Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Feasibility of Attention Training for Reducing Mind-Wandering and Digital Multitasking in High Schools

During academic activities, adolescents must manage both the internal distraction of mind-wandering and the external distraction of digital media. Attention training has emerged as a promising strategy for minimizing these distractions, but scalable interventions that can deliver effective attention training in high schools are still needed. The present investigation used a one-group pre-post design to examine the feasibility and outcomes of a digital attention training course at a public high school. The intervention was delivered with reasonably strong fidelity of implementation, with students completing 92% of the lessons and 79% of the daily exercises. At baseline, students reported mind-wandering more frequently during class than they multitasked, and mind-wandering was more negatively correlated with classroom focus. From pre-test to post-test (n = 229), students reported improved emotional regulation and reduced mind-wandering during daily life. Among the 76% of students who felt they paid attention in class less than they should, classroom focus improved significantly. During class, these students reported significantly less mind-wandering but slightly greater digital multitasking. During homework, they reported significantly less digital multitasking but only marginally reduced mind-wandering. Collectively, these results suggest that online interventions could be a scalable way of providing attention training in high schools, but that future work must consider the role of both mind-wandering and digital multitasking.
Local Content Development Framework in Mining Context: The Case of Pantukan, Compostela Valley, Philippines

: This case study aimed to describe the status of mining industry, the status of the backward linkages, the forward linkages and the sideward linkages of mining industry; and formulate a local content development framework of Pantukan, Compostela Valley Province, Mindanao, Philippines. The present investigation discovered that mining industry in Pantukan was classified into two sectors, the large-scale mining sector and the small-scale mining sector and are operating in a distinctive manner and comprised of diversified players which created competition among players leading to more efficient and effective value chain. The existing backward, forward and sideward linkages, although not fully establish, is an indication that local content development is possible in the mining areas of Pantukan. Four areas shall be considered in local content development in the context of mining in Pantukan under value chain approach, to include the industry structure analysis, core competencies analysis, segmentation analysis, partnership and collaboration.
Data-Driven Real-Timed-Failure-Propagation-Graph Reﬁnement for Complex System Fault Diagnosis

—Timed Failure Propagation Graphs (TFPGs) have been widely used for the failure modeling and diagnosis of safety-critical systems. Currently most TFPGs are manually constructed by system experts, a process that can be time-consuming, error-prone, and even impossible for systems with highly nonlinear and machine-learning-based components. Moreover, the current formalism of TFPGs can only deal with discrete-state systems, a feature greatly restricts its adoption in the diagnosis of continuous-state systems. This paper proposes a new type of TFPGs, called Real Timed Failure Propagation Graphs (rTFPGs), designed for continuous-state systems. More importantly, it presents a systematic way of constructing rTFPGs by combining the powers of human experts and data-driven methods: ﬁrst, an expert constructs a partial rTFPG base his/her expertise; then a data-driven algorithm reﬁnes the rTFPG by adding nodes and edges based on a given set of labeled signals. The proposed approach has been successfully implemented and evaluated on a testbed emulating a spacecraft power storage and distribution system.
Experimental Study on the Effect of Variation of Blade Arc Angle to the Performance of Savonius Water Turbine Flow in Pipe

Water is one of the renewable energy sources that can replace fossil energy sources for supplying electricity needs. Savonius water turbine is capable of operating at a low rotational speed and suitable for hydroelectric power plants using limited water head at wastewater pipe in the high rise building. However, this turbine has disadvantages at low power and torque coefficient. Research has been carried out to improve the performance of the turbine, such as varying the number of blades and angles of curvature in the prototype U-type turbine rotor. This study discusses the process of designing and testing a prototype of L type turbine rotor with three variations of blade arc angle; 120°, 135° dan 150°. The result shows that type L turbines with arc 135° blade angles have the highest power coefficient of 27% on a TSR of 1,32 compared to others. 
SpecROP: Speculative Exploitation of ROP Chains

Speculative execution attacks, such as Spectre, reuse code from the victim’s binary to access and leak secret information during speculative execution. Every variant of the attack requires very particular code sequences, necessitating elaborate gadget-search campaigns. Often, victim programs contain few, or even zero, usable gadgets. Consequently, speculative attacks are sometimes demonstrated by injecting usable code sequences into the victim. So far, attacks search for mono-lithic gadgets, a single sequence of code which performs all the attack steps. We introduce SpecROP, a novel speculative execution attack technique, inspired by classic code reuse attacks like Return-Oriented Programming to tackle the rarity of code gadgets. The SpecROP attacker uses multiple, small gadgets chained by poisoning multiple control-ﬂow instructions to perform the same computation as a monolithic gadget. A key difference to classic code reuse attacks is that control-ﬂow transfers between gadgets use speculative targets compared to targets in memory or registers. We categorize SpecROP gadgets into generic classes and demonstrate the abundance of such gadgets in victim libraries. Further, we explore the practicality of inﬂuencing multiple control-ﬂow instructions on modern processors, and demonstrate an attack which uses gadget chaining to increase the leakage potential of a Spectre variant, SMoTherSpectre.
Katrina-related Health Impacts on Vietnamese New Orleanians: A Longitudinal Analysis

A wide range of self-reported and objective health measures collected for a Vietnamese immigrant sample living in the greater New Orleans area just weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck possess extraordinary potential as baseline measures for investigating how immigrants fare after such disasters. We assess the short term (1 year) effects of a natural disaster upon the health of a recent immigrant population by comparing pre-event and post-event physical and mental health assessments for working age (20-49) Vietnamese-American New Orleanians. Individuals in our sample underwent a 90 minute health assessment during June and July 2005 (n=125); and the majority of these same individuals have been located and re-assessed during August and September of 2006 (current n=82). Our working sample is these 82 individuals for whom we now have both pre and post-event physical and mental health measures. This sample size will increase as interviews continue over the next several weeks.
Genetic Diversity Analysis of Strawberry Accession with ISSR

ISSR were used to detect the genetic diversity among 34 strawberry accessions from different countries,to establish genetic tree and reveal the genetic relationships between the varieties.The results showed that eleven ISSR primers produced 79 DNA bands with averaged 7.18 DNA bands each primer pair;in which 59 were polymorphic bands with the ratio of 74.68%. The genetic similarity coefficient between the varieties was 0.71 to 0.99,34 strawberry accessions were classified into 7 groups at similarity coefficient of 0.75. The results from ISSR molecular markers were correlated obviously with the geographical distribution of the Strawberry accessions.The varieties of "Fualandi" in Fujian and Guangdong province with "Sweet Charlie" in American were proved to be a synonym.
Constrained minimization of incomplete quadratic functions and its applications

In an ordinary minimization problem, the quadratic function contains both quadratic and linear terms. Through minimization, a system of linear equations is yielded. The right-hand side vector of such a system is normally a known input. In a special type of elasticity problem in which coerced deformation of an elastic body is sought, the applied load becomes unknown. In other words, the quadratic function does not have a linear term. The objective function has two quadratic terms, and the minimization is conducted to satisfy some constraints. In another application where the amount of springback of a stamped metal is to be determined, the applied force giving the metal the least strain energy is sought. In this paper, the mathematical formulation as well as the approach to solve the problems is presented. Several numerical examples are presented.
Significance of Convergence and the Role of IFRS in Japan: To encourage IFRS to be accepted by converging countries

The paper is to be revised and subsequently published in Hans-Georg Bruns, Robert H. Herz, Heinz-Joahim Neubuerger, and Sir David Tweedie ed., International Accounting: Standard Setting–Practice–Enforcement (working title). It is not intended for circulation or distribution except as indicated by the author. It goes without saying that the views expressed here do not represent those of any organization but are the author’s own.
Automatic Discriminator of Abnormal Chromosomes Using Deep Learning Algorithms

Radiation dose estimation is an important procedure for not only radiological operators but also persons who are exposed by a background or artificial radiations such as cosmic rays, specific soils, and medical exposures. One of the renowned methods of biological dose estimation is Dicentric Chromosome Assay (DCA) discriminating the abnormal chromosomes whether cells have aberration chromosomes or not. Although the previous studies suggested the method to automatically estimate the radiation exposure with DCA [1-5], they still have lower accuracy than manual analysis and require human intervention. We developed an automatic system of discriminating the abnormal chromosomes using an object detection algorithm based on deep learning method. In this research, Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) [6] was adopted and the chromosome data which were provided from Dongnam Institute of Radiological & Medical Sciences (DIRAMS) were used to train the neural network.
Static and Dynamic Disparities between Monetary and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement: Evidence from Thailand

There has been a rapid expansion in the literature on the measurement of multidimensional poverty in recent years. This paper focuses on the longitudinal aspects of multidimensional poverty and its link to dynamic income poverty measurement. Using panel household survey data in Thailand from 2007, 2008, and 2010, the paper analyses the prevalence and dynamics of both multidimensional and monetary poverty from the same dataset. The results show that the monetary poor (or non-poor) are not always multidimensionally poor (or non-poor) indeed the overlap between the two measures is much less than 50 percent. Additionally, monetary poverty shows faster progress as well as a higher level of fluctuation than multidimensional poverty. I suggest that rapid economic growth as experienced by Thailand has a larger and more immediate impact on monetary than on multidimensional poverty.
Conditional Value at Risk and Extreme Values: Risk Analysis of the Emerging Stock Markets from Brazil and Mexico

Stock markets, particularly those from the developing countries, are characterized by high volatility which conventional models fail to capture fully, potentially leading to high losses. Value at Risk (VaR) models signified an important step to estimate losses of financial assets and portfolios. However, the stylized fact that financial returns exhibit fat tails, implies that conventional VaR models (parametrics and non-parametrics models) show important limitations because they fail to take into account the right statistical distributions to capture the frequency and severity of extreme values; the normal distribution is insufficient for this purpose. Extreme Value Theory (EVT) overcomes this limitation because it provides a framework to formally study the extreme behavior of stock markets returns and quantifies the possible losses experienced during financial instabilities and turbulences without making any assumptions about the underlying distribution of returns. This study uses the c-quantile of a fat tailed distribution to Value at Risk analysis; the parameters thus obtained improve the accuracy of measuring financial risk and reduces model risk. This work also extends the results of extreme value theory to show the impact of the frequency and size of extreme returns on values of Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR). A generalized extreme value distribution (GEVD) is used for the cases of the two largest stock markets from Latin America, Brazil and Mexico, and a CVaR model is applied to determine risk exposure by investing in those markets. Daily index data for the period January 2 1970 to December 31, 2004 is used. The empirical evidence shows a high potential of GEVD to explain adequately the extreme behavior from the stock markets from Brazil and Mexico. Similarly, analyzing tail indexes estimates for each market, weak evidence of asymmetry between left and right tails is found; the distribution’s right tail is slightly heavier than the left tail, which is different to the case of mature markets. Also, the return distribution from the Mexican Stock Exchange presents heavier tails and a higher propensity to experience losses than the distribution from the Brazilian exchange. Finally, in general, Extreme Value Theory is a more conservative methodology to estimate VaR and CVaR than the traditional VaR models.
Savoiu rev nr 1 2010 final EDEN III

The present paper tries to describe not only the contemporary relations between economics and physic s, but also between many, many other sciences, or more cor rectly scientific universes, in a so-called “multiverse” o f disciplines in the field of contemporary scientific research. T e idea of a multidisciplinarity field, resulting from the reuni ted universes of Econophysics, Sociophysics, Quantum Physics, Demographysics, sciences of complexity, etc. is a n ormal consequence of the development of multidisciplinary sciences during this century and especially in the next one. The definitional issues of this new disciplinary multiv erse are detailed against a short historical background of t eaching and researching physics about the Universe. Two spe cial examples about multiverse as a synthesis, or a reun ion of universes of multidisciplinarities, are detailed th rough the work of two scientific researchers in the field of mathematics and informatics field, Serbia’s Petrovitch M. and R omania’s Odobleja Ş. , and some important ideas from their papers are described in the lines of this paper. The special d evelopment of Econophysics, Sociophysics, Quantum Physics in R omania, and the impact of EDEN I, II and III are the final themes of this analysis.
Exploration Analysis in Finite-Horizon Turn-based Stochastic Games

Exploration and exploitation trade-off is one of the key concerns in reinforcement learning. Previous work on one-player Markov Decision Processes has reached near-optimal re-sults for both PAC and high probability regret guarantees. However, such an analysis is lacking for the more complex stochastic games with multi-players, where all players aim to ﬁnd an approximate Nash Equilibrium. In this work, we address the exploration issue for the N -player ﬁnite-horizon turn-based stochastic games (FTSG). We propose a framework, Upper Bounding the Values for Players (UBVP), to guide exploration in FTSGs. UBVP leverages the key insight that players choose the optimal policy conditioning on the policies of the others simultaneously; thus players can explore in the face of uncertainty and get close to the Nash Equilibrium. Based on UBVP, we present two provable algorithms. One is Uniform -PAC with a sample complexity of ˜ O (1 / ✏ 2 ) to get an ✏ -Nash Equilibrium for arbitrary ✏ > 0 , and the other has a cumulative exploitability of ˜ O ( p T ) with high probability.
Studies on corm and cormel production in gladiolus

Two experiments were conducted to observe the influence of various cultural operations on corm multiplication of gladiolus cv. Jester. The results showed that planting of whole corm is beneficial for the production of corms and cormel, as compared to 3/4 and 1/2 size Further, planting of cormel, in soil + leaf mould substrate in equal proportion improved corm diameter, weight of corm and cormel number and their weight when compared with soil, FYM, Soil + FYM, FYM + Leaf mould and soil + FYM + Leaf mould.
Antibacterial Components of Levisticum officinale Koch against Multidrug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis

Background: Levisticum officinale commonly known as as Anjedan e roomi in the Persian language, is a member of the Apiaceae family. One of the most important biological activities reported to date for L. officinale is the antibacterial activity. So, a bioassay-guided fractionation technique was used to evaluate the active constituents of Levisticum officinale against some bacterial strains. Methods: Column chromatography was used to isolation of compounds from Levisticum officinale. Spectroscopic methods including 1D & 2D NMR and HRMS were used to identification of isolated compounds. Also to evaluate antibacterial activity, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) was carried out by broth micro-dilution method. Results: Phytochemical analysis of the ethyl acetate extract of the plant roots led to isolation of bergapten (1), isogosferol (2), oxypeucedanin (3), oxypeucedanin hydrate (4), oxyimperatorin (5), ferulic acid (6) and falcarindiol (7) that falcarindiol and oxypeucedanin were relatively active on MDR M. tuberculosis with MIC values of = 32 and 64 μg/mL, respectively. The results of the docking analysis showed that oxypeucedanin (3) and falcarindiol (7) had good affinity for InhA with docking score values of -7.764 and -7.703 kcal/mol, respectively. Also, compounds 3 and 7 were studied against two Gram negative (Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and two Gram positive (Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecium) bacteria strains. Falcarindiol showed antibacterial activity against the S. aureus strain with a MIC value of 7.8 μg/mL and against methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), with a MIC value of 15.6 μg/mL. Conclusion: Finally, 7 compounds were isolated that compounds 2-6 report for the first time from Levisticum officinale. On the basis of the molecular docking study, oxypeucedanin (3) and falcarindiol (7) as active compounds against M. tuberculosis may be proposed as potential inhibitors of 2-trans-enoyl-ACP reductase (InhA), a key enzyme involved in the biosynthesis of the mycobacterial cell wall.
Global referencing systems and their contribution to a versatile production

—Cooperating systems like robots are an enabler of versatile production. Their integration into production is supported by virtual planning tools today, that are commonly known to provide versatility. Though the alignment of virtuality and production reality is still challenging. The transformation of virtual versatility on the real production cell is the key to allow what is called versatile production. Production research focuses on self-referencing systems, which use global referencing systems (GRS) as a part of the underlying infrastructure to synchronize virtuality and reality. By implementing global referencing systems, production itself becomes the focus of metrology and self-organizes around the planned process autonomously. In this contribution Nikon Metrology iGPS serves as a base for the global referencing system and the self-referencing is enabled using a simple control strategy.
Ramona-Mihaela PAUN, PhD E-mail: ramona.paun@csie.ase.ro USING FILTERS AND PRODUCTION FUNCTION METHOD FOR ESTIMATING OUTPUT GAP AND POTENTIAL GDP FOR ROMANIA

Univariate filters and production function methods are among the most widely recommended methods for estimating potential output and output gap. In this paper we apply the production function method on annual time series covering years 1991-2012 and employ the Hodrick-Prescott filter, BaxterKing and Christiano-Fritzgerald bandpass filters on quarterly data of real GDP covering the period 20002012 to extract potential GDP and output gap for Romania. The production function we use is Cobb-Douglas type with constant returns to scale and Hicks neutral technological progress and the potential labor is computed considering both constant NAIRU, estimated with Ball-Mankiw’s method (2002), and variable NAIRU resulted from a version of Phillips curve expectation augmented model (Greenslade, Pierse (2003)). Potential output and output gap are calculated using two different values for production elasticity with respect to capital, and both constant and variable NAIRU. Regarding the empirical applications of the filters, we conclude that the CF filter performed better, and that all the methods used show the economic crisis that affected the Romanian economy during 2008-2010.
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON EVAPORATION OF A MOVING LIQUID PLUG INSIDE A HEATED DRY CAPILLARY TUBE

The paper reports an experimental study to understand the effect of heat on an isolated liquid plug (methanol) of length L moving inside a long, dry, horizontal circular mini-channel (inside D = 1.5 mm). The plug (with specified range of L/D ratios) is pushed from rest by controlled injection of air from its one side, till a quasi-steady terminal plug velocity is achieved in the adiabatic section of the capillarity tube. It is then allowed to move through the heated section maintained at constant wall temperature. It is evident from the experiments that there is a significant increase of the plug velocity in the heated region, which can be attributed to the evaporation of liquid; this increases as the wall temperature increases. Also, it is observed that evaporation is not primarily from the bulk of liquid plug but from the thin film trailing behind it.
Design of approach informing sound for quiet vehicles that indicates a car traveling

Quiet vehicles, such as hybrid and electric vehicles, emit less noise than vehicles having an internal-combustion engine, particularly at low speeds. To prevent accidents resulting from this quietness, acoustic vehicle alerting system has been designed to create approach informing sounds. However, a questionnaire survey that we conducted previously revealed that the recognition rate of the approach informing sound was not high (about 40%). To improve the recognition of the approach informing sound, we designed approach informing sounds using onomatopoeic sounds and evaluated them using an evaluation grid method for carlike sounds. We first obtained onomatopoeic sounds that reflected pedestrians’ images of approach informing sounds for quiet vehicles. The obtained onomatopoeic sounds frequently included the vowel “u,” the consonants “p” and “b,” and long tones. According to acoustic characteristics of the obtained onomatopoeic sounds (such as the fundamental frequency and roughness), we created four sound stimuli as samples of approach informing sound. We conducted an experiment using these sound stimuli and an evaluation grid method to examine the factors that affect the perception of car-like sounds as approach informing sounds. We found that sounds that replicated road noise tended to be evaluated highly as indicative of a car traveling on a road and they are thus suitable for approach informing sounds.