Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors associated with the decision to investigate child protective services referrals: A systematic review

Background: Limited resources for child protection create challenging decision situations for child protective services (CPS) workers at the point of intake. A body of research has examined the factors associated with worker decisions and processes using a variety of methodological approaches to gain knowledge on decision-making. However, few attempts have been made to systematically review this literature. Objective: As part of a larger project on decision-making at intake, this systematic review addressed the question of the factors associated with worker decisions to investigate alleged maltreatment referrals. Methods: Quantitative studies that examined factors associated with screening decisions in CPS practice settings were included in the review. Database and other search methods were used to identify research published in English over a 35-year period (1980-2015). Findings: Of 1,147 identified sources, 18 studies were selected for full data extraction. The studies were conducted in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden and varied in methodological quality. Most studies examined case factors with few studies examining other domains. Conclusions: To inform CPS policy and practice, additional research is needed to examine the relationships between decision-making factors and case outcomes. Greater attention needs to be given to the organizational and external factors that influence decision-making.
Variation in dC among species and sexes in the family Restionaceae along a fine-scale hydrological gradientaec_2089 1..7

Consistent, repeatable segregation of plant species along hydrological gradients is an established phenomenon that must in some way reflect a trade-off between plants’ abilities to tolerate the opposing constraints of drought and waterlogging. In C3 species tissue carbon isotope discrimination (dC) is known to vary sensitively in response to stomatal behaviour, reflecting stomatal limitation of photosynthesis during the period of active growth. However, this has not been studied at fine-spatial scale in natural communities.We tested how dC varied between species and sexes of individuals in the family Restionaceae growing along a monitored hydrological gradient. Twenty Restionaceae species were investigated using species-level phylogeny at two sites in the Cape Floristic Region, a biodiversity hotspot. A spatial overlap analysis showed the Restionaceae species segregated significantly (P < 0.001) at both sites. Moreover, there were significant differences in dC values among the Restionaceae species (P < 0.001) and between male and female individuals of each species (P < 0.01). However, after accounting for phylogeny, species dC values did not show any significant correlation with the hydrological gradient. We suggest that some other variable (e.g. plant phenology) could be responsible for masking a simple response to water availability.
National Institutions and Self-Insurance

This paper studies the relationship between national institutions and farming practices in Africa. The analysis exploits detailed geospatial data to compare farming practices across nearby plots exposed to the same underlying agroclimatic risk but belonging to adjacent countries with different national institutions. We develop a novel approach to measure crop risk without information on local prices, and use this methodology to assess how formal institutions affect decisions to cultivate “safer” versus “riskier” crops. The results show significant cross-border differences in outcomes. In countries with worse national institutions, farmers grew lower risk crops, diversified land across more different crops, and devoted more total land to agriculture. The findings cannot be attributed to cross-border differences in market access. Instead, the patterns are consistent with a setting in which differences in the expropriation of wealth and non-farm income affect how farmers respond to agroclimatic risk.
Advisory role in farmers’ micro systems of agricultural knowledge and innovation (microAKIS)

This paper is part of the H2020 project AgriLink “Agricultural Knowledge: Linking farmers, advisors and researchers to boost innovation”. It presents and develops the concept of ‘microAKIS’, i.e. the micro knowledgeand innovation-system that farmers personally assemble to manage their agricultural practices and ensure sustainability. It includes the range of individuals and organisations with whom farmers seek services and exchange knowledge, and the processes involved in the formation and working of this system, including the way farmers translate these resources into innovative activities (or not). Utilising the concept of microAKIS enables us to identify and assess the range of information sources and media through which new knowledge is generated and transformed. We can thus address more specifically the present knowledge-gap on the use of advisory services by farmers within the current context of deep transformations of both farm structures and supply of such services (Knierim et al. 2017). In a broader perspective, we will defend the idea that, at a micro-scale, it is necessary to combine both a process and an infrastructural view on microAKIS (Klerkx et al. 2012). The knowledge systems that farmers build to source knowledge and information might be specific to a given innovation area. At the same time, however, these systems might also be influenced by farm characteristics: size, access to ICTs, geographical location, etc. These factors could both induce path-dependency mechanisms and trigger change cycles for farmers (Sutherland et al. 2012).
INFLUENCE OF AEROBIC EXERCISE ON INHIBITORY CONTROL OF EXCUTIVE FUNCTION IN SPASTIC HEMIPLEGIC CEREBRAL PALSY: A Randomized Controlled Trail

Background: Inhibitory control of executive functions (EF) is one of the main specific cognitive impairments that affect children with cerebral palsy, cognitive skills begin to develop in infancy and continuing through the pre-school years, childhood and into adolescence it changes across the lifespan of an individual and has great effect on their participation and quality of life. Aim: The aim of study was to assess the influence of aerobic exercise on inhibitory control of executive functions in spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy. Methods: Sixty children with spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsywere enrolled in this studyand were assessed for eligibility. Their aged ranged fromseven and eleven years. They were assignedrandomly into twoequal groups.Group (A) the study group received aerobic exercise in addition to selected physical therapy program. And group (B) the control group received the same selected physical therapy program only. The treatment was conducted for one hour, three times / weak for three successful months. Eriksen flanker test and StroopColorWord test were used to assess inhibitory control of EF pre and post treatment. Results:Post treatment there was significant increase in accuracy inEriksen flanker test and StroopColor-Word test and decrease in reaction time ( congurant and incongurant)only in study group, P< 0.05. Conclusion:Aerobic exercise has significant effect on inhibitory control of executive functions in spastic hemiplegic cerebral palsy.
An Accelerated Broyden’s Algorithm for Solving Systems of Nonlinear Equations

: Quasi Newton’s methods are promising schemes for solving systems of nonlinear equations. In this paper, we continue in the spirit of quasi-Newton update and present an accelerated Broyden’s-like method with improved Jacobian approximation for solving large-scale systems of nonlinear equations. The anticipation has been to further improve the performance of Broyden’s update as well as reducing function values. The effectiveness of our proposed scheme is appraised through numerical comparison with some well known Newton’s like methods
DOES WOMEN DIRECTORS EDUCATION MATTERS FOR FIRM PERFORMANCE? EVIDENCE FROM INDIAN TRADED FIRM

Does qualification of women directors impact firm performance? The present study seeks to answer this question. The enacted legislation for Indian listed firm having minimum one women directors. The argument for qualified/ financially literate directors is intuitively appealing; there is very little evidence of the efficacy of qualified/ financially literate directors towards keeping eye on short term profits and long term shareholder value. In an effort to determine the effectiveness of this policy, the study uses pooled OLS regression with white robust method to examine the relation between women directors’ qualification and firm performance. Using institutional and signalling theories, this study tests the impact of women directors’ qualification on firm performance. Findings provide some interesting insights into the relation between women directors’ qualification and firm performance. We firmly believe that we add significantly to literature as we could not find a study using women directors’ data to explain the relationship between qualification and firm performance.
Indonesia Urban Water Governance: The Interaction Between the Policy Domain of Urban Water Sector and Actors Network

Received: 20 November 2018 Accepted: 15 January 2019 The urban water cycle comprises surface water, groundwater, drinking water, and wastewater, which are managed separately by many actors at different levels of government. They have their own respective laws and operational regulations which could result in fragmented governance. Fragmented urban water governance could threaten the future sustainability of urban development. This paper aims to determine to what extent urban water governance in Indonesia’s metropolitan cities experiences features of fragmented governance. This paper also identifies key actors of urban water governance network that have a significant role and responsibility in policy domain. A mixed method research approach was used, comprising both qualitative content analysis and quantitative social network analysis. The Bandung Metropolitan Area was chosen as a case study to test the urban water governance network. The research results reveal that Indonesia urban water governance network has a low network density, a low degree-based centrality, a low betweenness centrality and a high reachability. These results indicate that Indonesia urban water governance network is disconnected between actor in each subsector and the policy domain of urban water sector. Urban water governance is fragmented. Our research contribution is a method for measuring the degree of interaction between urban water stakeholders within the policy domain.
Properties of black holes and their searches at the LHC

We presented the main properties of black holes and their evolution from macro to micro black holes. We considered Kruskal-Szekeres diagram representing the evolution of time in the form of hypersurfaces and stressed that the transition between the Universes is connected with the so-called Einstein-Rosen bridge. This fact was used for the consideration of the models of Randall-Sundrum, large extra dimensions and multidimensional theory of relativity for the description of scattering of two particles with the formation of a multidimensional brane space. For experimental searches of these exotic objects at the LHC we have studied their different properties: numbers of micro black holes produced at the LHC with energy 14 TeV, momentum distribution of black hole decay products and formation cross sections of rotating and non-rotating black holes for different models of extra dimensions. These results are of interest for future experimental searches of new physics beyond the Standard Model.
Comparing Hong Kong with Australia and the United Kingdom

Purpose – With the increasing interest in public private partnership (PPP), there is a need to investigate the factors contributing to successful delivery of PPP projects. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the perceptions of respondents from Hong Kong, Australia and the UK on the importance of 18 such factors. Design/methodology/approach – An empirical questionnaire survey was conducted in Hong Kong and Australia. The survey respondents were asked to rate 18 factors which contribute to delivering successful PPP projects. Findings – The findings from this survey were further compared with the results achieved by a previous researcher in a similar survey conducted in the UK. The comparison showed that amongst the top five success factors ranked by Hong Kong respondents, three were also ranked highly by the Australians and British. These success factors included: “Commitment and responsibility of public and private sectors”; “Strong and good private consortium”; and “Appropriate risk allocation and risk sharing”. Therefore, it can be concluded that there are certain common critical success factors for conducting PPP projects, irrespective of the geographical locations. Originality/value – The findings presented in this paper have highlighted the most significant critical success factors which may be applicable to all jurisdictions, and also those which are specifically for Hong Kong and Australia. It is believed that the participants of future PPP projects can use these findings to maximize the success of conducting similar projects.
Online Supplement to “Panel Threshold Regressions With Latent Group Structures”

This supplement is composed of four parts. Section B contains the proofs of Lemmas A. -A.8 in the above paper. Section C contains the full analysis of the infeasible estimators. Section D provides some additional assumptions for the determination of the true number of groups and a new proposition. Section E studies the consistency of the panel threshold estimators in the framework of fixed threshold effects.
Assistive-as-Needed Strategy for Upper-Limb Robotic Systems: An Initial Survey

Stroke is amongst the leading causes of deprivation of one’s ability in carrying out activities of daily living. It has been reported from literature that, the functional recovery of stroke patients are rather poor, unless frequent rehabilitative therapy is assumed on the affected limb. Recent trends of rehabilitation therapy have also shifted towards allowing more participation of the patient in the therapy session rather than simple passive treatments as it has been demonstrated to be non-trivial in promoting neural plasticity to expedite motor recovery process. Therefore, the employment of rehabilitation robotics is seen as a means of mitigating the limitations of conventional rehabilitation therapy. It enables unique methods for promoting patient engagement by providing patients assistance only as needed basis. This paper attempts on reviewing assist-as-needed control strategy applied on upper-limb robotic rehabilitation devices.
A NOVEL SECURE KNN CLASSIFIER WITH A LIGHT WEIGHT HIGHLY SECURE ENCRYPTION SCHEME OVER ENCRYPTED DATA IN THE CLOUD

: Data Mining has wide applications in many areas such as banking, medicine, scientiﬁc research and among government agencies. Classiﬁcation is one of the commonly used tasks in data mining applications. For the past decade, due to the rise of various privacy issues, many theoretical and practical solutions to the classiﬁcation problem have been proposed under different security models. However, with the recent popularity of cloud computing, users now have the opportunity to outsource their data, in encrypted form, as well as the data mining tasks to the cloud. Since the data on the cloud is in encrypted form, existing privacy-preserving classiﬁcation techniques are not applicable. In this paper, we focus on solving the classiﬁcation problem over encrypted data. In particular, we propose a secure k-NN classiﬁer with light-weight highly secure encryption scheme over encrypted data in the cloud. The proposed protocol protects the conﬁdentiality of data, privacy of user’s input query, and hides the data access patterns. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the ﬁrst to develop a secure k-NN classiﬁer over encrypted data under the semi-honest model. Also, we empirically analyze the efficiency of our proposed protocol using a real-world dataset under different parameter settings .
High-Frequency Refinement for Sharper Video Super-Resolution

A video super-resolution technique is expected to generate a ‘sharp’ upsampled video. The sharpness in the generated video comes from the precise prediction of the high-frequency details (e.g. object edges). Thus high-frequency prediction becomes a vital sub-problem of the super-resolution task. To generate a sharp-upsampled video, this paper proposes an upsampling network architecture ‘HFR-Net’ that works on the principle of ‘explicit refinement and fusion of high-frequency details’. To implement this principle and to train HFR-Net, a novel technique named 2-phase progressive-retrogressive training is being proposed. Additionally, a method called dual motion warping is also being introduced to preprocess the videos that have varying motion intensities (slow and fast). Results on multiple video datasets demonstrate the improved performance of our approach over the current state-of-the-art.
Fractional Order PID Design for MPPT-Pitch Angle Control of Wind Turbine Using Bat Algorithm

Received: 23 May 2019 Accepted: 15 August 2019 Extract the maximum power and protection of the Wind Turbine (WT) become critical issues for the development of the renewable energy process. For this purpose, a competitive Fractional Order PID (FOPID) controller adjusted with Bat Algorithm (BA) optimisation technique is proposed for the control of WT based Permanent Synchronous Generator WT-PMSG. The principals objectives of control are tracking the Maximum Power Point (MPPT) in low wind speed region and protect the WT in high wind speed region using Pitch Angle control. Performance of proposed optimal FOPID design is compared with the classical PI controller under low-high wind speed profiles. Simulation results improve the effeteness and the superiority of FOPID over PI controller in terms; response, overshoots and indices performance
Palladium coating on quenched-tempered martensitic steel for hydrogen electrochemical permeation tests

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Palladium coating on quenched-tempered martensitic steel for hydrogen electrochemical permeation tests Flavien Vucko, Cédric Bosch, Asdin Aoufi, David Delafosse
Vertebral Scale System to Measure Heart Size in Dogs in Thoracic Radiographs

Received: 2013-03-16 Revised: 2013-03-22 Accepted: 2013-03-26 Radiographs of thoracic cavity are useful as a diagnostic modality to detect heart diseases and have a potential to provide information equivalent to other cardiac diagnostic modalities. Radiographic interpretation can be done by number of ways viz., by gross examination or by using different measurements like cardiothoracic ratio, relationship with inter-costal spaces or vertebral heart score. Cardiothoracic ratio and a specification of 2.5 to 3.5 inter-costal spaces had been introduced in veterinary medicine as an indicator of normal heart size in lateral radiographic views for dogs, but due to some limitations, use of these techniques has been supplanted by another cardiac measurement technique called the vertebral heart score, in which the heart length and width on the thoracic radiograph is compared with the vertebral length. The vertebral heart score may be useful in assessing the change in size of the heart in a patient over time as there is good correlation between the growth of different visceral organs and vertebral body length. Knowledge of interbreed variation in the thoracic conformation and selection of proper reference value may further enhance the value of vertebral heart score technique in diagnosis of cardiac enlargement in dogs. All copyrights reserved to Nexus® academic publishers
Slot-Coupled Directional Coupler for Application in K-Band 4x4 Butler Matrix

In this paper, an application of recently developed slot-coupled directional couplers in 4x4 Butler matrix is presented. The circuit is composed of 3dB slot-coupled directional couplers, in which by insertion of two uncoupled transmission lines between slot-coupled lines, isolation and coupling characteristics have been improved. An exemplary directional coupler and Butler matrix operating in K-band at center frequency of 24 GHz has been designed and its performance in context of practical applications has been verified. Keywordsslot coupler, coupled-line directional coupler, Butler matrix
Time-Based Separation Using the LWR Model

This paper proposes a time-based flow model using the modified LWR highway model. This model treats each aircraft as a continuum in the flow. Instead of using density distribution, a distribution of air collision probability, the danger value distribution (DVD), is used to represent each aircraft. The closer the distance to the aircraft, the higher the danger value is. Since an aircraft passes through wider space under faster speed in a fixed time period, the faster the aircraft the wider the danger value distribution will be. This concept is the same as the surveillance zone of Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Using the proposed flow model, danger value distribution propagates on the airway in coordination with the velocity profile of each aircraft while maintaining the characteristics of the danger level of collision. Collision can then be easily detected by the peak value of the overlap of each aircraft’s danger value distribution even if each aircraft has different velocity on the airway. Once the collision is predicted, the flow should be managed by adjusting the velocity of aircraft on the airway. Hence this model can be used as a tool to optimize the air traffic in the manner of time-based separation.
Histological Correlation of Karmans Endometrial Sampling with Dilation and Curettage in Abnormal Uterine Bleeding

The study was done to compare the diagnostic efficacy of endometrial biopsy obtained by Karman suction cannula with conventional D&C following TVS in patients with AUB. 100 patients of AUB presenting in gynaecology OPD were studied with history, examination, laboratory investigations, TVS, endometrial aspiration using Karman cannula and endometrial curettage. It is concluded that endometrial aspiration is an effective, useful and minimally invasive procedure and can be used for the primary investigation of women with AUB along with TVS.
LABLINK – A NOVEL CO-SIMULATION TOOL FOR THE EVALUATION OF LARGE SCALE EV PENETRATION FOCUSING ON LOCAL ENERGY COMMUNITIES

The rising penetration of distributed generation, electric energy storage and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) leads to new challenges and opportunities in the energy system. Local intelligences such as home energy management systems (HEMS) are a possible solution for the synergies between these distributed actors. In order to evaluate the large-scale deployment of these approaches, sophisticated test systems are needed. This paper presents a novel co-simulation middleware called Lablink which is used to test the large-scale deployment of HEMS and BEVs in a low-voltage distribution grid. Photovoltaic (PV) generation as well as controllable storage is also included. Two example HEMS implementations are evaluated with respect to their grid sustainability. Results show that the combination of HEMS with distributed storage systems can mitigate voltage magnitude issues.