Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Pronominal bu-şu and this-that: Rhetorical Structure Theory

This study presents a contrastive analysis of the pronominal uses of bu and su and this and that in written academic discourse within the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988; Marcu 2000). The comparative analysis of these pronominals is done with respect to the rhetorical relations in which they are used. Data for this study were retrieved from journal articles on linguistics and education. The results show that bu-su and this-that are sensitive to rhetorical relations. Although bu and this are used in similar rhetorical functions (i.e. interpretation, explanation and reason relations), in some occurrences they are used in different rhetorical relations (i.e textual organisation and hypothetical relations). On the other hand, su is used differently from that and this in the establishment of rhetorical relations. Şu is used in the subtypes of elaboration relation (i.e. elaboration-set-member, elaboration part-whole), while that is not used in elaboration relations. That is used in antithesis, list and contrast relations, where occurrences of su are not seen. While this is used in addition, interpretation, hypothetical, summarisation and concession relations, su is not.
Language Teaching Models in Teacher Training Programs

Any language teacher who has gone through some kind of training program for the teaching of English should be familiar with various specific language teaching models that constitute the core of the training process. A language teaching model is a guide that helps the trainee to sequence the activities designed for the expectations and needs of learners in a lesson. This paper reviews the common language teaching models in teacher training programs (PPP, OHE, III, TTT, TBLT, ESA, ARC) and discusses them with deficiencies over each other.
A New Method to Improve Directivity Bandwidth of Directiional Coupler

In this paper a new technique is proposed to improve the directivity and directivity bandwidth of couplers. In this approach, a low pass filter has been inserted before isolation port. It is shown that this technique can improve coupling and coupling bandwidth. To show the performance of this approach, a coupler with small directivity bandwidth is considered. By implementing this technique on the structure, the bandwidth is increased from 0.6 GHz to 3.1 GHz. Keywordslow pass filter; directional coupler; directivity; coupling; isolation
Abscess Disease in Pastoral and Feedlot Sheep in The Sudan

1. Department of Microbiology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Khartoum, B. O. Box 32, Khartoum North – Sudan 2. Department of Medicine, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Khartoum, B. O. Box 32, Khartoum North – Sudan 3. Department of Pathology, Parasitology and Microbiology, College of Veterinary Medicine, Sudan University of Science and Technology, Hilat-Kuku, P.O. Box 407, Khartoum North, Sudan 4. Department of Pathology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Khartoum, B. O. Box 32, Khartoum North - Sudan 5. Unit of Animal Health and Safety of Animal Products. Institute for Studies and Promotion of Animal Exports, University of Khartoum, B. O. Box 32, Khartoum North – Sudan * K. Rodwan and A. Babiker contributed equally to this paper
Changes in beach shoreline due to sea level rise and waves under climate change scenarios: application to the Balearic Islands (Western Mediterranean)

Abstract. This work assesses the impacts in reshaping coastlines as a result of sea level rise and changes in wave climate. The methodology proposed combines the SWAN and SWASH wave models to resolve the wave processes from deep waters up to the swash zone in two micro-tidal sandy beaches in Mallorca island, western Mediterranean. In a first step, the modelling approach has been validated with observations from wave gauges and from the shoreline inferred from video monitoring stations, showing a good agreement between them. Afterwards, the modelling set-up has been applied to the 21st century sea level and wave projections under two different climate scenarios, representative concentration pathways RCP45 and RCP85. Sea level projections have been retrieved from state-of-the-art regional estimates, while wave projections were obtained from regional climate models. Changes in the shoreline position have been explored under mean and extreme wave conditions. Our results indicate that the studied beaches would suffer a coastal retreat between 7 and up to 50 m, equivalent to half of the present-day aerial beach surface, under the climate scenarios considered.
Effects of Legumes Consumption on the Association of Cholesterol and Bone Mineral Density in Ovariectomized Rats

Soy isoflavones have been suggested to improve bone loss and lipid profile in postmenopausal women and ovariectomized rats. In present study, we investigated the hypothesis that consumption of soybean, mung bean, cowpea and azuki bean has a beneficial effect on lipid profile which associates with bone mass in ovariectomized rats. Forty two female Sprague-Dawley rats were either sham-operated (Sham) or surgically ovariectomized (OVX). Sham and OVX groups were fed a regular AIN-93M diet, but ovariectomized rats with soybean (OS), mung bean (OM), cowpea (OC) or adzuki bean (OA) were fed AIN-93M diet replacing 35% of corn starch with powdered OS, OM, OC or OA for 10 weeks. Total- and LDL-cholesterol concentrations were significantly lower in Sham and OC groups than other OVX groups. There was significant negative association between total cholesterol concentration and bone mineral density (BMD) of tibia in only OC group. In conclusion, total-cholesterol concentration was significantly and negatively correlated with BMD in rats consumed cowpea, suggesting that the reduced cholesterol concentration may have a beneficial effect on bone mass.
ROAD TRACKING BY MAXIMIZATION OF MUTUAL INFORMATION

Automated and semi-automated geospatial feature extraction has attracted great interest from academic and industry researchers in the last decade. In this paper, we present a novel semi-automated algorithm for tracking road centerlines from medium and high-resolution remote sensing imagery. Roads are modeled as continuous and curvilinear features with similar intensity profiles perpendicular to the road centerlines. Our algorithm starts from a user-defined road seed point located on the road’s center and tracks the road centerline by searching similar image subsets along the road direction. A square window around the seed point is used as a road template. The initial position for the next road point is estimated by linear extrapolation. It is then tuned toward the road centerline by maximizing the mutual information between the template and the image subset around the tracked point. Mutual information was first defined in information theory and has been used in inter and intra-modality image matching and registration since the 1990s. Previous research on semi-automated road extraction used least squares template matching (LSTM) techniques. This paper demonstrates that mutual information is also a useful similarity metric for road tracking. Experiments performed on a variety of test sites demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more robust than algorithms using other similarity metrics. Specifically, the algorithm proposed here is less sensitive to variations in scene illumination and surface material changes.
Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities: How Much Subordination is Enough?

The commercial mortgage-backed security market has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and is now the second most important source of intermediation to the commercial real estate sector. Despite its growing importance, relatively little academic research has questioned the apparent success of the CMBS capital structure. In this paper, we study whether the recent growth in the CMBS market actually reflects the mitigation of a market imperfection, as some have suggested, or reflects ever thinner subordination levels, perhaps backed up by overly aggressive assumptions about future commercial real estate performance. Our analysis is based on a multi-factor structural model of commercial mortage defaults in which defaults are a function of interest rates and property prices. The model incorporates heterogeneity at the borrower level and transaction frictions, rendering solution of the model highly computationally burdensome task. We solve the model using a parallel alogirithm developed for the Rice Terascale Cluster (RTC), a computational platform capable of terabyte processing and storage. Our preliminary results indicate that, somewhat surprisingly, the optimal levels of CMBS subordination are lower than those observed in recent CMBS deals. One interpretation of these results is that, in the absence of a performance track record for securitized commercial mortgages, the subordination levels of early deals were set too high. Under this interpretation, our results imply that in the future the CMBS market will likely see further reductions in subordination and continued rapid growth. An indirect implication of this conclusion is that the CMBS capital structure does create value. These results have implications not just for commercial real estate, but also other markets that employ securitization structures similar to those in the CMBS market, such as asset-backed commercial paper and CDOs
Compare the Relative Frequency of Thyroid Function Disorders in Obese and Overweight Children with Non-Obese Children; a Case-Control Study

BackgroundChildhood obesity has become a global epidemic. In the recent studies has reported risk of thyroid dysfunction due to obesity. Therefore, this study intends to compare the relative frequency of thyroid function disorders in obese and overweight children with non-obese children.Materials and MethodsThis case-control study during 2015 to 2016 in Birjand, Iran was done on 137 children and adolescents (6 to 18 years), with overweight and obesity as case group and 137 non-obese subjects as control group. Body mass index (BMI), thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), free triiodothyronine (FT3) and free thyroxine (FT4) were measured, and analyzed using SPSS software version19.ResultsTSH level in obese children was significantly more (P<0.001), and FT4 (P<0.001) and FT3 levels (P=0.003), less than non-obese subjects. In the control group, 0.73% and in the case group, 2.92% of patients showed hypothyroidism disorder, that difference was not significant (P=0.177). In the control group, there was significant relationship between TSH with FT4 (P <0.001) and FT3 (P <0.001). Moreover, in the case group, there was significant relationship between TSH with FT4 (P <0.001) and FT3 (P = 0.001), and also, between FT4 with FT3 (P <0.001). ConclusionOverweight and obesity in children and adolescents can be effect on increase of TSH and decrease of FT4 and FT3. Long-term studies with larger sample size is suggested.
Assessing the occurrence of hybridisation in endangered indigenous sheep

Indiscriminate crossbreeding contributes to the loss of unique local genetic resources and the extinction of indigenous livestock species. The Namaqua Afrikaner (NAM), an indigenous fattailed sheep, has come under threat of extinction and is now mainly found in conservation flocks in its home country of South Africa. We surveyed three research or resource flocks described as purebred NAM to ascertain whether crossbred individuals were present in these flocks. Samples from the three locations underwent 50K SNP chip genotyping and results were compared with samples of known genetic heritage from ten important commercial and indigenous South African sheep breeds, including NAM. Results from principal component analysis, and FST and genetic distance calculations indicated individuals from the first two sampling locations were genetically similar to known NAM samples. Samples from the third location did not exhibit a distinct genetic similarity to NAM or any of the other breeds tested. This group may be the result of several generations of crossbreeding between indigenous and commercial breeds, such as the Meatmaster, with largely similar appearance. Continued conservation efforts of the NAM will need to safeguard against indiscriminate crossbreeding and the unintentional introduction of foreign genetics.
Improving indoor air in rural Bangladesh : results of controlled experiments

In rural Bangladesh, Indoor Air Pollution (IAP) is dangerously high for poor households dependent on biomass cooking fuels. Based on earlier World Bank research, controlled, scientifically monitored experiments were conducted in Burumdi village, Narayanganj district, to test the effects of structural arrangements and ventilation practices on IAP. Findings suggest optimal structural choices and village-level measures to reduce IAP exposure.
Comparison of Alternative Approaches to VaR Evaluation

The main goal of this article is to present alternative methods of market risk measurement in Polish banking sector with popular Value at Risk (VaR) approach. Four main methods: analytical, historical, simulation and hybrid (Filtered Historical Simulation, FHS) of VaR are presented and then three of them are applied to evaluate interest risk stemming from government bonds’ portfolio held by Polish banks. Adequacy of VaR measures counted with particular methods is compared with the help of formalized criteria and best fitted methodology is recommended.
Current in vitro assay to determine bacterial biofilm formation of clinical isolates

Biofilm mode of growth is bacterial lifestyle widespread in microbial world and represents a concern in health care. Recently, serious problem concerning biofilm-related infection is increasing significantly. However complexity of biofilm makes it difficult to conduct proper analysis. Although biofilm represents a major challenge for microbiologist, methods aimed to determine biofilm formation and development are not standardized yet. The aim of the present review was to provide an overview of the advantages and disadvantages of the difference in vitro methods for determining biofilm forming ability of clinical isolates.
A Preliminary Study on the Development of Donkey Milk Based Fermented Product

Donkey milk’s nutritional properties make it similar to human milk more than any other mammal milk, it is rich in antimicrobials and it has also been classified as hypoallergenic. Nowadays, donkey milk is again under investigation for the exploration of its functions. Due to its high price and its low fat, donkey milk is not considered ideal for commercial use especially for fermented products but due to the increased awareness for allergies it could be an excellent alternative. The aim of this study was to explore ways of producing a yoghurt-style product from donkey milk using only traditional material and methods. Donkey milk was used alone and in combination with other milks and also different cultivation methods were tested. Finally, the most successful products were tested for their sensory characteristics and their acceptance by the consumers. The results are encouraging and they indicate that a yoghurt-style product from donkey milk, without additives, is possible with the addition of other milk, in limited amount, and its sensory characteristics may be well received.
Flexible baseband transmitter for OFDM

To fully utilize the available spectrum for a wireless communication system it is feasible to adapt to different situations on the channel. In this paper a flexible OFDM transmitter is presented together with basic theory behind OFDM transmission. It is shown that high flexibility can be obtained with a reasonable amount of additional hardware. Part of the design, the FFT-processor, has already been fabricated and measurement results are presented.
Performance of n-Grams for a Question Retrieval System in the Context of Approximated Spelling

AbstractQuestion retrieval systems, unlike question answering systems, exploit the knowledgecontained in previously answered questions to answer new ones by returning already an-swered question that may respond to the user’s information needs. In our experiment, wework on improving a French language question retrieval addressing mostly young people’squestions with approximate spelling. To assess the spelling problem, character n-gramfeatures have been proposed in the literature as an alternative to the classical word basedfeatures. In the present study, we compare the performances of question retrieval modelsusing character n-grams (for n = 3, 4 and 5) to ones obtained using the classical baselineword based features. Furthermore, we test the “simpliﬁed French” procedure which at-tempt to improve the performance of the model by simplifying the French writing. Ourresults show that if n-grams do not perform as well as we could expect but perform ratherwell in the case of 4-gram together with the simpliﬁed French procedure.R´esum´eContrairement aux syst`emes de r´eponse automatiques, les syst`emes d’extraction dequestions exploitent les informations contenues dans les questions auxquelles on a d´ej`ar´epondu en fournissant a l’usager des questions auxquelles on a d´ej`a r´epondu qui peu-vent les satisfaire. Dans notre exp´erience, nous travaillons a l’am´elioration d’un syst`emed’extraction de questions destin´e principalement a des jeunes, dans un contexte avec or-thographe approximative. Pour r´epondre a ce probl`eme, les n-grams ont ´et´e propos´es dansla litt´erature comme une alternative aux caract´eristiques de textes bas´ees sur les mots.Dans cette ´etude, nous comparons les performances de mod`eles d’extraction de questionsutilisant les n-grams (avec n = 3, 4 et 5) a ceux utilisant des mots. De plus, nous testonsune proc´edure de francais simpliﬁ´e qui tente d’am´eliorer la performance des mod`eles ensimpliﬁant l’´ecriture du fran¸cais. Nos r´esultats montrent que si les n-grams ne performentpas aussi bien qu’excompt´e, mais performent relativement bien dans le cas des 4-gramss’ils sont associ´es a la proc´edure de fran¸cais simpliﬁ´e.
The Collection Of Pre-Evacuation Times From Evacuation Trials Involving A Hospital Outpatient Area And A University Library Facility

This paper presents data relating to occupant pre-evacuation times from a university and a hospital outpatient facility. Although the two structures are entirely different they do employ relatively similar procedures: members of staff sweeping areas of the structure to encourage individuals to evacuate. However, the manner in which the dependent population reacts to these procedures is quite different. In the hospital case the patients only evacuated once a member of the nursing staff had instructed them to do so while in the university evacuation the students were less dependent upon the actions of the staff with over 50% of them evacuating with no prior prompting. Although this data may be useful in a variety of areas, it was collected primarily for use within evacuation models.
Information Modelling on Mechanized Earthworks

Mechanized earthworks for post-disaster reconstruction largely forks into unmanned construction at hazardous working sites and manned one at less hazardous sites. In order to avoid secondary disasters, it is significant and required to compensate operator’s realistic sensation in order to enhance spatial awareness in the mechanized earthworks. The mechanized earthworks consist of a series of discrete works, which are sometimes independently and at other time interactively performed by different workers and managed by small and medium contractors. Generally, a variety of construction machines made by different manufactures are used there. On the other hand, diverse machine guidance systems come from different vendors. Most of them are self-contained and constitute an independent unit in and of itself. Here, are demanded inexpensive and easy-to-use software systems with sensors capable of easily mounting and demounting. The software systems of those should be not embedded in specific construction machines but available to multiple ones. To overcoming problems like those, our primary efforts target on fabricating information modelling system for mechanized earthworks by utilizing open source software. The information modelling here means a process involving acquisition of field data and feedback of relevant digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of works in progress. This paper presents framework of field data acquisition and exploratory spatio-temporal visualizations, enhancement of spatial awareness, enhancement of communication, and conclusions with a discussion of the contributions included in this paper. Finally, some open problems are also pointed out.
Talent identification for top athletes

‘Talent Identification’ (TID) in sports is of crucial importance to the search for excellence in top-class sports and the efficient coaching of sports programmes. However, current TIDmodels struggle with low predictive power caused by, among other things, the absence of clearly notable relationships between the properties of young athletes and their eventual succes on the highest levels of competition. This project aims to research and develop new ‘soft computing’ (SC) techniques which could lead to an efficient decision system with a sufficiently high predictive value, intended to support TID.
The literacy impact on tax revenues

The paper investigates the relationship between tax revenues and literacy level, using a panel-model approach. The dataset covers the period 1996 to 2010 and includes 123 countries. The estimations suggest that the assumed function is nonlinear, with inverted-U and U-shaped curves. More precisely, a very low literacy level is associated with reduced tax revenues. Furthermore, the government inputs increase as the literacy level increases, reaching a maximum point. Beyond this level, the tax revenues decrease even if the literacy has an ascendant tendency, registering a minimum level. Finally, the tax revenues increase in a parallel manner with the literacy index.
A large sample of shear selected clusters from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program S16A wide field mass maps

We present the result of searching for clusters of galaxies based on weak gravitational lensing analysis of the $\sim 160$~deg$^2$ area surveyed by Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) as a Subaru Strategic Program. HSC is a new prime focus optical imager with a 1.5 diameter field of view on the 8.2-meter Subaru telescope. The superb median seeing on the HSC $i$-band images of $0.56$ arcsec allows the reconstruction of high angular resolution mass maps via weak lensing, which is crucial for the weak lensing cluster search. We identify 65 mass map peaks with signal-to-noise (SN) ratio larger than 4.7, and carefully examine their properties by cross-matching the clusters with optical and X-ray cluster catalogs. We find that all the 39 peaks with SN$>5.1$ have counterparts in the optical cluster catalogs, and only 2 out of the 65 peaks are probably false positives. The upper limits of X-ray luminosities from ROSAT All Sky Survey (RASS) imply the existence of an X-ray under-luminous cluster population. We show that the X-rays from the shear selected clusters can be statistically detected by stacking the RASS images. The inferred average X-ray luminosity is about half that of the X-ray selected clusters of the same mass. The radial profile of the dark matter distribution derived from the stacking analysis is well modeled by the Navarro-Frenk-White profile with a small concentration parameter value of $c_{500}\sim 2.5$, which suggests that the selection bias on the orientation or the internal structure for our shear selected cluster sample is not strong.