Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Threat of Communism during the Cold War: A Constraint to Income Inequality?

Did the threat of communism influence income distribution in developed capitalist economies during the Cold War? This article addresses this question by testing whether income inequality in OECD countries was related to events linked to the spread of communism—revolutions and Soviet interventions—around the world. We argue that the threat of the spread of communism acted as an incentive for the elites and governments to keep economic inequality low. This article provides an empirical contribution to the recent literature on inequality, which highlights the role of domestic institutions but ignores the role of the Cold War in redistributing income. We find a robust relationship between income inequality and the distance to communist events. The results, reinforced by cases studied, suggest that the spread of communism fostered income redistribution deals between domestic elites and workers. Finally, we show that these effects were reinforced by strong unions and the presence of strong communist parties.
Economic Growth and Poverty: The Mediating Effect of Employment

The results of previous research on the relationship between economic growth and poverty have shown inconclusive results. This could be due to the fact that the relationship between these variables is indirect. Therefore, this study tries to introduce employment opportunity as a mediating variable. In addition, the authors also examined the effect of control variables consisting of dependency ratio, education, and infrastructure. The data used in this study are panel data of 6 provinces on Java Island in the period of 2000-2017. The methods used in this study are path analysis and multiple linear regression. The results show that employment opportunity perfectly mediates the relationship between poverty and economic growth. This study also found that dependency ratio and education had a significant effect on poverty, while infrastructure had a negative, but insignificant effect on poverty. The perfect mediating effect implies that economic growth will reduce poverty only if the economic growth is able to generate employment opportunities. These findings imply the importance of inclusive growth that gives access to the poor to work and business opportunities.
Application of neural networks to obtain the site response in Mexico City

We have implemented a neural network of three hidden layers with 40 neurons each layer to be used as soil/rock transfer functions for two stations in Mexico City. The net was trained with supervised learning through input and output vectors of accelerations (twelve records, from five seismic events from Guerrero and Puebla, 5.8 M 7.3), and tested with three records not taken in account in the training. The results in the frequency domain are good, finding a seismic amplification between 0.2 to 5 Hz for the Lake zone. In the time domain we obtain results that are not coincident. Due to the data and the complex of the phenomena, it is necessary to apply this tool using more records for the training net, so the phenomena can be learned better through reliable database.
Understanding a Deep Learning Technique through a Neuromorphic System a Case Study with SpiNNaker Neuromorphic Platform

Deep learning (DL) has been considered as a breakthrough technique in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Conceptually, it relies on a many-layer network that exhibits a hierarchically non-linear processing capability. Some DL architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks and recurrent neural networks have been developed and applied to many fields with incredible results, even comparable to human intelligence. However, many researchers are still sceptical about its true capability: can the intelligence demonstrated by deep learning technique be applied for general tasks? This question motivates the emergence of another research discipline: neuromorphic computing (NC). In NC, researchers try to identify the most fundamental ingredients that construct intelligence behaviour produced by the brain itself. To achieve this, neuromorphic systems are developed to mimic the brain functionality down to cellular level. In this paper, a neuromorphic platform called SpiNNaker is described and evaluated in order to understand its potential use as a platform for a deep learning approach. This paper is a literature review that contains comparative study on algorithms that have been implemented in SpiNNaker.
Feature Analysis of Sketch Based Image Retrieval System

Although many researches are increased in Sketch Based Image Retrieval (SBIR) field, it is still difficult to bridge the gap between image and sketch matching problem. Feature extraction is the critical role for SBIR to get efficient matching. In this paper, the proposed feature descriptor called Edge Orientation Histogram (EOH) for sketch based image retrieval (SBIR) system is presented. The features of database images and query sketch are extracted by EOH descriptor. And then cosine similarity measure is applied for matching features. The retrieved images similar with query sketch are displayed by rank order. Mean Average Precision (MAP) is measured as evaluation criteria. The Flickr15K benchmark dataset is used to evaluate the performance of this system.
Adaptive Trust Management Protocol Based on Fault Detection for Wireless Sensor Networks

Trust management is an important issue in selfconfigurable and autonomous networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks. Sensor nodes need to determine if other nodes are trustworthy, in order to decide whether to cooperate with them in completing the sensing and communication tasks. Therefore, adaptive trust management assures an appropriate level of security to the critical services provided by Wireless Sensor Networks. In this paper, we present the Adaptive Trust Management Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, which is able to compute data trust based on fault detection. The adaptive trust management protocol operates cycles in which reputation values are computed and penalty values are exchanged periodically. A spanning tree is generated for the sensor network, after which nodes evaluate their children using the fault detection mechanism and then exchange penalty values with their neighbors. The protocol has been implemented in TinyOS and evaluated in a test scenario using TOSSIM. Keywords-reputation, trust, fault detection, wireless sensor
COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF INNOVATION, ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY, PUBLIC FINANCIAL SUPPORT AND DETERMINANTS OF THE INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE OF ENTERPRISE

The aim of this paper is to better understand whether cooperation, absorptive capacity and public financial support for innovation activities, how they influence the innovative performance of Portuguese enterprise. The literature review focuses the importance of these three factors both drivers as the limiters process of business innovation, influencing the innovative performance of enterprise. Based on a review of the literature, hypotheses are formulated, which are tested with secondary data resources from the Community Innovation Survey 2010. This questionnaire was implemented under the supervision of EUROSTAT. The method used is the logistic regression model. The results obtained confirm that the implementation of cooperation with partners belonging to internal sources of business has a significant influence on the innovations achieved at the level of both products and processes.
Ion transport from plasma ion source at ISOLTRAP

In this report, my work as CERN Summer Student at the ISOLTRAP experiment at ISOLDE is described. A new plasma ion source used as offline source for calibration and implemented before my arrival was commissioned and transportation settings for the produced ions to the ion traps were found. The cyclotron frequencies of Ar and the xenon isotopes 129−132Xe were measured using time-of-flight and phase-imaging ion-cyclotron-resonance mass spectroscopy.
Social Media, Recruitment, Allegiance and the Islamic State

Islamic State relies heavily on the recruitment of foreign fighters. We examine this recruitment from an organizational perspective. We analyze how the process of recruitment of foreigners shapes the adverse selection problem affecting the dissident groups that they join. We also examine the different mechanisms used to maintain the allegiance and compliance of foreigners as opposed to indigenous recruits. More broadly, we analyze how the recruitment of foreign fighters affects the organization. Foreign fighters and local recruits exhibit significant differences in recruitment patterns and motivations for joining IS. This could create problems for the organization. Evidence of such strife, however, is not discernible. Given the information at hand, IS appears to be effectively managing the mix of foreign and local recruits.
Using the Visual Arts in Religious Education: An Analysis and Critical Evaluation

The arguments which recommend the deployment of the visual arts are divided into four categories: the arts as a stimulus for awareness of the transcendent; the arts in phenomenological approaches to religious education (RE); the arts as a means of promoting spiritual development; and the arts and creativity in RE. Each of these is analysed according to four key concepts: their understanding of ‘religion’, ‘religious education’, ‘the arts’ and ‘imagination’. A critique of each approach is offered and conclusions drawn which identify their strengths and weaknesses at both a theoretical and classroom level.
Assessing The Impact Of Adoption Of Improved Seed Yam Technology in Cameroon

ABSTRACT:This study assesses the impact of adoption of improved seed yam technology (the minisett technology) on yam yields and the income of smallholder farmers in the northwest region of Cameroon. This technology has the potential to increase yam yields by a factor of 2 to 3 compared to traditional techniques, however, adoption by smallholder farmers in Cameroon has so far been low. Survey data was collected from a total of 394 randomly sampled farmers in three of the five administrative divisions of the northwest region. Of this total sample a sub-sample of data from 274 farmers who had been exposed to the technology was analyzed using propensity score matching (PSM) and employing a variety of different matching algorithms that take into account counterfactuals and potential impact. PSM is a quasi-experimental research design which was adopted because it is known to address problems of selection bias resulting from sampling and self-selection issues. The results show that the adoption of the minisett technology has a positive and significant (p<0.01) effect on yam yields. We also find that this increase in yam yield is partly due to; the use of good agronomic systems (such as proper weed control practices and the use of stakes), access to information through farmer organizations, and access to the support provided by extension and research services. We also found a positive and statistically significant (p<0.01) effect of adoption on household income. With the adoption being more likely to have a positive and significant effect on household incomes of farmers that have access to fertilizers and those that are affiliated to farmers' organizations. Our results highlight the need to encourage the use of innovative agricultural technologies to boost crop production and the household incomes of smallholder farmers in Cameroon. This can be achieved provided appropriate measures are taken to facilitate access to agricultural inputs (especially fertilizers and stakes). Farmers should also be encouraged to employ good agronomic practices. The extension and research services should make use of existing farmers' organizations to enhance their capability of capturing potential adopters.
A Review on Neural Network Question Answering Systems

In recent years neural networks (NN) are being used increasingly on Question Answering (QA) systems and they seem to be successful in addressing different issues and challenges that these systems exhibit. This paper presents a review to summarize the state of the art in question answering systems implemented using neural networks. It identifies the main research topics and considers the most relevant research challenges. Furthermore, it analyzes contributions, limitations, evaluation techniques, and directions proposed for future research.
A SURVEY PAPER ON INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

Information retrieval is the process of obtaining and presenting more related information from the largest collection of information resources according to the user’s need. The tremendous growth in information resources on the Internet makes the information retrieval process a tedious and difficult task for users. Due to information overloading, there is a need for better techniques to retrieve most relevant information from web. This paper presents the information retrieval system by using the PSO algorithm. In presented system, to extract the text from web documents, all html tags are removed. After that stop words and special characters are removed from extracted text for recovering only meaningful contents. TF-IDF concept is used for feature selection. Now PSO optimization technique is used for identifying and refining the features set, these selected features are stored in a database which is used for information retrieval process. In other hand input query is converted into more than one similar semantic query strings. These query strings are compared with the obtained feature sets in the database by using the cosine similarity function. The most similar text is retrieved as an outcome of the information retrieval system.
Auditing Keyword Queries Over Text Documents

Data security and privacy is an issue of growing importance in the healthcare domain. In this paper, we present an auditing system to detect privacy violations for unstructured text documents such as healthcare records. Given a sensitive document, we present an anomaly detection algorithm that can find the top-k suspicious keyword queries that may have accessed the sensitive document. Since unstructured healthcare data, such as medical reports and query logs, are not easily available for public research, in this paper, we show how one can use the publicly available DBLP data to create an equivalent healthcare data and query log, which can then be used for experimental evaluation.
Truncated Cosmopolitanisms: Post-apartheid Literary Identities in Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View

South African writer Ivan Vladislavić’s The Exploded View tells the stories of four seemingly unconnected individuals who inhabit the shared imaginative space of Johannesburg.65 It is through their maneuvers of belonging and self-affirmation that Vladislavić further instantiates the ideas of writing the postcolonial metropolis, and in doing so, shows again what I contend his oeuvre to be almost entirely constitutive of—the paradox of the urban condition in a specific South African city. While one can potentially deconstruct any text, The Exploded View lends itself particularly to deconstructive readings, as evidenced (to begin with) in the structure of the text, which, from a cursory reading, appears to be comprised of four totally disparate narratives, but on closer examination is revealed to be a narration of closely connected spaces, rendered through multiple perspectives. These perspectives offer glimpses into the transient social and material spaces of the city in which characters are located and imagined events take place. In this way, Vladislavić draws clear links between the actions of individuals and the material realities that inform and affect their actions and decisions. With respect to the last two strands of the quadruple-pronged narrative of The Exploded View, this chapter is focused on making similar connections in order to better contextualise the writer’s consideration of the characters’ (multiple) identities within specific and shifting historical milieu. The first part of this chapter is theoretically framed by what Shane Graham has described as Vladislavić’s use of the “metaphor of the exploded view as a representational strategy. ” By, in effect, doubling this metaphor on itself, I will use it as a tool of analysis to examine the attempts of Simeon Majara (the central character in “Curiouser”) at re-signification and re-presentation of the Rwandan holocaust, on one hand, and common curio pieces, on the other. Veronique Tadjo reminds us in The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda of the difficulties of finding the appropriate idiom, as well as the role of language and memory in representing trauma on the personal scale and at the level of genocide.
twin nucleation at prismatic/basal boundary in hexagonal close-packed metals

ABSTRACT This paper examines {10} twin nucleation and growth under uniaxial tension at the prismatic/basal boundary through both molecular dynamics simulations and continuum mechanics modelling. Our results show that two disconnection dipoles exist on every intrinsic prismatic plane of the crystal which constructs the prismatic/basal boundary. Only one of the two disconnection dipoles is at the nucleus of {10} twins. The disconnection is activated and glides plane-by-plane along the direction throughout twin growth. The prismatic plane of the matrix is converted to the basal plane of the twin during the sliding of the disconnection. It is also predicted that a twin nucleates when the local gradient of elastic-energy or the average elastic-energy difference along the prismatic/basal boundary exhibit a sharp increase. Furthermore, the critical strain for twin nucleation can be obtained with the aid of local energy-based descriptors, when viewing twin nucleation as an instability phenomenon. Simulations suggest that both the local gradient and spatial average of elastic-energy difference are fundamental quantities behind the onset of twin nucleation at the prismatic/basal grain boundary in hexagonal close-packed metals under uniaxial loadings. Furthermore, results from our simulations and mechanics model, provide the position and the critical strain of the {10} twin nucleation at the prismatic/basal boundary.
Fretting wear behaviour of MoS2 dry film lubricant

Dry film lubricants (DFL) are used as palliative coatings to prevent fretting wear. In this work fretting tests are carried out on coated Ti6Al4V cylinders on coated flat samples under dry sliding conditions, using an amplitude of 300 μm, 2.5 Hz frequency and 575 N normal loads. During the tests the coefficient of friction (CoF) was monitored, with tests being terminated when the coefficient of friction reached 0.7. Wear scars were analysed by profilometry and SEM to elucidate wear mechanisms. Results show that CoF initially increases rapidly to 0.4, this is then followed by a plateau region that finishes in a sudden step decrease in CoF following which CoF rises steadily. This behaviour is shown to be characteristic and interrupted tests are presented to allow elucidation of the wear scar at different stages in the lifetime and thus aid an understanding of the mechanisms of degradation which control the tribological behaviour.
Repeated Field Teaching: Preservice Teachers' Changes in Teaching Efficacy and Theories of Mathematics Teaching

The aim of this study was to understand preservice teachers’ changes in their perceived teaching efficacy and theories of mathematics teaching by repeated field-teaching. A mathematics (teaching) methods course was designed to include repeated field-teaching with multiple supports, including course instructors, school teachers, peers, and a course website. The course website was used to organize all course reading materials, discussion, work submission, and research data collection. Compared with that after first filed-teaching, the preservice teachers’ teaching efficacy increased after the second field-teaching in pedagogy-content coordination, fluent teaching process, effective solution to student difficulties, and problem posing. In addition, their theories of effective mathematics teaching changed from teacher-centered, theoretical, and procedural approaches to student-centered, practical, and thematic ones.
GML2GEOJSON: Python Middleware Services for a Web Atlas Integrated in a Spatial Data Infrastructure

In this paper we describe the concept of an Atlas Services middleware layer that offers intermediate services to enable loose coupling of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) with a client–side mapping component. We first describe the challenges in creating quality maps if these have to be generated within a Spatial Data Infrastructure. We introduce a theoretical framework and a proof-of-concept architecture, developed at ITC to overcome some of these challenges. Part of this architecture are the middleware services mentioned above. We discuss in general the philosophy of the service layer, and in particular how we implemented a GML–to–GeoJSON proxy using Python.
A GNURadio Based Receiver Toolkit for IEEE802.11a/g/p

We present an open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) receiver toolkit that is able to decode OFDM frames of IEEE 802.11a/g/p WiFi in real time. It is the first for GNURadio that supports channel bandwidths of up to 20MHz. The toolkit comprises the physical layer, decoding of MAC frames, and extracting the payload of IEEE802.11a/g/p frames. It is further possible to access and visualize the data in every step of the decoding process in numerous ways. As an example demonstration, the impact of moving antennas and changing settings can be displayed live in time and frequency domain. Lastly, the decoded frames can be fed to Wireshark and/or received on a Linux network interface. Our receiver toolkit has been well received by the community and is already serving as the basis of further research.
Framing Vaccination in Post-Socialist Serbia: An Anthropological Perspective

In recent years, Southeastern European region (the Balkans) has seen a rise in vaccine skepticism due to increasing conflicts between the pro- and anti-vaccination stances, primarily with respect to childhood vaccines. Although vaccination controversies are generally perceived as a global trend, their framings are predominantly grounded in particular social, cultural, political and economic contexts. This paper will focus on the immunization issues raised in the post-socialist context of one particular Balkan state – Serbia. By juxtaposing the medical profession’s framing of vaccine skepticism with the lay framings of vaccines and immunization, I will examine their contrasting perspectives and point to the sources of their misunderstanding. These opposing views will also be contextualized against their respective political, economic, socio-cultural and historical backgrounds. The paper will hence suggest the possible determinants of vaccine skepticism in the context of post-socialist Serbia.
Visible and Invisible Forces. What Drives the Intensity of Trading in the European Carbon Market?

This study models the trading intensity in European Allowances (EUA) futures contracts, in the European Climate Exchange (ECX) using various specifications and investigates the forecasting ability of observable versus unobservable factors. This set up tests empirically the impact of the evolving market structure through regulatory updates and the contribution of the different market participants to the intensity of trading in the European Carbon market. The findings suggest that observable market characteristics capture better the dynamics of trading intensity than their latent counterparts, which implies that regulatory changes that enhance transparency would also improve market efficiency.