Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Twenty years of internal migration in Italy. Answers from some economic and non-economic determinants

The aim of the paper is to examine the determinants of interregional migration in Italy. In addition to the conventional variables used to explain migration decision, the impact of housing prices and externalities variables were studied. The period considered is 1985-2006, during which different migration trends took place. Using a GMM dynamic panel, the results show that this model, due to the complexity of the internal migration process, omits some important economic and non-economic variables and may not be representative of migration flow in Italy. Furthermore, the analysis confirms the perception that in different periods could be different also the reasons behind the migration decision.
Evaluation of Head Movements in Short-term Measurements and Recordings with Human Subjects using Head-Tracking Sensors

Measurements for spatial hearing research, binaural recordings, virtual reality techniques etc. often rely on Head-Related Transfer Functions of human subjects, head-tracking techniques etc. Individually measured HRTFs and recordings on human heads may result in more accurate localization and sound field rendering. On the other hand, the measurement and recording procedure raise new problems such as decreased signal-to-noise ratio or subject comfort. For measurements with human subjects lots of methods are used from free heads to different head fixations methods. This study analyses the range of unwanted head movements during measurements using different sensors and environmental conditions based on the circular angle variance, errors in yaw-pitch-roll directions and magnitude of standard deviation. Results show errors about 2 degrees and magnitudes of standard deviation of 2-8 cm depending on the situation as well as a preference for sitting instead of standing posture.
Fisheries forensics: the use of DNA tools for improving compliance, traceability and enforcement in the fishing industry

There is an increasing requirement for traceability of fish and fish products, both for consumer protection and for regulatory enforcement, in particular with respect to illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. IUU fishing is a serious global problem and one of the main impediments to the achievement of sustainable world fisheries. Genetic markers are used for the identification of species and populations in fisheries biology and can potentially also be used to support investigations and deter IUU fishing and food fraud. This review examines the development and application of non-human forensic genetic techniques for the purposes of species identification, population assignment and supply chain traceability in world fisheries. Key issues in the transfer from academic research to validated forensic methods are presented highlighting differences in how data are produced and interpreted. The rapid increase in genomic data production and subsequent future potential for greater spatial resolution of fish stocks is discussed alongside the biological and practical limitations of using DNA markers for fisheries enforcement.
A tool for effective transferring of knowledge and technology in contracting organizations

The project-based nature of contracting organizations creates a learning opportunity from most of its activities. Although knowledge helps to gain valuable experience from construction projects, due to its complex and unique nature, organizations do not systematically secure knowledge for later usage. Due to that, contracting organizations create significant discontinuities in flows of knowledge within members, tasks and tools. Therefore, for contracting organizations to make the use of its knowledge, a mechanism for managing knowledge has to exist. That mechanism should include efficient transferring of knowledge throughout the organization. Such transferring can occur through the organization’s various activities and organizations stand to benefit if these activities are done strategically not only to acquire, but also to share and transfer knowledge and ultimately enhance performance. Today, the construction industry is moving towards sustainable solutions for projects. Therefore, necessity of knowledge transferring mechanism has become much more important than ever. The study has henceforth analyzed the knowledge transfer process of contracting organizations in Sri Lanka and explored how these organizations facilitate transfer of knowledge. Three contracting organizations were selected among C1 contractors in Sri Lanka for this case study and the research problem was examined through semi-structured interviews of the key participants of the organizations. The analyses from findings support the propositions set forth in the study: the importance of the knowledge transfer process in contracting organizations, the situational nature of the knowledge being transferred, effects, barriers and measures for its effectiveness for knowledge transfer initiatives. In effect, the study builds a knowledge transfer process reflected in contracting organizations in Sri Lanka by mapping case study findings to the conceptual model and a model for sustainable business process of contracting organizations. Recommendations for contracting organizations at policy and functional level are made based on the findings. Fundamentally, contracting organizations should adapt knowledge transfer process to its organizational strategy to achieve success in their business through sustainable solution.
The relationship between trading volume, stock index returns and volatility: Empirical evidence in Nordic countries.

In this paper, several methods such as VAR and EGARCH are employed to examine the relationship between trading volume, stock index returns and volatility in Nordic countries for the period 1999 to 2009. Our results confirm a positive relationship between trading volume and absolute stock returns. More specifically, there are bidirectional causality in Demark and Finland while Sweden and Norway are found to have unidirectional causality from returns to trading volume. This paper also points out that while trading volume may contain some information which is helpful in explaining volatility it cannot remove the persistence of volatility.
Restricting mischievous users in anonymizing networks

Anonymizing networks such as knoll tolerate users to admittance Internet services clandestinely by using a progression of routers to bury the client's IP address from the server. The achievement of such networks, conversely, has been restricted by users employing this anonymity for obnoxious purposes such as defacing admired websites. Website administrators habitually rely on IP-address jamming for disabling admission to mischievous users, but jamming IP addresses is not convenient if the abuser routes through an anonymizing network. As a consequence, administrators obstruct all recognized depart nodes of anonymizing networks, denying anonymous access to mischievous and behaving users alike. To tackle this problem, we current Nymble, a system in which servers can "blacklist" mischievous users, thereby jamming users without compromising their ambiguity. Our organization is thus atheist to different servers' definitions of mischievous — servers can blacklist users for whatever reason, and the privacy of blacklisted users is maintained.
Macroeconomic Determinants of Migrants' Remittances: New Evidence from a panel VAR

This paper examines the macroeconomic determinants of migrants' remittances dynamics. The study uses panel VAR methods in order to compensate for both data limitations and endogeneity among variables. The analysis considers annual data for 14 Latin and Caribbean countries over the period 1990-2007. The results show evidence that host (U.S) economic conditions are an important factor explaining remittances dynamics, while home economic conditions do not have a significant influence on remittances.
La Chanson d’Otinel : édition complète du corpus manuscrit et prolégomènes à l’édition critique

Se rattachant a la geste du roi, la Chanson d'Otinel n'avait pas ete reeditee depuis le travail pionnier de F. Guessard et H. Michelant en 1858. Partant des objets tangibles que sont les manuscrits pour aller vers l'etude de la tradition et de l'œuvre, ce travail se propose de reexaminer l'ensemble des donnees disponibles, en vue de permettre la restauration d'une œuvre qui a connu une diffusion importante dans l'Europe medievale, mais que nous ne conservons qu'en l'etat de vestiges epars. La these prend un parti resolument methodologique, en cherchant a faire beneficier l'edition des progres epistemologiques engendres tant par les contributions les plus recentes aux debats propres a l'ecdotique et a la critique textuelle que par ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler les « humanites numeriques ». L'edition tente ainsi de depasser l'opposition entre philologie « nouvelle » et traditionnelle, de la methode des fautes communes ou d'inspiration bedieriste, pour se placer dans la perspective d'une « quatrieme voie » et d'une edition « tournee vers la tradition ». Les techniques de l'edition electronique et de la philologie numerique sont sollicitees afin de fournir une edition complete du corpus manuscrit, qui, par des transcriptions « a couches », donne acces a differentes representations et au systeme graphique des differents temoins. L'edition vise egalement a la description et l'analyse des liens que ces temoins entretiennent entre eux, en mettant en place une methode de representation de la variance textuelle et en cherchant a appuyer l'analyse genealogique sur une prise en compte globale de la tradition, incluant les traductions medievales (galloises, norroises, anglaises) et les versions derivees. Le travail de modelisation et de description des manuscrits et de leurs textes, formalise par un modele XML/TEI concu pour les besoins de cette edition mais se voulant de portee plus generale, est tres nettement tourne vers l'exploitation des donnees, dans une perspective d'analyse quantitative doublee d'une approche plus traditionnelle (paleographie, scriptometrie, stemmatologie). Des methodes relevant de la modelisation mathematique, de la statistique, de l'algorithmique et de l'intelligence artificielle sont mises en œuvre, ainsi que des traitements visant a permettre l'interoperabilite, la montee en masse et la systematisation du travail editorial (reconnaissance optique de caracteres, annotation linguistique, collation), au sein d'une chaine editoriale faisant la part belle a l'analyse. Les developpements effectues sont principalement en XML (TEI, XSLT), R et Python.
Economic Causes of Extremism Intellectual (Thoughts) Views of Graduate Students Using Multivariate Statistical Techniques

The present study investigated the impact of the economic reasons on the intellectual (thoughts) extremism, and the statement of the most important indicators in the economic factor that lead to extremism from the views of graduate students. The study problem based on the following question: What are economic factors leading to the extremism of the intellectual(Thoughts)? Correlation coefficient, Principal component analysis (PCA), varimax (F) rotated factor analysis, and dendrogram cluster analysis (DCA) were assessed for the economic impacts that leads to extremism(Thoughts). Multivariate statistical analysis of the dataset and correlation analysis suggested that the strong positive correlations are commonly associated in the poverty and lack of interest in remote areas for major cities Center. Multivariate statistical analysis such as principal component analysis, varimax rotated factor analysis, and dendrogram cluster analysis allowed the identification of three main factors controlling that lead to extremism from the views of graduate students. The extracted factors are as follows: low living expenses, poverty and substantial deprivation, and unequal opportunities and unemployment associations related to prevalence of corruption phase.
The tongue and lips in Lombard speech: A pilot study of vowel-space expansion

We investigate some ways in which speech production alters to make speech sounds more intelligible to a listener. This single speaker pilot study uses ultrasound tongue imaging and videos of lips to investigate the underlying articulatory processes used to distinguish six different monophthongal vowels in Scottish English in a consistent b__p frame. Lombard speech was elicited in an interactive feedback task with a neutral condition and a condition where the listener’s hearing was masked by speech babble. As a baseline, the acoustic formant space was measured, which showed Lombard effects of F1 lowering for all vowels except /i/ and an increase in intensity. In articulation, we found that in the low and back vowel targets, the hyper-articulated version has extra lowering. However, for high front vowels /i/ and /e/, the hyper-articulated version has slight blade lowering and dorsal retraction in association with raising into the palate. The vowel /ʉ/ has very little change, but seems to fit in the high front set. Lip protrusion and spreading are enhanced, appropriately. Despite the frame being identical in each word, qualitatively the speaker enhanced the /b/ but not the /p/, supporting models in which a CV unit is planned holistically in speech production.
Learning to Score Figure Skating Sport Videos

This paper aims at learning to score the figure skating sports videos. To address this task, we propose a deep architecture that includes two complementary components, i.e., Self-Attentive LSTM and Multi-scale Convolutional Skip LSTM. These two components can efficiently learn the local and global sequential information in each video. Furthermore, we present a large-scale figure skating sports video dataset – FisV dataset. This dataset includes 500 figure skating videos with the average length of 2 minutes and 50 seconds. Each video is annotated by two scores of nine different referees, i.e., Total Element Score(TES) and Total Program Component Score (PCS). Our proposed model is validated on FisV and MIT-skate datasets. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our models in learning to score the figure skating videos. The codes and datasets would be downloaded from https://github.com/loadder/MS_LSTM. git.
Gate-refreshable nanowire chemical sensors

ZnO nanowire field effect transistors were implemented as highly sensitive chemical sensors for detection of NO2 and NH3 at room temperature. Due to a Debye screening length comparable to the nanowire diameter, the electric field applied over the back gate electrode was found to significantly affect the sensitivity as it modulates the carrier concentration. A strong negative field was utilized to refresh the sensors by an electrodesorption mechanism. In addition, different chemisorbed species could be distinguished from the “refresh” threshold voltage and the temporal response of the conductance. These results demonstrated a refreshable field effect sensor with a potential gas identification function.
Nitrate Removal from Aqueous Solutions Using Granular Activated Carbon Modified with Iron Nanoparticles (RESEARCH NOTE)

Nitrate contamination of water resources and the growing concentration of nitrate endanger human health and the environment and considering its reduction strategies from water resources is important. The aim of this study was to investigate the possibility of removal of nitrate from aqueous solutions using granular activated carbon from grape wood coated with iron nanoparticles. The results showed that more than 99% of the nitrate was removed from the solution using granular activated carbon/nanoparticles zero valent iron (GAC/NZVI). The nitrate adsorption process by GAC followed the Freundlich isotherm (R2 = 0.95) and NZVI and GAC/NZVI followed Langmuir isotherm (R2 = 0.96). Furthermore, the kinetic studies of all three adsorbents for nitrate adsorption showed the highest correlation with the pseudo-second order equation. According to the results of this study, it can be stated that activated carbon derived from grape wood coated by iron nanoparticles as a relatively cheap adsorbent is efficient in nitrate removal from water.
Video Inpainting Using a Contour-based Method in Presence of More than One Moving Objects

To restore corrupted images and video frames, a technique named inpainting or completion is used. This paper introduces an approach which is used to inpaint damaged objects in video frames. These objects are damaged whether partially or totally. In order to get to a more visually pleasant result, the moving objects and the background are separated from each other. To inpaint the stationary background, a patch-based method is used. Missing moving objects are inpainted using an object-based method with the help of a contour-based method. Presence of more than one moving object makes a problem; how to separate the goal object from other moving objects. This paper proposes a new method based on contour to solve this problem. Finally, the inpainted foreground and background are superimposed; the result is the inpainted video.
THE APPLICATION OF SYSTEMS THINKING TO THE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABILITY

The study proposes a systems model for the concept of sustainability. Based on the premise that the spectrum of challenges of sustainable development are systemic problems that cannot be resolved with a reductionist approach, the paper explores the key conceptual successions to explain the root of sustainable development. It then clarifies a few misconceptions concerning the Brundtland Report and highlights the limitations of the current widely used model of sustainability. The study collates and synthesises recent definitions of the concept. It then applies systems thinking to develop a more comprehensive model to promote the understanding and form the basis for further research in the application of a systems approach to the concept of sustainability.
Assessment of the changes in some diagnostic parameters in male albino rats (Rattus norvegicus) toxicated with thiodicarb insecticide

The Present work investigates the serum levels of glucose, cholesterol, protein, urea, creatinine and some enzyme activities (AST,ALT and ALP) in male albino rats treated orally with 1/10 LD50 dose of thiodicarb insecticide (carbamate group)daily for 7 days (short-term) and 30days (long-term). A highly significant elevation in serum urea, creatinine, AST and ALT accompanied by a highly significant decrease in the body weight and a significant increase in serum glucose level were recorded in rats of long-term group. While, the short-term group showed a highly significant increase in serum level of glucose and urea. Moreover, a significant decrease in serum cholesterol content was recorded but the total protein concentration and ALP activity were not affected.
Book Review: I, Musician: Towards a Model of Identity Construction and Maintenance by Music Education Students as Musicians

pecking order and they must rely on other students and faculty to maintain an acceptable opinion of their abilities as ’performer’. The ’musician’ in the title of the monograph generally refers to ’performer’. Roberts notes that the designation ’musician,’ a somewhat nebulous concept, appears to be second to that of ’performer. ’ That is, those students who do not feel secure as performers claim to be musicians.
Expanding the Horizons of Supply Chain in Higher Education Institution: Resources and Expatriate Academics (EAs) Outcomes

The ultimate goal of any service industry is to provide quality services to its customers. Applying industry models of supply chain management in higher education institutions (HEIs), this study aims to examine the impact of various resources on expatriate academics’ outcomes. Internationalisation of higher education sector has created the need to recruit foreign faculty to become part of critical inputs in providing world-class education to students. In this regard, understanding the factors contribute to their effectiveness is imperative for continuous quality improvement. A survey-based quantitative research using a sample of 152 expatriate academics (EAs) employed in 20 Malaysian public universities revealed some important findings. Both the personal (cultural intelligence) and organizational resources (perceived organizational support) are found to be important determinants of EAs work engagement and psychological needs satisfaction which is important for quality service delivery. The findings of this study have made significant contribution to international human resource management practices and policy makers especially to Malaysian HEIs with regards to recruitment and retention of academic expatriates.
EXPLAINING SHORT TERM FOREIGN DEBT IN SELECTED SUB-SAHARAN AFRICAN COUNTRIES

The study examined the impact of external financial liberalisation and political institutions on short term foreign debt in 42 selected sub-Saharan African countries. It answered the question on whether external financial liberalisation and institutionalised democracy reduce short term foreign debt. Both theory and the empirical literature suggest that external financial liberalisation and institutionalised democracy lead to reduced stock of short term foreign debt. By using a dynamic panel data analysis, this study confirmed the hypotheses that external financial liberalisation within the framework of institutionalised democracy leads to reduced stock of short term foreign debt.
DYNAMICS OF SECONDARY DROP BREAKUP—A RATE CONTROLLING PROCESS IN DENSE SPRAYS

Recent progress toward understanding secondary drop b reakup is reviewed, considering both experimental and computational studies but li mited to step changes of ambient velocities, i.e., to secondary breakup due to classical shock wave disturbances. Experimental studies of secondary breakup have concentrated on large liquid/gas density ratios because this s implifies apparatus development and measurements. Initial work along these lines established deformation and b reakup regimes, and d rop size and velocity distributions after breakup as jump conditions, assuming that breakup times were small compared to times required for significant changes of the spray environment. These results confirmed a proposal due to Levich (1962) that significant effects of liquid viscosity (characterized b y large Ohnesorge number conditions) would inhibit secondary drop d eformation and b reakup compared to the secondary breakup criteria of Hinze (1955). Later measurements raised questions about the use of jump conditions to represent secondary breakup p roperties, finding that breakup can require significant ti mes and distances within the dense spray region n ear an injector exit; therefore, subsequent experimental studies at l arge liquid/gas density ratios considered the temporal properties of secondary breakup. These studies found the drop size and velocity distributions of drops formed by secondary breakup, as well as rates of liquid breakup, as a function of time during the breakup process. Finally, recent numerical simulations of drop deformation and secondary breakup have been able to consider large variations of liquid/gas density ratios and Reynolds numbers that are difficult t o address using experiments. These studies have shown that effects of liquid/gas density ratios and Reynolds numbers are relatively small for values greater than 8 and 50, respectively, which are typical of past experimental conditions and are representative of most practical sprays. Numerical simulations have shown that smaller values of these parameters, however, significantly inhibit drop deformation and secondary breakup.