Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Self-Transcendence Values, Relationships, and Participatory Practice in Early Childhood Education

This study seeks to reveal the circumstances that encourage versus those that block children’s participation in the context of daily teacher-children encounters in preschools in Israel. Six cases were selected for analysis—three in which children’s participation was enabled and three in which children’s participation was blocked by teachers or student-teachers. Participants in the study were five student-teachers doing fieldwork as part of their professional preparation as well as two teachers. Analysis yielded the following conclusions: meaningful participation takes place in the context of a personal, caring relationship with an educator. For challenging situations that require decisions about enabling or denying children’s participation, self-transcendence values need to be activated by student-teachers or teachers. Activation of these values is the outcome of personal mental struggle, which is strengthened by having clear, articulated goals to include children in guided and nonguided social encounters. This study suggests that a teacher’s espousal of self-transcendence values is among the attributes that have an impact on teachers’ representations of relationships, their interactions with children, and the children’s participation in daily, preschool social encounters, whose quality may in turn affect the relationships with children. Documentation and critical reflection need to be incorporated into educational practice so that decision-making in challenging situations will be the product of thorough deliberation.
Backwardation and Normal Backwardation in Energy Futures Markets: With an Application to Metallgesellschaft's Short-Dated Rollover Hedging of Long-Term Contracts

We show that, since the inception of energy futures markets, prices have on average exhibited backwardation. Normal backwardation has also been the norm, but, because of the low power of the standard tests, most researchers have concluded that the unbiased expectations model cannot be rejected. The fact that backwardation has been and (though somewhat more weakly) continues to be prevalent makes MGRM? s strategy of hedging long-term supply commitments with short-dated futures contracts look somewhat better than previous observers have argued. That said, it should be re-stressed that their strategy was a highly speculative one and its unraveling should have come as no great surprise.
Effects of Cattle on the Abundance and Composition of Carabid Beetles in Temperate Grasslands

Grasslands are of vital importance to the ranching industry. Cattle grazing can alter the structure and composition of the plant community, and may indirectly affect insect communities. We investigated the effects of cattle grazing and site productivity on carabid beetle abundance, dried weight (biomass), species richness and diversity. We used pitfall traps to capture beetles in three sessions in 2008 in Lac Du Bois Provincial Park, British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. To test for main and interacting effects of elevation and grazing, carabid beetles were quantified by trap for abundance, dried weight (biomass), species richness and Shannon’s diversity. We found that elevation (a proxy of site productivity) was the most important predictor of carabid parameters, with lower elevation (low site productivity) having lower abundance, biomass, species richness and diversity compared to upper elevation (high site productivity). Although there was no main effect caused by grazing, there was a reduction in carabid biomass and diversity at grazed upper elevation sites compared to ungrazed upper elevation sites, suggesting that site productivity and plant structure affects carabid communities. Cattle management of natural grasslands benefits by considering biodiversity of all biota, including invertebrates. Carabid species diversity can be maximized by restricting grazing at high site productivity where plant biomass and litter is high.
Development of Biosensors for Small Environmental Target Molecules Using Ce-Selex

Microcystin is a naturally occurring liver cyanotoxin that can be found in water bodies around the world. Cyanobacterial blooms occur worldwide and can potentially contaminate municipal drinking water supplies with various toxins. These events are hazardous, naturally occurring processes that can be worsened by anthropogenic activities. The past 50 years have shown notable changes in global climate, likely due to environmentally detrimental human activities. Our environmental impacts have increased the frequency and severity of these events in the past decade. Developments in water quality control and maintenance have greatly reduced exposure to contaminated water, but current methods to detect microcystin are expensive and take several hours to complete. Aptamers are single-stranded DNA sequences with a high affinity to bind to a specific target. A simple to use, aptamerbased method could reduce water quality testing time and cost and allow more frequent testing by quality technicians and consumers alike. Selection of aptamers can be done using an in vitro selection process, Systematic Evolution of Ligand Exchange, combined with capillary electrophoresis.
Shielding in Mental Health Hospitals

Shielding is defined as the confinement of patients to a single room or a separate unit/area inside the ward, accompanied by a member of staff. It is understood as both a treatment and a control. The purpose of this study is to examine how staff in psychiatric hospitals describe and assess shielding. This qualitative study uses a descriptive and exploratory design with an inductive approach. The material was acquired through the Acute Network (in Psychiatry) nationwide shielding project. Data collection was carried out by the staff, who described the shielding procedure on a semi-structured form. The analysis was inspired by Graneheim and Lundman’s qualitative content analysis. Shielding has been described as an ambiguous practice, that is, shielding can be understood in several ways. There is a clear tension between shielding as a control and shielding as a treatment, with control being described as more important. The important therapeutic elements of shielding have also been mentioned, and shielding involves isolation to different degrees.
A Matching Approach to Analyze the Impact of New Agricultural Technologies: Productivity and Technical Efficiency in Niger

In this paper we assess the performance of farmers adopting an improved sorghum technology package in the Maradi region of Niger. A propensity score matching method is used to address self-selection bias into the program. First, we estimate a propensity model to participate in the extension program, examine factors affecting the participation, and assess the average adoption effect on participants by testing for productivity difference between adopters and non-adopters. Secondly, we estimate a stochastic production technology frontier to compare technical efficiency of farmers in the extension program. We test for returns to scale, examine factors affecting technical efficiency of participants, and compare technical efficiency scores of participants based on their compliance to program recommendations. Participants in the extension program are older, have less farming experience, and operate on larger farm sizes. After controlling for bias, there is very little change in the yield differences, which in both cases are substantial. There is some evidence for greater productivity of the smaller size producers.Technical efficiency of participants is increasing overtime, younger participants are technically more efficient and farming experience increases significantly participants’ technical efficiency. Good followers of the fertilization technique recommendation are much more technically efficient.
Energy Consumption and Economic Growth: A Panel Cointegration Analysis for Developing Countries

The aim of this paper is to examine the long-run relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for 80 developing countries from 1990 to 2009. For this purpose, methods of panel unit root test, panel cointegration test and panel dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) are applied. These 80 countries are divided into three income groups, namely, upper middle income countries, lower middle income countries and low income countries. The empirical results reveal a long-run cointegrated relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for the whole panel of countries as well as for each group of countries. We find the strong relation running from energy consumption to economic growth for upper middle income countries and lower middle income countries, and a strong relation which runs from economic growth to energy consumption for low income countries. These findings clearly indicate that energy consumption had a positive and statistically significant impact on economic growth in the long-run for these countries.
Assessing the role of economic instruments in a policy mix for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision: a review of some methodological challenges

In this paper we review a number of methodological challenges of evaluating and designing economic instruments aimed at biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision in the context of an existing policy mix. In the context of the EU 2010 goal of halting biodiversity loss, researchers have been called upon to evaluate the role of economic instruments for cost-effective decision-making, as well as non-market methods to assess their benefits. We argue that cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and non-market valuation (NMV) methods are necessary, but not sufficient, approaches to assessing the role of economic instruments in a policy mix. We review the principles of “social-ecological-systems”(SES) (Ostrom et al. 2007) and discuss how SES can complement economic cost and benefit assessment methods, in particular in policy design research. To illustrate our conceptual comparison of assessment methodologies, we look at two examples of economic instruments at different government levels – payments for ecosystem services (PES) at farm level and ecological fiscal transfers to municipal /county government. What conceptual problems are introduced when evaluating policies in an instrument mix? How can the SES framework complement CEA and NMV in policy assessment and design? We draw on experiences from Brazil and Costa Rica to exemplify these questions. We conclude with some research questions.
Why do people sometimes not keep their promises

This paper investigates two theories that account for promise keeping. The rst theory is motivated by guilt aversion when people dislike to let othersexpectations down; the second theory argues that promises generate a sense of moral obligation, which is independent of othersexpectations. A crucial aspect for testing these theories is understanding how communication yields to a promise and how the latter shapes expectations. We show that awed promise de nitions may lead to biased interpretation of the experimental data. Moreover, we analyze in details the belief formation process and individuate the e¤ects of cognitive biases. By de ning a promise in a way that is consistent to data, we nd that making a promise is not su¢ cient to make people feel a moral obligation. Sometimes people can go back on their promises. It is necessary that the one who promises also believes that he raised the partners expectations. Only in this case, she feels guilty and honors her obligation. Keywords: Cheap talk, promises, moral obligations, cognitive biases, guilt aversion, beliefs, psychological games. The authors are grateful to XXXX for useful comments on earlier drafts. Giovanni Di Bartolomeo acknowledges nancial support by Sapienza University of Rome. The authors also thank G. Cresci, V. Di Simone, G. Orati for assistance. yDepartment of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome, via del Castro Laurenziano, 9 00161, Rome, Italy, email: giovanni.dibartolomeo@uniroma1.it. zDepartment of Communication, University of Teramo, email: spapa@unite.it. xDepartment of Communication, University of Teramo, email: fpassarelli@unite.it and Bocconi University, Milan.
Query based Personalized Search in Tag Social Systems

Online social networks (OSNs) like Delicious, Facebook and Flicker are becoming more and more popular with both users of Web 2.0 and academic researchers for new opportunities. Users of such web sites can use tags to annotate various resources and share them with their friends. With this new way of sharing and managing resources in the social systems, the challenge is to incorporate this additional information to retrieve relevant resources for the querying users. In this paper, we focus on the problem of improving search in tag social systems. We first show the weakness of the existing user-centric friendship-based solutions where the strength of a friendship is determined by the degree of overlapping tags or resources among users. Such solutions may not be able to retrieve relevant results as they do not consider whether these friends are qualified to answer the specific query. We propose the notion of authoritative users who have frequently tag resources that are relevant to the issued query, and hence more qualified to answer the specific query. Determining these authoritative users for each query in a large social system requires an efficient and scalable algorithm. We construct a scoring model and design an incremental method to build a social network graph to identify the authoritative users for each query. Experiment results on real world Delicious annotation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our query-based personalized approach to return relevant results in tag social systems.
Remote sensing training in African conservation

The potential of remote sensing (RS) to assist with conservation planning, implementation and monitoring is well described, and particularly relevant in African areas that are inaccessible due to terrain, finances or politics. We provide an African perspective on remote sensing (RS) training for conservation and ecology over the last decade through investigating (1) recent use of RS in African conservation literature, (2) use of RS in African conservation agencies, (3) RS training by African institutions and (4) RS capacity development by ad hoc events. Africa does not produce most of the research using RS in conservation and ecological studies conducted on Africa, with authors with correspondence addresses in the USA predominating (33% of a bibliometric analysis), although South Africa‐based authors constituted 20% (with an increase between 2000 and 2015), Kenya 6% and Tanzania and Ethiopia 4% each. Ideally research should be conducted close to the point of use to ensure relevance and data residence in the country concerned. This is a point for attention, possibly through international funding to increase the capacity of African academic institutions to conduct research using RS to answer conservation questions. Part of this will need to include attention on data and software costs, internet speeds and human capacity. Data costs have been alleviated by free Landsat and MODIS data, and the Copernicus programs, but there is need for higher resolution imagery to be freely available for certain conservation projects. Open Source software may well offer a long‐term solution to software costs. This would require that teaching is realigned to employer requirements, which are shifting in many countries and agencies from proprietary software to Open Source due to licensing costs. Low internet connectivity in many areas of Africa might limit the uptake of new data processing options that require connectivity, although over time these tools may become available to more users. However, human capacity is developing. Of the 72 academic institutions surveyed, a number of conservation programs supplied either tailored RS teaching or used ‘service modules’ to provide RS skills to young graduating conservation professionals, showing a recognition of the importance of RS in conservation in Africa. This study highlights the success of capacity development in Africa, and the increasing use of remote sensing for conservation in Africa.
Prospects for Measuring Rainfall Using Propagation Differential Phase in X- and Ka-Radar Bands

Abstract Model calculations and measurements of the specific propagation and backscatter differential phase shifts (KDP and δo, respectively) in rain are discussed for X- (λ ∼ 3 cm) and Ka-band (λ ∼ 0.8 cm) radar wavelengths. The details of the drop size distribution have only a small effect on the relationships between KDP and rainfall rate R. These relationships, however, are subject to significant variations due to the assumed model of the drop aspect ratio as a function of their size. The backscatter differential phase shift at X band for rain rates of less than about 15 mm h−1 is generally small and should not pose a serious problem when estimating KDP from the total phase difference at range intervals of several kilometers. The main advantage of using X-band wavelengths compared to S-band (λ ∼ 10–11 cm) wavelengths is an increase in KDP by a factor of about 3 for the same rainfall rate. The relative contribution of the backscatter differential phase to the total phase difference at Ka band is signif.
Energy Efficient Dynamic Node Localization Technique in Wireless Sensor Networks

Objective: This paper represents an energy efficient algorithm for localization of nodes in wireless sensor network by the help of a small number of anchor nodes (mobile). It calculates the node distance and node location. Method/Statistical Analysis: A small group of mobile dynamic anchor node is being associated with a powerful GPS receiver, Radio frequency and ultrasonic device. Location information is broadcasted periodically by the mobile anchor node and by trilateration/ multilateration technique, the static node location is calculated. To calculate the approximate position of a sensor node it takes three rounds. Findings: The technique is evaluated with the matlab and result compared with chord selection approach. The simulation result shows that the proposed localization method performs better and efficient than the other localization algorithms. Application/Improvement: The proposed algorithm adopts distance measurement as TDOA technique and static sensor node can localize when it comes into the reception range. The method is applicable location computation based routing, sensing nodes, node signal processing, and for node localization.
Lyman-α emission properties of simulated galaxies: interstellar medium structure and inclination effects

Aims. This paper is the first of a series investigating Lyman-alpha (hereafter Ly ) radiation transfer through hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation. Its aim is to assess the impact of the interstellar medium (ISM) physics on Ly radiation transfer and to quantify how galaxy orientation with respect to the line of sight alters observational signatures. Methods. We compare the results of Ly radiation transfer calculations through the ISM of a couple of idealized galaxy simulations in a dark matter halo of 10 10 M . In the first one, G1, this ISM is modeled using physics typical of large scale cosmological hydrodynamics simulations of galaxy formation, where gas is prevented from radiatively cooling below 10 4 K. In the second one, G2, gas is allowed to radiate away more of its internal energy via metal lines and consequently fragments into dense star-forming clouds. Results. First, as expected, the small-scale structuration of the ISM plays a determinant role in shaping a galaxy’s Ly properties. The artificially warm, and hence smooth, ISM of G1 yields an escape fraction of 50% at the Ly line center, and produces symmetrical double-peak profiles. On the contrary, in G2, most young stars are embedded in thick star-forming clouds, and the result is a 10 times lower escape fraction. G2 also displays a stronger outflowing velocity field, which favors the escape of red-shifted photons, resulting in an asymmetric Ly line. Second, the Ly properties of G2 strongly depend on the inclination at which it is observed: From edge-on to face-on, the line goes from a double-peak profile with an equivalent width of 5A to a 15 times more luminous red-shifted asymmetric line with EW 90A. Conclusions. The remarkable discrepancy in the Ly properties we derived for two ISM models raises a fundamental issue. In e ect, it demonstrates that Ly radiation transfer calculations can only lead to realistic properties in simulations where galaxies are resolved into giant molecular clouds. Such a stringent requirement translates into severe constraints both in terms of ISM physics modeling and numerical resolution, putting these calculations out of reach of current large scale cosmological simulations. Finally, we find inclination e ects to be much stronger for Ly photons than for continuum radiation. This could potentially introduce severe biases in the selection function of narrow-band Ly emitter surveys, and in their interpretation, and we predict these surveys could indeed miss a significant fraction of the high-z galaxy population.
Thermoelectric properties of the CoSi1-xGex alloys

The effects of Ge partial substitution for Si on the thermoelectric properties of CoSi1−xGex alloys were investigated by means of thermal and electrical transport measurements. Electrical resistivity (ρ), Seebeck coefficient (S), and thermal conductivity (κ) measurements were performed on a series of CoSi1−xGex alloys with x varying from 0 to 0.15. A substantial decrease in electrical resistivity and lattice thermal conductivity was noticed with increasing substitution level, whereas the Seebeck coefficient shows a weak variation with respect to Ge concentration. The thermoelectric efficiency was found to be enhanced by an order of magnitude in CoSi with Ge substitution. These observations were interpreted on the basis of the changes in the electronic band structure induced by Ge substitution.
20 years of development of squid-based cryogenic current comparators for beam diagnostics

An absolute and exact measurement of the intensity of charged particle beams - extracted from an accelerator or circulating in a Storage Ring - is one of the major problems of beam diagnostics. Also the measurement of socalled dark currents, generated by superconductive RF accelerator cavities at high voltage gradients to characterize the quality of these components becomes more and more important for the commissioning of new accelerators (XFEL at DESY). The Cryogenic Current Comparator (CCC) based on high precision LTS SQUIDs is an excellent tool to solve these problems. This contribution gives an overview of the development of highly sensitive SQUID-based Cryogenic Current Comparators (CCC) for nuclear physics from the first successful demonstration of its performance at GSI Darmstadt through the latest improved version for FAIR and the Cryogenic Storage Ring at MPI Heidelberg.