Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AC 2011-2764: UNCOVERING THE ROLE OF EMOTION IN ENGINEER- ING EDUCATION WITHIN AN INTEGRATED CURRICULAR EXPERI- ENCE

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the role of emotion within an interdisciplinary, projectbased design studio as implemented in 2009 and 2010. This qualitative research study involves a narrative analysis of data collected over two semesters of the design studios to identify the types of emotions described, the change in these emotions over the semester, and the interaction of these emotions with learning. This analysis is conducted on students’ written reflections, as it is important to understand emotions from the perspective of the student and within the desired context. More specifically, the research study consisted of a narrative analysis of individual reflection reports written by students after participating in multiple reflective activities over the course of one semester. Two student narratives are highlighted in this analysis. The analysis of this data indicates that emotions at the high end of the activation spectrum, for example angry, tense, and excited, were described by the students as leading to critical learning incidents. The students described how their emotions changed over time as participating in the overall class or an individual project. The presence of high-activation emotions within the student narratives indicates that higher order thinking strategies were present. Additionally, the presence of negative emotions at the beginning of projects and positive emotions later in the project suggests a need for more scaffolding of projects and activities at the beginning of the time period and less later in the project or activity.
What Determines Welfare Losses from Oligopoly Power in the Food and Tobacco Industries?

This paper estimates welfare losses in thirty-eight U.S. food and tobacco industries at the four-digit SIC level, then relates such losses to market structure and conduct variables to identify the welfare loss determinants. Empirical findings indicate that these losses are higher in markets characterized by high export intensity, high advertising expenditures, economies of scale, mergers and acquisitions, and market concentration. In addition, losses are larger in industries that sell finished consumer products and face lower import competition.
Heterogeneous Beliefs and the Performances of Optimal Portfolios

The market selection depends on agent's survival index, which is a function of agent's belief and risk preference. When preferences are identical, the survival index of an agent is a decreasing function of his belief accuracy and therefore agent survives if and only if he has the lowest survival index. Following this result, one maybe tempted to think that an agent is expected to perform at least as good as the market if he survives, and he is expected to outperform the market if his belief is more accurate than all other agents' beliefs. We show that the these statements are false in general. In terms of long-run performance, market outperforms those agents who do not have the minimum survival index in the long-run. When multiple agents survive, we show that no agent can outperform the market in the long-run. In terms of the expected performance, all agents are expected to underperform the market even when they all survive in the long-run. When survival indices differ, the fittest agent with the lowest survival index is expected to outperform the market consistently with any given finite investment horizons if and only if his subjective belief is much more accurate than the other agents' beliefs.
Poverty and inequality in South Africa and the world

This article begins with a discussion of various definitions and concepts of poverty and inequality. It then distinguishes between objective and subjective concepts of poverty, temporary versus chronic poverty, and absolute versus relative poverty. The concept of inequality is discussed and compared with that of poverty. Specific measures of poverty and inequality are considered next. The measurement of poverty requires the choice of a welfare measure, a benchmark welfare level for identifying those in poverty (a poverty line), and the selection of one or more appropriate poverty indicators. The mathematically desirable features of a poverty or inequality measure are discussed, and the most commonly used measures are described. Some of the special considerations that arise when measuring poverty and inequality at the world level are then investigated, and this is followed by a discussion of the datasets available for producing these. Finally, actual estimates of poverty and inequality in South Africa and the world are examined, with a particular focus on trying to assess the trend in recent years. It seems fairly certain that the proportion of people in the world living in absolute poverty has declined significantly and consistently over the last few decades, and this trend is continuing. There is less agreement about trends in inequality. Progress against poverty has been very uneven across regions: there have been dramatic declines in Asia, but the situation in Africa has worsened. There is an ongoing debate about poverty and inequality trends in South Africa. Keywords : Poverty; inequality; South Africa; world South African Acturial Journal Vol. 7 2007: pp. 117-160
Outsourcing to Online Food Delivery Services: Perspective of F&B Business Owners

Purpose - There are two main purposes for this study. The first aims to provide a comprehensive review on the past literature review on outsourcing in the foodservice business sector by identifying the commonalities and filling in the gaps. The second purpose is to contribute to the limited research works that cover this field of study. Design/methodology/approach - This study adopted a qualitative research method with data collected through physical interviews with F&B business owners based on their knowledge, attitudes, perspectives, and needs on outsourcing to online food delivery services. Findings - In most research works, motivators, trends, risk, benefits, and relationships are discussed. The research on business owner's perspective in relation to outsourcing food delivery service is found to be scarce. The findings in this research work suggests that there are three main driven factors to the business ownersâÂÂ behavioural intention to outsource food delivery service to third-party online food delivery service provider. These factors are listed as increase of revenue, wider customer reach and expand customer base. The findings propose that business owners should consider and pay close attention to the changes in the consumer preference as it still remains dynamic, if they want to remain competitive in the foodservice industry. On top of that, this research work also provides insights and recommendations to third-party online food delivery service providers. This is one of the few research works that study the determining factors for restaurant businesses to outsource to online food delivery service providers. Practical implications - The continuous and drastic changes in the restaurant business reflects the worthiness for further researches considering the booming potential in the foodservice industry where online delivery service is taking up a big part of the market share. In order to reduce cost and maximise profit, many restaurants are asserting effort in outsourcing to online food delivery service providers. It may be difficult for business restaurant owners to explore the opportunities or challenges associated with the outsourcing to online food delivery service in the existing studies and literature. This study identifies the areas that are less explored in the literature, in the views of restaurant business owners. Originality/value - This study is a first attempt to organise the outsourcing literature with the view of restaurant business owners using non-statistical and in-depth analysis in exploring the contents of the studies in a new approach.
INVITED REVIEW: FOREST BIOTECHNOLOGY: INNOVATIVE METHODS, EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES

The productivity of plantation forests is essential to meet the future world demand for wood and wood products in a sustainable fashion and in a manner that preserves natural stands and biodiversity. Plantation forestry has enormously benefited from development and implementation of improved silvicultural and forest management practices during the past century. A second wave of improvements has been brought about by the introduction of new germplasm developed through genetics and breeding efforts for both hardwood and conifer tree species. Coupled with the genetic gains achieved through tree breeding, the emergence of new biotechnological approaches that span the fields of plant developmental biology, genetic transformation, and discovery of genes associated with complex multigenic traits have added a new dimension to forest tree improvement programs. Significant progress has been made during the past five years in the area of plant regeneration via organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis (SE) for economically important tree species. These advances have not only helped the development of efficient gene transfer techniques, but also have opened up avenues for deployment of new high-performance clonally replicated planting stocks in forest plantations. One of the greatest challenges today is the ability to extend this technology to the most elite germplasm, such that it becomes an economically feasible means for large-scale production and delivery of improved planting stock. Another challenge will be the ability of the forestry research community to capitalize rapidly on current and future genomics-based elucidation of the underlying mechanisms for important but complex phenotypes. Advancements in gene cloning and genomics technology in forest trees have enabled the discovery and introduction of value-added traits for wood quality and resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses into improved genotypes. With these technical advancements, it will be necessary for reliable regulatory infrastructures and processes to be in place worldwide for testing and release of trees improved through biotechnology. Commercialization of planting stocks, as new varieties generated through clonal propagation and advanced breeding programs or as transgenic trees with high-value traits, is expected in the near future, and these trees will enhance the quality and productivity of our plantation forests.
Elemental fingerprints of southern calamary ( Sepioteuthis australis ) reveal local recruitment sources and allow assessment of the importance of closed areas

Movement of individuals over a range of temporal and spatial scales is a critical process in determining the structure and size of populations. For most marine species, a substantial amount of movement that is responsible for connecting subpopulations occurs when individuals are too small and numerous to be tagged using conventional methods. Using the elemental fingerprints of the statoliths of the squid Sepioteuthis australis and a robust machine learning classification technique, this study determined that newly hatched squid had elemental signatures that exhibited sufficient spatial variation to act as natural tags for natal origin and that elemental signatures can be used to allocate adult squid back to their natal site. Between 55% and 84% of the adult squid caught throughout the east and southeast of Tasmania, Australia, were classified back to an area that is closed to commercial fishing over much of the peak spawning period, and this was the only location with substantive evidence of natal recruitment. Although many studies have demonstrated the potential of this approach to discern connectivity between population units, few studies have successfully done so by then examining the trace element profiles of adults in addition to those of hatchlings as we have demonstrated with S. australis. Résumé : Les déplacements des individus sur une gamme d’échelles temporelles et spatiales sont des éléments essentiels dans la détermination de la structure et de la taille des populations. Pour la plupart des espèces marines, une partie majeurs des déplacements qui sont responsables des liens entre les sous-populations se produit lorsque les individus sont trop petits et nombreux pour être marqués à l’aide des méthodes conventionnelles. En utilisant les empreintes en éléments des statolithes du calmar Sepioteuthis australis et une technique robuste de classification par apprentissage automatique, notre étude démontre que les calmars nouvellement éclos possèdent une signature d’éléments qui montre suffisamment de variation spatiale pour servir d’étiquette naturelle afin de déterminer leur origine à la naissance; les signatures d’éléments peuvent aussi servir à associer les calmars adultes à leur site de naissance. Entre 55 % et 84 % des calmars adultes capturés sur l’ensemble de l’est et du sud-est de la Tasmanie, Australie, ont été classifiés comme provenant d’une région fermée à la pêche commerciale durant une grande partie de la période maximale de fraie; c’est la seule région qui présente des preuves solides de recrutement natal. Bien que plusieurs études aient démontré le potentiel de cette approche pour discerner la connectivité entre les unités démographiques, peu de travaux ont réussi à le faire en examinant les profils des éléments en trace des adultes en plus de ceux des nouveau-nés comme nous l’avons fait chez S. australis. [Traduit par la Rédaction]
Comparative Assessment of the Antibacterial activity of Three Tephrosia Species against Helicobacter pylori

The present study was carried out to provide evidence to the traditional use of three species Tephrosia calophylla, Tephrosia maxima and Tephrosia purpurea to treat ulcers in the regions of Andhra Pradesh. The plants were extracted with chloroform, methanol and then subjected to preliminary phytochemical screening. The antibacterial activity of the extracts against Helicobacter pylori was tested in vitro and in vivo. In vitro activity was screened using the disc diffusion method in Brucella agar supplemented with 7 % sheep blood. In vivo activity against Helicobacter pylori was screened in naproxen and Helicobacter pylori-induced ulcers in Swiss mice with triple regimen of clarithromycin, amoxicillin, omeprazole serving as the standard. The parameters evaluated were Log CFU/g of stomach tissue, infection status by polymerase chain reaction, rapid test for urease and histopathological studies. Phytochemical screening indicated the presence of similar phytochemicals in all the three extracts. Methanol extracts of the plants exhibited high antibacterial activity in vitro. Tephrosia maxima showed potent activity against Helicobacter pylori-infected ulcer in rodents relative to Tephrosia calophylla and Tephrosia purpurea. Log CFU/g of stomach tissue was observed to be very low after treatment with Tephrosia maxima. Observations on infection status confirmed these findings. These results suggested that Tephrosia maxima to be an effective inhibitor of Helicobacter pylori-infected ulcer. Histopathological studies further supported these results. Mild inflammation and congestion were seen in the gastric mucosa of the mice treated with Tephrosia maxima methanol extract without any ulcer whereas with the other two plant extracts, slight increase in inflammation and congestion was observed.
Investigation of Antioxidant Capacity and Phytochemical Composition of Sun Chlorella -An Invitro Study

Sun Chlorella is a natural whole food supplement derived from a fresh water single celled green algae called Chlorella pyrenoidosa. The aqueous and organic extracts (hexane and ethyl acetate) obtained from Sun chlorella were screened on reactive oxygen species scavenging capacity, total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and lipid peroxidation inhibition potential. The aqueous extract compared to hexane and ethyl acetate extracts exhibited significant high levels of antioxidant potential, lipid peroxidation inhibition potential along with phenolic and flavonoid contents. In addition, the correlation coefficient between the TAC, phenolic content was found to be significantly positive for the aqueous extract (R2=0.0995) when compared to hexane (R2 =0.016 2), ethyl acetate ( R2 =0.0395 ) extracts. As the aqueous extract of sun chlorella showed significant antioxidant potential by positively modulating the antioxidant activity in vitro ((fish liver homogenate sample) study sample, it is rightly to be considered as a fish feed.
Predictive Analytics and Decision Support for Heart Failure patients

Predictive Analytics and Decision Support for Heart Failure patients Aftab Hassan Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Assistant Professor Senjuti Basu Roy Institute of Technology In the last few years, legislations such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have emphasised the need for improving the quality of health care. Part of the programs introduced by this Act is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which reduces payments to hospitals with excess readmissions. Hospitals are, therefore, constantly looking for ways to help reduce their readmission rate, and an idea of patients that are at a higher risk of getting readmitted is extremely beneficial. In this thesis, we first look at ways to predict the chance of a patient getting readmitted, and investigate predicting future healthcare costs, to understand how much money the patient would have to spend on hospital expenses during the readmission visit. We, then design a multi objective medication recommendation framework. We would like to echo the sentiments of the medical community here, that, while reducing readmissions is important, there are also other factors that go into ensuring a successful patient discharge experience, such as reducing mortality rate and the patient’s length of stay at the hospital during the subsequent visit. We propose a novel framework that recommends personalized medications to patients by analyzing the complex interplay among a multitude of factors, such as, demographic factors, medical diagnoses, clinical factors, and how they contribute to the three objectives thirty day readmission, subsequent length of stay and mortality rate. We then find the best medication combination to simultaneously reduce all three objectives by performing Multi objective optimization. Our proposed framework is flexible enough to include or exclude additional factors, as well as layers, and can even obey constraints provided by the domain experts (i.e., doctors) in the design of this hierarchical network. We present a case study validated by a domain expert as well as comprehensive experimental results based on the proposed approach to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Our work is validated on the largest (1000+ bed) South Puget Sound healthcare system: MultiCare Health on their EMR data including medication transactions. While our primary effort is to design medication recommendations for heart failure patients, the proposed framework could be adapted for other diseases as well. We also develop a web based service called Pathway Finder with the objective of visually exploring and discovering clinical pathways that reduce the patients chance of readmission. We, therefore, try and play our small part in improving the quality of health care in the United States.
Overweight and Obesity among Medical Students of Public Sector's Institutes in Karachi, Pakistan

Objectives: To determine the factors associated with overweight and obesity among medical students of public sector’s institutes in Karachi, Pakistan. Methodology: A university based cross-sectional analytic study was conducted in public sector institutes of Karachi. Data was collected from first year to final year medical students through convenient sampling technique by using self administered questionnaire followed by anthropometric measurement. The outcome variable “overweight or obesity” was defined by using South Asian BMI (≥ 23) cut-off points. Logistic regression technique was applied by using software SPSS to determine the factors associated with overweight and obesity among medical students. Results: A total of 428 medical students participated in study. Prevalence of overweight and obesity among medical students was found to be 14.7%, 12.4% respectively. Among boys it was 47.7% whereas among girls it was 15.9%. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was associated with male gender (adjusted OR=4.96 (95% C.I: 3.02 - 8.15)), lunch taking from college/outside home (adjusted OR=3.67 (95% C.I: 2.44 - 6.61)), snacks taking habit between the meals (adjusted OR=1.95 (95% C.I: 1.03 - 3.68)), and tea drinking habit (adjusted OR=2.50 (95% C.I: 1.38 - 4.54)). Conclusion: Prevalence of overweight and obesity among medical students was high in our sample population. Multifaceted efforts are required to target this high risk group of medical students to prevent obesity and its related morbidity and mortality.
Fast Threshold Selection Algorithm of Infrared Human Images Based on Two-Dimensional Fuzzy Tsallis Entropy

Infrared images are fuzzy and noisy by nature; thus the segmentation of human targets in infrared images is a challenging task. In this paper, a fast thresholding method of infrared human images based on two-dimensional fuzzy Tsallis entropy is introduced. First, to address the fuzziness of infrared image, the fuzzy Tsallis entropy of objects and that of background are defined, respectively, according to probability partition principle. Next, this newly defined entropy is extended to two dimensions to make good use of spatial information to deal with the noise in infrared images, and correspondingly a fast computation method of two-dimensional fuzzy Tsallis entropy is put forward to reduce its computation complexity from to . Finally, the optimal parameters of fuzzy membership function are searched by shuffled frog-leaping algorithm following maximum entropy principle, and then the best threshold of an infrared human image is computed from the optimal parameters. Compared with typical entropy-based thresholding methods by experiments, the method presented in this paper is proved to be more efficient and robust.
Implementation of RaD management models in global organisations

This paper addresses implementation of R&D management models in global product development organisations. The study rests upon empirical material originating from five industrial companies that was collected via workshops and interviews. A number of enablers for and barriers to implementation of R&D management models have been identified. The study adds to the current theory on how companies with global organisations can ensure that the R&D management model is implemented throughout the entire organisation. In addition, the practical value refers to that the identified enablers and barriers support companies in their strive towards better adherence to the R&D management models in product development projects.
Predicting Missing Attribute Values Using Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization

In recent years, the problem of predicting missing attributes values has noticed in data mining and discovering knowledge from source of data. Simplest procedure encounter with attribute values is ignoring them which in this case we will miss valuable information. Different methods have been proposed with this problem. Most of this methods use decision rules for predicting missing attribute values. In this paper, a new method which using Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization offer for predicting attribute values. This method utilizes data records for convergence to missing attribute values without extracting data relations. We do not need knowledge of professional person for detection relation between data in this method. Proposed algorithm has been done on whether casting of Tabriz which has gain for 50 years that shows accuracy 98.45 percent of missing data.