Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Receptivity to different types of migrants in Taiwan: Civic behavior and support for same-sex marriage as novel correlates

In an era of rising global intra-regional migration, in-depth explorations of attitudes toward immigrants and immigration (ATII) in emerging migrant-receiving societies in Asia are scarce. Using Taiwan as a case of an emerging non-Western, democratic migrant-receiving context with a racially homogeneous population, aging social structure, and vibrant civic culture, this is the first study to examine receptivity to three major migrant types. The study contributes to the ATII literature and sociological research through discovering something old (perceived group threat of foreign professionals and labor migrants at the individual level), something new (link between positive attitudes toward same-sex marriage and higher receptivity to blue-collar migrants), something borrowed (civic behavior), and something context-specific (effect of the high visibility of marriage immigrants in certain places on receptivity). This study highlights the importance of uncovering patterns and mechanisms of nativity-, ethnicity-, and class-based foreigner exclusionism in emerging non-Western migrant destinations. The findings on receptivity toward intra-Asia migrants in a 21st-century Asian society illuminate possibilities for reinventing theories on the social organization of difference and the socio-cognitive construction of ethnicity, with broader relevance to inter-minority relations among Asians in traditional Western immigrant societies.
A Study of Language Learning Strategies Used by Freshmen of Gedu College of Business Studies

Aim: To study the use of language learning strategies among freshmen of Gedu College of Business Studies. Study Design: A cross-sectional survey. Methodology: Data were collected through SILL, and they were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics. Results: Descriptive statistics revealed meta-cognitive as the most favored strategies while memory strategies were the least preferred ones among the respondents. However, the usage of all six strategies among Bhutanese college students was medium, which means the strategies were sometimes used. The independent t-test revealed statistically insignificant difference between the two groups of genders. Conclusion: This study examined the use of LLS among the freshmen of Gedu College of Business Studies. The findings of this study will have implications for learner autonomy and naturalistic exposure to English language. Such experiences are, therefore, expected to assist acquisition of English as a second language and develop learners’ communicative competence.
Stability of a Fe-Rich Cathode Catalyst in an Anion Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell

Fe-rich alloys have been widely studied as catalyst materials for the cathodic oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in hydrogen fuel cells, and many have shown high activities. The stability of Fe-rich catalysts has also been researched, and some studies have shown promising results using an accelerated stress test (AST), which uses a potential cycling method. However, for commercial fuel cell applications, such as standby power systems, the catalyst has to tolerate a high potential for a long period, which can not be represented by the AST test. In this paper, the cathode stability of a Fe-rich catalyst was studied using a standby cell potential of 0.9V, a potential shown to be challenging for the competing Pt catalysts. After 1500 hrs of testing, significant morphology changes of both the tested cathode and anode were found due to a Fe leaching process. Other alloy materials, including Ni, Cr, and Mn, were also found leached out along with the Fe species from the catalyst framework. The results are a cautionary note for using Fe based catalysts for AEMFC cathodes.
Analysis of Inputs Parameters Used to Estimate Enteric Methane Emission Factors Applying a Tier 2 Model: Case Study of Native Cattle in Senegal

In the context of the Paris Agreement, and considering the importance of methane emissions from cattle in West Africa, application of a Tier 2 method to estimate enteric methane emission factors is clearly pertinent. The current study has two purposes. Firstly, it aims to detect how much each input parameter contributes to the overall uncertainty of enteric methane emission factors for cattle. Secondly, it aims to identify which input parameters require additional research efforts for strengthening the evidence base, thus reducing the uncertainty of methane enteric emission factors. Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis methodologies were applied to input parameters in the calculation of enteric methane emission factors for lactating cows and adult male Senegalese native cattle using the IPCC Tier 2 model. The results show that the IPCC default input parameters, such as the coefficient for calculating net energy for maintenance (Cfi), digestible energy (DE) and the methane conversion rate (Ym) are the first, second and third most important input parameters, respectively, in terms of their contribution to uncertainty of the enteric methane emission factor. Sensitivity analysis demonstrated that future research in Senegal should prioritize the development of Ym, Cfi and DE in order to estimate enteric methane emission factors more accurately and to reduce the uncertainty of the national agricultural greenhouse gas inventory.
Day 21 serum Free Light Chain (FLC) levels as a predictor of response to therapy in symptomatic multiple myeloma

Introduction: Serum Free Light Chain (sFLC) assay has a major role in the screening, diagnosis and monitoring in patients with Multiple Myeloma (MM). Measuring involved Free Light Chain (iFLC) has a proven advantage due to the short half-life compared to that of M-protein, thus useful as a prognostic tool for the assessment of response to therapy. It is established that achieving VGPR (very good partial response) or better after induction chemotherapy is associated with better OS (overall survival) and PFS (progression free survival) in myeloma patients. Few studies have shown that early reduction in iFLC during treatment is associated with achievement of VGPR or better. Objective: To study the predictive value of reduction of involved free light chain level on Day 21 of chemotherapy for achievement of VGPR after 4 cycles of induction chemotherapy. Methods: We conducted a prospective observational study in twenty eight patients of newly diagnosed Multiple Myeloma with iFLC ≥ 100mg/L. Serum FLC assay was done at baseline and on day 21 of therapy. All patients were followed up till the end of induction therapy for response assessment based on the IMWG criteria. Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was done to determine the cut off value of percent reduction in day 21 iFLC for achievement of VGPR or better. Results: After the induction chemotherapy, out of 28 patients, 13 patients achieved CR, 8 patients achieved VGPR, 4 patients achieved PR and 2 patients had stable disease (≥ VGPR = 21 patients, < VGPR = 6 patients). One patient expired after 2nd cycle of chemotherapy. The mean per cent reduction in day 21 iFLC level as compared to baseline was 91.5% and 57.1% in patients achieving ≥ VGPR and < VGPR (P < 0.0001), respectively. No other baseline parameter was found to be significantly different between the 2 groups. ROC curve analysis demonstrated a cut off of 84% reduction in iFLC value on day 21 (AUC of 0.937) had a sensitivity of 85.7% and a specificity of 100% in predicting the achievement of VGPR after four cycles of induction chemotherapy. Conclusion: Monitoring iFLC levels on Day 21 can be used as an important tool for early identification of responders/non responders to myeloma therapy. We recommend serum FLC assay to be done on day 21 as a real time assessment of treatment response in newly diagnosed myeloma patients. Key words- Multiple Myeloma, involved Free Light Chain (iFLC), Very Good Partial Response (VGPR)
Footprint of Tropical Cyclone Cold Wakes on Top‐of‐Atmosphere Radiation

A recent study noted reduced rainfall and cloud fraction over cold wakes induced by tropical cyclones, but a quantification of top‐of‐atmosphere (TOA) radiation change due to these cold wakes has not been attempted. Based on global TOA radiative flux observations, we show that TOA shortwave and longwave radiations increase by 0.76 W m−2 (0.2%) and 0.74 W m−2 (0.3%) over the cold wake area relative to local climatology, respectively. Due to the cancelation between the shortwave and longwave components, daily average TOA net radiation is only marginally modulated by cold wakes, but stands out in the day and night time average. In addition, the seasonal basin‐wide regulation of TOA net radiation by cold wakes can be up to 1.0 W m−2, locally comparable to the magnitude of radiative forcing due to man‐made aerosols. The regional impact of cold wakes on TOA radiations is therefore highly relevant and potentially important.
The Impact of Socrative Exit Tickets on Initial Teacher Training

Abstract The purpose of this research is to investigate the opinions of future teachers on their experience using Socrative exit tickets in the university classroom. For this purpose, the Socrative program was implemented as a learning tool within the education programs of two large universities in Spain, and a questionnaire was created by adapting instruments from previous research. The results show that the use of exit tickets improves the participants’ reported attention and perceived abilities to reflect on, synthesize and analyze the course content. In addition, the use of Socrative facilitates instructors in identifying the degree of understanding or difficulties of students.
EVALUASI USABILITY WEBSITE DINAS PENDIDIKAN PROVINSI RIAU MENGGUNAKAN METODE SYSTEM USABILITY SCALE

ABSTRAK Salah satu penerapan e-goverment yang telah diterapkan pada Dinas Pendidikan Provinsi Riau yaitu dengan memanfaatkan website resminya sebagai media publikasi informasi terkait pendidikan dengan alamat https://disdik.riau. go.id. Website ini telah berjalan kurang lebih 10 tahun dan belum pernah dilakukan evaluasi dengan standar metode tertentu untuk mengukur tingkat kepuasan pengguna akhir. Tujuan penelitian ini yaitu melakukan evaluasi usability website Dinas Pendidikan Provinsi Riau menggunakan metode System Usability Scale (SUS). SUS telah terbukti valid dan reliable , dan dapat digunakan dengan mudah. SUS terdiri 10 pertanyaan John Brooke dengan hasil berupa skor 0-100. Penentuan responden menggunakan teknik accidental sampling dengan jumlah responden sebanyak 96 orang yang didapatkan dari teknik lemeshow . Hasil yang diperoleh dari perhitungan SUS yaitu 51,87, untuk kategori adjective rating termasuk ok , dengan grade scale F , dan termasuk marginal low untuk kategori acceptability ranges dimana website sudah dapat diterima tetapi tingkat penerimaan yang masih rendah. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa website masih perlu dilakukan perbaikan untuk menghasilkan tingkat penerimaan yang lebih baik. Penelitian ini menghasilkan 6 rekomendasi solusi perbaikan yang dapat dijadikan sebagai rujukan dalam pengembangan website kedepannya. Kata Kunci: E-goverment , System Usability Scale , Usability , Website Dinas Pendidikan Provinsi Riau ABSTRACT One of the applications of e-government that has been implemented at the Riau Provincial Education Ofﬁce is by utilizing its ofﬁcial website as a media for publication of information related to education with the address https://disdik.riau. go.id. This website has been running for about 10 years and has never been evaluated by a certain standard method. to measure the level of end-user satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the usability of the Riau Provincial Education Office website using the System Usability Scale method. SUS has been proven valid and reliable, and can be used easily. The SUS consists of 10 John Brooke questions with a score of 0-100. Determination of respondents using accidental sampling technique with the number of respondents 96 people obtained from the Lemeshow technique. The results obtained from calculations using the SUS method 51.87, for the adjective rating category is ”ok”, with ”F” grade scale, and ”marginal low” for the acceptability ranges category means the website is acceptable but the acceptance rate is still relatively low. This shows that the website still needs to be improved to produce a better acceptance rate. This research resulted in 6 recommendations for improvement solutions that can be used as a reference in website development. Keywords: E-government, System Usability Scale, Usability, Riau Provincial Education Ofﬁce Website
Rolling-Shutter Modelling for Direct Visual-Inertial Odometry

We present a direct visual-inertial odometry (VIO) method which estimates the motion of the sensor setup and sparse 3D geometry of the environment based on measurements from a rolling-shutter camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The visual part of the system performs a photometric bundle adjustment on a sparse set of points. This direct approach does not extract feature points and is able to track not only corners, but any pixels with sufficient gradient magnitude. Neglecting rolling-shutter effects in the visual part severely degrades accuracy and robustness of the system. In this paper, we incorporate a rolling-shutter model into the photometric bundle adjustment that estimates a set of recent keyframe poses and the inverse depth of a sparse set of points. IMU information is accumulated between several frames using measurement preintegration, and is inserted into the optimization as an additional constraint between selected keyframes. For every keyframe we estimate not only the pose but also velocity and biases to correct the IMU measurements. Unlike systems with global-shutter cameras, we use both IMU measurements and rolling-shutter effects of the camera to estimate velocity and biases for every state. Last, we evaluate our system on a new dataset that contains global-shutter and rolling-shutter images, IMU data and ground-truth poses for ten different sequences, which we make publicly available. Evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms a system where rolling shutter is not modelled and achieves similar accuracy to the global-shutter method on global-shutter data.
Student-related variables and academic outcome of social science education students in the University of Calabar, Nigeria

This study examined the influence of student-related variables like peer influence, parental income and self-esteem on the academic outcome of Social Science Education Students in the Department of Social Science Education in University of Calabar, Calabar, Nigeria. The descriptive survey design was used for the study; while the purposive sampling technique was used in selecting 150 undergraduate students for the study. A 20-item Student-Related Variables Questionnaire (SRVQ) and a 60-item Social Science Education Achievement Test (SSEAT) were used to collect data for the study. Data analysis techniques adopted were the Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient (r) and Independent t-test. The result showed that peer influence significantly relates with students’ academic outcome, and that parental income, and students’ self-esteem; significantly influence students’ academic outcome. Based on the findings, it was recommended amongst others that students should be encouraged to put in the best into their studies and avoid all forms of distractions especially associating with any group that would not enhance their academic outcome; as this might help in addressing the problem of poor academic outcome.
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct a crowdsourcing task: given an utterance expressing verbal irony, users are asked to verbalize their interpretation of the speaker’s ironic message. We propose a typology of linguistic strategies for verbal irony interpretation and link it to various theoretical linguistic frameworks. We design computational models to capture these strategies and present empirical studies aimed to answer three questions: (1) what is the distribution of linguistic strategies used by hearers to interpret ironic messages? ; (2) do hearers adopt similar strategies for interpreting the speaker’s ironic intent? ; and (3) does the type of semantic incongruity in the ironic message (explicit vs. implicit) inﬂuence the choice of interpretation strategies by the hearers?
RP-HPLC METHOD DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION FOR SIMULTANIOUS ESTIMATION AND FORCED DEGRADATION STUDIES OF LAMIVUDINE AND RALTEGRAVIR IN SOLID DOSAGE FORM

Objective: A stability indicating reverse phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) method was developed and validated for the estimation of the combined tablet formulation of lamivudine (LAM) and raltegravir (RAL) in dosage forms and its API.Methods: Chromatographic separation was achieved on inertsil ODS C18 5 µm (4.6 X 150 mm) using a mobile phase (MP) consisting of a mixture of mixed orthophosphoric acid (OPA): acetonitrile (ACN) in the ratio 50:50 v/v which was determined at 242 nm respectively. Results: The assay of LAM and RAL was performed with tablets, and the % assay was found to be 100.12 and 99.89 which shows that the method is useful for routine analysis. The linearity of LAM and RAL was found to be linear with a correlation coefficient of 0.998 and 0.999, which shows that the method is capable of producing good sensitivity. The retention time of LAM and RAL was 1.99 min and 4.34 min respectively; linearity range was found to lie from 15 µg/ml to 75 µg/ml for LAM, 30 µg/ml to 150 µg/ml for RAL with a correlation coefficient of 0.999 respectively. Forced degradation studies were conducted in acidic, basic, thermal, photolytic and peroxide where all the degradation peaks were monitored.Conclusion: The proposed HPLC method was found to be simple, specific, precise, accurate, rapid and economical for simultaneous estimation of LAM and RAL in bulk and tablet dosage form. Thus the validated economical method was applied for forced degradation study of LAM and RAL tablet.
Chromatic Discrimination Thresholds as a Function of Color Differences and Cone Excitations

In this paper, Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs) of color-normal subjects measured towards the Protan, Deutan, and Tritan confusion points are presented as a function of the chromaticity of the reference points. Measurements were executed with the Cambridge Colour Test Trivector test in equidistant reference points towards eight directions equally spaced and centered on the neutral reference point in the CIE 1976 UCS diagram.Results were evaluated as the function of the distance between the reference points and the neutral point. The reference points were the chromaticities of the backgrounds of the pseudoisochromatic plates in the test, and the neutral point was defined as equal energy white. The evaluation was performed considering ∆Eu'v' differences and L/(L + M) and S/(L + M) ratios of the cone-excitations.Chromatic discrimination thresholds exceeded the normative upper limit of color normal subjects in ∆Eu'v' units at extreme reference points. Shifting the reference points from the neutral point towards the confusion points indicated an increase of Just Noticeable Differences measured towards the confusion points following second-order polynomials. Based on our results a model estimating the JNDs expressed in ∆Eu'v' units towards the confusion points was recommended.Even though CIE 1976 UCS diagram is not a perceptually uniform color space, the Just Noticeable Differences measured with the CCT correlate with the corresponding L' and S' cone excitations. This confirms the basic applicability of the CIE 1976 UCS diagram for characterizing Just Noticeable Differences. For complete perceptual analysis, the use of cone-excitation-based metrics is still essential and recommended.
Forecasting Summer Rainfall and Streamflow over the Yangtze River Valley Using Western Pacific Subtropical High Feature

The western Pacific subtropical high (WPSH) is one of the key systems affecting the summer rainfall over the Yangtze River Valley in China. In this study, the forecasting capacity of the WPSH for summer rainfall and streamflow is evaluated based on the WPSH index (WPSHI) derived from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis dataset. It has been found that WPSHI can identify extreme flood years with a higher skill than normal wet years. Specifically, exceedance probability forecasting based on WPSHI has higher skills for higher thresholds of rainfall. For streamflow, adding WPSHI as a predictor only enhances the skill for higher thresholds of streamflow relative to models based on antecedent streamflow. Under the same framework, performances of two postprocessing approaches for dynamical forecasts, i.e., the model output statistics (MOS) approach and the reanalysis-based (RAN) approach are compared. Hindcasts from Climate Forecast System version 2 from the National Center for Environmental Prediction (CFSv2) are used to calculate WPSHI, which is used as the predictor for rainfall and streamflow. The result shows that the RAN approach performs better than the MOS approach. This study emphasizes the fact that the forecasting skill of exceedance probability would largely depend on the selected threshold of the predictand, and this fact should be noticed in future studies in the long-term forecasting field.
Beta DVBF: Learning State-Space Models for Control from High Dimensional Observations

Learning a model of dynamics from high-dimensional images can be a core ingredient for success in many applications across different domains, especially in sequential decision making. However, currently prevailing methods based on latent-variable models are limited to working with low resolution images only. In this work, we show that some of the issues with using high-dimensional observations arise from the discrepancy between the dimensionality of the latent and observable space, and propose solutions to overcome them.
Meta-Analysis of Genomic and Transcriptomic Variations in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung cancer is the leading cause of the largest number of deaths worldwide and lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common form of lung cancer. In this study, we carried out an integrated meta-analysis of the mutations including single-nucleotide variations (SNVs), the copy number variations (CNVs), RNA-seq and clinical data of patients with LUAD downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We integrated significant SNV and CNV genes, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and the DEGs in active subnetworks to construct a prognosis signature. Cox proportional hazards model (LOOCV) with Lasso penalty was used to identify the best gene signature among different gene categories. The patients in both training and test data were clustered into high-risk and low-risk groups by using risk scores of the patients calculated based on selected gene signature. We generated a 12-gene signature (DEPTOR, ZBTB16, BCHE, MGLL, MASP2, TNNI2, RAPGEF3, SGK2, MYO1A, CYP24A1, PODXL2, CCNA1) for overall survival prediction. The survival time of high-risk and low-risk groups was significantly different. This 12-gene signature could predict prognosis and they are potential predictors for the survival of the patients with LUAD.