy, non-repudiation, and authentication. The TokenVote scheme spreads shares of secret (vote), embeds them inside the encoding biometric data (i.e. fingerprint), and distributes them over multiple clouds. During the voting process, each voter must provide his/her fingerprint, causing the TokenVote scheme to collect all voting shares from all voters to compute the final voting result. TokenVote does cloud parallel computing for the voting process in an encoded mode to prevent disclosure of the shares of voting and the fingerprint itself. Our experiments show that TokenSign has a significant performance and comparable accuracy when compared with two baselines.
Priority-Aware Virtual Machine Selection Algorithm in Dynamic Consolidation

In the past few years, many researchers attempted to tackle the problem of decreasing energy consumption in cloud data centers. One of the widely adopted techniques for this purpose is dynamic Virtual Machine (VM) consolidation. Consolidation moves VMs between hosts to decrease energy consumption. However, it has a negative impact on performance leading to Service Level Agreement (SLA) violations. Accordingly, selecting which VM to migrate from one host to another is a challenging task since it can affect performance. Researchers came up with several solutions and policies for efficient VM selection. In this paper, we exploit the fact that many tasks and users may tolerate some performance degradation which means, the tasks running on the VMs can be of different priorities. Accordingly, we propose augmenting consolidation with the priority concept, where low priority tasks are always selected first for migration. Towards this goal, we modified the popular Minimum Migration Time VM selection algorithm using the priority concept. The efﬁciency of the proposed algorithm is confirmed through extensive simulations using CloudSim toolkit and a real workload. The results show that priority awareness has a positive impact on decreasing energy consumption as well as maximizing SLA obligation.
Intra-building People Localisation Using Personal Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Devices

This paper discusses the conceptual implementation of a system to locate people inside buildings using their personal Bluetooth® low energy device(s) in situations of a crisis. Various aspects of BLE technology are covered with regard to their usage for emergency management. Legal, social, ethical and professional issues are also discussed in using this technology, especially in matters of safeguarding information privacy. The plan of the proposed system is then discussed and concluded.
FFS: A F-DBSCAN Clustering- Based Feature Selection For Classification Data

Feature selection is an important step in most classification problems to select an optimal subset of features to increase the learning accuracy and reduce the computational time. In this paper we proposed a new feature clustering based method to perform feature selection (FFS) in classification problems. The FFS algorithm works in two steps. In the first step, features are divided into clusters by using F-DBSCAN method. A novel F-DBSCAN clustering method used mutual information for measuring dependencies between features. In the second step, the most representative feature is selected from each cluster by a new criterion function. This allows us to consider the possible dependency on the target class and the redundancy between the selected features in each cluster. The experimental results on different datasets show that the proposed algorithm is more effective for feature selection in classification problems. Compared with the other methods, the average classification accuracy of C4.5, KNN and Naive Bayes are improved using FFS by 8.05, 8.36 and 4.63 percent, respectively. Also, the results demonstrate that the FFS algorithm produces small subsets of features with very high classification rate.
SQL Versus NoSQL Movement with Big Data Analytics

Two main revolutions in data management have occurred recently, namely Big Data analytics and NoSQL databases. Even though they have evolved with different purposes, their independent developments complement each other and their convergence would benefit businesses tremendously in making real-t ime decisions using volumes of complex data sets that could be both structured and unstructured. While on one hand many software solutions have emerged in supporting Big Data analytics, on the other, many NoSQL database packages have arrived in the market. However, they lack an independent benchmarking and comparat ive evaluation. The aim of this paper is to provide an understanding of their contexts and an in-depth study to compare the features of four main NoSQL data models that have evolved. The performance comparison of traditional SQL with NoSQL databases for Big Data analytics shows that NoSQL database poses to be a better option for business situations that require simplicity, adaptability, high performance analytics and distributed scalability of large data. This paper concludes that the NoSQL movement should be leveraged for Big Data analytics and would coexist with relational (SQL) databases.
Aerosol size-resolved trace metal composition in remote northern tropical Atlantic marine environment: case study Cape Verde islands

Abstract. Size-resolved trace metal concentrations of 15 elements in aerosol particles at the Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory (CVAO) under remote background conditions were investigated through analysis of aerosol samples collected during intensive field studies from January 2007 to November 2011 using total reflection x-ray fluorescence (TXRF). The identification of the main air mass origin that influence remote marine aerosol in the northern tropical Atlantic has been investigated. In total, 317 samples were collected. The dataset was analyzed according to the main air mass inflow at the station. We found that remote conditions make up about 45% of the meteorological conditions in a year at CVAO and thus the northern tropical Atlantic. Surprisingly, air masses from North America are often responsible for higher trace metal concentrations in this region. Elements such as Zn, Pb, Cu, Cr, Ni, and V were mostly found in the submicron size fractions, while elements with dominant crustal or oceanic origin such as Fe, Ti, Mn, Sr, and Rb were found in the coarse fractions (>1 μm). The highest metal concentrations, especially for Zn (3.23 ng m−3), Cu (0.81 ng m−3), Sr (2.63 ng m−3), and Cr (0.53 ng m−3), were observed in air masses originating from North America and the concentrations were within the same concentration range to those reported previously in the literature for remote marine aerosols. Fe (12.26 ng m−3), Ti (0.91 ng m−3), and Mn (0.35 ng m−3) showed higher concentrations when air mass came from Europe and the Canary Islands. Pb concentration was low ( 20) for Zn, Cu, Ni, Cr, Pb, and Se. The observed enrichment of the elements was attributed to crustal, marine, anthropogenic, and biogenic sources, as well as long-range transport and resuspension. Zn, Cu and Pb were indicators of anthropogenic activities, while Ti and Sr were indicators of crustal and marine origin, respectively. Oceanic and biogenic emissions might have contributed to most of the Se observed. This work provides the first long-term size-resolved trace metals study for remote tropical northern Atlantic marine aerosols and the dataset could serve as good initiation of yearly flux estimates.
ON THE INFERENCE OF THE COSMIC-RAY IONIZATION RATE ζ FROM THE HCO+-to-DCO+ ABUNDANCE RATIO: THE EFFECT OF NUCLEAR SPIN

The chemistry of dense interstellar regions was analyzed using a time-dependent gas–grain astrochemical simulation and a new chemical network that incorporates deuterated chemistry, taking into account nuclear spin states for the hydrogen chemistry and its deuterated isotopologues. With this new network, the utility of the [HCO+]/[DCO+] abundance ratio as a probe of the cosmic-ray ionization rate has been re-examined, with special attention paid to the effect of the initial value of the ortho-to-para ratio (OPR) of molecular hydrogen. After discussing the use of the probe for cold cores, we compare our results with previous theoretical and observational results for a molecular cloud close to the supernova remnant W51C, which is thought to have an enhanced cosmic-ray ionization rate ζ caused by the nearby γ-ray source. In addition, we attempt to use our approach to estimate the cosmic-ray ionization rate for L1174, a dense core with an embedded star. Beyond the previously known sensitivity of [HCO+]/[DCO+] to ζ, we demonstrate its additional dependence on the initial OPR and, secondarily, on the age of the source, its temperature, and its density. We conclude that the usefulness of the [HCO+]/[DCO+] abundance ratio in constraining the cosmic-ray ionization rate in dense regions increases with the age of the source and the ionization rate as the ratio becomes far less sensitive to the initial value of the OPR.
In-situ Observations of Fracture Processes in 0.6 μm and 9.5 μm SiCP/6061Al Composites

ln-situ SEM observations of fracture processes in two 6061 Al alloy composites reinforced with coarse and line SiC particles, respectively. were carried out to clarify their fracture mechanisms. It was found that in the coarse particle reinforced composite, void were formed in the matrix around SiC particles ahead of the main crack tip. then coalesced with each other, and finally connected with the main crack tip. Causing propagation of the main crack. However. in the fine particle reinforced composite, multiple in micro-cracks were formed at the boundaries between SiC particle clusters and surrounding matrix or within the clusters. then connected with each other, and finally joined with the main crack tip. leading to crack branching and growth of the main crack, Crack branching, multiple cracking and crack deflection were proposed to contribute to the enhanced fracture toughness in the fine particle reinforced composite compared with the coarse particle reinforced composite.
Contingent Expatriate Training Strategies with Examples of Taiwan MNEs

Expatriates play the critical role and are expected to demonstrate performances. Therefore, providing sufficient quantity and quality trainings to expatriates is critical for MNEs. With qualitative approach, this paper proposes four expatriate training strategies which consist of pre-departure training and supportive training for different internationalization situations after the literature review. We selected 4 presentative international companies from 2014 Outward Investment Directory of Taiwan as examples to explain four expatriate training strategies with different internationalization situations. We hope the contingent expatriate training strategies will facilitate MNEs to create and maintain competitive advantages.
Resilience to nematode parasite challenge in industry and AgResearch selection flocks

A large-scale industry project on the resilience of lambs to nematode parasite challenge was undertaken in 2001/02 and 2002/03, to evaluate the feasibility of recording standardised age at first drench (StAge) and postweaning weight gain under nematode challenge, and to estimate genetic differences among flocks. The project involved 15 Romney flocks from two ram breeding groups, with some flocks having been part of an earlier AgResearch study of the genetics of resilience traits. This provided the opportunity to assess any correlated changes in resilience over time (where direct selection over that time period in the industry flocks had been applied to productivity traits, but not to resilience), and to compare the industry performance with AgResearch Resilient-selected and Control lines. The overall estimates of heritability for StAge and weight gain (2 time periods: Gain1 and Gain2) were 0.14 ± 0.014, 0.30 ± 0.015 and 0.15 ± 0.007, respectively. Genetic correlations between StAge and either Gain1 or Gain2 were 0.30 ± 0.06 and 0.41 ± 0.06, respectively. Genetic differences for all traits between the two industry groups were small and not significant. The genetic differences of the current industry-group means (all 15 flocks) above the AgResearch Control line were small (0.8 days, 0.5 kg and 0.9 kg, respectively). In comparison, the genetic differences of the AgResearch Resilient-selected line over the Control line after eight years of selection were 19 days, 0.7 kg and 1.4 kg (11, 8.3 and 9.6% of the industry means). The results confirm that while selection for increased resilience is feasible (although very time-consuming) under commercial conditions, a ram breeder would need to consider an index approach which combined production and resilience traits, to make best use of his animal resources.
Port Sustainability Practices: A Case Study of Port of Rotterdam and Port of Los Angeles

Nowadays seaports have become a key node in global supply chains, connecting parties from all over the world in order to enhance global trade. The dynamics in the industry have shifted the scale of port competition from geographical advantage towards the ability of ports to satisfy the desires not only of its clients but the other parties related to its operations called stakeholders. While ports strive for larger market share they need to balance their impact on the economy in which they operate, the environmental impact they have and the livability to the society that they contribute. This is why such strategy, called port sustainability strategy is required. Only when ports manage to put the amount of attention needed to the three different parties, then they will manage to become more competitive. This research describes what practices do Port of Rotterdam and Port of Los Angeles implement in order to become more sustainable. The study concludes highlighting the main differences in the two ports and their possible development in in the future.
Diagnostic Accuracy of Positron Emission Mammography with 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose in Breast Cancer Tumor of Less than 20 mm in Size

Objective(s): To investigate the diagnostic accuracy of positron emission mammography (PEM) and positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) for small breast tumors of less than 20 mm in size. Methods: The study was conducted on a total of 100 subjects (i.e., 50 patients with pathologically proven breast cancer and 50 normal cases of medical screening). The total number of tumors was 54 (mean size: 11±5.1 mm, range: 4-20 mm). The diagnostic accuracy of PEM alone, PET/CT alone, and combined PET/CT and PEM was evaluated by two nuclear medicine physicians based on visual inspection. The two groups (i.e., tumors of ≤ 10 mm and > 10-20 mm) were compared in terms of the diagnostic capability of the three modalities (PEM alone, PET/CT alone, and PET/CT+PEM). Results: The sensitivities of PEM alone, PET/CT alone, and combined PET/CT and PEM were 72%, 60%, and 76%, respectively. The specificities of these tests were 98%, 100%, and 98%, respectively. Furthermore, the accuracies of these diagnostic modalities were 85%, 79%, and 87%, respectively. The combined PET/CT and PEM showed significantly higher sensitivity and accuracy than PET/CT alone (P=0.005 and P=0.02, respectively). In addition, PEM demonstrated a significantly higher sensitivity than PET/CT in the ≤ 10 mm group (P=0.03); however, no difference was observed between the two modalities in the > 10 mm group in terms of sensitivity. Conclusion: 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose PET had limited capability for the detection of small breast cancers of < 10 mm. Combined PET/CT and PEM showed higher sensitivity and accuracy, compared to PET/CT alone.
Excellent passivation of highly doped p-type Si surfaces by the negative-charge-dielectric Al2O3

From lifetime measurements, including a direct experimental comparison with thermal SiO2, a-Si:H, and as-deposited a-SiNx:H, it is demonstrated that Al2O3 provides an excellent level of surface passivation on highly B-doped c-Si with doping concentrations around 1019cm−3. The Al2O3 films, synthesized by plasma-assisted atomic layer deposition and with a high fixed negative charge density, limit the emitter saturation current density of B-diffused p+-emitters to ∼10 and ∼30fA∕cm2 on >100 and 54Ω∕sq sheet resistance p+-emitters, respectively. These results demonstrate that highly doped p-type Si surfaces can be passivated as effectively as highly doped n-type surfaces.
'Can't Get Enough': Prejudice, Contact Jobs and the Racial Wage Gap in the US

The wage gap between African-Americans and white Americans is substantial in the US and has slightly narrowed over the past 30 years. Today, blacks have almost achieved the same educational level as whites. There is reason to believe that discrimination driven by prejudice plays a part in explaining this residual wage gap. Whereas racial prejudice has substantially declined over the past 30 years, the wage differential has slightly converged overtime. This 'prejudice puzzle' raises other reasons in explaining the absence of convergence of this racial differential. In this paper, I assess the impact which of the boom of jobs in contact with customers has on blacks' labor market earnings. I develop a search-matching model with bargaining to predict the negative impact which of the share of these contact jobs has on blacks' earnings in the presence of customer discrimination. I test this model using the IPUMS, the General Social Survey and the Occupation Information Network. My estimates show that black men's relative earnings are lower in areas where the proportions of prejudiced individuals and of contact jobs are high. I also estimate that the decreased exposure to racial prejudice is associated with a higher convergence of the residual gap, whereas the expansion of contact jobs partly explains the persistence of the gap.
DIMENSIONS OF MATERNAL HEALTH FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS DIMENSÕES DA SAÚDE MATERNA NA PERSPECTIVA DAS REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAIS DIMENSIONES DE LA SALUD MATERNA DESDE LA PERSPECTIVA DE LAS REPRESENTACIONES SOCIALES Research

2 Adjunct Professor IV of the UFPA. Belem, PA - Brazil. 3 Adjunct Professor of the UFPA. Belem, PA - Brazil. 4 Nursing student of the UFPA. Belem, PA - Brazil. ABSTRACT An integrative literature review was conducted to identify the trends in maternal health from the perspective of social representations. The search occurred within the LILACS, BDENF, SCIELO databases, between the years 2003-2011, with 15 articles selected. After the thematic analyses of the contents of the articles, two dimensions were obtained: sociomaternal dimension and the socio-caring dimension. The sociomaternal dimension considered the social representations of women about pregnancy, prenatal care, normal and cesarean delivery, breastfeeding, and rooming-in. The outcomes revealed the necessity of exploring women's common sense and to integrate them into the scientific approach so that they developed autonomously the care for themselves as well as for their baby. The evidence showed a need for professionals to rethink verbal and non-verbal communication, observing more humane and nurturing attitudes. The socio-caring dimension integrated the social representations about the health care during the prenatal period in nursing consultation; nursing care in the puerperium; nursing care in the puerperal gestational cycle among women, and childbirth care; health care in the Family Health Strategy; integrality and teamwork among professionals. In conclusion, the necessity of broadening the vision of health professionals beyond the biomedical and techno-scientific approach is essential in order to incorporate health education in health and a biosocial-humanistic approach.
Use of a running coupling in the NLO calculation of forward hadron production

We address and solve a puzzle raised by a recent calculation [1] of the cross section for particle production in proton-nucleus collisions to next-to-leading order: the numerical results show an unreasonably large dependence upon the choice of a prescription for the QCD running coupling, which spoils the predictive power of the calculation. Specifically, the results obtained with a prescription formulated in the transverse coordinate space differ by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude from those obtained with a prescription in momentum space. We show that this discrepancy is an artifact of the interplay between the asymptotic freedom of QCD and the Fourier transform from coordinate space to momentum space. When used in coordinate space, the running coupling can act as a fictitious potential which mimics hard scattering and thus introduces a spurious contribution to the cross section. We identify a new coordinate-space prescription, which avoids this problem, and leads to results consistent with those obtained with the momentum-space prescription.