Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
COMPARISON BETWEEN POST ISOMETRIC RELAXATION AND RECIPROCAL INHIBITION MANUEVERS ON HAMSTRING FLEXIBILITY IN YOUNG HEALTHY ADULTS: RANDOMIZED CLINICAL TRIAL

Background & Purpose: Variations in the application of muscle energy technique (MET) for increasing the extensibility of muscles have been advocated, but little evidence exists to support the relative merit of a particular approach. This study investigated two types of muscle energy techniques that have been advocated in the osteopathic literature that differ primarily in the muscle group targeted. Aim: To compare the efficacy of Post Isometric Relaxation (PIR) and Reciprocal Inhibition (RI) on hamstring length in young healthy adults Methodology: Randomized clinical trial 100 college students aged between 18-25 years were included. The subjects were randomly assigned to PIR and RI group. Each group consisted of 50 subjects (25 male, 25 female). Knee extension limitation was measured by using active knee extension test (AKET) pre & post-intervention, i.e. after 3 weeks of stretching regimen, with the help of universal full circle goniometer. Results: There was significant improvement in hamstrings flexibility (p=0.000) in both PIR and RI groups. Statistical comparison of the results of both the technique showed that PIR group had greater improvement than the RI group (p=0.000) Conclusion: PIR and RI were both found to be effective in improving hamstring flexibility but, PIR is more effective therapeutic maneuver.
Government Expenditure Financing, Growth, and Factor Intensity

By shedding light on the factor intensity, this paper incorporates the Romer (1986)-type knowledge spillover technology into the Uzawa (1961, 1963) two-sector model of consumption and investment goods and studies the effect of the ratio of government expenditure to total output on the economic growth rate under three types of tax financing schemes: lump-sum tax financing, income tax financing, and consumption tax financing. We find that a rise in government expenditure with lump-sum tax financing has an ambiguous effect on the balanced growth rate depending on the factor intensity between the sectors. The balanced growth rate decreases (increases) with a rise in government spending if the consumption (investment) goods sector is capital-intensive. Moreover, the result of consumption tax financing is equivalent to lump-sum tax financing, while an increase in the government expenditure with income tax financing reduces the balanced growth rate. Our two-sector model with lump-sum tax or consumption tax financing seems to be able to provide a channel through which to explain the mixed empirical findings.
A tutorial worksheet to help students develop the ability to interpret the dot product as a projection

Background:When we administered the Test of Understanding of Vectors (TUV) to students who were completing a physics university remedial course (which covers subjects of a traditional high school physics course), we observed that they had considerable difficulties in interpreting the dot product as a projection. As a result of this, we decided to design a tutorial worksheet to guide students through the development of this skill. The worksheet was implemented with 288 students of the same course in another semester.Material and methods:A test was administered to all the participants before the beginning of the course. It is a multiple-choice test that evaluates students’ knowledge of the main topics of a traditional high school mechanics course. We used the test to validate that both groups were comparable. To evaluate the participants’ understanding of vector concepts once the course had ended, we used the TUV. We had 313 students in the control group and 288 in the experimental.Results:Upon using the TUV to evaluate the students’ understanding, we confirmed that the tutorial worksheet facilitated their learning.Conclusions:This tutorial worksheet is presented in the Appendix and might be used by other physics instructors teaching this material in high schools, colleges or universities.
Complex systems modelling by rule based networks

A rule based system is a 'black box' model in the form of a single large rule base which does not take into account any interconnections in a complex process. As opposed to this, a rule based network is a 'white box' model in the form of multiple smaller rule bases which takes into account all interconnections. This paper introduces briefly the foundations of rule based networks including formal models, basic operations, structural properties and advanced operations. It also highlights feedforward and feedback rule based networks. Finally, a comparative evaluation of rule based networks in relation to rule based systems is presented.
14th Rural Entrepreneurship Conference, Lincoln Business School, 15-18th June 2016 Anticipating Technological Futures in Rural Enterprises Track: Technology and innovation in the rural economy

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate ways in which rural enterprises prepare for their futures with respect to technological developments. It sets out a methodological framework for operationalizing the notion of Anticipation and applies this to data from interviews with a range of rural small enterprises The methodology takes an anticipatory perspective. Anticipation is conceptualised as processes that mediate between knowledge and action; how knowledge is ‘used’ to guide and motivate practices. The data is drawn from eleven case studies of small enterprises in rural areas, based on interviews with the principals and follow-up engagement with the firms to help them shape their digital strategies. Analysis to date, initially published at the ISBE conference in 2015 and subject to more data and analysis for this paper, highlights the particular concerns and focus of the business owner-managers with regard to their identify and practices the digital economy. This analysis also helps to reveal the more precise nature of the mediating quality of anticipation between knowledge and action in rural entrepreneurial contexts in a digital economy. This mediation, termed ‘modelling relations’, appears to focus on the boundary conditions of the enterprise, i.e. the limits of its relationships with stakeholders and with technologies; testing in various ways how these can be modified to create greater value. External resources, such as the university play a part in this process of experimentation or testing. The work allows us to understand the actual challenges being addressed by rural enterprises, rather than taking a supply-side perspective on what these might be. In particular it helps us understand how these challenges are constructed, anticipated and responded to. This knowledge is likely to be of value to other rural enterprises in that they can learn and judge what anticipatory practices might help them to achieve their prospects. This in turn will have effect on the design of rural business models Acknowledgments The action research element of this work was supported by European Regional Development Fund, onlinconshire (rural broadband) and Lincolnshire County Council. Thank you to my colleagues also working with the SMEs and producing detailed case studies, not fully reflected in this paper. Namely, Gary Bosworth, Georgiana Ciuchete, Adele Crowther, Hazel Donnelly, Jane Deville, Chris Phelan , Liz Price, Anjum Sawhney.
Physical and Technological Parameters of Maize Varieties (Zea mays L.) Grown in the Southern Parts of Benin and the Influence of Chemical Composition

Objective: The study aims to investigate some physical and technological parameters of varieties of maize collected from the most representative areas of maize production in the southern part of Benin, and mainly used by the populations of those areas. Method: The chemical composition, physical and technological characteristics of the grains were determined using standard methods. Results: The results showed that the weight of 1000 grains ranges from 158.01 to 305.12 g, the length from 0.79 to 1.81 cm, the average width from 0.74 to 1.51 cm, thickness from 0.36 to 0.85 cm and density from 1.07 to 1.25. Regarding the technological parameters, the hardness of the grains before and after cooking was between 16.78 and 47.20 kgf, and 0.23 and 0.71 kgf respectively, while the cooking time varies from 71.00 and 158.33 mn. There was a positive and significant correlation (r = 0.405; p < 0.026) between the hardness after cooking and the weight of 1000 grains, between the hardness after cooking and grain width (r = 0.460; p < 0.011). A positive and highly significant correlation (r = 0.527, p < 0.003) was also observed between the hardness after cooking and the grain length, between the hardness after cooking and the thickness of grain (r = 0.476, p < 0.008), and between the grain density and the weight of 1000 grains (r = 0.481, p < 0.007). A positive and highly significant correlation (r = 0.923, p < 0.000) was also observed between maize grain length and width, and between grain length and grain thickness (r = 0.764, p < 0.000) and between the width and thickness (r = 0.764, p < 0.000). On the other hand, a significant negative correlation (r = -0.394, p < 0.031) was found between the hardness before cooking and the thickness and between the hardness before cooking and sphericity index (r = -0465*, p < 0.010). Conclusion: Through its chemical and technological characteristics the maize constitutes an important raw material for many culinary recipes in West African region.
Role of Demand and Supply Shocks in Driving Inflation: A Case Study of Pakistan

This study attempts to measure the relative significance of structural shocks in explaining inflation. We use monthly time series data on key macroeconomic variables of Pakistan from July 1992 to June 2011, and structural vector auto-regressions (SVAR) to understand the role of supply and demand shocks as key drivers of inflation. Long-run restrictions according to standard aggregate demand and aggregate supply framework are employed to identify structural shocks in the system. The results indicate that inflation follows a sluggish time path in response to supply shock as compared to demand shock of nominal nature. Specifically, around 75 percent of long-run impact of supply shock on inflation is realized over a period of one year horizon as compared with 90 percent for demand shock. In terms of relative significance, supply side disturbances explain 48 percent of variation in inflation over the estimation period. Within demand side, nominal shocks are relatively more important than the real demand shock. The share of real demand shock was around 10 percent, while the reaming 42 percent was attributed to nominal shock. These results suggest that in addition to monetary factors, supply side disturbances should be taken into account for better understanding of and ‘handle’ on inflation in Pakistan.
A Combined Analytical Modeling Machine Learning Approach for Performance Prediction of MapReduce Jobs in Hadoop Clusters

Nowadays MapReduce and its open source implementation, Apache Hadoop, are the most widespread solutions for handling massive dataset on clusters of commodity hardware. At the expense of a somewhat reduced performance in comparison to HPC technologies, the MapReduce framework provides fault tolerance and automatic parallelization without any efforts by developers. Since in many cases Hadoop is adopted to support business critical activities, it is often important to predict with fair confidence the execution time of submitted jobs, for instance when SLAs are established with end-users. In this work, we propose and validate a hybrid approach exploiting both queuing networks and support vector regression, in order to achieve a good accuracy without too many costly experiments on a real setup. The experimental results show how the proposed approach attains a 21% improvement in accuracy over applying machine learning techniques without any support from analytical models.
Modeling of Silicon Photonic Devices for Optical Interconnect Transceiver Circuit Design

Optical interconnect system efficiency is dependent on the ability to optimize the transceiver circuitry for low-power and high-bandwidth operation, motivating co-simulation environments with compact optical device simulation models. This chapter presents compact Verilog-A silicon carrier-injection and carrier-depletion ring modulator models which accurately capture both nonlinear electrical and optical dynamics. Experimental verification of the carrier-injection ring modulator model is performed both at 8 Gb/s with symmetric drive signals to study the impact of pre-emphasis pulse duration, pulse depth, and dc bias, and at 9 Gb/s with a 65-nm CMOS driver capable of asymmetric pre-emphasis pulse duration. Experimental verification of the carrier-depletion ring modulator model is performed at 25 Gb/s with a 65-nm CMOS driver capable of asymmetric equalization.
An Integration of Self Potential, Electromagnetic and Resistivity Profiling Methods in the Search for Sulfide Deposits in Gwoza, Borno State, Nigeria

The combination of Self Potential (SP), Electromagnetic (EM) and Resistivity profiling methods in Gwoza has resulted in the delineation of conductive zones suspected to be sulfide mineralization in the area. Mineralization potentials of –201 mV on the profile AA’, –250.2 mV on the profile BB’ and –203 mV on the profile CC’ respectively have been observed. Correspondingly, both the vertical coil and the horizontal coil readings of the EM anomalies on the profiles AA’, BB’ and CC’ also show significant negative anomalies across the delineated conductive zones. Three resistivity profiles DD’, EE’ and KK’ have also shown very low resistivity values across the said conductive zones. These conductive zones have been established as sulfide mineralization within faults in this work. The recovery of chalcopyrite samples from a hand-dug well close to the delineated conductive zone of the profile BB’ tends to lend credence to the interpretation in this study.
Fission‐track evidence for late Oligocene and mid‐Miocene activity along the North Anatolian Fault in south‐western Thrace

Apatite fission‐track (FT) analyses of sandstone samples collected across the trace of the Ganos segment of the North Anatolian Fault (NAF) in south‐western Thrace (Turkey) indicate that a significant structural discontinuity was in existence at least by the latest Oligocene. Such discontinuity had a complex kinematic history, as exhumation south of it occurred during the latest Oligocene and north of it during the mid‐Miocene. Our data imply that early Pliocene westward propagation of the NAF in the Marmara region followed a pre‐existing structural discontinuity; such discontinuity could be related to the development of the Intra‐Pontide Suture, marking the terminal closure of the Intra‐Pontide Ocean during the Oligocene.
Comparative study of functional properties of eight walnut (Juglans regia L.) genotypes

Abstract Eight walnut ( Juglans regia L.) genotypes were assessed for the glutathione (GSH) and total phenolic contents (TPC), as well as their antioxidant capacities. The GSH contents were between 1.1 and 7.2 mg 100 g -1 . The TPC contents ranged from 33 to 50.3 mg GAE g -1 , while the ferric ion reducing antioxidant power (FRAP) values ranged from 156 to 302 mg FeSD 4 g -1 . A strong correlation ( r 2 =0.8258) was determined between the FRAP values and the TPC. Cupric ion reducing antioxidant capacity (CUPRAC) values ranged from 13 to 35 mg trolox g -1 . The correlation between the CUPRAC values and the GSH contents was weak ( r 2 =0.2069). The walnut extracts (0.2 mg mL -1 concentration) showed 16.2-40% DPPH (2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl) scavenging activity. A strong correlation between DPPH-TPC was determined ( r 2 =0.8538), and it was concluded that the TPC makes the most important contribution to the antioxidant capacity of the walnut. Additionally, the walnut may be appraised, in view of its nutritional value and health benefits, by considering the GSH content revealed in the current study.
Robust projections in the class of martingale measures

Given a convex function f and a set Q of probability measures, we consider the problem of minimizing the robust f -divergence infQ∈Q f(P |Q) over the class P of martingale measures. Under mild conditions on P and Q we show that a minimizer exists within the class P if limx→∞ f(x)/x =∞. If limx→∞ f(x)/x = 0 then there is a minimizer in a class P of extended martingale measures defined on the predictable σ-field. We also explain how both cases are connected to recent developments in the theory of optimal portfolio choice, in particular to robust extensions of the classical expected utility criterion.
Some heuristic approaches for solving extended geometric programming problems

This article introduces an extension of standard geometric programming (GP) problems, called quasi geometric programming (QGP) problems. The idea behind QGP is very simple, it means that a problem becomes a GP problem when some variables are kept constant. The consideration of this particular kind of nonlinear and possibly non-smooth optimization problem is motivated by the fact that many engineering problems can be formulated, or well approximated, as a QGP problem. However, solving a QGP problem remains a difficult task due to its intrinsic nonconvex nature. This is why this article introduces some simple approaches for easily solving this kind of nonconvex problem. The interesting thing is that the proposed methods do not require the development of a customized solver and work well with any existing solver able to solve conventional GP problems. Some considerations on the robustness issue are also presented. Various optimization problems are considered to illustrate the ability of the proposed methods for solving a QGP problem. Comparison with previously published work is also given.
Vulnerability of Tax Revenue in Resource-Rich Countries

Conventional wisdom has it that natural resource dependence is associated with increased vulnerability to external shocks emanating from sudden supply and demand changes in the global economy. This paper explores to what extent government revenue in low- and middle-income countries is affected by different kinds of shocks and whether these effects are different for resource-rich as compared to non-resource-rich countries. Based on data from 176 countries between 1980-2010, we measure the elasticity of tax revenue in resource-rich countries with respect to two kinds of shocks: exchange rate pressure and terms of trade shocks. We find that government revenue in resource-rich countries is more volatile, but not necessarily more vulnerable, in particular with regard to terms of trade shocks. Poorer resource-rich countries are more vulnerable than their higher-income counterparts. Vulnerability in resource-rich countries has significantly decreased in the 2000s as compared to previous decades. Introducing institutional variables such as political regime type or bureaucratic quality we find that the general institutional characteristics of a country may not always reflect the quality of its management of natural resources. Still, results provide some support to those arguments that stress the relevance of good governance in the context of the so-called “resource curse”.
Effective mobility of single-layer graphene transistors as a function of channel dimensions

A detailed analysis of the extracted back gated FET mobility as a function of channel length, channel width, and underlying oxide thickness for both exfoliated and chemical vapor deposited (CVD) graphene is presented. The mobility increases with increasing channel length eventually saturating at a constant value for channel lengths of several micrometers. The length dependence is consistent with the transition from a ballistic to diffusive transport regime. The mobility as a function of channel width first increases and then decreases. The increase in mobility for very small channel widths is consistent with a reduction in edge scattering. The decrease in mobility for larger channel widths is observed to be strongly dependent on the oxide thickness suggesting that electrostatics associated with fringing fields is an important effect. This effect is further confirmed by a comparative analysis of the measured mobility of graphene devices with similar channel dimensions on oxides of different thicknesses. Th.
Molecular evaluation of M2 protein of Iranian avian influenza viruses of H9N2 subtype in order to find mutations of adamantane drug resistance

Background: The H9N2 subtype of influenza A viruses is considered to be widespread in poultry industry. Adamantane is a group of antiviral agents which is effective both in prevention and treatment of influenza A virus infections. These drugs inhibit M2 protein ion channel which has role on viral replication. OBJECTIVES: The main objective of this study is to evaluate M gene of avian influenza viruses (AIVs) of H9N2 subtype in order to find adamantane drug resistance mutations. METHODS: Over 100 suspected samples were collected from different geographical regions of Iran during 2012-2013. Samples were injected via allantoic sac of 9-11 day-old chicken embryos. A total of 11 out of 100 were AIV. The H9N2 subtype was confirmed by specific RT-PCR. The RT-PCR was conducted for full length M gene. PCR amplified products were purified and then conducted for commercial direct sequencing. Finally, sequences were checked for possible sites of adamantane resistance mutations. RESULTS: Overall, 8 out of 11 viruses harbored the adamantane resistance-associated mutations. Of which, four viruses were isolated in 2013 and four viruses in 2012. Two different resistance-associated mutations were observed during different years. CONCLUSIONS: The present study provided clear evidence concerning resistance AIVs of H9N2 subtype that were circulating in Iranian poultry sector. This concern is always present as M segment might be introduced into human influenza viruses by reassortment phenomenon.
Social capital erosion in education? A closer look at the social implications of grade retention

It is important for educational systems to ensure that students are connected to one another. In other words, educational systems should make sure that students have social capital. However, at least one practice, which is nonetheless widely applied in many educational systems, may be expected to erode social relationships between students. It concerns grade retention – i.e. the practice of letting academically challenged students repeat their grade. Inherent to grade retention is that retainees are taken away from their familiar class group and put in an unfamiliar one. As a result, existing friendship relations are disrupted and retainees have to establish new ones. Researchers expect that the label of “retainee” impedes their ability to form new friendships. As such, most scholars assume that retainees are at risk for social isolation, which, if true, would go directly against education’s integrating function. Few empirical studies, however, have been undertaken to investigate these assumptions. This study investigates the role of grade retention in the quantity and the quality of adolescents’ friendships. Moreover, we investigate the direct effect of the percentage of retained students at school on friendship quantity and quality, and its moderating effect on the relationship between retention and these friendship dimensions. Multilevel analyses on data (2004-2005) from 11,759 students in 83 Flemish secondary schools suggest that secondary school retention was related to a lower number of friendships, but was unrelated to friendship quality. Primary school retention was unrelated to friendships in secondary education. Furthermore, all students attending schools with a higher percentage of retainees –even the promoted ones– had fewer and less qualitative friendships. Moreover, the retention composition moderated the effect of individual grade retention on friendships. As this widespread practice yields the risk of diminishing students’ social capital and promoting isolation, we argue that this intervention strategy should be abandoned.