Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evidences of Factorial Structure and Precision of Phonemic Awareness Tasks (TCFe)

Para avaliar a consciencia fonologica, habilidade determinante para a aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita, e necessario prover evidencias acerca do construto que um dado instrumento se propoe a mensurar de modo a fornecer parâmetros confiaveis tanto para a pesquisa empirica como para o desenvolvimento de programas de intervencao educacional e de reabilitacao. No Brasil, ate o momento, nao ha estudos de evidencias de validade com base na estrutura interna para testes de consciencia fonologica. Este artigo apresenta os resultados para a validade de um teste de consciencia fonologica constituido por tres sub-testes: duas tarefas de subtracao do fonema inicial e uma de segmentacao fonemica. A analise fatorial confirmatoria multidimensional foi aplicada a uma amostra de 176 estudantes brasileiros ( Midade= 9,3 anos) de 1o ao 5o ano do ensino fundamental. Resultados indicaram modelo bem ajustado, com itens de dificuldade mediana e cargas fatoriais altas; corroborando a estrutura interna e concepcao teorica adequadas.
Financial Convergence or Decoupling in Electricity and Energy Markets? A Dynamic Study of OECD, Latin America and Asian Countries

The motivation for this theoretical paper is to “shed further light” on electricity market liberalisation. The major influences on electricity prices in each country are local supply and demand conditions, which include costs of renewables and/or regulatory effects on pricing. This also includes effects of public or private monopoly pricing. However, many countries from a representative sample of groups of economies, show long-term equilibrium relationships in their electricity and energy stock market sectors. In these countries in the short-term, exogeneity lies with the energy sectors in the EMU, the UK, New Zealand, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Thailand. In the cases of the US and India the electricity markets are exogenous, which is probably due to the sheer size of those markets. Where there is evidence of cointegration the nexus between electricity and energy sectors remains and the strength of this relationship is indicative of greater progress in electricity market liberalisation. This is because their electricity prices are influenced to a significant degree by global fossil fuel supply costs. In those cases domestic factors such as cost of regulatory environments are less important.
Self-Thinning in a Space-Limited Rocky Intertidal Barnacle System

Acorn barnacles were assumed to have a self-thinning exponent close to -3/2 widely acknowledged for plant populations. However, space and food competition mechanisms would lead to a different exponent. Different recruit densities between tidal levels should result in different geometry of space occupation with adult individuals morphologically different and a different biomass-density relationship. Using Tetraclita squamosa, an intertidal barnacle, we investigated the biomass-density relationship along an intertidal gradient to study self-thinning. The self-thinning slope was steeper than the -3/2 power and did not differ among lower tidal levels with an intercept significantly higher in the low intertidal than in the mid-intertidal, whereas there was no significant relationship in the high intertidal. Growth in height of crowded barnacles along with the weaker effect of competition for food may retard mortality and result in a self-thinning slope steeper than -3/2. Our results suggested that self-thinning exponent in barnacles is steeper than -3/2 found for plant populations and allometric growth may not be the only factor causing this deviation from the “self-thinning law”. As one progresses higher in the intertidal, self-thinning processes disappear owing to reduced competition.
Comparing Risks and Benefits for the Value Enhancement of Online Purchases

In a developing economy, the acceptability of e–retailing is not very new, but the potential of online marketing in market research and analysis is still largely unexplored. This article is an attempt to understand the psyche of Indian online consumers. As consumers have their own preconceived notions toward this growing purchasing environment, it becomes important for e-retailers to understand the consumers’ perceptions and attitudes toward online purchases. This paper integrates the dimensions of the risks and benefits with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to understand how consumers adopt their online purchase processes. Four hundred and sixty-eight valid responses were analyzed using structural equation modeling on AMOS 21 to identify the relationship between the different factors and the intention to purchase online. The paper concludes that consumers’ purchase intentions are jointly determined by their attitude towards online purchases and the subjective norm. Furthermore, their attitude is determined by the sub-dimensions of perceived benefits (hedonic benefit, convenience benefit, economic benefit and variety) and the sub-dimensions of perceived risk (product risk and financial risk).
Insights into population structure and epidemiology of Phytophthora infestans from Nicaragua

Late blight caused by Phytophthora infestans (Mont) de Bary is a constraint to both potato and tomato crops in the northern highlands of Nicaragua. This thesis describes studies on population structure and epidemiology of P. infestans from Nicaragua. The genotypic and phenotypic variation in isolates of P. infestans collected in potato and tomato growing areas of northern Nicaragua were analyzed using genotypic (SSR fingerprinting and mtDNA haplotyping) and phenotypic markers (mating type, virulence and fungicide sensitivity). Genotypic markers revealed no polymorphism among the P. infestans isolates tested. Phenotypic variation was observed. Nicaraguan population of P. infestans is dominated by a clonal lineage of the A2 mating type, Ia mtDNA haplotype and no evidence of genetic population differentiation among potato and tomato isolates was found. The aggressiveness of P. infestans isolates sampled from potato and tomato fields was determined through cross-inoculations experiments. Potato and tomato isolates both had a shorter LP, higher SP, and were more aggressive on tomato leaflets compared to potato ones. The adequacy of the late blight simulation model LATEBLIGHT (version LB2004) was evaluated under Nicaraguan conditions. During 2007-2008 field experiments were conducted in Nicaragua. The simulation model was considered adequate as it accurately predicted high disease severity in susceptible cultivars without fungicide sprays, and demonstrated a decrease in the disease progress curves with additional fungicide applications, similar to that observed in the field plots. The quantitative relationship between host resistance and the need for fungicide was also investigated using simulations performed with LATEBLIGHT, as well as field trials.
Development of liposomal curcumin for vaginal drug delivery

SUBMITTED LIPOSOMAL CURCUMIN: THE WAY TO IMPROVED ANTIINFLAMMATORY ACTIVITY Purusotam Basnet, Haider Hussain, Ingunn Tho, Natasa Skalko-Basnet Drug Transport and Delivery Research Group, Department of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway Email: natasa.skalko-basnet@uit.no Purpose: Curcumin (I), demethoxy curcumin (II) and bisdemethoxy curcumin (III) are commonly called curcuminoids and are major constituents of the widely used spice, turmeric powder (Curcuma longa rhizome). Curcumin has shown diverse pharmacological effects in treatment of various diseases due to its strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activities. Its therapeutic potential is acknowledged in over 10,000 research papers and over 40 clinical trials. Its broader use is limited by its poor solubility. We propose that drug delivery system such as liposomes can provide a mean of improved therapeutic action. Methods: We standardized water-, alcoholicand ethyl acetate-extracts of turmeric powder and characterized compounds I, II and III by HPLC, NMR and MS. The extracts with major curcuminoid constituents and/or individual compounds I, II and III were incorporated in liposomes. Formulations were optimized in regard to vesicle size, lipid composition entrapment efficiency and stability. The in vitro antioxidant and antiinflammatory activities of free and liposomally entrapped curcuminoids were determined. Results: Ethanol extract of turmeric powder contains almost exclusively three curcuminods. Liposomal preparation significantly enhanced in vitro anti-inflammatory activity, however antioxidant activity based on DPPH assay was not significantly changed. Ethanolic extract expresses stronger biological response than individual curcuminoids. Conclusions: Use of turmeric powder extract in form of liposomal preparation is found to be superior and cost-effective. Anti-inflammatory activity of curcumin/curcuminoids enhanced by liposomal carrier makes the proposed system especially interesting for topical treatment of vaginal inflammation.
A Novel Reduced-Precision Fault-Tolerant Floating-Point Multiplier

This paper presents a new fault-tolerant architecture for floating-point multipliers in which the fault-tolerance capability is achieved at the cost of output precision reduction. In this approach, to achieve the faulttolerant floating-point multiplier, the hardware cost of the primary design is reduced by output precision reduction. Then, the appropriate redundancy is utilized to provide error detection/correction in such a way that the overall required hardware becomes almost the same as the primary multiplier. The proposed multiplier can tolerate a variety of permanent and transient faults regarding the acceptable reduced precisions in many applications. The implementation results reveal that the 17-bit and 14-bit mantissas are enough to obtain a floating-point multiplier with error detection or error correction, respectively, instead of the 23-bit mantissa in the IEEE-754 standardbased multiplier with a few percent area and power overheads.
VULNERABILITY OF SMALL ISLAND DEVELOPMENT STATES

Small island states have in recent decades been identified as particularly vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. Violent winds, floods, and draughts have had severe consequences for millions of people and currently present an increasingly significant challenge for development and poverty alleviation in small islands. However, although islands tend to have similar geographical features, natural hazards produce widely different outcomes in different island states, indicating great variation in resilience. While some islands seem to cope and adapt fairly well, others suffer tremendously. That is the impact of natural hazards of the same physical magnitude ranges from going more or less unnoticed or causing only small disturbances to resulting in severe catastrophes. The overall objective of this paper is to explore the suggested sources of this variation further. More specifically, with the point of departure in theories about how institutions and social contracts affect collective action and adaptive capacities, this paper sets out to investigate how political institutions such as democracy, corruption, and government effectiveness impact the overall resilience of island states. While claims over the importance of institutions are well abound in the literature, there is a serious lack of systematic empirical accounts testing the validity of such claims. This shortcoming is addressed by this study’s quantitative, time series cross-sectional analysis using data from the International Disaster Risk database and the Quality of Government dataset. Martin Sjostedt The Quality of Government Institute Department of Political Science University of Gothenburg Martin.sjostedt@gu.se Marina Povitkina The Quality of Government Institute Department of Political Science University of Gothenburg Marina.povitkina@gu.se
Risk Premium, Interest Rate Differential, and Subsidized Lending in Pakistan

Episodes of monetary contraction increases the risk premium of the enterprises which results in higher effective interest rate differential between market loans and subsidized loan; making these firms more reliant on subsidized loans. Since subsidies are easier to exploit and hard to administer. This study evaluates the subsidized lending schemes of Pakistan using information on risk premium and effective interest rate differential of 174 exporting corporate firms over thirteen years (1999-2011). Our results shows that export finance schemes (EFS) helped promoting exports, while long term financing facility (LTFF) facilitated fixed capital formation of these corporate firms. Additionally, using matched sample with loan level data from eCIB, we found that during the phases of high interest rate differential enterprises substituted their short term market loans with subsidized loans (export finance); while no such substitution is observed between long term loans and LTFF.
Introducing the bipartite Package: Analysing Ecological Networks

Interactions among species in ecological communities have long fascinated ecologists. Prominent recent examples include pollination webs (Memmott et al., 2004), species-rich predator-prey systems (Tylianakis et al., 2007) and seed dispersal mutualisms (all reviewed in Bluthgen et al., 2007). Many of the topological descriptors used in food webs since the 1960s have limited ecological meaning when only two trophic levels are investigated (for example chain length: Pimm, 1982/2002; Montoya et al., 2006). Here, the network becomes bipartite, i.e. every member of one trophic level is only connected to members of the other trophic level: direct interactions within trophic levels are regarded as unimportant. For bipartite ecological networks very many, more or less different, indices have been proposed to capture important features of the interactions and of the species. For example, species degrees (number of species the target species is linked to) or species strength (sum of level of dependencies of other species on the target) are supposed to quantify the importance of a species in a web. The new R-package bipartite, introduced here, provides functions to viualise webs and calculate a series of indices commonly used to describe pattern in ecological webs. It focusses on webs consisting of only two trophic levels, e.g. pollination webs or predator-prey-webs. We had three types of ecological bipartite webs in mind when writing this package: seed-disperser, plant-pollinator and predatorprey systems. Bipartite networks, as analysed and plotted in the package bipartite, can be represented by a matrix, in which, in our definition, columns represent species in the higher trophic level, and rows species in the lower trophic level. Entries in the matrix represent observed links, either quantitatively (with one to many interactions per link) or qualitatively (binary). Usually such matrices are very sparse, marginal sums (i.e. abundance distributions) highly skewed and average number of interactions per link are low (around 2: Bluthgen et al., 2007). With the package bipartite, presented here, we wanted to overcome two main deficiencies in the field: 1. Lack of software to calculate various indices and topological descriptors of bipartite networks. And 2. No convenient plotting tool for bipartite networks. This article aims to briefly present the two visualisation functions (plotweb and visweb), then present an example output from the calculation of network-level descriptors (using function networklevel) and finally address some miscellaneous issues to do with fitting degree distributions, secondary extinction slopes and null models for bipartite webs. Along with several functions we also include 19 data sets on pollinator networks, taken from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis webpage devoted to this topic (www.nceas.ucsb. edu/interactionweb). There are several other bipartite data sets at this repository, and our data include only quantitative plant-pollinator networks.
TRANSFORMATION OF EQUATIONS OF COUPLED ROTATORS TO THE STANDARD FORM AND STUDY OF THEIR DYNAMICAL PROPERTIES USING THE METHOD OF AVERAGING

An effective procedure to study systems of coupled rotators and oscillators that govern dynamics of different mechanical systems, electric-mechanical systems, superconductive systems etc. is discussed here. The procedure is based on special transformations of systems of coupled rotators to the standard form suitable for application of the method of averaging. Averaging of obtained systems leads to the equations in a form that allows for obtaining the full information about dynamics of the systems. In particular, the full knowledge about periodic, quasiperiodic and chaotic oscillatory regimes can be obtained. This information is used to obtain torque-speed curves. Proposed procedure is thoroughly illustrated by different examples. This technique can be applied for systems with any number of degrees-offreedom.
Correcting Drift, Head and Body Misalignments between Virtual and Real Humans

Head-mounted displays (HMD) allow a personal and immersive viewing of virtual environments, and can be used with almost any desktop computer. Most HMDs have inertial sensors embedded for tracking the user head rotations. These low-cost sensors have high quality and availability. However, even if they are very sensitive and precise, inertial sensors work with incremental information, easily introducing errors in the system. The most relevant is that head tracking suffers from drifting. In this paper we present important limitations that still prevent the wide use of inertial sensors for tracking. For instance, to compensate for the drifting, users of HMD-based immersive VEs move away from their suitable pose. We also propose a software solution for two problems: prevent the occurrence of drifting in incremental sensors, and avoid the user from move its body in relation to another tracking system that uses absolute sensors (e.g. MS Kinect). We analyze and evaluate our solutions experimentally, including user tests. Results show that our comfortable pose function is effective on eliminating drifting, and that it can be inverted and applied also to prevent the user from moving their body away of the absolute sensor range. The efficiency and accuracy of this method makes it suitable for a number of applications in immersive VR.
Probing dark matter haloes of spiral galaxies at poorly explored distances using satellite kinematics

We present the results of a pilot project designed to study the distribution of dark matter haloes out to very large radii in spiral galaxies. As dynamical probe we use their rotation curves and the motions population of satellite galaxies. In this pilot stage, we observed seven late-type spiral galaxies of about the same luminosity M_R ~ -22 (and approximately the same mass). We investigate the kinematics of these galaxies, and the radial and angular distribution of their satellites. Using VIMOS at the VLT, we carried out a spectroscopic survey in seven 14' x 14' fields each around a late-type isolated spiral galaxy. We obtained radial velocities and spatial distributions for 77 candidate satellites. After removing the interlopers, we are left with 61 true satellites. In combination with the rotation curves of the primary galaxies, satellites are used to probe the gravitational potential of the primaries and derive the dark matter halo properties by means of standard mass modeling techniques. We find (a) that the dark matter haloes of luminous spirals (M_R ~ -22) have virial radii of ~400 kpc and virial masses of 3.5 x 10^12 Msun; (b) that the radial velocity and angular distributions of the satellites around the primaries are isotropic; and (c) that the resulting mass distribution is in good agreement with that found in the optical regions of spirals and described by the universal rotation curve of spirals once extrapolated to large radii. The results obtained in this pilot phase of the project are already interesting and limited only by small number statistics. The full project involving an order of magnitude more targets, would very likely provide us with a definitive picture of the dark matter distribution around spirals out to their virial radii and beyond.
EMPREENDEDORISMO SUSTENTÁVEL E O RECONHECIMENTO DE OPORTUNIDADES: ESTUDO DE CASOS MÚLTIPLOS EM PEQUENAS EMPRESAS EM SERGIPE

Este estudo tem como objetivo analisar como empreendedores de pequenas empresas em Sergipe reconhecem oportunidades para negocios sustentaveis. Foi adotado o modelo de Patzelt e Shepherd (2011), que tem como premissas a fonte do conhecimento previo do ambiente natural/social; a motivacao, como outra fonte que move o empreendedor a reconhecer a oportunidade; e o conhecimento empresarial, como elemento auxiliar dessas fontes que levam ao reconhecimento de oportunidades. Esta pesquisa e qualitativa e o metodo de pesquisa adotado foi o estudo de casos multiplos realizado em duas pequenas empresas que promovem acoes sustentaveis. Observou-se, nas empresas estudadas, que o conhecimento previo dos empreendedores sobre o ambiente natural/social influencia no reconhecimento de oportunidades de negocios voltados a sustentabilidade. Pode-se observar ainda que os empreendedores tem motivacoes distintas, enquanto o empreendedor tem suas preocupacoes voltadas as questoes ambientais, a empreendedora possui maior foco na busca de solucoes dos problemas sociais. Ademais, nos dois casos foi percebida a relevância da experiencia de vida dos empreendedores, sem a qual seria improvavel a criacao de negocios sustentaveis.
POLYPLOIDY INDUCTION IN Phlox paniculata L. UNDER in vitro CONDITIONS

MATISKA, P., VEJSADOVA, H. : Polyploidy induction in Phlox paniculata L. under in vitro conditions. Acta univ. agric. et silvic. Mendel. Brun. , 2010, LVIII, No. 1, pp. 101–106 The objective of this work was to fi nd an eff ective method of polyploidy induction using chemomutagens, colchicine and oryzalin, in diploid cultivar of Phlox paniculata ‘Fujiyama’ (syn. Mt. Fuji, Fuji). Ploidy level was determined by the fl ow cytometry method (FCM). Two methods of treating the explants (in vitro regenerated shoots) were tested; chemomutagen infi ltration from nutrient media (“the infi ltration method”) and dipping of the explants in a chemical mutagen solution (“the dip method”). The highest values of tetraploid (5%), mixoploid (1.67%) frequency and polyploidization effi ciency (1.25) were found in explants treated with 0.2% colchicine for 24 h in the dip method. Concentrations of 10 μM oryzalin and 0.2% colchicine for 14 d were the most eff ective for obtaining tetraploids in the infi ltration method. The results will be exploited to other P. paniculata cultivars for breeding of this species. Phlox, in vitro culture, colchicine, oryzalin, polyploidization, fl ow cytometry method (FCM)