Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Study on Schottky AlxGa1-xN/GaN IMPATT Diodes for Millimeter-Wave Application

This article proposes a Schottky aluminum gallium nitride (AlGaN)/GaN single-drift-region (SDR) IMPATT diode that uses AlGaN as the avalanche active layer. Compared with GaN, AlGaN has a wider bandgap and better breakdown characteristics. These features can significantly improve the device performance. We simulated the direct current (DC) and radio frequency (RF) performances of the new structure for the 0.2–0.6 Al composition under the millimeter-wave band and compared the results with the conventional GaN avalanche layer IMPATT. The results indicate that the AlGaN avalanche layer IMPATT significantly improves the breakdown voltage, RF voltage, and RF current performances. Furthermore, the application of AlGaN avalanche layer increases the RF efficiency from 18.16% to 21.98% and increases the RF power from 1.56 to 2.67 MW/cm2. As this structure has greater potential for the millimeter wave, even terahertz application, this article brings a new reference for the design of GaN-based IMPATT diodes.
Measuring the differences of neighbourhood environment and physical activity in gated and non-gated neighbourhoods in Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract Neighbourhood environment (NE) is important for physical activity (PA); however, no studies have compared the NE and PA in gated neighbourhoods, especially in developing countries. Therefore, the objective of this study is to compare NE and PA between gated and non-gated neighbourhoods. Objective and subjective (n = 1042) methods and independent sample t-tests were used. Results show that all the indicators are significantly different except housing density. Vigorous Physical Activity (VPA) is higher in gated but walking is higher in non-gated neighbourhoods. Therefore, it can be concluded that gating can reduce walking habits of people living in gated neighbourhoods in developing countries.
HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICES AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT: A STUDY AMONG ACADEMICIANS IN MALAYSIAN PRIVATE HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Academicians represent the key factor in providing education service to students and universities cannot work well without academicians. This study aimed to examine the influence of human resource practices (HR practices) on employee engagement among academicians in Malaysian private universities. This paper examined four HR practices, namely employee compensation, performance appraisal, training, and employee development. The conceptual framework developed for this paper aimed to fully understand the influence of HR practices and employee engagement. Self-administered questionnaires were distributed to academicians in Malaysian private universities using the proportional stratified random sampling technique. This study was conducted on 331 respondents. Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Multiple Linear Regression Analysis were performed with SPSS to test the hypotheses and secure results. The results indicated that each HR practice (performance appraisal, training, and employee development) has significant impact on employee engagement among academicians in Malaysian private universities. This study could provide useful information for decision-makers in Malaysian private universities in designing more appropriate and effective HR practices to improve employee engagement among academicians and for the government, in improving human resource employment acts, policies or legislation related to Malaysian private universities.
Innovative Long-Term Monitoring of the Great Belt Bridge Expansion Joint Using Digital Image Correlation

AbstractMaking informed decisions on timely intervention for effective bridge maintenance activities relies on good quality, accurate, reliable data. Although the proper functioning of expansion joints is critical to bridge performance, long-term monitoring of their condition is challenging due to the cost of sensors and data processing. Digital image correlation (DIC) is a non-contact photogrammetry technique that can image a bridge component periodically and compute strain and deformation from images previously recorded. This paper describes a one-month-long monitoring campaign wherein a DIC system was used as a cost-effective tool for gathering data on the movement and rotation of one of the Great Belt Bridge’s expansion joints. The monitoring provided previously unavailable data, helped improve understanding of the behaviour of the joint and informed the next steps for the maintenance strategy. The results show good agreement between the DIC data and measured temperature data. A mathematical model was.
1,4-Naphthoquinone (CNN1) Induces Apoptosis through DNA Damage and Promotes Upregulation of H2AFX in Leukemia Multidrug Resistant Cell Line

The multidrug resistance (MDR) phenotype is one of the major obstacles in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in advantage stages such as blast crisis. In this scenario, more patients develop resistance mechanisms during the course of the disease, making tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) target therapies ineffective. Therefore, the aim of the study was to examine the pharmacological role of CNN1, a para-naphthoquinone, in a leukemia multidrug resistant cell line. First, the in vitro cytotoxic activity of Imatinib Mesylate (IM) in K-562 and FEPS cell lines was evaluated. Subsequently, membrane integrity and mitochondrial membrane potential assays were performed to assess the cytotoxic effects of CNN1 in K-562 and FEPS cell lines, followed by cell cycle, alkaline comet assay and annexin V-Alexa Fluor® 488/propidium iodide assays (Annexin/PI) using flow cytometry. RT-qPCR was used to evaluate the H2AFX gene expression. The results demonstrate that CNN1 was able to induce apoptosis, cell membrane rupture and mitochondrial membrane depolarization in leukemia cell lines. In addition, CNN1 also induced genotoxic effects and caused DNA fragmentation, cell cycle arrest at the G2/M phase in leukemia cells. No genotoxicity was observed on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). Additionally, CNN1 increased mRNA levels of H2AFX. Therefore, CNN1 presented anticancer properties against leukemia multidrug resistant cell line being a potential anticancer agent for the treatment of resistant CML.
Street art and evental heritage: from failure to discovery

ABSTRACT Conventionally, heritage conservation emphasises value-based systems, material maintenance and the continuation of practices. However, not only do these approaches fail to address street art’s ephemeral and intangible aspects, they are also exclusive. In response, drawing on more-than-representational theory and critical theories of heritage and street art, this paper proposes ‘evental heritage’ as a new frame for conceptualising the affective heritage politics of street art, as well as the ‘heritagisation’ of street art as a dynamic force for material and socio-political change. Exploring three events from Norway, the research argues that the unexpected destruction, removal or ‘threat of removal’ of street artworks is not necessarily negative, as it may enact a democratic heritage politics of street art through which the dominant pole of authorised aesthetics may be challenged and shaped. In particular, the exploration shows that such events can not only lead to a reconsideration of the meaning and value of street art, but also reveals the failures of representation and gives rise to new collective ways of being, doing and thinking about the city commons.
A Hybrid-Order Spectral-Spatial Feature Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Convolutional neural networks are widely applied in hyperspectral image (HSI) classification and show excellent performance. However, there are two challenges: the first is that fine features are generally lost in the process of depth transfer; the second is that most existing studies usually restore to first-order features, whereas they rarely consider second-order representations. To tackle the above two problems, this article proposes a hybrid-order spectral-spatial feature network (HS2FNet) for hyperspectral image classification. This framework consists of a precedent feature extraction module (PFEM) and a feature rethinking module (FRM). The former is constructed to capture multiscale spectral-spatial features and focus on adaptively recalibrate channel-wise and spatial-wise feature responses to achieve first-order spectral-spatial feature distillation. The latter is devised to heighten the representative ability of HSI by capturing the importance of feature cross-dimension, while learning more discriminative representations by exploiting the second-order statistics of HSI, thereby improving the classification performance. Massive experiments demonstrate that the proposed network achieves plausible results compared with the state-of-the-art classification methods.
The Engagement of Informal Social Organisations in Social Security Mobilisation in Tanzania

Formal social security is helpful to the general population, especially during a post-retirement time and when they have been affected in ways that make them unable to work due to medical or physical conditions. About 95 per cent of the people working in the informal economy are not members of the social National Social Security Fund (NSSF). Some of them have formulated social organisations that are offering informal social services. The central argument of this paper is that can we use these informally arranged social security organisations can be used by the relevant authorities to mobilise people to join formal social security schemes. The study uses the private saving theory to answer this question. Through qualitative interviews, data were collected from 14 members, including the bodaboda association, food vending network, and fisheries group, to find the possibility of mobilising social security schemes through these social organisations. Findings show that the national social security fund can cover most informal actors to reach the casual workers through their existing informal groups such as the bodaboda association, food vending network, and fishing saving groups. Since the informal actors have shown significant dependency on and trust their associations, networks, and groups, it would be easy for NSSF and the likes to cover this sector for easy contribution to these reliable social security schemes. It is, thus, recommended that informal economy actors continue to use associations for their income protection; yet, through these organisations, link up with the more reliable national social security funds such as NSSF when arrangements are made for them.
Democracy challenged: how parties politicize different democratic principles

ABSTRACT Scholars have paid increasing attention to how questions of multi-level governance have become politicized in the domestic political arena. Issues surrounding democratic government itself have received surprisingly little attention in this debate. In this article, we ask how political parties politicize the principles of liberal democracy within advanced democracies. We expect that challenger parties are most likely to question existing principles. The targets of their criticism, however, should vary according to their ideological origins. Conducting automated quantitative text analysis of Swiss, German and Austrian party press releases between 2006 and 2018 using a multidimensional dictionary of liberal democracy, we confirm that left-libertarian and populist radical right parties are the main challengers of the democratic status quo. The foundation of criticism, however, differs fundamentally. While left-libertarians focus on principles that strengthen individual autonomy in politics, populist radical right parties demand more forms of participation and fewer constraints by liberal elements of democracy.
The Influences of Virtual Reality Shopping Characteristics on Consumers’ Impulse Buying Behavior

Abstract With the rapid development of virtual reality (VR) hardware devices and virtual technologies, VR applications in retailing are increasingly becoming an inevitable trend of future shopping, particularly essential to the “metaverses” in the digitalization 4.0 era. Thanks to its superiority over traditional e-commerce, virtual stores can provide highly interactive and immersive sensory shopping experiences to system users or end customers. Todays, both retailers and scholars, pay much attention to impulse buying behavior. Nevertheless, this domain remains unaddressed in the context of virtual commerce. Drawing upon the Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm, this article investigates the effectiveness of VR shopping platform factors, namely interactivity and vividness, that impacts consumers’ internal stages (telepresence, perceived diagnosticity, and playfulness) and lead to the urge to buy impulsively in virtual shopping stores. A full 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design experiment was conducted with 227 participants. The empirical results show that interactivity and vividness positively impact telepresence, perceived diagnosticity, and playfulness, which trigger consumers' urge to buy impulsively. Furthermore, the role of the impulsiveness trait in driving the urge to buy impulsively was further explicitly investigated in the VR environment. Detailed discussions and future research directions were also provided.
Posturography in the analysis of postural control in children with cerebral palsy: a literature review

| Children with cerebral palsy (CP) have reduced postural control given that sensory and motor functions are compromised. There are several functional protocols for balance analysis, but few studies have used the force platform as an instrument of precision in this assessment. The objective of this review was to identify published articles that employed this evaluation of children with CP and to analyze the used protocols and parameters. To this effect, a search was carried out through the BVS in the following databases: LILACS, IBECS, MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, SciELO. A total of 165 articles were found, from which 16 were selected on the basis of the Posturografia na análise do equilíbrio em crianças com paralisia cerebral: revisão de literatura Posturography in the analysis of postural control in children with cerebral palsy: a literature review Posturografía en el análisis del equilibrio en niños con parálisis cerebral: revisión de literatura Guilherme Henrique Ramos Lopes, Ana Cristina de David Estudo desenvolvido na Faculdade de Educação Física da Universidade de Brasília (UnB) – Brasília (DF), Brasil. Mestrando em Educação Física (Desempenho Motor Infantil) do Departamento de Pós-Graduação da Faculdade de Educação Física da UnB – Brasília (DF), Brasil. Doutora em Educação Física (Biomecânica); Professora Associada da Faculdade de Educação Física da UnB – Brasília (DF), Brasil. inclusion and exclusion criteria. Studies have shown that the parameters of medial-lateral and anterior-posterior linear displacement of the center of pressure and the sway ratio have been used more frequently, and that the evaluation time of the force platform, in most studies, does not exceed 20 seconds. This review demonstrates that children with typical development present better postural control, and children with CP can increase their balance via specific interventions, including the use of force platform.
Customers’ Brand Purchase Intention in Emerging Markets: The Influence of Brand Credibility on Consumers’ Brand Awareness and Brand Preferences

A brand is comprised of a name, term, sign, or symbol, or any combination of these, that attempts to represent the unique benefits a company can provide to consumers through a specific product or service, in terms of attributes, value, and culture, through a particular product or service (Kotler, 1997).
The knowledge competency of civil engineers in construction industry

Construction management’s knowledge is basis knowledge for one who works as civil engineer in construction industry. A good construction management will make the progressing of the project is more efficient and follow as in the plan also fulfill the customer needed as in the contract. The weak management will cause problem at site such as the delay, over budgeting and so on. As a civil engineer that involve direct with the site activities, they need to master this knowledge to manage the project. The purposes for this research are to identify and to determine the knowledge that a civil engineer in construction industry should have to be a competent engineer. The data collections are taken from the respondents who work as civil engineer with contractor class G6 and G7 in Penang state. The importance of this research is to determine the best knowledge characteristics that will be used for nowadays civil engineer. They will apply this knowledge during manage any project. The result from the survey will be compared with the data that get from the literature review. This is to identify the latest knowledge to be a guideline to become a competent engineer. From the result of the survey, mostly respondents who are civil engineers that involve in construction activities in Penang agree that have the knowledgeable in technical knowledge, decision making knowledge, teamwork knowledge planning and scheduling knowledge also leadership knowledge is very important to be a competent engineer.
A 20 MHz Low-Profile DC–DC Converter With Magnetic-Free Characteristics

This paper proposes a 20 MHz low-profile dc–dc converter with magnetic-free characteristics based on aircore planar inductors. The switch and diode of the proposed converter operate in soft-switching modes, which significantly reduces the switching loss. Furthermore, the parasitic capacitances are taken as part of corresponding resonant capacitors. A high-performance aircore inductor with a variable width and an optimal connecting angle is analyzed. The optimal parameters design method to achieve minimum winding resistance is derived in detail. The resonant driving method is adopted to reduce driving loss in a high-frequency condition. A 20 MHz prototype is built to verify the feasibility of the proposed converter.
Reassessing growth and mortality estimates for the Ordovician trilobite Triarthrus eatoni

Abstract. A length–frequency sample (n = 295) from a fossil population of the Ordovician trilobite Triarthrus eatoni Hall, 1838, assembled and analyzed by J. L. Cisne in 1973 is here reexamined using methods of length–frequency analysis commonly used in fishery science and marine biology. Theoretical considerations and the empirical data at hand suggest that the growth of T. eatoni was not “linear,” but asymptotic, as is the growth of most Recent marine invertebrates. The parameters of the von Bertalanffy growth function (L ∞ = 41 mm, K = 0.29 yr–1) suggest that T. eatoni, which apparently lived in a challenging environment, grew somewhat more slowly than the extant marine isopod Ceratoserolis trilobitoides (Eights, 1833), used here as Recent analogue to T. eatoni. This trilobite probably lived up to 10 years, rather than the suggested 4 years, and its mortality rate was 15%–20% per year rather than 30%–40% per year. These represent the first estimates of trilobite absolute growth characteristics using methods known to accurately model growth in extant water-breathing ectotherms. These provide a baseline for trilobite growth that can be used to make inferences about growth in other species. The approach used here may also be applied to other trilobites for which suitable length–frequency data exist.
CFJLNet: Coarse and Fine Feature Joint Learning Network for Bone Age Assessment

Effectively locating fine discriminative regions and fully analyzing fine region features is a challenging task in bone age assessment (BAA). Existing annotation-based methods are labor-intensive and attention-based methods can only learn semantic global features from coarse regions. In this article, in order to efficiently locate coarse and fine regions and fully learn features of them, we present a “coarse and fine feature joint learning network” (CFJLNet, including a coarse and a fine branch). Specifically, in each of the two branches of the CFJLNet, we first obtain attention used to locate discriminative regions and then design a “dual feature fusion” (DFF) module that can capture long-term dependencies in attention while fully fuse attention and features. Furthermore, for accurate localization of fine regions, we design an “Attention in Attention” ( $A^{2}$ ) module to force coarse attention to guide the generation of fine attention. In particular, the visualization show that regions located by fine attention are consistent with the regions of interest (ROIs) used by TW3 method. We empirically analyze the contributions of the DFF and $A^{2}$ modules in our network and demonstrate their superiority. The experimental results showed a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.07 months on the RSNA dataset. To validate the generalizability of the proposed network, experiments are conducted on two face datasets, and it also achieves excellent performance.
A proposal for a method of the redesign of self-organising systems: The case of minibus transportation in the Istanbul public transport system

The aim of this study was to propose a method for situations in which self-organising systems developed by creative communities are considered by the governing authorities. Self-organising systems form as a result of situations in which the basic needs of communities are inadequately met by the governing authorities. In the framework of this study, minibus transportation, a system organised by community stakeholders, was addressed as a design problem, and a redesign of the system was proposed to the governing authorities of the public transport service of Istanbul. Semi-ethnographic research was used to investigate the case study, and service design tools were used to transform the information obtained into data that was presented to the designers. The methodology consisted of three research stages: recognise the self-organising system, perform research concerning the co-experiences of system stakeholders, and determine design references for the governing authorities. As a result of the study, design references obtained by applying the proposed methodology were converted and evaluated by the designers as design solution proposals. Keywords: self-organising systems, creative communities, transition design, co-experience.
Quantitative Analysis Using Consecutive Time Window for Unobtrusive Atrial Fibrillation Detection Based on Ballistocardiogram Signal

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common clinically significant arrhythmia; therefore, AF detection is crucial. Here, we propose a novel feature extraction method to improve AF detection performance using a ballistocardiogram (BCG), which is a weak vibration signal on the body surface transmitted by the cardiogenic force. In this paper, continuous time windows (CTWs) are added to each BCG segment and recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) features are extracted from each time window. Then, the number of CTWs is discussed and the combined features from multiple time windows are ranked, which finally constitute the CTW–RQA features. As validation, the CTW–RQA features are extracted from 4000 BCG segments of 59 subjects, which are compared with classical time and time-frequency features and up-to-date energy features. The accuracy of the proposed feature is superior, and three types of features are fused to obtain the highest accuracy of 95.63%. To evaluate the importance of the proposed feature, the fusion features are ranked using a chi-square test. CTW–RQA features account for 60% of the first 10 fusion features and 65% of the first 17 fusion features. It follows that the proposed CTW–RQA features effectively supplement the existing BCG features for AF detection.