Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PROCUREMENT CONTRACT MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC PROCUREMENT AND DISPOSAL ENTITIES (PDES)

Contract management spans through all levels of the procurement process. At the initiate stages of planning, contract management can be split down into service delivery management, relationship management, and contract administration. In public procurement, service delivery management is concerned with meeting fully the deliverables that were agreed upon in the contract, the levels of performance as per the contract, and quality. Changes can affect the performance of the contract. The methodology adopted case to undertake an in-depth analysis in the levels of non compliance in procurement contract management. Basing on the results of this study proper contract management is key to improving procurement performance in public entities regardless of the challenges that respondents pointed out as essential in contract management and the strategies that can be adopted to minimize the short coming in procurement contract management. The study recommends need for Commitment, trust of suppliers and maintaining relationships with suppliers who are honest and trustful, and supplier of high level of integrity in contract management.
Cooperative Tile-Based 360° Panoramic Streaming in Heterogeneous Networks Using Scalable Video Coding

The use of high-quality 360° panoramic video is booming in the video industry. However, existing schemes for smartphones suffer from significant bandwidth consumption as they transmit the entire panoramic views in very high resolutions. This demand for bandwidth becomes even more problematic when multiple adjacent smartphones compete to access the same content, which further challenges a wireless network’s capacity, and when the available bandwidth fluctuates much more than wired networks. In this paper, we propose a cooperative streaming scheme for tile-based 360° video using scalable video coding (SVC) to maximize a group of users’ quality of experience. We formulate an optimization problem to choose optimal downloading and sharing subsets from a set of all requested SVC layers of tiles to maximize the effective quality of the users’ viewport while meeting the feasibility of the bandwidth of heterogeneous networks. We then show that the problem is NP-hard and compose a heuristic approach. In the approach, we rank the SVC layers based on the aggregated group-level preference to guide the devices’ downloading and sharing activities. A prototype on the Android platform is developed to test the approach’s performance, and the real-world results show that our proposed scheme outperforms baseline alternatives.
EGEC: An Energy Efficient Exponentially Generated Clustering Mechanism for Reactive Wireless Sensor Networks

As most of the wireless sensor networks are unattended by humans, the energy is an important issue while deploying nodes of wireless sensor network in hazardous environments. One of the method to preserve energy consumption among sensor nodes is clustering. Using clustering, the nodes send the data to the nearest cluster head instead of far away sink. In applications using reactive wireless sensor networks, a limited number of sensor nodes are activated due to exceed in threshold values and the other nodes are under idle state. As far as the reactive wireless sensor network is concerned, the number of clusters would have been based on the number of active nodes and alive nodes. In this work, an optimum number of clusters is computed based on the ratio between active nodes and alive nodes. Extensive analysis and comparisons are made with existing protocol and found that the proposed methodology outperforms the existing protocol in terms of networks life time and throughput.
Research on Optimizing PID Controller Parameters using for a Heating System Applied to the Relay Feedback Method with PLC S7-200

Although there is a large number of control methods applied successfully to control systems in industrial field, the advantages of the PID controller can be considered as significant. The PID controller is being used widerly due to the simplicity of the control algorithm and the ease of implement. But until now, the most difficult problem is to determine a set of optimal parameters of the proposed controller. While each method has its own benefits and drawbacks, applying Modified Relay Feedback meaning to parameter optimization of PID controller in PLC for a heating system is proposed.
On the Stability of Financial Markets and the Role of the Rational International Investor

Foreign Investors are indeed guilty of destabilizing national financial markets where they are active. This paper analyzes the impact international investors have on the trading stability of financial markets. By calibrating GJR-GARCH models on overlapping, moving windows of daily returns for the German equity index DAX I find strong statistical evidence that a large portion of the asymmetric part of the model can be explained by investor composition. Apparently, increased exposure of international investors results in larger asymmetry in the conditional volatility. This strongly links the foreign investor to increased market volatility during adverse market information inflows. Thus, trading behavior of foreign investor adds destabilizing influences to the financial market.
An Exploratory Study on Brand Personality : The Case of A Traditional Casual Brand in Korea +

In order to build strong brand equity in the current market circumstances, it is essential to understand the core dimensions of brand image, which is brand personality. The objectives of this study were to identify the brand personality dimension so f a casual brand, "BeanPole," and to investigate the effects of the brand personalit yo n BeanPole buyers' brand preference, satisfaction and loyalty. The data were collected via a web survey. The sample consists of 500 people between the ages of 18-45 who are familiar with Bean Pole casual clothing brand (male- 40%; female-60%). Sixty-six percent of the sample indicated that they had purchased the Bean Pole clothing during the last three years. A total of five factors were extracted from the brand personality index scale: They were excitement/sophistication, competence, sincerity, ruggedness, and smoothness. Compared to the B/P non-buyers, B/P buyers tended to rate excitement/sophistication, competence, sincerity, and the smoothness brand personality dimensions higher. Multiple regression analysis revealed that excitement/sophistication, competence, sincerity and ruggedness brand personality were significant predictors of respondents' casual clothing brand preference, satisfaction, and brand loyalty. Among these significant predictors, competence was the best predictor of casual clothing brand preference, satisfaction and brand loyalty. Based on these findings, strategic implications are discussed.
Cheating and Plagiarism in E-Assessment: Students’ Perspectives

The aim of this study was to identify students’ perceptions on cheating and plagiarism and trust in e-assessment according to their assessment experience and mode of learning as well as exploring their concerns in e-assessment. Participants were 952 students from two public universities in Turkey and Bulgaria. The study was designed as a cross-sectional survey. A questionnaire consisting of closed and open-ended questions was applied to collect data. Descriptive statistics, t-test, ANOVA and thematic analyses were performed. According to the results, no significant difference was found on students’ perceptions towards cheating and plagiarism and their feelings of trust in e-assessment regarding students’ prior e-assessment experience. However, there was a significant difference on students’ perceptions towards cheating and plagiarism and their feelings of trust in e-assessment regarding the mode of learning they are involved in. In addition, students’ concerns about e-assessment were explored in details in the paper.
Development and Validation a comprehensive instrument to measure customer perceived service quality of mobile data services

Following the rapid growth of mobile data services in China, the competition between mobile data service providers becomes more intensively. To gain advantage in the fierce competition, it’s very critical to service providers managing their service quality effectively, thus a comprehensive measurement instrument of service quality is needed. However, there are few studies dedicated to mobile data services in this area. Our study proposes a conceptualization framework derived from Technical Acceptance Model. Based on the framework, we develop and validate an instrument to measure perceived service quality of mobile data services in rigorous process. Finally we have gotten a service quality instrument with six-dimensions: content quality, usability, reliability and speed, interaction, entertainment/ enjoyment, security/privacy. This scale provides a useful instrument for researchers who wish to measure the service quality of mobile data services and for marketing managers who want to improve their service performance.
LAR: Locality‐Aware Reconstruction for erasure‐coded distributed storage systems

Many modern distributed storage systems adopt erasure coding to protect data from frequent server failures for cost reason. Reconstructing data in failed servers efficiently is vital to these erasure‐coded storage systems. To this end, tree‐structured reconstruction mechanisms where blocks are transmitted and combined through a reconstruction tree have been proposed. However, existing tree‐structured reconstruction mechanisms build reconstruction trees from the perspective of available network bandwidths between servers, which are fluctuating and difficult to measure. Besides, these reconstruction mechanisms cannot reduce data transmission. In this study, we overcome these limitations by proposing LAR, a locality‐aware tree‐structured reconstruction mechanism. LAR builds reconstruction trees from the perspective of data locality, which is stable and easy to obtain. More importantly, by building reconstruction trees that combine blocks closer to each other first, LAR can reduce the data transmitted through the network core and hence speed up reconstruction. We prove that a minimum spanning tree is an optimal reconstruction tree that minimizes core bandwidth usage. We also design and implement a general reconstruction framework that supports all tree‐structured reconstruction mechanisms and nearly all erasure codes. Large‐scale simulations on commonly deployed network topologies show that LAR consumes 20%–61% less core bandwidth than previous reconstruction mechanisms. Thorough experiments on a testbed consisting of 40 physical servers show that LAR improves proactive recovery throughput by 23% at least and improves degraded read rate by up to 68%.
Overview: a cautious return of risk tolerance

Following deepening turmoil and rising concerns about systemic risks in the first two weeks of March, financial markets witnessed a cautious return of investor risk tolerance over the remainder of the period to end-May 2008. The process of disorderly deleveraging which had started in 2007 intensified from end-February, with asset markets becoming increasingly illiquid and valuations plunging to levels implying severe stress. However, markets subsequently rebounded in the wake of repeated central bank action and the Federal Reserve-facilitated takeover of a large US investment bank. In sharp contrast to these favourable developments, interbank money markets failed to recover, as liquidity demand remained elevated. Mid-March was a turning point for many asset classes. Amid signs of short covering, credit spreads rallied back to their mid-January values before fluctuating around these levels throughout May. Market liquidity improved, allowing for better price differentiation across instruments. The stabilisation of financial markets and the emergence of a somewhat less pessimistic economic outlook also contributed to a turnaround in equity markets. In this environment, government bond yields bottomed out and subsequently rose considerably. A reduction in the demand for safe government securities contributed to this, as did growing perceptions among investors that the impact from the financial turmoil on real economic activity might turn out to be less severe than had been anticipated. Emerging market assets, in turn, performed broadly in line with assets in the industrialised economies, as the balance of risk shifted from concerns about economic growth to those about inflation. Credit market turmoil gives way to fragile recovery Following two weeks of increasingly unstable conditions in early March, credit markets were buoyed by a cautious return of risk tolerance, with spreads recovering from the very wide levels reached during the first quarter of 2008. Sentiment turned in mid-March, following repeated interventions by the Federal Reserve to improve market functioning and to help avert the collapse of a major US investment bank. As these actions alleviated earlier concerns about risks to the financial system, previously dysfunctional markets resumed trading and prices rallied across a variety of risky assets.
Fourier Transform Profilometry in LabVIEW

Fourier transform profilometry (FTP) is an established non-contact method for 3D sensing in many scientific and industrial applications, such as quality control and biomedical imaging. This phase-based technique has the advantages of high resolution and noise robustness compared to intensity-based approaches. In FTP, a sinusoidal grating is projected onto the surface of an object, the shape information is encoded into a deformed fringe pattern recorded by a camera. The object shape is decoded by calculating the Fourier transform, filtering in the spatial frequency domain, and calculating the inverse Fourier transform; afterward, a conversion of the measured phase to object height is carried out. FTP has been extensively studied and extended for achieving better slope measurement, better separation of height information from noise, and robustness to discontinuities in the fringe pattern. Most of the literature on FTP disregards the software implementation aspects. In this chapter, we return to the basics of FTP and explain in detail the software implementation in LabVIEW, one of the most used data acquisition platforms in engineering. We show results on three applications for FTP in 3D metrology.
The implementation of voice over internet protocol on private automatic branch exchange using analog telephone adapter

Voice over internet protocol is a technology that has offer to the telephone by Internet Protocol and has developed to be VoIP IP PBX which can be connected between VoIP and Private Automatic Branch eXchange, the use of technology VoIP IP PBX would be being easy more and emphasizing of the cost to the increasing extension telephone analog which is on the private automatic branch exchange without added Central Private Automatic Branch eXchange. To implemented that idea, so we make server VoIP by using elastix as IP PBX server which is installed to the PC, and then using analog telephone adapter as signal conversion analog to the digital to be connected to the private automatic branch exchange. Measuring is done by calling between client as much as 12 times in 5 minutes. And the value of quality of service Jitter is 2,004 ms, Delay is 91,562 ms, and Packet Loss is 3%, so it can be categorized that quality of internet telephone is well done, it is based on ITU-T G. 114.
'The mythological marauding violent schizophrenic': Using the word sketch tool to examine representations of schizophrenic people as violent in the British press

Combining theories and methods from Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, this article examined grammatical collocates of the lemma SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) relating to violence in a 15 million word corpus of U.K. national newspaper texts. Using the Word Sketch tool via the online toolbox SketchEngine, it isolated several relatively formulaic lexico-grammatical patterns. SCHIZOPHRENIC co-occurred unusually frequently with modifiers relating to perceived dangerousness and, when grammatical subject, with verbs referring to violent actions. The analysis noted incidentally that, when predicated by the intransitive verb DIE, some examples referred to stories where schizophrenics were killed by police or medical staff, and grammatical agency was obscured. ). Other modifiers of SCHIZOPRENIC referred to examples of ‘lay diagnoses’ which were based solely on evidence of violent behaviour. Almost all instances of reported speech ascribed to SCHIZOPHRENIC referred to the admission of violent crime or the lurid and inaccurate representation of psychotic symptoms. Lastly, SCHIZOPHRENIC was grammatically co-ordinated unusually frequently with social groups defined by their violent behaviour. The article concluded by arguing that while the label SCHIZOPHRENIC (n.) is problematic owing to its evident negative semantic prosody, charities and medical professionals should work towards changing the negative misconceptions revealed by identified patterns rather than simply discouraging use of the label.
A Novel Filtering Approach in Visual Odometry for Autonomous Ground Vehicles Application

A monocular Visual Odometry system has been developed and tested on different datasets and the outputs have been compared with the available ground truth information to analyze the precision of the system. This system is capable of estimating the 3D position of a ground vehicle robustly and in real time. One of the main challenges of monocular VO is the ambiguity of the scale estimation which is addressed by assuming that the ground is locally planar and the height of the mounted camera from the ground is fixed and known. In order to improve the VO estimation and to help other stages of VO process an effective filtering approach is utilized. It is shown that an IMM filtering can address the needs of this specific application, as the movement of a ground vehicle is different depending on different scenarios. The results of simulation on the well-known KITTI dataset demonstrates that our system’s accuracy improved compared to what is considered to be one of the best state-of-the-art monocular Visual Odometry system.
Single image super-resolution based on residual learning and convolutional sparse coding

In this paper, we propose an improved method for single image super-resolution on the basis of residual learning and convolutional sparse coding (CSC). The key idea of it is to first perform a CSC-based decomposition on the input so that it can be split into two predefined parts: the smooth and residual components. Then, the extracted components are individually mapped according to their own characteristics, rather than directly perform a mapping from the original input. Specifically, we place more emphases on the residual one as it is much important to our task, while the smooth one is just propagated to the final output for providing a quick reference. Accordingly, the final architecture of our method conceptually integrates all the above steps into a completely end-to-end trainable deep network. Extensive experimental results indicate that our proposed method outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual fidelity and objective evaluation.
Implementation of Deep Feedforward Neural Network with CUDA backend for Efficient and Accurate Natural Image Classification

Recent advancements in techniques for constructing and training deep feedforward neural networks for classification tasks has enabled efficient training procedures leading to impressive results. This involves reducing overfitting due to over parameterized models, using an adaptive learning rate for avoiding exploding and vanishing gradients and symmetry breaking parameter initialization for efficient model optimization. Utilizing these techniques, this thesis concerns with the implementation of deep feedforward neural networks capable of efficient and accurate natural image classification. Four feedforward neural network models were constructed with the aim to classify tiny natural images from the CIFAR10 dataset. Having 3.274. 634 trainable parameters for gray scale input and 4.259. 274, 29.853. 002 and 30.955. 290 trainable parameters for rgb input, the training procedure utilizes a CUDA backend for efficient parameter optimization. The handwritten digits were classified with 97.31% accuracy and the tiny natural images were classified, using the best model, with 72.88% accuracy.
ESCUELA SUPERIOR POLITÉCNICA DEL LITORAL Facultad de Ingeniería en Electricidad y Computación

The Municipalities of the small Cantons of the Ecuador, present offices with spaces that occupy big quantities of documents and physical files with their users' important information, and they have the great necessity to improve the control and handling of the Fixed Assets. For it intends it a Computer System that allows the Modernization and optimization of the Control and handling of the Fixed Assets, improving the current operations of the Municipal Government's public servants notably through a better assignment, administration and control of the Fixed Assets. This Computer System will allow to have detailed and consolidated, up-to-date and historical information of physical and economic movements, like support for the taking of guessed right decisions that they allow to guarantee, the efficient and transparent use of the Fixed Assets of the Municipalities of the small Cantons of the Ecuador, benefitting them with the reduction of administrative and operative expenses, with the readiness of information on any fixed asset in the wanted moment, as the location of a certain Fixed Asset, the information of the custodian of the fixed asset, etc. to Know in any moment the current value, the physical state of the Fixed Assets, and the record of depreciations and additions of the fixed assets.
Executing large-scale processes in a blockchain

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the blockchain as a trusted computing platform. Understanding the strengths and limitations of this platform is essential to execute large-scale real-world applications in blockchains. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes several modiﬁcations to conventional blockchain networks to improve the scale and scope of applications. Findings Simple modifications to cryptographic protocols for constructing blockchain ledgers, and digital signatures for authentication of transactions, are sufficient to realize a scalable blockchain platform. Originality/value The original contributions of this paper are concrete steps to overcome limitations of current blockchain networks.
Hearing aid assembly

The system of the present invention includes a microphone, a first generic portion including an amplifier and loudspeaker, a CIC hearing aid is composed of a second part adapted to the ear canal of the patient. Hearing aids are programmable design digitally. Programming is performed by a cable. Connection to the first portion, can not be easily performed because there is no space, according to the present invention, an auxiliary part to be replaced with the first part, used to establish the desired amplifier characteristics it is proposed to use an auxiliary part to be. Desired amplifier characteristics acquired in this way, the accessible contacts when removing the hearing aid from the ear, is transferred to the first part to be used by the patient.