Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Chemistry of Interpersonal Attraction: Developing further Bion's concept of "valency"

The present is an attempt to further develop Bion's (1961) concept of "valency", a term the latter borrowed from chemistry. First, the author extended the concept to include not only, as Bion believed, the person's readiness to combine with other members to contribute to the formation of the basic assumption group, but also the person's way to relate and react to his peers in general. Second, he provides a detailed description of the main characteristics of the four types of valency (fight, dependency, flight, and pairing) . Then, developing further Bion's analogy between man and atom, he discussed the relationship between these types of valency, proposing thus a set of hypotheses which shed a new light on the "chemistry" of interpersonal relationship and attraction. Third, filling the gap left by Bion, the author discussed the psychogenesis of valency, tracing it back to early psychotic positions (paranoid-schizoid and depressive) and object relations described by Melanie Klein (1946). Finally, the author postulated a causal relationship between valency and psychopathology, proposing a new concept, namely the "minus valency" (-V). This concept corresponds to a mental state where valency functions in reverse. That is, instead of bounding the subject to his peers, -V does the opposit; it hinders, destroys and prevent the establishment of interpersonal relationships. According to the author each valency type has a minus counterpart. Thus, there are four possible -V types (minus fight, minus dependency, minus flight and minus pairing) and each one is associated with a number of mental and psychosomatic diseases, especially personality diseases. This suggests thus that the concept of -V provides the psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist working with personality disorders with a "starting point", namely the client's -V, and a goal to achieve, that is, the restoration of the client's valency, or his/her ability to establish "healthy" and lasting relationships with others.
A Price Analysis and Management Model for Adriatic Small Pelagic Fish (Anchovies and Pilchards)

This study focuses on the price formation mechanisms and was conceived due to the crucial nature of the Adriatic small pelagic fish market. It covers several aspects of the market, although those specifically connected with supply and demand were the primary focus. The issue of price formation mechanism is unique in the fish and seafood production sector as fishing companies, unlike many other industrial sectors, cannot plan production. Fishing boats head out to sea without any certainty that the market will absorb the entire catch and that the price obtained will be profitable. This implies that, in practice, variable costs are not easily adjustable as they are paid in advance. In more general terms, this leads to a degree of asymmetry in the management of fishing companies. The daily price series and associated volumes for the year 2009 were analyzed for anchovies (Engraulis Encrasicolus) and pilchards (Sardina Pilchardus) in the main Adriatic fishing areas. The analysis shows that a uniform approach to managing the average price of small pelagic fish for the entire Adriatic Sea would not be effective, as this would negatively impact local niche markets. Specifically, the average annual prices for anchovies (Engraulis Encrasicolus) vary greatly at the different markets and there is little competition within the various fish and seafood markets. The study also focused on determining “no-fishing days” to control the supply of product on the markets, incorporating economic/income data from companies operating in the Adriatic small pelagic fish sector.
Neighborhood and Family Effects on Children's Health in Los Angeles

This paper examines the effects of family and neighborhood factors on child health in one of the largest urban areas in the United States, Los Angeles County. We use data from a new representative survey of neighborhoods and households in L.A. —the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, or L.A. FANS—to examine the effects of family and neighborhood characteristics on child health status. A particular focus is on differences between Latinos and other race/ethnic groups as well as differences by duration of family residence in the U.S. and other key factors. We seek to answer two questions. First, how are family background factors such immigrant status, ethnicity, and social class related to child health outcomes? Second, are there differences in health outcomes by neighborhood-level socioeconomic status, once individual and family differences are held constant? Among the child health outcomes we examine are the mother’s report of the child’s overall health status, reports of physician diagnoses of key chronic diseases (such as anemia and asthma), and, among children aged 12-17 years, body mass index adjusted for age as well as indicators of being overweight or at risk of overweight.
Producing ergosterol from corn straw hydrolysates using Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Ergosterol is an economically important metabolite produced by Saccharomyces cerevisiae . In this study, the production of ergosterol by the strain using corn straw as an inexpensive carbon source was investigated. The total yield of ergosterol was determined by both the biomass and ergosterol content in yeast cells which depend not only on the hydrolyze condition, but also on the culture conditions. The corn straw hydrolyzing stability test result showed that the average content of reduction sugar (dextrose equivalent, DE) was 52.3% and the conversion efficiency of hemi-cellulose was 80.0%. Cultivation in 10 L bioreactor was carried out under the optimized corn straw hydrolysate medium. According to the fermentation stabilized experiment, the mean values of biomass and ergosterol average content were up to 8.5 gL -1 and 2.35%, respectively. Results on the stability of ergosterol content in yeast cell extraction solution, crystallize ergosterol productivity and the mean extraction yield values are shown to be 2.35, 2.05, 87.24%, respectively. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) was employed to observe the morphology of the as-product, the infrared furrier spectrometer (IR) was used to record the infrared spectrum of the ergosterol, and the X-ray diffractometer (XRD) was carried out to characterize its component and crystallite structure. Characterization analysis indicated that the ergosterol obtained by yeast from corn straw hydrolysates has achieved high purity, and could be used as one of the widely used feedstock for Vitamin D 2 . Key words : Corn straw, ergosterol, hydrolyze, fermentation, characterization.
The Comparative Effect of Teaching Grammar through Interpretation Tasks and Pictorial Clues on EFL Learners’ Writing Accuracy

The focus of this study is to investigate the comparative effect of teaching grammar through interpretation tasks and pictorial clues on EFL learners’ writing accuracy. The participants were 60 female intermediate EFL learners with age range of 21-35 who were divided into two experimental groups after being homogenized by a piloted PET test. In the piloted researcher-made pre-test, the researcher required the participants to write a narration and also complete another narration with some blanks with provided words using grammatical points they were going to be taught. After the treatment phase, another researcher-made parallel form of the pre-test was administered as the post-tests. To investigate the research question of the study, an ANCOVA was conducted. The results revealed that there was not any significant difference between the performances of either group. In other words, the mentioned ways of teaching grammar had equal effect on the learners’ writing accuracy.
Representations for conditional expectations and applications to pricing and hedging of financial products in Lévy and jump-diffusion setting

Abstract In this article, we derive expressions for conditional expectations in terms of regular expectations without conditioning but involving some weights. For this purpose, we apply two approaches: the conditional density method and the Malliavin method. We use these expressions for the numerical estimation of the price of American options and their deltas in a Lévy and jump-diffusion setting. Several examples of applications to financial and energy markets are given including numerical examples.
The Two-Phase Arterial Blood Flow with or without a Catheter and in the Presence of a Single or Multi Stenosis

We consider the problem of blood flow in an artery with or without a catheter and in the presence of single or multi stenosis whose shape is based on the available experimental data for the stenosis in a human’s artery. The presence of stenosis in the artery, which locally narrows portion of the artery, can be a result of fatty materials such as cholesterol in the blood. The use of catheter is important as a standard tool for diagnosis and treatment in patience whose blood flow passage in the artery is affected adversely by the presence of the stenosis within the artery. The blood flow in the arterial tube is represented by a two-phase model composing a suspension of red cells in plasma. The governing equations for both fluid (plasma) and particles (red cells) are solved subject to reasonable modeling and approximations. The important quantities such as blood velocity, blood pressure gradient, impedance (blood flow resistance), wall shear stress and its surface integrated force are computed in the presence or absence of the catheter, and, in particular, effects of the stenosis, size of the catheter’s radius and the hematocrit due to the red cells-plasma combination of the blood flow are determined.
The Wage Effects of Fixed-term Contract Employment Revisited: an Investigation Based on Social Security Records

Using data from social security records on Spanish males, we investigate the wage effects of working under a fixed-term contract. In a first step, we provide fixed-effects estimates of the wage effect of working under a fixed-term contract for low-skilled, medium-skilled, and high-skilled men based on administrative data. Next, we include the individual s work history into the wage equation to obtain wage effects conditional on the work history and to study the returns to experience under fixed-term contracts. For this analysis we employ a three-equation random effects model estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Finally, we use the estimates of this model to simulate the long-term effects of working under a fixed-term contract on future career outcomes.
Ranking Authors in an Academic Network Using Social Network Measures

Online social networks are widely used platforms that enable people to connect with each other. These social media channels provide an active communication platform for people, and they have opened new venues of research for the academic world and business. One of these research areas is measuring the influential users in online social networks; and the same is true for academic networks where finding influential authors is an area of interest. In an academic network, citation count, h-index and their variations are used to find top authors. In this article, we propose the adoption of established social network measures, including centrality and prestige, in an academic network to compute the rank of authors. For the empirical analysis, the widely-used dataset of the Digital Bibliography and Library Project (DBLP) is exploited in this research, and the micro-level properties of the network formed in the DBLP co-authorship network are studied. Afterwards, the results are computed using social network measures and evaluated using the standard ranking performance evaluation measures, including Kendall correlation, Overlapping Similarlity (OSim) and Spearman rank-order correlation. The results reveal that the centrality measures are significantly correlated with the citation count and h-index. Consequently, social network measures have potential to be used in an academic network to rank the authors.
Wintertime photochemistry in Beijing: observations of ROx radical concentrations in the North China Plain during the BEST-ONE campaign

Abstract. The first wintertime in situ measurements of hydroxyl (OH), hydroperoxy (HO2) and organic peroxy (RO2) radicals (ROx=OH+HO2+RO2) in combination with observations of total reactivity of OH radicals, kOH in Beijing are presented. The field campaign “Beijing winter finE particle STudy – Oxidation, Nucleation and light Extinctions” (BEST-ONE) was conducted at the suburban site Huairou near Beijing from January to March 2016. It aimed to understand oxidative capacity during wintertime and to elucidate the secondary pollutants' formation mechanism in the North China Plain (NCP). OH radical concentrations at noontime ranged from 2.4×106cm-3 in severely polluted air (kOH∼27s-1) to 3.6×106cm-3 in relatively clean air (kOH∼5s-1). These values are nearly 2-fold larger than OH concentrations observed in previous winter campaigns in Birmingham, Tokyo, and New York City. During this campaign, the total primary production rate of ROx radicals was dominated by the photolysis of nitrous acid accounting for 46 % of the identified primary production pathways for ROx radicals. Other important radical sources were alkene ozonolysis (28 %) and photolysis of oxygenated organic compounds (24 %). A box model was used to simulate the OH, HO2 and RO2 concentrations based on the observations of their long-lived precursors. The model was capable of reproducing the observed diurnal variation of the OH and peroxy radicals during clean days with a factor of 1.5. However, it largely underestimated HO2 and RO2 concentrations by factors up to 5 during pollution episodes. The HO2 and RO2 observed-to-modeled ratios increased with increasing NO concentrations, indicating a deficit in our understanding of the gas-phase chemistry in the high NOx regime. The OH concentrations observed in the presence of large OH reactivities indicate that atmospheric trace gas oxidation by photochemical processes can be highly effective even during wintertime, thereby facilitating the vigorous formation of secondary pollutants.
Utilizando Análise de Sentimentos para Definição da Homofilia Política dos Usuários do Twitter durante a Eleição Presidencial Americana de 2016

Este trabalho propoe uma analise da homofilia politica entre usuarios do Twitter durante a eleicao presidencial americana de 2016. Os tweets, perfis de usuarios e suas redes de contatos foram coletados para este estudo ao longo de 122 dias (01/08/2016 ate 30/11/2016). Considerando a base de dados coletada, o sentimento em relacao aos candidatos Donald Trump e Hillary Clinton foi utilizado para a analise da homofilia. Os resultados mostraram que existe maior homofilia entre usuarios que compartilham sentimento negativo em relacao a ambos candidatos, sendo mais evidente no caso do candidato Donald Trump. Os resultados tambem mostraram que existe maior heterofilia entre usuarios que nao manifestaram sentimento em relacao aos dois candidatos.
EFFICIENCY OF A SCALE MODEL VERTICAL FLOW AND AEROBIC WETLAND SYSTEM IN TREATING ACID MINE DRAINAGE 1 .

The efficiency of a scale model vertical flow wetland (VFW) and aerobic wetland system in treating acid mine drainage was monitored over a two year period. The vertical flow system was constructed using a mixture of mushroom compost and limestone and the aerobic wetland was a cattail (Typha latifolia) dominated system constructed with mushroom compost as the planting medium. Water samples were collected weekly and analyzed for pH, acidity, alkalinity, iron, manganese, iron and manganese oxidizing bacteria. There was nearly a three unit increase in pH (3.73-6.65) along with a 83% reduction in acidity from an average of 300 mg/L to 50mg/L (83%) and corresponding net alkaline discharge of between 40-9 mg/l. The average iron concentrations were reduced from 32 to 4 mg/l (88%), but only an average of 2 mg/L (11%) of manganese was removed with all manganese reductions occurring in the aerobic wetland. The efficiency of the system varied seasonally, as well as between years, and the reductions in iron and manganese concentrations were correlated with bacterial activity within the systems. The majority of reduction in acidity in the VFW occurred within the upper 45 cm of the substrate, whereas alkaline addition and metal removal occurred between 45 and 90 cm of substrate depth. The efficiency of the systems decreased in the second year of operation. The efficiency of the scale model was similar to systems currently treating acid mine drainage in northwestern Pennsylvania.
A VTS-based Feature Compensation Method using Noisy Speech HMMs

In conventional Vector Taylor Series (VTS) based noisy speech recognition methods, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are trained using clean speech, and the parameters of the clean speech HMM are adapted to test noisy speech, or the original clean speech is estimated from the test noisy speech. However, these approaches have a drawback in that acoustic models trained using noisy speech cannot be used in recognition. In noisy speech recognition, improved performance is generally expected by employing noisy acoustic models produced by methods such as Multi-condition Training (MTR) and Multi-Model-based Speech Recognition framework (MMSR). Motivated by this idea, a method has been developed that can make use of the noisy acoustic models in the VTS algorithm where additive noise was adapted for the speech feature compensation. In this paper, we modified the previous method to adapt channel noise as well as additive noise. A mathematical relation was derived in the log-spectrum domain between the test and training noisy speech considering both channel and additive noise. After approximating the relation using VTS, Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) estimation of the training noisy speech is obtained from the test noisy speech based on the relation. The proposed method was applied to noisy speech HMMs trained by MTR and MMSR and cou ld reduce the relative word error rate by 7% and 8%, respectively, in the noisy speech recognition experiments on the Aurora 2 database.
Managers’ incentives for issuing cash flow forecasts

This study examines a recent change in voluntary disclosure by investigating the issuance of management cash flow forecasts for a sample of 690 UK non-financial firm-year observations which are drawn from the top 500 UK listed firms by total market capitalisation as listed by Financial Times on 30 March 2007. Automated content analysis is used to search for cash flow forecasts in annual reports narratives using QSR NVivo 8. The results of regression analysis provide support for institutional theory that companies try to imitate the disclosure practices of other companies in the same industry. Also, the results document that operating cash flow, industry behaviour, cross-listing, and company size are positively and significantly related to disclosure of cash flow forecasts, whereas performance and competition rate are negatively and significantly related to disclosure of cash flow forecasts. However, the results fail to find any significant relationship between normative or coercive isomorphism proxies and disclosure of cash flow forecasts.
Fault localization in ABAP Programs

In this paper we present an automated technique for localizing faults in data centric programs. Data-centric programs typically interact with databases to get collections of content, process each entry in the collection and output another collection or write entries back to database. Many of the production faults in data centric programs are manifested because of presence of certain data values or data patterns in the database that were not checked for or handled correctly during development of the initial code. Our technique collects the execution trace of the faulty program, uses a novel precise slicing algorithm to break the trace into slices mapping to each entry in the output collection and finally does a semantic difference between the slices corresponding to correct output entries versus incorrect ones to suggest potentially faulty statements. We implemented our approach for ABAP programs. ABAP is the language used to code in SAP systems and interacts heavily with databases. It also contains embedded SQL like commands to work on collections of data. We applied our technique to a suite of 13 ABAP programs with faults from the field and it was able to identify the precise cause in 12 cases.
Secure Key Renewal in WirelessHART

WirelessHART is a wireless extension to the HART protocol. Even though WirelessHART is designed to be a secure protocol, the loopholes in the key management system makes it vulnerable to security threats. The broadcast approach for key renewal mechanisms in WirelessHART is not secure enough to be used in sensitive industrial automation environments where breach of security may result in catastrophic results. Also, key distribution with unicast communication with each device requires O(n) rekeying messages, where n is the size of the network. In this paper we provide a secure and scalable key renewal protocol for WirelessHART that reduces the communication overhead to O(logn). Our protocol requires far less messages than the conventional unicast approach.
Probabilistic Inventory Model Multi-Source Backlogged Probabilistic Inventory Model for Crisp and Fuzzy Environment

This paper proposed a multi-item multi-source probabilistic periodic review inventory model under a varying holding cost constraint with zero lead time when: (1) the stock level decreases at a uniform rate over the cycle. (2) some costs are varying. (3) the demand is a random variable that follows some continuous distributions as (two-parameter exponential, Kumerswamy, Gamma, Beta, Rayleigh, Erlang distributions). The objective function under a constraint is imposed here in crisp and fuzzy environment. The objective is to find the optimal maximum inventory level for a given review time that minimize the expected annual total cost. Furthermore, a comparison between given distributions is made to find the optimal distribution that achieves the model under considerations. Finally, a numerical example is applied.
Accurate Real-Time Traffic Sign Recognition Based on the Connected Component Labeling and the Color Histogram Algorithms

—Image processing such as Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) plays a key role in Intelligent Transportation Systems particularly in Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) which aims at increasing driver safety. Several studies have proposed TSR systems based on different image processing and machine learning algorithms. However, the efficiency of the proposed TSR algorithms requires improvement to enable real-time alerts on onboard devices which have limited computational power. Further improvement on accuracy of TSR is also required mainly in unstable weather conditions or when multiple signs exist on one pillar. This research proposes an improved model for Automatic TSR (ATSR) consisting of improved Connected Components Labeling and color histogram. Firstly, images are captured in real-world conditions in Palestine. The region of interests is detected using the improved Connected Components Labeling algorithm combined with Vectorization to reduce computational time. Secondly, the local features of detected images are computed using the color histogram. The results of the research show that combining the Connected Components Labeling with Vectorization reduces the computational time. Also, the Connected Components Labeling algorithm followed by histogram increase the accuracy of recognition. The low computational cost and the accuracy of the model enable us to use the model on smart phones for accurately recognizing traffic signs and alerting drivers in real time. 