Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Four-step Approach for Selecting a Genetically Diverse Group of Animals from Pedigree Data using the Example of Endangered Austrian Goat Breeds

A four-step approach using pedigree data to create genetically diverse groups of animals for genotyping from a limited pool of available samples was developed and applied to a data set comprising fi ve endangered Austrian goat breeds. Animals were selected according to their raw gene contribution, number of off spring, average relatedness to the living population and relatedness to other selected animals. Not all criteria could be applied to the same degree to all breeds due to small number of available samples. Methods to cope with this circumstance are presented in the paper. Inbreeding coeffi cient was lower in the selection groups than in the total populations in all breeds. Genotype data derived from the selected animals will be used to analyse diversity parameters and compare with available data from other Alpine goat breeds.
Quasi-experimental evidence on the political impacts of education in Vietnam

ABSTRACT This paper estimates the causal effects of education on political concern and political participation in Vietnam by employing the 1991 compulsory schooling reform to instrument for plausibly exogenous changes in education. The paper finds that, in general, education does cause favorable impacts on political outcomes. In particular, one more year of schooling, on average, results in increases in the probabilities of political concern and political participation by about 6–12 percentage points and 6–8 percentage points, respectively. This paper significantly provides suggestive evidence on the role of education in explaining political behaviors using the developing country context.
Estimating determinant of innovations by generalized methods of moments with persistence of panel data on developing countries

This paper addresses the empirical analysis of determinant of innovations in developing countries by using Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimating on panel data that consists of 52 countries. Innovation defined as a process that attempt to try out new or improved products, processes or ways to do. In order to achieve this phase, past studies address a few determinants of innovations such as human capital, patent, trademark, regulation, stock market and trade openness. This paper analyses the question: which factor will contribute to successful innovation? By using GMM method, we estimate the data at the difference and system GMM with one-step and two steps. The results addresses that trade openness are highly significant in determine innovation in developing countries. Thus our finding provides that free trade is the most important determinant to encourage innovation activities in developing countries.
Energy crops on floodplains – flood risk or benefit?

Under the Renewable Energy Strategy the UK aims to achieve 15% of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2020, with 30% of the renewable energy target coming from biomass. Farmers are being encouraged through the Energy Crops Scheme to plant energy crops such as Miscanthus or Willow in suitable locations. However, there is little understanding of the impacts that dense plantings of these crops might have on flood dynamics and flood risk, This has often led to some applications for the crops being, potentially unnecessarily, refused on a precautionary basis. A short-term project was carried out to help bridge this gap in scientific knowledge. Two case study floodplains were selected, namely the River Severn at Uckinghall (Tewkesbury) and the River Isle at Ashford Mill (Ilminster). Additionally, a theoretical model was designed to help define scenarios with the biggest impacts, without introducing local subtleties specific to each case study. This paper describes the approach and provides outputs of the modelled scenarios, including changes to river and floodplain flows, flood depths, velocities, and the overall likely impact of the energy crops upstream and downstream. The conclusions discuss how the findings inform new guidance and practice regarding energy crops on floodplains, and how such a change can inform national policy in this area.
CREDIT RISK-TAKING AND CAPITAL POSITION: EVIDENCE FROM TWO-STAGE REGRESSION

Research on credit risk and its relationship with capital in a company is important. This isbecause the information about such thing can be considered very beneficial. This study examinesthe relationship between risk and capital in Indonesia Banking Market. It tested whetherbank credit risk taking is correlated with its capital position. In this study, risk and capitalwere based on accounting ratios. Data for the study were taken from Banks cope databasefor the period 2003 to 2008. A two-stage-Regression analysis was used to estimate the relationship.On the risk taking model, it is correlated with ex post risk, portion of loan loss provisionto capital (RISKCAP), and ratio of net loans to asset (NLTA), and negatively to sizeand inefficiency. On the capital equation, there is negative relationship with risk taking butnot with inefficiency. Asset size has negative impact on capital positions and profitable bankshold more capital. It is clear that risk taking is not influenced by capital and capital is negativelydetermined by risk taking. In short, the relationship between risk taking and capital isnot two-way but one way.
Classification models of hungarian honey samples based on analytical and physical characteristics

As one of the most often used natural sweeteners, honey has recently been reconsidered and more commonly used. Although Hungary is one of the main honey exporter countries, data referring to Hungarian honeys is very limited. Our aim was to investigate the analytical, physical and rheological properties of different honey samples and use these attributes to identify their geographical and botanical origin. Our results show the application of colorimetry, analytical and rheological measurements might be a promising combination of affordable methods for authentication of honey origin, however, further experiments are proposed to build up a robust database.
Web platform for casting process selection

The choice of the right process for casting components is a complex activity that directly impacts on the product’s design and manufacturing. A single failure in the casting process selection can increase design and production time and, in critical cases, result in a collapse of the manufacturing and assembly of components. In this context, our goal is to adapt a previously developed method for casting process selection into a Web platform to aid the casting process selection. The adopted selection method uses Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Design for Manufacturing (DFM) principles to provide a structure to support casting selection decision based on part features and process demands. The proposed software was developed for the Web using HTML and JavaScript, providing better usability than the previously proposed selection method format using spreadsheets. For validation, ferrous and nonferrous cast parts were analyzed using the proposed Web platform. The results showed a good relation to other methods, also providing a quantitative classification (prioritization) of the results. In addition, this software supports the design of the manufacturing process by means of a checklist to adapt the part to the metal casting process presented to the designer.
Design and Management of Complex Technical Processes and Systems by means of Computational Intelligence Methods On the Analysis of a Simple Evolutionary Algorithm With Dynamic Parameter Control

Evolutionary algorithms usually are controlled by various parameters and it is well known that an appropriate choice of these control parameters is crucial for the eÆciency of the algorithms. In many cases it seems to be favorable not to use a static set of parameter settings for a problem but let the sizes of the parameters vary during an optimization. Even for the most simple type of nonstatic parameter settings, dynamic parameter control, no formal general proof is known that varying the parameter settings is advantageous. Here, a very simple evolutionary algorithm is analyzed, and an exponential improvement against even the optimal static parameter setting is proved. This result is closely related to the open question whether simulated annealing with a natural cooling schedule can provably outperform the Metropolis algorithm on a natural problem.
Biotechnological production of xylitol by mutant Candida tropicalis OMV5: Process optimization using statistical approach

An orthogonal experimental design L16 (2) was used to investigate effects of key media components namely xylose, yeast extract, peptone, urea and inoculum size on the production of xylitol by a mutant strain of Candida tropicalis (CTOMV5). Software for automatic design and analysis of the experiments, based on Taguchi approach was used. Optimal levels of key media components were also determined. Among the tested parameters, xylose and urea contributed higher influence and yeast extract concentration also played an important role in the conversion of xylose to xylitol. Application of Taguchi method helped in easy process optimization and higher xylitol yield. The increased yield was possible at lower levels of yeast extract and peptone. The yield of xylitol under these optimal conditions was 0.89g/g of xylose.
Deeper than a Collection of Artifacts: Recognition of Experiential Learning for Adults within the Academy

This study examines the e-portfolio development process of one cohort of adult applicants to a graduate school in one Canadian province relative to Kolb’s theory of how adults learn from experience. The study examines the participants’ views of their learning processes when preparing the digital portfolios through their written and video-recorded reflections and work logs. Data also include the transcripts from interviews with the e-portfolios authors during the graduate studies program in order to explore how eportfolio learning processes might be predictive of the skills and knowledge required for study in education and technology at the graduate level. Findings indicate that participants’ accounts of their experience can be understood through the lens of Kolb’s model. The participants recalled key learning activities aligned with Kolb’s model that facilitated their e-portfolio development such as: understanding criteria for the assessment of prior learning (PLAR); the establishment of organizing categories for concepts in the portfolio which led to concept development; and support in reconceptualising adult work experience and community service as learning.
Chinese radicals in spaced repetition systems : a pilot study on the acquisition of Chinese characters by students learning Chinese as a foreign language

This thesis explores the effect on learning Chinese characters for learners of Chinese as foreign language through implementing the unique properties of the Chinese script in a prototype spaced repetition system. Both Chinese radicals and the spacing effect have the potential to positively influence the recall ability of students in learning Chinese characters, however the interaction between the spacing effect and Chinese radicals in spaced repetition system, such as Anki and Mnemosyne, had not been tested. An experimental spaced repetition system prototype was designed and developed to investigate these interactions. Two groups of students learning Chinese as a foreign language at the University of Stellenbosch studied the same list of Chinese characters in which there were both massed and spaced characters present. One group had additional information on Chinese radicals on the flashcard. The students were given an immediate post-test to test their recall of the meaning and pronunciation of the Chinese characters. The results showed a positive trend for the spacing effect in which students had higher scores for spaced characters, but the recall ability between the two groups of students did not change regardless of whether there was information on Chinese radicals or not. The results were surprising considering the potential positive impact of Chinese radicals on recall. The thesis concludes that the presentation of information on Chinese radicals in a spaced repetition system does not necessarily improve the recall ability of the students. The impact of explicit instruction on the role of Chinese radicals in Chinese characters and the ability of the student to apply this knowledge should be considered for future research. Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
Fifty Years of Seismic Network Performance in Greece (1964-2013): Spatiotemporal Evolution of the Completeness Magnitude

The National Observatory of Athens (NOA) produces the NOA earthquake catalog since 1964. For its 50 year anniversary, we describe the evolution of the Greek seismic network by examining its performance in terms of completeness magnitude M c. Over its 50 years of existence, the earthquake catalog of Greece has improved on the basis of several network upgrades. The mid‐1960s marked the start of the modern Greek seismic network coordinated by the NOA. Since then, the earthquake catalog of NOA has been published with no interruption. Three main upgrades of the network are notable. (1) The passage from analog‐to‐digital instrumentation and processing took place in 1995. (2) The development of the Hellenic Unified Seismological Network (HUSN) took place gradually from the end of 2007 to 2011, which combined the NOA network to three university networks (Athens, Patras, and Thessaloniki). In addition, (3) the upgrade of the magnitude determination software happened in early 2011. More information about the history and characteristics of the Greek seismic network can be found in the literature (Bath, 1983; Chouliaras and Stavrakakis, 1997; Papanastassiou et al. , 2001; Papanastassiou, 2010; Roumelioti et al. , 2010; D’Alessandro et al. , 2011; Deshcherevskii and Sidorin, 2012; Chouliaras et al. , 2013). The goal of the present study is to provide the first comprehensive spatiotemporal analysis of the Greek seismic network performance in terms of completeness magnitude M c, computed using the recently proposed Bayesian magnitude of completeness (BMC) method (Mignan et al. , 2011). We additionally make an in‐depth analysis of the frequency–magnitude distribution (FMD) to validate the BMC results and to provide additional recommendations for the computation of M c. We used the NOA earthquake catalog, available at http://www.gein. noa.gr/en/seismicity/earthquake-catalogs (last accessed October 2013), and defined the study area (19° E; 29° E; 34° N; 42° N). We considered …
Do business intelligence systems actually improve information quality

Technology and solution providers in the field of business intelligence usually claim that implementation of business intelligence technologies and systems will lead to easier, more flexible, and rapid access to information. Shortly, they promise improved information quality. The aim of this study is to test the declared impact of business intelligence systems on improved information quality and to further investigate this relationship. Empirical data were collected through a survey of Slovenian medium and large size organizations. Quantitative analysis was carried out on the data, which related to 181 medium and large size organizations. Data analysis was carried out using PLS Path Modelling. From the study it appears data integration and analytics are important components when defining business intelligence systems maturity. The results of the analysis show that business intelligence systems actually have a positive impact on two segments of information quality, namely content quality and media quality. However, the impact of business intelligence systems on media quality is stronger, while the quality of content is more important for making better business decisions and providing high business value of business intelligence systems. Thus, implementation of business intelligence systems must be complemented with other activities for advancing information quality.
Exploring knowledge bases for engineering a user interests hierarchy for social network applications

In the recent years, social networks have become an integral part of our lives. Their outgrowth has resulted in opportunities for interesting data mining problems, such as interest or friendship recommendations. A global ontology over the interests specified by the users of a social network is essential for accurate recommendations. The focus of this work is on engineering such an interest ontology. In particular, given that the resulting ontology is meant to be used for data mining applications to social network problems, we explore only hierarchical ontologies. We propose, evaluate and compare three approaches to engineer an interest hierarchy. The proposed approaches make use of two popular knowledge bases, Wikipedia and Directory Mozilla, to extract interest definitions and/or relationships between interests. More precisely, the first approach uses Wikipedia to find interest definitions, the latent semantic analysis technique to measure the similarity between interests based on their definitions, and an agglomerative clustering algorithm to group similar interests into higher level concepts. The second approach uses the Wikipedia Category Graph to extract relationships between interests. Similarly, the third approach uses Directory Mozilla to extract relationships between interests. Our results indicate that the third approach, although the simplest, is the most effective for building an ontology over user interests. We use the ontology produced by the third approach to construct interest based features. These features are further used to learn classifiers for the friendship prediction task. The results show the usefulness of the ontology with respect to the results obtained in absence of the ontology.
INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL EFFECTS OF QUALITY ON COMPETITIVENESS: APPLICATIONS FOR THE HOTEL SECTOR IN SPAIN

The aim of this paper is to analyze — from a global perspective — the main relationships existing between service quality and businesses competitiveness. To this end, a simultaneous equations model is presented. This model enables distinguishing between the external and internal effects of quality on competitiveness, and empirically verifies a set of hypotheses of great significance for the hotel industry. The data used to empirically verify this model were gathered from hotels owned by a national hotel company in Spain. The client survey carried out by the hotel — in the form of questionnaires — was the basis for creating the service quality indicators and establishing their most relevant dimensions. The quality indicator was created for each hotel based using Structural Equation Modelling (S.E.M.). On the other hand, the economic and financial data pertaining to the hotels served to create competitiveness indicators for each of them. The sign and value of the coefficients estimated by the model presented lead to a series of conclusions regarding the complex sequence of direct and indirect causal relationships between quality and competitiveness. The estimation obtained was used to empirically verify a set of key hypotheses regarding the competitiveness of these hotels and to propose measures designed to improve it.
SELF-LOCALIZATION METHOD BY INTEGRATING SENSORS

Recently, development of high performance CPU, cameras and other sensors on mobile devices have been used for wide variety of applications. Most of the applications require self-localization of the mobile device. Since the self-localization is based on GPS, gyro sensor, acceleration meter and magnetic field sensor (called as POS) of low accuracy, the applications are limited. On the other hand, self-localization method using images have been developed, and the accuracy of the method is increasing. This paper develops the self-localization method by integrating sensors, such as POS and cameras, on mobile devices simultaneously. The proposed method mainly consists of two parts: one is the accuracy improvement of POS data filtering, and another is development of self-localization method by integrating POS and camera. The POS data filtering combines all POS data by using Kalman filter in order to improve the accuracy of exterior orientation factors. The exterior orientation factors with POS filtering are used as initial value of ones in image-based self-localization method. The image-based self-localization method consists of feature points extraction and tracking, relative orientation, coordinates estimation of the feature points, and orientation factors updates of the mobile device. The proposed method is applied to POS data and images taken in urban area. Through experiments with real data, the accuracy improvement by POS data filtering is confirmed. The proposed self-localization method with POS and camera make the accuracy more sophisticated by comparing with only POS data filtering.
Extraction of Pyrocatechol from pharmaceutical wastewater through Adsorption Using Molecularly Imprinted Polymer prepared from Methacrylic Acid Monomer

Development of inexpensive adsorbents from polymer materials for the extraction of pyrocatechol (PC) from wastewaters is an important area in environmental sciences. The study involves the development of molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) as sorbent material for the extraction of PC from wastewater. To realize this objective, the non-covalent approach has been applied for the preparation of MIP using methacrylic acid (MAA) as a functional monomer and ethylene glycol dimethacrylate (EGDMA) as crosslinker. Furthermore, the synthesized polymers were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis techniques. Adsorption equilibrium data were determined for the uptake of PC from synthetically prepared aqueous PC solution. The designed MIP demonstrated outstanding affinity towards PC. The adsorption capacity of the MIP increases from 1.91 to 27.60 mg/g by increasing the initial concentration of PC from 10 to 500 mg/L, yielding a hyperbolic curve. The equilibrium data were evaluated using two isotherm models namely, Langmuir and Freundlich isotherms. The MIP material was used for extraction of PC from real sample of pharmaceutical effluent and its efficiency was studied. Keywords : Molecular imprinting, adsorption, pyrocatechol, wastewater, characterization
Study of the Geotechnical Parameters of the Different Soils by Correlation Analysis and Statistical, in the Kenitra Region (Morocco)

This study focuses on the geotechnical characterization of soils in the area of study located at the western end of the plain of Sebou. The interest of this work is to identify, quantify and take into account the variability for a better estimate of the geotechnical risk. To this end, a database was created. Firstly, a study of the lithological distribution of soils is performed. Then, a statistical analysis of physical and mechanical parameters is realized in order to look for possible correlations between the main parameters. This simple descriptive analysis is followed by a multidirectional statistical study: a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and an Ascending Hierarchical Classification (AHC). This study showed that the first three principal axes absorb more than 72% of the total variance and the first principal component explains (CP1 or F1) up to 32%. The AHC method allowed to divide all samples into four classes more or less homogeneous with a degree of dissimilarity of 35.7%.