Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Use of Play Assessment to Evaluate the Cognitive Skills of Two-and Three-Year-Old Children

Play assessment is increasing in popularity despite the lack of empirical support. The purpose of this study was to explore the use of play assessment with young children and determine its efficacy in determining cognitive levels of development. Eight 2-year-olds and eight 3/2-year-olds were observed playing in an unstructured format. Results indicated that Exploratory Play becomes more complex with age and is displayed more than Pretend Play in an unstructured play session. Children's play primarily consisted of Exploratory Play, Pretend Play and Problem Solving and Planning Skills. Several of the Supple mental Subdomains measured by play assessment were not observed to occur in the spontaneous play format. A tendency for increasing complexity of play across time in session was also found.
Analyzing the Findings of the Saudi Research on Student Attrition in Higher Education

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the available literature on student attrition in Saudi higher education context. Despite the reported low student retention rates in Saudi tertiary institutions, student attrition remains an under-researched phenomenon. Thus, this paper aims to trace and collect all the available studies that addressed the issue of low student retention in the Saudi in higher education and to present and analyse their findings. This will help in providing evidence and empirical data that give a clearer view of the problem and pave the way for the future researchers as well as allowing for suggestions towards more effective plans and solutions. The student attrition factors reported in the reviewed Saudi studies were classified under personal, academic, social and institutional categories. However, the students’ low academic abilities and institutional factors were the most common across all of the studies. These factors relate to students’ experiences with the administrative system of their academic institution, including the admission, registration and disciplinary rules and policies and the availability and quality of student services and facilities.
How we use what we learn in Math: An integrative account of the development of commutativity.

One crucial issue in mathematics development is how children come to spontaneously apply arithmetical principles (e.g. commutativity). According to expertise research, well-integrated conceptual and procedural knowledge is required. Here, we report a method composed of two independent tasks that assessed in an unobtrusive manner the spontaneous use of procedural and conceptual knowledge about commutativity. This allowed us to ask (1) in which grade students spontaneously apply this principle in different task formats and (2) in which grade they start to possess an integrated concept of the commutativity. Procedural and conceptual knowledge of 8 to 9 year olds (163 second and 180 third graders) as well as 46 adult students was assessed independently and without any hint concerning commutativity. Results indicated procedural as well as conceptual knowledge about commutativity for second graders. However, their procedural and conceptual knowledge was unrelated. An integrated relation between the two measures first emerged with some of the third graders and was further strengthened for adult students.
Long-Run Consequences of Natural Disasters : Evidence from Tangshan 1117 Discussion Papers

Exploiting Tangshan 1976 the deadliest earthquake in the 20th century as a source of exogenous variation, we estimate the long-run effect of a historical shock on contemporary socio-economic outcomes. Cohorts born after the earthquake were not only larger, but exhibit lower school completion rates, particularly among the female today. Despite lower schooling levels, there is no evidence for adverse labour market outcomes. We conduct robustness checks and argue that the effect is causal.
Perception of Chair Materials in a Cultural Context: Indonesian Sample Group

Human attitudes, behavior and perceptions are shaped by their culture. Culture is deeply embedded in all aspects of human life, including design development. This study was conducted to discover perceptions regarding five chair materials (wood, rattan, bamboo, metal, and plastic) in a cultural context in an Indonesian student sample group. A previous study suggested that Indonesian participants have a positive attitude toward natural chair materials such as wood and rattan. The experimental results of the present follow-up study suggest that rattan is the chair material most representative of Indonesian culture. As a heterogeneous country, Indonesia has multiple ethnicities, which influences the perception of which material best represents Indonesian culture.
An Novel Image Recognition method based on Three-way Decision

The traditional recognition method takes the low-level information of the image as the foundation. The image recognition center of gravity is biased towards the typical features, and achieves the effect of recognition by region-dependent segmentation. Because the general image segmentation is a regular rectangle, easily lead to the same target is divided into different sub-blocks, ignoring the image of the fuzzy part, so the image recognition is not complete. An image recognition algorithm based on threeway decision is proposed. It takes full advantage of effective information in the image, improving the image recognition accuracy. First, this method divided the image into three regions: positive region, negative region and delay decision region. Second, an iterative process is performed on the region of the delay decision. Final, image recognition is performed on the positive sample region. Based on the basic theory of the three-way decision, the more obvious the decision result is, the more iterations are, and the information is added to the classifier until the blurred part of image cannot be divided. Finally, to achieve the realize effective image recognition. This method simulates the process of human cognition effectively, and makes the utilization of the effective information reach the maximum in the recognition process. The results of the experimental analysis showed that the method is more concise and efficient, and the recognition accuracy is more accurate.
Verslas: Teorija ir prakTika Business: Theory and pracTice

The goal of this research is to determine the dimensions of beliefs about internet advertising affecting Syrian consumers’ attitudes and behaviors towards internet advertising. The results indicate that Attitudes are influenced positively by information, and entertainment; and negatively by irritation and values’ corruption. Irritation positively influences consumers’ behaviors of leaving websites showing the ads. Entertainment positively influences consumers’ behaviors of clicking on internet ads for further information concerning advertised products. Attitude is found to fully mediate the relationships between beliefs of information, irritation, and values’ corruption and the behaviors clicking on internet ads, and partially mediate the relationship between enter­ tainment and the behaviors of clicking on internet ads. Attitudes fully mediate the relationships between beliefs of information, entertainment, and values’ corruption and the behaviors of leaving websites showing the ads, and partially mediate the relation­ ship between irritation and the behaviors of leaving websites showing the ads. This research comes to be one of the first studies to investigate Syrian consumers’ beliefs about, attitudes, and behavioral responses towards internet advertising. As well as, this study provides evidence of the direct relationship between some of the beliefs about internet advertising (i.e. entertainment and irritation) and the behavioral responses towards it.
Calculating the aerosol asymmetry factor based on measurements from the humidified nephelometer system

Abstract. The aerosol asymmetry factor (g) is one of the most important factors for assessing direct aerosol radiative forcing. However, little attention has been paid to the measurement and parameterization of g. In this study, the characteristics of g are studied based on field measurements over the North China Plain (NCP) using the Mie scattering theory. The results show that calculated g values for dry aerosol can vary over a wide range (between 0.54 and 0.67). Furthermore, when ambient relative humidity (RH) reaches 90 %, g is significantly enhanced by a factor of 1.2 due to aerosol hygroscopic growth. For the first time, a novel method of calculating g based on measurements from the humidified nephelometer system is proposed. This method can constrain the uncertainty of g to within 2.56 % for dry aerosol populations and 4.02 % for ambient aerosols, providing that aerosol hygroscopic growth is taken into account. Sensitivity studies show that aerosol hygroscopicity plays a vital role in the accuracy of predicting g.
An Investigation of Relationship between Employees' Biographical Characteristics, Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment

Background: Job satisfaction refers to cognitive, affective and evaluative reactions or attitude and state that it is a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or experience. Organizational commitment has been defined as the extent that an individual accepts, internalizes, and views his or her role based on organizational values and goals. Objective: The purpose of present research was to investigate the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment of Mazandaran Fishery and Marine Organization’s employees (N=150 and n=108). Results: Results showed that there were significant relationships among employees’ biographical characteristics, job satisfaction and its’ dimensions, and organizational commitment and its’ components. The results of the regression analysis indicated the predictive effects of employees’ intrinsic, extrinsic, and general job satisfaction on organizational commitment, affective commitment, continuance commitment, and normative commitment. Conclusion: According to present research results and in order to create attachment and/or commitment sense within employees towards their job and organization, managers of the organization should provide primarily the context of their satisfaction enhancement because. Some of the contexts that pragmatically caused high levels of satisfaction and then high levels of commitment within employees include compensation, policies, increasing well-being, working conditions, building trust, teamwork, and employee training, participating, and empowerment.
IMPACT OF IMAGE RESIZING FACTOR IN FACE RECOGNITION SYSTEM USING PCA

Image recognition is an emerging field ever since it has been invented. In this field, machine recognition of human face is a challenging task. Human face recognition system has been grabbing high attention from commercial market point of view, as well as research community. Human recognition system is a biometric identification system that authenticates an individual uniquely. Among the existing biometric systems , face recognition system is user friendly, which does not interrupt the user activities. The present paper focuses on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), which is well known for its dimensionality reduction approach. It uses resizing factor as a preprocessing step for training the system, while keeping the aspect ratio the same. The effect of resizing an image using vary resizing factor has been carried out experimentally and obtained challenging results.
DSC and TGA Measurements of Room Temperature Ionic Liquids (RTILs) Containing Ammonium Alum or Aluminum Nitrate with Amide Compounds

Characterization of some room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) as thermal storage media and heat transfer fluids in thermal applications were investigated. Five ionic liquids prepared from ammonium alum NH4Al(SO4)2.12H2O as inorganic salt with urea NH2CONH2 or acetamide CH3CONH2 as organic compounds, and aluminum nitrate salt Al(NO3)3.9H2O either with urea or acetamide compounds in two mole ratios were investigated using Thermo-Gravimetric Analysis (TGA), Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and conductivity measurements. Thermo-physical properties such as enthalpy, heat capacity and thermal energy storage capacity were determined. It was found that ammonium alum: urea (USIL) in the mole ratio (1:5) and aluminum nitrate: acetamide (AN2IL) in the mole ratio (1:22) ionic liquids to be characterized with high density, wide liquid temperature range, high chemical stability, high heat capacity and high thermal energy storage capacity. Based on experimental results, it is concluded that ionic liquids could be considered as a candidate for liquid thermal storage media and heat transfer fluids.
Practices of Capital Structure Decisions: Malaysia Survey Evidence

How firms make their corporate financing decisions has been one of the most extensively researched areas in corporate finance. Yet there is little consensus on how firms choose their capital structure. This study examines the capital structure practices of the Malaysian CFOs by employing a survey analysis on the non-financial listed firms in Malaysia, conducted from November 2010 to March 2011. 203 usable responses from the Malaysian CFOs were obtained, thus representing a response rate of 25%. This study is to analytically identify how the capital structure choices are influenced by those who make the decisions in practice. The survey result provides mixed support for the notion that firms does trade-off costs and benefits to derive an optimal debt ratio. From the financing hierarchy point of view, this study finds that Malaysian managers regard the use of internal funds for financing projects as the most important source of financing. Thisstudy enriches the literature by discovering the extent to which the capital structure theories are able to explain the corporate financing behavior and practices of Malaysian managers.
Emotion work, conflict, and family business performance

Due to the inherent overlap of family and business, family members who work in family businesses (family co-workers) experience unique interactions and relationship dynamics. Such interactions and relationships among family co-workers are critical to the performance of the family business. By using the lens of emotion work and organizational conflict, this paper develops propositions exploring how emotion work and emotion regulation patterns influence the team dynamics in the family business. By extending the emotion work literature to the complex and understudied context of family businesses, this paper contributes to the emotion work and family business literatures. Further, this paper also identifies links between emotion work strategies and conflict patterns, contributing to the team literature. xxx
Predicting the Lapse Rates of AllSecur

The lapse rate of the clients of AllSecur is predicted by three different methodologies. The current method used by AllSecur is the Generalized Linear Model and serves as benchmark. The two new methodologies are survival analysis and machine learning. I select the best method by evaluating its predictive performance in an out-of-sample dataset. The best survival analysis method is the Cox Proportional Hazards model with variables selected by a Lasso regression. The best machine learning method is the Stochastic Gradient Boosting algorithm. I find that the Stochastic Gradient Boosting algorithm outperforms the GLM and the Lasso regression, and that the GLM outperforms the Lasso regression.
Carbon nanotubes for biomolecular sensing and photovoltaics

A computational investigation of some optoelectronic applications of carbon nanotubes (CNT) is presented, including CNT-based solar cells and biosensors. The results could be used to evaluate the performance of CNT devices and clarify the necessity of further experimental research in this area. A coaxially-gated CNT field-effect transistor (CNFET) forms the basic structure of the devices modeled in this thesis. Diffusive transport is present in long-channel devices, as in our case, while the quantum mechanical effects are mainly present in the form of tunneling from Schottky-barrier contacts at the metal-CNT interfaces. Band-to-band recombination of electron-hole pairs (EHP) is assumed to be the source of electroluminescence. In a first-order approximation, protein-CNT interactions are modeled as the modification of the potential profile along the longitudinal axis of CNTs due to electrostatic coupling between partial charges, in the oxide layer of the CNFET, and the nanotube. The possibility of electronic detection is evaluated. The electroluminescence of the CNT is proposed as an optical detection scheme due to its sensitivity to the magnitude and the polarity of the charge in the oxide. The validity of the model is argued for the given models. A value for the minimum required size of a computational window in a detailed simulation is derived. The structure of an electrostatically gated p-i-n diode is simulated and investigated for photovoltaic purposes. The absorbed power from the incident light and the interaction between the nanotubes is modeled with COMSOL. The results are interpreted as a generation term and introduced to the Drift-Diffusion Equation (DDE). We have observed behavior similar to that in an experimentally-realized device. The performance of CNT-based
Leverage and the Cost of Capital: Some Tests Using Nepalese Data

This paper is devoted to test the MM’s propositions about the relationship between leverage and cost of capital in the context of Nepalese capital markets. The main objective of the study is to determine whether the firms' overall cost of capital and cost of equity decline with the increasing use of leverage. The results showed a negative but insignificant beta value of the relationship between leverage and the overall cost of capital. Therefore the leverage may not be regarded as contributing variable to the cost of capital function for Nepalese firms. But finding contradicts with the traditional approach of the capital structure theories. It is further concluded that the cost of capital declines not only with leverage because of the tax deductibility feature of interest charge. The relationship between the cost of equity and leverage is also strongly negative. Besides leverage, the size, and D-P Ratio are other important variables that affect the cost of capital in Nepalese context. Journal of Nepalese Business Studies 2006/III/1 pp. 85-91
Who Are the "Informed" in Bond Markets: Foreign or Domestic Traders?

We empirically examine the relative information content embedded in the trades by foreign and domestic investors on a government bond market in a relatively small open economy. Bonds allow us to focus on the information pertaining to interest rates. We find that foreign investors have a greater impact on prices and incur smaller trading losses. Both foreign and domestic investors hold loss positions longer than gain positions but the effect is weaker for foreign investors. Foreign investors also exhibit a stronger tendency to trade in the active portion of the market. Collectively, these results suggest that foreign investors are more informed than their domestic counterparts in bond markets. JEL Classification: G15, G21, F21
POPULATION DYNAMICS AND SEASONAL OCCURRENCE OF ADULTS OF CHRYSOPERLA EXTERNA (HAGEN, 1861) (NEUROPTERA: CHRYSOPIDAE) IN A CITRUS ORCHARD IN SOUTHERN BRAZIL

Studies of the populationdynamics of Chrysoperla externa (HAGEN, 1861) adults were carried out ininLavras, Minas Gerais, Brazil, ina citrus orchard, with the influence of precipita tion, relative humidity and maximum, minimum and average temperatures on its population density being evaluated. Sampling was made weekly with an entomological net on 20 citrus trees in an area of ca. 2 ha, between 13:00 and 17:00 h, from May 1992 to April 1996. Annual sampling records for adults collected were 853, 629, 575 and 313, respectively, with a decreasing population trend during the period, mainly in the fourth year of study. An increase in the number of adults collected was observed from May to September, with peaks of 687 (80.5%), 344 (54.7%), 328 (57.0%) and 107 (34.2%) in September of 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995, respectively. A remarkable decrease in the number of insects collected was observed in the months after September, with no insects or only few ones collected from November to March, December to February being the most critical period. There was an increase in the number of adults with the decrease in precipitation, relative humidity and temperature, with minimum and average temperature influencing the most.
Theoretical models of planetary system formation: mass vs. semi-major axis

Context. Planet formation models have been developed during the past years to try to reproduce what has been observed of both the solar system and the extrasolar planets. Some of these models have partially succeeded, but they focus on massive planets and, for the sake of simplicity, exclude planets belonging to planetary systems. However, more and more planets are now found in planetary systems. This tendency, which is a result of radial velocity, transit, and direct imaging surveys, seems to be even more pronounced for low-mass planets. These new observations require improving planet formation models, including new physics, and considering the formation of systems. Aims: In a recent series of papers, we have presented some improvements in the physics of our models, focussing in particular on the internal structure of forming planets, and on the computation of the excitation state of planetesimals and their resulting accretion rate. In this paper, we focus on the concurrent effect of the formation of more than one planet in the same protoplanetary disc and show the effect, in terms of architecture and composition of this multiplicity. Methods: We used an N-body calculation including collision detection to compute the orbital evolution of a planetary system. Moreover, we describe the effect of competition for accretion of gas and solids, as well as the effect of gravitational interactions between planets. Results: We show that the masses and semi-major axes of planets are modified by both the effect of competition and gravitational interactions. We also present the effect of the assumed number of forming planets in the same system (a free parameter of the model), as well as the effect of the inclination and eccentricity damping. We find that the fraction of ejected planets increases from nearly 0 to 8% as we change the number of embryos we seed the system with from 2 to 20 planetary embryos. Moreover, our calculations show that, when considering planets more massive than ~5 M⊕, simulations with 10 or 20 planetary embryos statistically give the same results in terms of mass function and period distribution.
Investigating the Effect of Company Financial Leverage and Growth Opportunities on the Investment Decisions in the Companies Listed on Tehran Stock Exchange

This study investigated the effect of company financial leverage and growth opportunities on the investment decisions using information on Iranian companies listed on Tehran Stock Exchange. This paper aims to answer is whether financial leverage influences the investment decisions in Iranian context. By answering this question, the author attempts to add to the existing literature by bringing new evidence on the relationship between leverage and investment decisions of firms listed in Tehran Stock Exchange in Iran. For the study purpose, the 83 companies with the desired condition were selected for this purpose and panel data with fixed effects was used to test hypotheses. The results of this research show that companies with higher Financial Leverage adjust their investment decisions. The results of this study can be used by shareholders, managers and finance researchers.