Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
INTEREST RATE REFORMS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN SADC COUNTRIES: THE SAVINGS AND INVESTMENT CHANNEL

The 2008/2009 global financial crisis has re-ignited the debate around financial reforms with contrasting views with regards to the impact of financial reforms on economic growth. This study examines the impact of interest rate reforms on economic growth through savings and investments in SADC countries for the period 1990-2015. Three specifications are used for the analysis; the first one determines the influence of interest rate reforms on savings, the second one analyses the effect of savings on investments while the third one examines whether investments have a positive impact on economic growth. The Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimation technique is employed for analysis. The results show that interest rate reforms have a positive impact on economic growth through savings and investments. The study therefore recommends that market forces should be allowed to determine real interest rates and furthermore, real interest rates maintained at artificially low levels may harm economic growth.
magnetomineralogie hornin Č eského masivu a tethydní oblasti Paleomagnetism and magnetomineralogy of rocks from the Bohemian Massif and Tethyan Realm

13 Introduction. 14 Main goals. 14 Methods. 16 Results. 17 Discussion. 20 Conclusions. 21 Figure captions. 21 Literatura / References. 22 Životopis. 24 Curriculum vitae. 25 Seznam publikací / Selected publications. 26
Effect of Ceria Nano-Coating on the Formation of a Protective Oxide-Scale Layer on the Surface of FeCrAl Fibers

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of nano-ceria coating on the formation of the protective oxide-scale layer on the surface of metal fibers made of FeCrAl alloy. FeCrAl alloy, which contains about 72% iron, 21% chromium, and 5% aluminum, forms an oxidescale layer dominated by aluminum oxide to protect the base metal alloy from further oxidation at high temperatures. A small fraction of rare earth elements, such as yttrium and cerium, are commonly added to FeCrAl alloy to enhance its oxidation characteristics at high temperature and improve the adhesion between the oxide-scale layer and the base metal alloy. In this study, the nano-ceria coating was added to the surface of the fibers. Three samples were considered in this investigation. The first sample was kept without ceria coating as a baseline. The second sample was coated with 2.5%, by weight, of the nano-ceria solution, while the third sample was coated with 7.5%, by weight, of the nano-ceria solution. Thermo-Gravimetric Analysis (TGA) was conducted for 10 hours at 800°C to quantify and compare the weight gain and oxidation rate for the three samples. The surface micromorphology of the samples was examined using a field-emission Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Chemical analyses of the surface of the samples were performed using Energy Dispersive x-ray Spectroscopy (EDS). The results clearly show that the ceria nano-coating reduces the oxidation rate of FeCrAl significantly; however, excess material on the surface of the fibers was observed. Different coating techniques were then tried to optimize the coating process.
The Frequency Unexpected Antibodies at Kyungpook National University Hospital

Background: Unexpected antibody screening and identification tests are very important pre-transfusion tests for preventing transfusion reactions. Nowadays, the column agglutination test is widely used in Korea. The results of many studies that used this method showed the decreased frequency of nonsignificant cold antibodies and an increased frequency of warm antibodies when compared with other studies that used the tube test or the microplate test. This study was performed in order to determine the accurate frequency and distribution of unexpected alloantibody by using the column agglutination test. Methods: We analyzed the results from 32,218 antibody screening tests with using LISS/Coombs cards and ID-DiaCell I and II for the transfusion candidates and patients with hemolytic anemia who were seen at Kyungpook National University Hospital during a recent eight-year period. Results: According to the results of the antibody screening test, 188 samples (0.58%) out of all 32,218 samples, were shown to be positive. Unexpected alloantibodies were detected in 86 patients (0.27%) with using the antibody identification test. The antibodies that were detected most frequently were anti-E (29 samples), followed by anti-D (8 samples), anti-M (8 samples) and anti-c (7 samples). Conclusion: The frequency and distribution of unexpected antibodies at our hospital are similar with those obtained in other Korean studies. The detection rates of warm antibodies, including Rh antibodies, were high. The proportion of Rh antibodies in patients with a gestation history was significantly higher than that in the patients without a gestation history. This study shows once again that pregnancy affects the antibodies and this supports the relationship between pregnancy and antibody formation. (Korean J Blood Transfus 2007;18:97-104)
SCREENING OF SOME BOTANICAL INSECTICIDES AGAINST MAIZE WEEVIL, SITOPHILUS ZEAMAIS MOTSCH. (COLEOPTERA: CURCULIONIDAE), ON MAIZE

Maize is one of the major cereal crops grown for food in Ethiopia and the maize weevil, Sitophilus zeamais is a major insect pest of stored maize. Controlling of the pest by use of synthetic insecticides is raising serious concern on the environmental safety, consumer health hazards and high costs for subsistence farmers and thus there is a need to develop alternative safe and cheap methods of insect control strategies such as the use of insecticidal botanicals against the storage pest. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of powders of seeds of Azadrichta indica, Millettia ferruginea and Jatropha curcas, leaves of Croton macrostachyus and Euphorbia schimperiana and to screen the minimum effective dose of each botanical for the management of maize weevil. The plant materials were collected air-dried under shade, ground separately into a fine powder using micro plant grinding machine. Three, four, and five grams of powder of each botanical were added to each 100 g of clean maize in each 250 cm3 glass jar and mixed uniformly by shaking. A standard insecticide, Pirimiphos-methyl 2 % dust (2 g) and untreated check were included for comparison. Twenty-six newly unsexed emerged adult weevils were placed in each jar and covered with muslin cloth. The treatments were arranged in completely randomized design (RCD) with three replications. Weevil mortality was recorded at 3, 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after initial infestation. During the last counting, both dead and alive weevils were counted and removed and the grains were kept under the same conditions for the emergence of F1 generation. The numbers of F1 progeny weevils emerging were recorded every other day for 33 days. Seed germination was tested using 15 randomly picked seed from undamaged grains from each jar. A significant difference (P 0.05) in the number of emerged F1 among the botanical treatments and the chemical insecticide, but significant difference was recorded between these treatments and the control at 1 and 2 days and cumulative emerged progeny after 28 days. Seed germination test generally revealed over 77 seed viability and no significant difference was found among all the treatments. The study revealed that the botanicals can be used as components of maize weevil management options as they caused high weevil mortality and very low fecundity and showed insignificant effect on seed viability. However, the impacts of consumption of the botanically treated maize on humans need further study.
Paddy Availability Modeling in Indonesia Using Spatial Regression

Paddy is one of Indonesian staple food in which its availability is highly needed. A prediction model of paddy availability in future such as by means of spatial regression is deemed necessary. The purpose of this study is to construct a spatial regression model to predict paddy production in Indonesia. The result of the research showed that paddy production could be presented using lag spatial regression with some influencing factors including harvested area, monthly average temperatures and numbers of workers.
EMF Exposure Modelling in the Vicinity of the Radiocommunication Stations

Due to rapid development of wireless systems and future implementation of the 5G system, it is necessary to increase number of the stations and/or number of radio emissions in current and new mobile service frequency bands. For each of the new or modified radio installation in Poland the Electromagnetic Field (EMF) strength levels has to be evaluated and measured/validated in accordance with allowable limits. In the paper the model of estimation of total EMF levels coming from mobile base stations radio emissions to be used for estimation of the whole country territory EMF levels is proposed. Results of preliminary analysis were also shown on practical examples. The model presented in the paper can be used for initial finding of possible places where exist the risk of exceedance of the maximum exposure limits and for analysis of potential radio network development taking into account current regulatory limits. The model will be used in computerized system SI2PEM which is developing in Poland for EMF levels controlling and validation purposes.
Urban Green Space as a Matter of Environmental Justice

i SAMMANFATTNING . i RESUMO . ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii CONTENT . iv LIST OF FIGURES & TABLES . vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS . viii
Ball Juggling on the Bipedal Robot Cassie

The increasing integration of robots in daily life necessitates research in multitasking strategies. The act of juggling offers a simple platform to test techniques which may be generalizable to more complex tasks and systems. This paper presents both analytical and empirical results for successful ball-juggling on the bipedal robotic research platform Cassie. A control strategy inspired by mirror law algorithms was simulated on a simple paddle-ball system and then extended to the Cassie-ball system in simulations and experiments, using two low-level control schemes. A Poincaré analysis demonstrated´ stability for both controllers. Both simulated and experimental results show that the proposed strategy is robust to a wide range of physical parameters and that the act of juggling while balancing is achievable through multiple methods.
The Role Of Integration And Resilience For Improving Resource Efficiency

DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.24018/ejbmr.2020. 5.1. 183 1 Abstract: The study aims to examine the impact of customer integration, internal integration, logistics collaborator integration and supply chain resilience on the resource efficiency of the supply chain firms in Karachi. Sample size included 181 responses with the help of purposive sampling, and the target population was supply chain firms of Karachi. The data was analyzed using PLS-SEM. The study found that the customer integration was significantly affecting SC resilience but negatively affecting resource efficiency. Also, internal integration was not affecting customer integration and SC resilience and resource efficiency but affecting the logistics collaborator integration. Moreover, LCI was significantly affecting customer integration, SC resilience and resource efficiency. Lastly, SC resilience was negatively affecting resource efficiency. The study recommends that the managers need to enhance their logistics collaborator integration as it was found to be significantly improving the customer integration, supply chain resilience and resource efficiency. Moreover, the managers need to improve their customer and internal integration as they can enhance their logistics collaboration integration and resource efficiency.
Stream Memory Subsystem in Reconfigurable Platforms

— High performance computing platforms require an efficient memory subsystem to keep processors busy. This paper proposes a memory hierarchy using stream units to move stream data between memory and processors. The stream units prefetch and align data based on stream descriptors, a mechanism that allows programmers to indicate data movement explicitly by describing their memory access patterns. Reconfigurable logic allows exploration of different memory hierarchy configurations based on application needs. This paper also presents an example stream unit design with preliminary synthesis results.
Utilizing Arabic WordNet Relations in Arabic Text Classification: New Feature Selection Methods

 Abstract — The availability of Arabic text documents on the Internet entails the use of convenient Arabic ‎text ‎classification (TC) techniques. Arabic TC requires extensive work in analyzing the content of valuable ‎Arabic documents. Its rich vocabulary, semantic ambiguity, and words ‎with ‎semantic relations characterize the Arabic language. ‎Therefore, using a bag-of-words (BoWs) text representation model may yield unsatisfactory results. This study is concerned with utilizing synsets and semantic relations from the original words to enhance Arabic TC accuracy. These relations are extracted using the Arabic WordNet (AWN) thesaurus as a lexical and semantic provenance. AWN provides various semantic relations for the original word. Some relations are more beneficial than ‎others with respect to dataset content. Consequently, we suggest either assigning ‎a weight for each relation, at which, the effect of weak relations can be minimized and the strong relations can be boosted, or selection of appropriate ‎ semantic relations‎. ‎‎ In this paper, two approaches are suggested, relation weighting scheme and relation grouping scheme. At the first approach, a developed weighting scheme for assigning weights to relations and their respective words, on the bases of Akhbar Al Khaleej dataset, is proposed. This method generates a large training file that contains the original words along with the corresponding relations extracted from AWN, as well as their weights. The second approach is based on relation grouping, at which two different types of relations are grouped based on one of three criterions (related semantic meaning, frequency occurrence (FO) of relations in AWN, and the ratio between the FO of relations in the dataset with respect to the FO of the corresponding relation in the AWN). Naive Bayes is used as a classifier, and F1 measure is used to assess the performance of the proposed methods. Tenfold cross-validation scheme is used to reduce the variability of the results. The efficiencies of the suggested methods are illustrated through the weighting scheme and semantic relation grouping. Results show that the proposed methods outperform the classic BoWs and statistical feature selection methods (Chi-Square and Information Gain). The grouping methods enhance classification accuracy and reduce feature dimensionality.
Can speed up the convergence rate of stochastic gradient methods to O(1/k2) by a gradient averaging strategy?

In this paper we consider the question of whether it is possible to apply a gradient averaging strategy to improve on the sublinear convergence rates without any increase in storage. Our analysis reveals that a positive answer requires an appropriate averaging strategy and iterations that satisfy the variance dominant condition. As an interesting fact, we show that if the iterative variance we defined is always dominant even a little bit in the stochastic gradient iterations, the proposed gradient averaging strategy can increase the convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$ in probability for the strongly convex objectives with Lipschitz gradients. This conclusion suggests how we should control the stochastic gradient iterations to improve the rate of convergence.
Cultural Communication and Cultural Transmission: The Case of Popular Tradition in Corsica

Culture is produced, shaped and transmitted through intergroup relations provoked by communication. In this paper it is examined the cultural communication alternations in a popular culture. More particularly, taking the case of dance practice in Corsica, it is described the actual dance situation. The purpose of this paper is to propose communication modules to avoid a possible cultural loss. This qualitative study is based on field research, in-depth interviews and observation. The lead researcher had the opportunity to observe the dance condition in Corsica, during the five (5) years that she lived on this island (2003 – 2007), exchanging and communicating with dance associations and other cultural organisations. Dance activity in Corsica today is considered a limited practice, as dance associations are the only places where it is experienced. This study identified an intergroup relation difficulty among the different dance associations. Some of the actions proposed in this study in order to improve communication and consequently improve the actual situation of insufficient dance transmission and practice is to follow common rules, propose a specific agenda with dance events, invite younger people to dance, achieve members’ identification by creating intercultural groups, mixing the teams with regard to nationality and promote cultural education and research.
Extremum Sensitivity Analysis with Least Squares Polynomials and their Ridges

Global sensitivity analysis is a powerful set of ideas and computational heuristics for understanding the importance and interplay between diﬀerent uncertain parameters in a computational model. Such a model is characterized by a set of input parameters and an output quantity of interest, where we typically assume that the inputs are independent and information on their marginal densities can be obtained. If the output quantity of interest is smooth and continuous, polynomial least squares approximations can be used to extract Sobol’ indices. In this paper, we build on these previously well-known ideas by examining two diﬀerent aspects of this paradigm. First, we study whether sensitivity indices can be computed eﬃciently if one leverages a polynomial ridge approximation—a polynomial least squares ﬁt over a subspace. We discuss a recipe that exploits a special dependence structure between a polynomial ridge approximation and a global polynomial least squares approximation, to reduce the number of model evaluations. Second, we discuss two heuristics for evaluating input sensitivities when constrained near output extrema: skewness-based sensitivity indices and variance reduction indices based on Monte Carlo ﬁltering. We provide algorithms that implement the ideas discussed in this paper, codes for which are available online.
University of Birmingham A tale of two worlds

This paper analyzes the vulnerability space arising in Trusted Ex-ecution Environments (TEEs) when interfacing a trusted enclave application with untrusted, potentially malicious code. Considerable research and industry effort has gone into developing TEE runtime libraries with the purpose of transparently shielding en-clave application code from an adversarial environment. However, our analysis reveals that shielding requirements are generally not well-understood in real-world TEE runtime implementations. We expose several sanitization vulnerabilities at the level of the Application Binary Interface (ABI) and the Application Programming Interface (API) that can lead to exploitable memory safety and side-channel vulnerabilities in the compiled enclave. Mitigation of these vulnerabilities is not as simple as ensuring that pointers are outside enclave memory. In fact, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art mitigation techniques such as Intel’s edger8r , Microsoft’s “deep copy marshalling”, or even memory-safe languages like Rust fail to fully eliminate this attack surface. Our analysis reveals 35 en-clave interface sanitization vulnerabilities in 8 major open-source shielding frameworks for Intel SGX, RISC-V, and Sancus TEEs. We practically exploit these vulnerabilities in several attack scenarios to leak secret keys from the enclave or enable remote code reuse. We have responsibly disclosed our findings, leading to 5 designated CVE records and numerous security patches in the vulnerable open-source projects, including the Intel SGX-SDK
A Model of Waste Management Improvement in Indonesia

Waste management (garbage) is an important thing and cannot be negotiated by any companies. By applying a good waste management system, companies will be the companies that are pro-environment and they will be positively appreciated by their stakeholders. This study aims to examined the factors that influence the waste management and their impacts on the financial performance of the company through a model to determine the antecedents of commitment and waste management program that eventually lead to improve financial performance. This research was conducted by distributing questionnaires to 100 managers of companies that implement waste management programs. The results showed that there was a positive influence of awareness and legal compliance towards its environmental commitments and positive influence on the environmental commitment program of waste management and waste management programs towards the financial performance of the company. The waste management program could make the companies prepare their operation better and minimize their environment cost. This study also gives a boost to companies that wants to improve the company's financial performance through waste management program
Subset Selection by Pareto Optimization with Recombination

Subset selection, i.e., to select a limited number of items optimizing some given objective function, is a fundamental problem with various applications such as unsupervised feature selection and sparse regression. By employing a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (EA) with mutation only to optimize the given objective function and minimize the number of selected items simultaneously, the recently proposed POSS algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance for subset selection. In this paper, we propose the PORSS algorithm by incorporating recombination, a characterizing feature of EAs, into POSS. We prove that PORSS can achieve the optimal polynomial-time approximation guarantee as POSS when the objective function is monotone, and can find an optimal solution efficiently in some cases whereas POSS cannot. Extensive experiments on unsupervised feature selection and sparse regression show the superiority of PORSS over POSS. Our analysis also theoretically discloses that recombination from diverse solutions can be more likely than mutation alone to generate various variations, thereby leading to better exploration; this may be of independent interest for understanding the influence of recombination.